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DoombatINC posted:then hearing him slowly explain the concept of crime to me like I'm an expat from Candy Land with a fresh head injury. This is the perfect way to describe 99 percent of the writing in the game. Why show when you can tell, and why tell when you can tediously overexplain?
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Jan 4, 2024 21:30
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in the future, all conversation will be people saying "that's a bit of an understatement" back and forth to each other
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Jan 4, 2024 21:59
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Ursine Catastrophe posted:Patching out "exploits" in a singleplayer game always felt stupid as hell to me, like what's the point Eh, I get it, bad design is bad design and being single player doesn't excuse it. Players are gonna tend to do what works best for whatever they are doing. Skyrims crafting became its own side game of tedious, trivial, boring, repetitive actions that had the side effects of making combat gameplay equally trivial and boring. You craft a buncha junk, craft more potions and junk to make you more better at crafting junk, rest a bunch to replenish stock, rob and craft again until you have the best gear and never get to think about your gear again, which gives even less reason to do their weak rear end main and side quests.
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Jan 4, 2024 22:13
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Alchenar posted:On the plus side I'm going to play Skyrim again. Be a wizard if you haven't yet, it's fun
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Jan 4, 2024 22:20
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Ugly In The Morning posted:This is the perfect way to describe 99 percent of the writing in the game. Why show when you can tell, and why tell when you can tediously overexplain? The best part is NG+ never has options to not have people explain things at length to you, it just has to be re-explained every time All told I'm real curious: how many things can you actually sequence break on a loop? You can skip the entire main quest, and you can go find the lost spacer dude but only once you've started the quest for it, you can skip the scow, you can skip to the "end of the scorpion tail" thing but not "intentionally" since people do it for the any% speedrun... is that it? Everything else is just a "changes the next line of dialogue" or a persuasion/bribe skip?
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Jan 4, 2024 22:38
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Khanstant posted:Eh, I get it, bad design is bad design and being single player doesn't excuse it. Players are gonna tend to do what works best for whatever they are doing. Skyrims crafting became its own side game of tedious, trivial, boring, repetitive actions that had the side effects of making combat gameplay equally trivial and boring. You craft a buncha junk, craft more potions and junk to make you more better at crafting junk, rest a bunch to replenish stock, rob and craft again until you have the best gear and never get to think about your gear again, which gives even less reason to do their weak rear end main and side quests. Sounds like a gameplay loop to me.
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Jan 4, 2024 22:41
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Khanstant posted:Eh, I get it, bad design is bad design and being single player doesn't excuse it. Players are gonna tend to do what works best for whatever they are doing. Skyrims crafting became its own side game of tedious, trivial, boring, repetitive actions that had the side effects of making combat gameplay equally trivial and boring. You craft a buncha junk, craft more potions and junk to make you more better at crafting junk, rest a bunch to replenish stock, rob and craft again until you have the best gear and never get to think about your gear again, which gives even less reason to do their weak rear end main and side quests. To me there's always a difference between "we designed it poorly and decided to make it better later" and "we designed it and we shipped it and someone used it in a way we didn't intend so we're patching that out but leaving the rest of the lovely experience as-is because That Was Our Design" The latter feels like if someone shipped an immsim, saw people were stacking boxes to bypass quest steps and said "oh hey now that's not intended" and patched out the ability to stand on boxes poo poo like Starfield's "people found out the exact pixel to stand on to access the vendor chests so we moved the vendor chests" falls into the latter category, like who the gently caress cares except designers high on their own farts about the sanctity of the game experience
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Jan 4, 2024 22:42
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Ursine Catastrophe posted:The best part is NG+ never has options to not have people explain things at length to you, it just has to be re-explained every time Part of this comes from the fact the main quest is so disconnected from the world. The NG+ stuff only cares about the main quest, therefore, the NG+ loop stuff is disconnected from the world. They really could have fixed the disconnect from the world, and add actual stakes, by having you do artifacts and temples as an aspect of side quests. Instead of just going to some cave and blasting it out of a wall, have an artifact involved in the poo poo that turns heatleeches into terrormorphs. Then on an NG+, if you’ve completed that quest in a past loop, the foreknowledge opens up ways to skip quest phases. That can tie into their overarching thing they have for the starborn where they keep looping and start seeing multiverses and people as disposable, by giving you some real evil options that skip huge phases of quests- on NG+ you’ll probably just take some cool shortcuts, especially if you have ones that combine quests. By NG++++ you’d probably be like “I can complete this loop faster if I get the Vanguard AND Crimson Fleet quest artifacts by selling the Fleet a way to weaponize heatleeches into terror weapons”. The problem is that’s entirely incompatible with Bethesda’s siloed as hell quest design.
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Jan 4, 2024 23:38
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DoombatINC posted:but I spend three quarters of my time in menus It's honestly kind of impressive how Bethesda has managed to make the menus worse with every game. I've never seen anyone giving them anything better than scathing criticism and they've still managed to dig a deeper hole every time.
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Jan 4, 2024 23:50
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In Starfield they managed to make a menu that was somehow obviously not designed for a controller or for a mouse. I’m not sure what input design it was made for but it’s definitely not one that I own.
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Jan 5, 2024 00:10
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Ugly In The Morning posted:In Starfield they managed to make a menu that was somehow obviously not designed for a controller or for a mouse. I’m not sure what input design it was made for but it’s definitely not one that I own. compromising means nobody's happy, therefore the menu is an excellent compromise I will say that jumping into FO4 from Starfield, I think I liked starfield's menuing over the pip boy's menuing
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Jan 5, 2024 00:17
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Ugly In The Morning posted:Part of this comes from the fact the main quest is so disconnected from the world. The NG+ stuff only cares about the main quest, therefore, the NG+ loop stuff is disconnected from the world. This would actually be really neat on a game-philosophy level. Get the choice to genocide a planet to short-circuit a quest loop. Have options to leverage your near-omniscience from past universes to set up a crime ring using extortion (you know everyone's secrets), insider trading, and lotto numbers to funnel the artifacts to you with no further effort on your part and become a god-king. What depths of immorality do you explore when life is cheap, repetitive, and resettable? But that would require 
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Jan 5, 2024 00:26
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Inspector Hound posted:Be a wizard if you haven't yet, it's fun I actually haven't. I've done a couple of playthroughs as the sword and board Imperial who crafts his own armour, and as a ninja thief who literally can't be seen the moment he does a slavic squat, but never as a wizard. Obviously everyone becomes an everyman to some degree, but it is harder than everyone remembers to go far down the opposite playstyle to the one you primarily follow.
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Jan 5, 2024 00:44
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Flubby posted:Starfield just came out and it makes ES6 feels like it's forever away. Hey at least Starfield coming out probably made a lot of peoples wait for ES6 a lot easier as they give up on any chance of it being good. Like if this trend of Bethesda making blander and blander games continues, there will be 10,000 dungeons larger and a map larger than any before, and all of them will seem the same as you fight through the same bandits and skeletons for tens of hours and you're 90th boring radiant fetch quest. Oh and it will turn out the missing father your chasing after is actually your son and the evil king in some stupid twist that no one cares about. Oh and other races others than humans are non-playable now and just generic enemies that you can't speak to, as you know why not. Can't over-complicate things.
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Jan 5, 2024 00:47
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Yeah I've completely lost all interest in TESVI, Bethesda need to demonstrate that they have a sense of what fun is before I'll start paying attention again.
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Jan 5, 2024 00:50
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isndl posted:It's honestly kind of impressive how Bethesda has managed to make the menus worse with every game. I've never seen anyone giving them anything better than scathing criticism and they've still managed to dig a deeper hole every time. Games bloggers have disappeared up their own asses and started to publish articles about how the time spent in menus is actually a good thing.
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Jan 5, 2024 00:54
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i have a buddy who gets excited the more a game is like a spreadsheet but even by his own admission he's a god damned weirdo
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Jan 5, 2024 01:05
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RPG Menu Manger 2025's going to be a best seller I tell you!
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Jan 5, 2024 01:22
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Morrowind was the peak of bethesda interfaces. Everything you could want all visible at once, and you can rearrange it all to your liking.
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Jan 5, 2024 01:49
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Draggable windows in your game
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Jan 5, 2024 02:42
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Tiny Timbs posted:Games bloggers have disappeared up their own asses and started to publish articles about how the time spent in menus is actually a good thing. too many people read articles praising pathologic and now think all bad games are objectively good because miserable user experience is deep actually
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Jan 5, 2024 02:55
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Ursine Catastrophe posted:The latter feels like if someone shipped an immsim, saw people were stacking boxes to bypass quest steps and said "oh hey now that's not intended" and patched out the ability to stand on boxes And uh... that was never patched out and people actually praised the game for "look what you can do!". Rahu posted:Morrowind was the peak of bethesda interfaces. Everything you could want all visible at once, and you can rearrange it all to your liking. But not in 2023. Wipfmetz fucked around with this message at 07:20 on Jan 5, 2024 |
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Jan 5, 2024 07:13
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Wipfmetz posted:I'm not sure if that's kinda your point, but BG3 had lots of obviously unintended stuff (for example: stacking boxes to reach a castle's ramparts) this was absolutely intended. Swen Vincke has frequently mentioned in interviews his love for Ultima 7, a game in which you can explicitly and easily do exactly that. tomfoolery was always part of the design for them.
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Jan 5, 2024 07:18
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Honestly, I love that. Ultima 7 was great (though I wouldn't be able to enjoy it _today_ anymore). But I appreciate that the game awarded with Steams "Most innovative Gameplay in 2023" is shunned while a game cribbing ideas from 1992 is loved. It has a nice, friendly aftertaste of "prefer fun over the sancticity of the intended gameplay".
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Jan 5, 2024 07:23
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i dont think anyone at all is taking that steam award seriously
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Jan 5, 2024 13:21
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Person that doesn't have steam award says what
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Jan 5, 2024 13:36
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Ursine Catastrophe posted:compromising means nobody's happy, therefore the menu is an excellent compromise I don't have any problems navigating the menus on Xbox. I wish I had a different hotkey for the space maps, though. The game is gonna wear out my B button.
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Jan 5, 2024 14:28
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The Pip Boy menu system is a neat and well-executed but awful idea for a Bethesda RPG
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Jan 5, 2024 14:32
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Ursine Catastrophe posted:compromising means nobody's happy, therefore the menu is an excellent compromise get the mod that gives you fallout 76's pipboy interface. Ursine Catastrophe posted:poo poo like Starfield's "people found out the exact pixel to stand on to access the vendor chests so we moved the vendor chests" falls into the latter category, like who the gently caress cares except designers high on their own farts about the sanctity of the game experience Tankbuster fucked around with this message at 17:24 on Jan 5, 2024 |
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Jan 5, 2024 17:22
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I've never understood what, exactly, is supposed to be the problem with the inventory menu or how they 'get worse' each game. They're mostly nothing to me.
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Jan 5, 2024 17:24
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Never have seen a UI that is good. Just ones that are less bad.
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Jan 5, 2024 17:24
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Magmarashi posted:I've never understood what, exactly, is supposed to be the problem with the inventory menu or how they 'get worse' each game. They're mostly nothing to me. I don't even really know if they "get worse" each game or just never change and everyone gets used to SkyUI between game releases with things like "value to weight ratio" and "damage per second" and "being able to see more than 5 items at a time without scrolling" and get re-slapped in the face with the baseline UX when a new game drops
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Jan 5, 2024 18:05
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there's so much drat wasted space in the inventory menu, give me a key to press to make the gun take 2/3rds of the screen instead of making that default
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Jan 5, 2024 18:15
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I know making a game is hard but the Morrowind UI is just Windows 95 for your game menus; is it really THAT hard to say "on PC the menus will be in windows and everything will be little". Being little isn't unusual for PC games in the industry but putting your items, status, magic, map etc all on the screen at once with a system of windows you can move and resize seems to elude everyone except some MMO designers, so that's not just Bethesda.
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Jan 5, 2024 18:30
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I liked the skyrim menu system it was refreshing at the time to have simple white text instead of a bunch of goofy 720p menus that looked like winamp skins
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Jan 5, 2024 18:33
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Ursine Catastrophe posted:I don't even really know if they "get worse" each game or just never change and everyone gets used to SkyUI between game releases with things like "value to weight ratio" and "damage per second" and "being able to see more than 5 items at a time without scrolling" and get re-slapped in the face with the baseline UX when a new game drops My sister hates SkyUI, says there's "too much text" and vastly prefers the vanilla menu. I can't understand this at all but apparently bethesda's target audience exists!
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Jan 5, 2024 19:02
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Magmarashi posted:I've never understood what, exactly, is supposed to be the problem with the inventory menu or how they 'get worse' each game. They're mostly nothing to me. Do you enjoy scrolling through a list of hundreds of items with only a half dozen visible at a time? Or going into a shop and jumping between three different versions of the same menu and accidentally selling your ammo because you thought you were buying it? How about trying to figure out why you're fifty pounds heavier than usual - oh look, you're carrying ship parts which are in the Aid section and weigh a hundred times anything else in there.
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Jan 5, 2024 19:15
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ship parts in my personal inventory + weed = constantly overburdened
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Jan 5, 2024 19:21
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VostokProgram posted:My sister hates SkyUI, says there's "too much text" and vastly prefers the vanilla menu. I can't understand this at all but apparently bethesda's target audience exists! i've searched for it on twitter and apparently there are people who are really into sarah
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Jan 5, 2024 19:29
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isndl posted:Do you enjoy scrolling through a list of hundreds of items with only a half dozen visible at a time? Or going into a shop and jumping between three different versions of the same menu and accidentally selling your ammo because you thought you were buying it? How about trying to figure out why you're fifty pounds heavier than usual - oh look, you're carrying ship parts which are in the Aid section and weigh a hundred times anything else in there. Don’t forget how that aid section is incomprehensibly sorted where food, HP packs, and status cures are all just jumbled together
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Jan 5, 2024 19:40
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