Starker on 17/11/2021 at 00:21
Quote Posted by Tomi
Imagine spending three hundred hours playing your generic RPG, and then having an army of orcs wipe down the entire kingdom or an evil dragon that has been chasing you burning you to a crisp, if you fiddle around with the side quests for too long. :D
Quote Posted by Pyrian
Then, also like FTL, it should be a soft limit, things get harder and less useful rather than "oops fail lol".
That's exactly what Exile 3: Ruined World did -- if you took too long faffing about, the big bad would start progressively destroying the cities (that is, some terrain and architecture destroyed at one date, some more at a later date, etc), so you might finally arrive at a place and find only ruins and the NPCs either moved away to other cities or killed. But the game isn't real time and you have plenty of time to spare even before any significant damage starts happening (minor damage starts happening pretty soon, though).
But even if it's a clearly sign-posted and generous time limit, like in Fallout, people seem to hate it with a passion. Not to mention that even some games that are specifically designed around a time limit, like Majora's Mask or Dead Rising, get a lot of flak for it.
Aja on 17/11/2021 at 02:32
I got a PS5! At least I think I did. After a few weeks of following one Twitter account with notifications turned on, I decided to get serious and followed a few more accounts plus signed up for a Discord that constantly reports stock. Happened to be at my desk at work when alerts from all three went off. With the signal triangulated, I got in the queue and managed to get all the way through checkout. My credit card's been charged, but the console hasn't shipped yet and might not be here till December. I haven't owned a next-gen console since PS3, so I'm excited to catch up on the PS4 back catalogue and then maybe Demon's Souls, Deathloop, Elden Ring, and whatever else the good people of General Gaming recommend.
Meantime I started Subnautica. It's kind of addicting but pretty buggy for a game that's been out so long. First it mixed up the LT and RT on my controller. I had to rebind, so now it just says the opposite button whenever a prompt pops up. Also annoying is that if you play with a controller, the menu item descriptions are always on screen, and they constantly block your view of the rest of the menu. I don't know if I'm supposed to switch to mouse for the menus or what, but I haven't found anyone else complaining about it and no mod seems to exist to fix it, so I guess I gotta live with it. Otherwise, I'm having fun swimming around and breaking rocks and making water bottles from bladderfish. Feels like the kind of game where at some arbitrary point I'll go, "Well, that's enough of that!" but I'm not there yet!
Malf on 17/11/2021 at 06:17
Quote Posted by WingedKagouti
I prefer if a game with lots of sidequests and random stuff to do don't also have a main quest where a time limit is implied (or real).
I prefer that too, and it would also help if more games stopped doing the whole "You're the Chosen One, and only you can save the world against the big bad!" schtick.
EvaUnit02 on 17/11/2021 at 06:55
Quote Posted by Malf
I prefer that too, and it would also help if more games stopped doing the whole "You're the Chosen One, and only you can save the world against the big bad!" schtick.
It's ludo-narrative dissonance, eh? Eg Fallout 4's main narrative: "I'm desperate to find my son". Meanwhile the player: looting everything for crafting scrap and building settlements.
nicked on 17/11/2021 at 09:30
Subnautica is worth continuing because the narrative is several steps above comparable survival games. I used mouse and keyboard though so I have no idea if the controller support is that bad.
reizak on 17/11/2021 at 11:15
Quote Posted by Aja
I got a PS5! [...] I haven't owned a next-gen console since PS3, so I'm excited to catch up on the PS4 back catalogue and then maybe Demon's Souls, Deathloop, Elden Ring, and whatever else the good people of General Gaming recommend.
Meantime I started
Subnautica. It's kind of addicting but pretty buggy for a game that's been out so long. First it mixed up the LT and RT on my controller. I had to rebind, so now it just says the opposite button whenever a prompt pops up. Also annoying is that if you play with a controller, the menu item descriptions are always on screen, and they constantly block your view of the rest of the menu. I don't know if I'm supposed to switch to mouse for the menus or what, but I haven't found anyone else complaining about it and no mod seems to exist to fix it, so I guess I gotta live with it. Otherwise, I'm having fun swimming around and breaking rocks and making water bottles from bladderfish. Feels like the kind of game where at some arbitrary point I'll go, "Well, that's enough of that!" but I'm not there yet!
I also just got a PS5! And it's my first console since the Mega Drive, so that's around 30 years. The whole crypto nonsense combined with the chip shortage kinda makes me feel like PC gaming isn't that viable right now, and who knows when it will be again; if I wanted to upgrade my GPU that alone would likely cost me three times the price of the PS5, so no thanks. I also got into some JRPGs over the pandemic so that's another motivation. Figured I could skip the several year wait for the Trails localizations with my middling japanese, but based on the demo of the newest one that was a bit too optimistic since most of the lines aren't voiced and I don't know 2/3 of the kanji.
The base version of
Demon's Souls is still a mindboggling €80 on the local PS Store so I've just been playing past titles so far, but I can definitely recommend
Horizon Zero Dawn. It's been patched for the PS5 and looks frequently amazing and runs completely smoothly. Comes with the expansion and was on sale for €10, which is half the price of the PC all time low. The Playstation Hits line has some other pretty decent deals too. I also got
The Last of Us which I'd been looking forward to, but it's not grabbing me at all. I hope it opens up at some point, but so far it's just a discrete arena fight after discrete arena fight separated by a short walking bit, and feels more like a fight puzzle game than whatever grand adventure I imagined it to be. But I'm not far in so I'll give it some time, when I run out of everything else to play.
Subnautica is amazing and well worth sticking with if you can sort out the control issues. Getting to the deepest parts really feels like a journey, and like you're somewhere you genuinely shouldn't be. The sequel did just about nothing for me, though.
demagogue on 17/11/2021 at 11:30
Subnautica is definitely worth sticking with, especially when you get to the part where you're building your underwater base, the plot starts thickening, and you start exploring some truly wondrous areas.
As for the bugginess ... I originally started it when it was a really, really early access version, where you could already feel its magic, but it was buggy as all get out. From my perspective it's so much better now than it was then that I don't seem to mind how buggy it still is in a lot of ways. XD
Malf on 17/11/2021 at 13:25
Quote Posted by EvaUnit02
It's ludo-narrative dissonance, eh? Eg Fallout 4's main narrative: "I'm desperate to find my son". Meanwhile the player: looting everything for crafting scrap and building settlements.
Exactly.
It's really noticeable in MMOs. For example, I'm playing Guild Wars 2 again, and I'm supposed to be the commander of the pact and leader of the Dragon's Watch guild... along with the thousands of other players running around at the same time as me doing the same stuff.
It's amplified there by how they make their maps. Although to be fair, this is a hard problem to solve for all MMOs.
Each map has its own story-line running through it, and after a certain point, those story-lines follow on from the previous map. So you end up with the weird experience where you're killing a dragon on one map, then afterwards heading to a map to fight off said dragon's original invasion. Very frequent ludo-narrative dissonance that you have to brush over if you want to enjoy yourself, and front-and-center thanks to "theme park" MMOs being designed around frequently repeating content.
It's less of a problem in "sandbox" MMOs like Eve Online or Elite Dangerous, as those are more concerned with providing a living environment that the players help to shape, and don't have rigid story-lines the player follows. There, you're just another schmuck in a spaceship, and the world evolves around you.
Just a shame the gameplay's shit.
In the first Guild Wars, because it wasn't really an MMO, they did clever things like updating the instanced maps with different details depending on your story progression. But in the shared map of a proper "theme park" MMO, that isn't really possible.
Thirith on 17/11/2021 at 14:11
IMO that's another thing that Disco Elysium did really well. There's an event that happens after a few days and that you first hear hinted at and then spoken out loud more and more clearly. Since every action in the game makes time pass, you know that you don't have an infinite amount of time, but it's all reasonably small-scale. There is urgency, but you still have time to explore, say, 2/3 of all the various leads. Some will be closed off at this stage anyway due to your skill levels or because you tried them and failed, and generally you can retry later, but it means that your to-do list before the thing happens doesn't grow so much it either stresses you or reveals the artifice of the time constraint.
And then the event in question happens - and afterwards some side stories may no longer be available, but the majority of them will still be there for you to follow up. Except their meaning has shifted because of what has happened.
I don't think you could do that exact same thing with an epic CRPG where you're trying to prevent the world from ending, but I expect that some of Disco Elysium's lessons could still be implemented. You just need to come away from this notion that the player has to be able to do all things at any time. A bit of player restriction also goes a long way towards shaping their experience into something other than a theme park or playground, templates that don't particularly foster a credible sense of urgency.
nicked on 17/11/2021 at 17:57
I blame Bethesda. I shouldn't be able to be the head of the Mage college, thieves guild, assassin's brotherhood, fighter's club, mayor of three different towns and be managing a thriving ice cream business all with the same character.
