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Qwertycoatl posted:And then they take it to extremes in KOTOR 2 where you get Kreia whining at you whenever you help someone, and also whining at you whenever you harm someone. Kreia's actually got a halfway interesting take on destiny and the Force, and it's a real shame that the game felt the need to while away so much time in Pazaak without exploring it- she actually believes that the Force- that is, the Force itself- is a conscious, deliberate influence in the universe and, moreover, it is deliberately loving with anyone able to influence it as a sort of petty revenge. Her point, which was incredibly poorly communicated, was "See? If you don't control everything, the universe will gently caress with you no matter what you try to do, so your best bet is to BRING THE UNIVERSE TO HEEL."
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Sep 29, 2016 08:44
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Professor Wayne posted:The thing dragging down the rest of the Dragon Age series is only the first one lets you have a dog party member. That's not true, the second game lets you have one. He's also a persistant spell that has no effect on the plot.
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Sep 29, 2016 11:44
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Somfin posted:Kreia's actually got a halfway interesting take on destiny and the Force, and it's a real shame that the game felt the need to while away so much time in Pazaak without exploring it- she actually believes that the Force- that is, the Force itself- is a conscious, deliberate influence in the universe and, moreover, it is deliberately loving with anyone able to influence it as a sort of petty revenge. Her point, which was incredibly poorly communicated, was "See? If you don't control everything, the universe will gently caress with you no matter what you try to do, so your best bet is to BRING THE UNIVERSE TO HEEL." It was also the most interesting thing to come out of Star Wars since Empire which is why it was immediately disavowed and personally detested by Lucas.
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Sep 29, 2016 12:10
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Breetai posted:It was also the most interesting thing to come out of Star Wars since Empire which is why it was immediately disavowed and personally detested by Lucas. Lucas never gave a poo poo and people need to stop assuming he did anything but get a royalty check from it. He didn't like ANY of the EU, but it was money.
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Sep 29, 2016 12:19
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Breetai posted:It was also the most interesting thing to come out of Star Wars since Empire Like, the coolest thing about the EU Star Wars' whole Force mythos is that there is this thing, The Force, that everyone kind of has to acknowledge exists but can't be meaningfully locked down in any way. For some reason some people can interact with it and some people can't, and sometimes people who can interact with it snap under stress and go full black magic super saiyan. Every Force user has their own understanding of what it is, so there's dozens of different opinions and viewpoints on it, all of which can be argued for and against. Yoda seems to understand it- he's presented as a wise teacher and spouts glorious poetic exposition about it- but his understanding is completely different to Kreia's, and it's completely different to the Emperor's, and it's completely different to Rey's, and their understandings still work. Since it never gets nailed down, people- even people who spout exposition on the regular- can disagree on axiomatic points, and the mythos never needs to declare either one explicitly correct. That whole "midichlorian count" thing from the prequels could be just fine, because people have been using stupid and wrong things to try to measure complicated stuff for ever, and a half-baked correlation is exactly the sort of thing that a science-minded folk might cling to in the face of overwhelming uncertainty. So on to something dragging games down- one thing I loving love from Pathologic is the fact that, as the Bachelor, so much of your playthrough is made up of people loving with you. Sometimes not even for important reasons- they'll give you exposition that is explicitly and clearly wrong, they'll tell you something that's really just a private joke, they'll lay out a line just to see if you'll believe it. The game gets a huge amount of mileage out of the fact that no-one in the game is ever gonna shoot straight with the wealthy, smug, overeducated foreign shithead who thinks he can save a world of ancient ritual and magic with some heathen "science." More games need to be willing to have characters lie, or give their own personal viewpoint, or just gently caress with the player character a bit, and for that to just be a thing that happened, rather than the ultra-sin to end all ultra-sins that it tends to be presented as.
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Sep 29, 2016 13:18
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Somfin posted:Kreia's actually got a halfway interesting take on destiny and the Force, and it's a real shame that the game felt the need to while away so much time in Pazaak without exploring it- she actually believes that the Force- that is, the Force itself- is a conscious, deliberate influence in the universe and, moreover, it is deliberately loving with anyone able to influence it as a sort of petty revenge. Her point, which was incredibly poorly communicated, was "See? If you don't control everything, the universe will gently caress with you no matter what you try to do, so your best bet is to BRING THE UNIVERSE TO HEEL." Other Star Wars stuff has talked about "the will of the Force"- in KOTOR1 it's a handwave for how all your party members turn out to have known the evil dark lord in some way, for example. Kreia's thing is that if the Force has a will and pushes people certain ways then she's not in control of her own life, possibly not even her own thoughts. It's a take on destiny that's kind of subverted with the player character who isn't affected by the Force and so doesn't have a destiny. The ultimate in player freedom!
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Sep 29, 2016 14:14
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e: nm.
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Sep 29, 2016 14:15
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Qwertycoatl posted:And then they take it to extremes in KOTOR 2 where you get Kreia whining at you whenever you help someone, and also whining at you whenever you harm someone. Bioware, at least the older games, have always seemed to have this dialogue problem for me. a) You pick the option that 90% of reasonable people would pick, the response is contempt from someone in your party or a argument about a moral angle, that you may have considered, but the game didn't give your character a chance to consider. The result is that answering the most reasonable ways still gets you chastised or berated throughout the game. b) You pick the unexpected option, and the response is, "I CAN'T BELIEVE YOU'RE SAYING THIS WOW!" Dunno if that's improved lately. Mass Effect 3 is the newest game of theirs I've played.
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Sep 29, 2016 16:16
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For the record, KOTOR2 was developed and written by Obsidian, not Bioware.
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Sep 29, 2016 17:14
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also it's pretty justified due to Kreia's whole shtick
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Sep 29, 2016 18:14
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Captain Lavender posted:Bioware, at least the older games, have always seemed to have this dialogue problem for me. Some of their complaints could maybe work if they weren't in an RPG where experience points are a thing, or if occasionally helping someone was actively harmful to your progress in some way. If Origins had an actual time pressure mechanic where the blight was encroaching and dillying about helping orphans meant cities were being engulfed in horror and death, if injuries suffered in combat were permanent and provoking unnecessary fights was actually a terrible idea, then maybe, but there are no deleterious ramifications in game, only boons.
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Sep 29, 2016 18:16
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Weird complaint: Bao-Dur in Kotor 2 sounds like his voice actor recorded all of his lines in a bathroom.
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Sep 29, 2016 18:54
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My issue with DA:O was the massive difficulty spike. I can understand a game jumping up the difficulty, even if I don't like it, but Orgins didn't bother to actually do that until literally the final boss. And they way over did it. I went from creaming the rest of the game with basically no issues, to being unable to complete it.
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Sep 29, 2016 19:25
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marshmallow creep posted:Some of their complaints could maybe work if they weren't in an RPG where experience points are a thing, or if occasionally helping someone was actively harmful to your progress in some way. If Origins had an actual time pressure mechanic where the blight was encroaching and dillying about helping orphans meant cities were being engulfed in horror and death, if injuries suffered in combat were permanent and provoking unnecessary fights was actually a terrible idea, then maybe, but there are no deleterious ramifications in game, only boons. Croccers has a new favorite as of 02:15 on Sep 30, 2016 |
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Sep 30, 2016 02:12
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Croccers posted:The newest Dead Rising is just completely removing the time mechanic because everyone bitched about it. Thank god almighty. Like I don't mind SOME timed things in games, but as much as I love the Dead Rising games, sometimes when I felt like playing them serious it really did reduce the entire experience down to gaming and racing small objective timers. Thankfully they're fun games where you can also say gently caress it to the timers and run amok, Off The Record especially which just gives you a "Have fun buddy" infinite mode from square 1, but even still that gives me more reason to look forward to 4 or whatever subtitle they'll run with this time.
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Sep 30, 2016 02:49
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Dead Rising 3's default mode was a good compromise, where it had a time limit but it was so generous that even a complete idiot could complete every side quest and story mission with time to spare.
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Sep 30, 2016 02:50
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Guy Mann posted:Dead Rising 3's default mode was a good compromise, where it had a time limit but it was so generous that even a complete idiot could complete every side quest and story mission with time to spare. At that point why bother with it though?
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Sep 30, 2016 04:11
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I'm confused, isn't removing the time limit from Dead Rising like removing the day timer from Majora's Mask? The passage of time being such an integral thing to how the game's designed?
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Sep 30, 2016 04:36
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Yeah I actually think a loose timer is worse than a tight one. Done right a tight timer can make the game revolve around tight execution, but a loose timer is just something nagging at me while I try to play the game.
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Sep 30, 2016 04:38
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Cleretic posted:I'm confused, isn't removing the time limit from Dead Rising like removing the day timer from Majora's Mask? The passage of time being such an integral thing to how the game's designed? Time limits suck and they sucked in MM too. I know, in MM at least it's resetable, but that basically makes it a starvation mechanic and nearly everyone agrees that sucks. It's sad because otherwise I'd say Majora's Mask is indisputably one of the best games ever.
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Sep 30, 2016 04:38
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Higsian posted:Yeah I actually think a loose timer is worse than a tight one. Done right a tight timer can make the game revolve around tight execution, but a loose timer is just something nagging at me while I try to play the game. Dead Rising 2: OTR is still the best.
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Sep 30, 2016 04:51
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WickedHate posted:Time limits suck and they sucked in MM too. I know, in MM at least it's resetable, but that basically makes it a starvation mechanic and nearly everyone agrees that sucks. It's really NOT a time limit in MM, though, unless you're extremely bad at the game. So much progress is saved/saveable in the cycle restart, and so many shortcuts become available that there's like, only one place where you can appreciably lose progress if you have to restart the cycle during it (the Pirate's Fortress). What the three days does is provide a sequence of events to participate in and see progress. Yes, you can't do everything in the one cycle, but since basically everything but your bomb and arrow count is saved in the restart you really don't need to. I genuinely don't get it. I just tried to outline to myself a player who constantly faces issue with MM's day counter, and I can't do it. Outside of not knowing about the Inverted Song of Time (which is still pretty optional, but it'll be rough going in some places) I literally cannot conceive of a player of Majora's Mask that has repeated trouble with the day counter. Help me out here, I'm lost!
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Sep 30, 2016 04:55
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Cleretic posted:I genuinely don't get it. I just tried to outline to myself a player who constantly faces issue with MM's day counter, and I can't do it. Outside of not knowing about the Inverted Song of Time (which is still pretty optional, but it'll be rough going in some places) I literally cannot conceive of a player of Majora's Mask that has repeated trouble with the day counter. Help me out here, I'm lost! Granted, I was literally four years old when I played Majora's Mask.
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Sep 30, 2016 04:58
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Cleretic posted:I genuinely don't get it. I just tried to outline to myself a player who constantly faces issue with MM's day counter, and I can't do it. Outside of not knowing about the Inverted Song of Time (which is still pretty optional, but it'll be rough going in some places) I literally cannot conceive of a player of Majora's Mask that has repeated trouble with the day counter. Help me out here, I'm lost! It's about the counter itself, not its direct impact on gameplay. Imagine a game that you like and then just insert a periodic beeping sound. The gameplay is completely unaffected but it's distracting and annoying and impacts your enjoyment of the game. That's kinda what timers can feel like to a lot of players.
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Sep 30, 2016 05:00
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Higsian posted:It's about the counter itself, not its direct impact on gameplay. Imagine a game that you like and then just insert a periodic beeping sound. The gameplay is completely unaffected but it's distracting and annoying and impacts your enjoyment of the game. That's kinda what timers can feel like to a lot of players. Sometimes, like, the level designers put together a nice-looking vista and you want to kick back and enjoy the view for a minute. But if there's a timer then you feel like nope, can't stop, gotta keep moving ahead. Even if it turns out that you had plenty of time and could've dicked around more, you have no way of knowing that until you actually get to the end. Game mechanics are a form of communication to the player, and a what a timer says is "always keep moving; never stop to smell the roses or it's going to cost you." In some games that works fine, but in many it worsens the experience.
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Sep 30, 2016 06:09
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I tried playing it recently and kept forgetting about things. Now granted that's more on me for being easily distracted but that still means I can't really play the game when poo poo might come up or I'm unfocused for whatever reason. That also makes it a terrible handheld game no matter how good it was when it came out originally and I had the time to actually sit down in front of a TV and be reasonably sure nothing would come up.
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Sep 30, 2016 06:14
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Triarii posted:Sometimes, like, the level designers put together a nice-looking vista and you want to kick back and enjoy the view for a minute. But if there's a timer then you feel like nope, can't stop, gotta keep moving ahead. Even if it turns out that you had plenty of time and could've dicked around more, you have no way of knowing that until you actually get to the end. On the one hand, that's true. On the other, in the case of Majora's Mask, you explicitly have infinite time to do everything, you just have to do it in time-limited chunks. Someone called it a starvation mechanic, and... I can't really argue with that. I suppose the difference that I feel is that with a starvation mechanic, there's usually a great sense of urgency about making sure I'm ready to top up when needed, while Majora's Mask has more of a 'certain doom' feeling to it. Apart from slowing down the clock, there's nothing you can do to make the moon go away, so you just have to do what you can in the time that you have this run. Once you hit a progress marker, if there's not enough time left to get to the next one, you kind of have a bit of time to gently caress around and see the sights- during the most dramatic and visually/musically strange part of the game.
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Sep 30, 2016 07:05
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I hate timers and missing out on stuff because I took too long, but it is annoying when characters keep telling you to hurry up when you know there's no time limit. I can think of a couple of ways around it though. You could just make the player choose between different options, so in one playthrough you might go through the forest and in another you might go over the mountain. It is super annoying when it's just one or two sections though, because having to replay the entire game for just a little bit of extra content is terrible. I think it would work really well for something like the Shadowrun games though, if they let you choose from two or three missions each time you went out and the next time you played you could do all different ones. The other option is just to stop having characters tell you to hurry up. If there's no actual time pressure, don't pretend there is. Dragon Age: Origins is a good example of where this would have worked well, because it already spaces out the plot-advancing cutscenes based on how much of the mandatory missions you've completed, so there's no need for Sten and Morrigan to complain about you wasting time on top of that.
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Sep 30, 2016 07:12
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And after that she asks you to impregnate her with a demon baby as a quick favor. Classic Morrigan
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Sep 30, 2016 07:17
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The only time I've liked characters complaining about you doing a bunch of side-quests and helping people is Nier, because the side-quests are deliberately annoying and the people are kind of terrible assholes and your protagonists himself wonders why the gently caress he's doing this poo poo.
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Sep 30, 2016 09:46
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So thanks to Voice of Dog and his Days of Ruin stream I have gotten into said game. It is fun, surprisingly deep...then I just did my first run through on a certain side mission. Wave. After. Wave of goddamn meat and metal. I got an A rank, almost an S rank and it was on day 150. The AI cheated so goddamn badly in this fog of war map too, they quasi knew where my indirect were so I would have to offer up a few low grade dudes else have my own indirect units get splattered. This took way too many hours and I think this is the one map I will not be going back to for the S rank even now knowing what I did wrong. (Throw more giga tanks at things.)
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Sep 30, 2016 11:15
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Morglon posted:At that point why bother with it though? Because it meant they could put in an optional hard mode so people who absolutely have to have a game that requires you to grind and reset multiple times due to a challenging time limit could have their fun too.
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Sep 30, 2016 11:29
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The final level of ClusterTruck can go gently caress itself. The game has probably the most interestingly specific control scheme in the platforming world- first-person platforming balanced specifically around gathering momentum from leaping on the backs of a conga-line of stupid, physics-driven trucks in order to pull off ludicrous gravity-defying parkour tricks when the trucks inevitably start to jackknife and flip and bounce after one of them hits a tree or whatever- so naturally the boss (problem number 0, the source of all others) is the worst-animated Satan in the history of video games, and beating him requires slowly playing along a very basic level (problem number 1) before ponderously clambering up a bunch of non-moving platforms (problem number 2) against a time limit (problem number 3) which isn't communicated to the player at all (problem number 4) and the platforms require really precise jumps because they're very close to instant-death walls (problem number 5) that your generous hitbox (problem number 6) just can't help but nick, in order to hit a tiny green hitbox (problem number 7) that no other level in the 90 or so you've played up to that point has ever used in any fashion (problem number 8) so that you can finally defe- I mean start the level all over again (problem number 9) except in order to do that you need to land an extremely long fall onto a one-wide line of trucks a mile below you (problem number 10). I don't know what you have to do after that point because as much as my anger makes me stubborn, even I have limits. I can smell a rule of three boss, and playing that poo poo through once was an exercise in pain and futility. And of course there's no loving checkpoint system, so I hope you like playing that boring-rear end start area where the boss is comically poorly animated a few dozen loving times. And by poorly animated I mean "it isn't looking at you at any point and its arms move completely independently of its body." I cannot emphasise enough how good the game is during its good parts- and how well its control scheme handles the ridiculous situations its levels throw at you- and how Super Meat Boy-quick the level reset is- but man that loving finale is just all of the worst parts of the game put together, with a big, dripping spoonful of "Our control scheme was never meant to do this." Somfin has a new favorite as of 12:03 on Sep 30, 2016 |
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Sep 30, 2016 11:59
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Yes, Steins;Gate, I really do care about some conflict between neko and serious anime fans so please feel free to explore the topic during the next 15 minutes. It's not like there's any other (and actually interesting) thing like time machines or anything. Also, one character must talk about his 2D waifus at all times. Danganronpa did nearly the same thing btw. I really want to enjoy both games but really don't care about the meta anime stuff.
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Sep 30, 2016 12:38
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Terminally Bored posted:Yes, Steins;Gate, I really do care about some conflict between neko and serious anime fans so please feel free to explore the topic during the next 15 minutes. It's not like there's any other (and actually interesting) thing like time machines or anything. Also, one character must talk about his 2D waifus at all times. Then why are you playing anime visual novels?
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Sep 30, 2016 12:39
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I really liked Phoenix Wright and Hotel Dusk, wanted something similar. Edit: 999 and the sequels were awesome, too. Had none of that meta anime stuff either. Terminally Bored has a new favorite as of 13:05 on Sep 30, 2016 |
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Sep 30, 2016 13:01
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Terminally Bored posted:Yes, Steins;Gate, I really do care about some conflict between neko and serious anime fans so please feel free to explore the topic during the next 15 minutes. It's not like there's any other (and actually interesting) thing like time machines or anything. Also, one character must talk about his 2D waifus at all times. Would you say that it's specifically the meta-anime stuff that drags it down for you, or would you say that it's more the fact that the characters are wasting time talking about something so off-topic or out-of-character that it kills the pace of the story? I find that there are a lot of weird diatribes or wacky one-liners in anime visual novels that are really hit-or-miss. In a similar but different vein, I remember 999 had a casual, overly-long dialogue between the characters about the properties of dry ice and crystallization/ice-9 or some such thing. While that was interesting and relevant to the situation-at-hand, keep in mind that their situation-at-hand was that they were locked in a freezer and slowly dying; maybe keep the talk short, guys?
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Sep 30, 2016 14:57
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FutureCop posted:Would you say that it's specifically the meta-anime stuff that drags it down for you, or would you say that it's more the fact that the characters are wasting time talking about something so off-topic or out-of-character that it kills the pace of the story? I find that there are a lot of weird diatribes or wacky one-liners in anime visual novels that are really hit-or-miss. That ice-9 talk was great for me because I'm a big Vonnegut fan but yes it was ridiculously long considering the situation they were in. Japanese writers can't edit their writing at all. MGS games are a big offender in that area. I don't mind small talk in VNs, I liked the Persona 4G characters just chilling and talking about whatever but in S;G and Danganronpa it comes off as catering to the hardcore otaku crowd. Like "look, one of the main protagonists is an otaku! Let's make some waifu jokes". I'm here for the story, not the fanservice.
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Sep 30, 2016 15:27
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Terminally Bored posted:That ice-9 talk was great for me because I'm a big Vonnegut fan but yes it was ridiculously long considering the situation they were in. Japanese writers can't edit their writing at all. MGS games are a big offender in that area. As you say, it certainly explains a lot of MGS moments, like the end of 3. "The Boss, you see... was not a traitor... to her country... but her country thinks she was... she won't be remembered as a hero... but as a traitor... except to you, Jack. She told you she wasn't a traitor... but a hero... to her country... which won't remember her. Only you will remember her... as a hero, Jack, which is what she was... not a traitor"
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Sep 30, 2016 15:41
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Lunchmeat Larry posted:I read an interesting explanation of this once, apparently translators find Japanese text difficult to translate and still fit naturally into the necessary scene times, because Japanese people take forever to say anything. The result is a lot of superfluous time that needs to be filled in with something or other when you translate to English. The ents then told Naked Snake that they have decided he isn't an orc.
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Sep 30, 2016 15:43
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