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Even when they're bad, I like stories in games. If nothing else, cut scenes are a great time to reload the bong
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Oct 25, 2016 22:08
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Also Re: video game story chat, something I find really funny and interesting is the whole interplay between the story written for a narrative-driven game and the technical and budget restrictions that come with making video games. You write the script, you've got an eight month pipeline for cutscenes or whatever, you're halfway through making those when the programmers come to you and ask if you can remove the part of the story where the heroes take a train because the engine can't render moving scenery out of a window, and then five months after that you have no time to make a new cutscene where a character dies, because the boss fight you were gonna put in there didn't turn out to be fun so it was removed, and so when you ship the game that character just stops appearing in cutscenes halfway through the game, and so on and so forth. Making the game fun to play is a higher priority than making it work well as a story, and given the limited time and money, the stories you end up with in games are often weird and messy. This is how you end up with a game like Final Fantasy 13, which has a character who shows up, is turned into a boss fight, dies, is resurrected offscreen, shows up in a cutscene, and then is killed again in another cutscene.
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Oct 25, 2016 22:08
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StashAugustine posted:Hey so I'm looking for a good ARPG. I played a bunch of Path of Exile and really really loved it except for the fact that it's stupidly grindy and time-intensive. I liked how much flexibility you had to build your character, how tightly designed the economy was, and how the mechanics tended to interact with each other in cool and interesting ways. Is there a good ARPG like that that you don't have to sink hundred+ hours into to be informed that your character isn't quite good enough to do all the content unless you grind for another hundred hours? Diablo 3? It sucked at launch but they slowly patched it into being really good. There's no way to build a character that's permafucked, its very casual, but also has good depth and pretty decent design. There's still a few limitations of the original design which are dumb (every class just wants one main stat, but don't worry there's still build variety), its got lots of new great design now that gives you plenty to do and have fun with. (Bounties, lots of legendaries dropping, horadric cube 2.0, shard vendor, etc.) Zaphod42 fucked around with this message at 22:10 on Oct 25, 2016 |
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Oct 25, 2016 22:08
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Zaphod42 posted:Diablo 3? It sucked at launch but they slowly patched it into being really good. 
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Oct 25, 2016 22:09
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tap my mountain posted:I thought it was the result of having to keep each voice line the exact same length as the Japanese lines since if they were off it would cause a crash. I think there's that too, but I believe the original director said that the Tidus laugh scene was originally intended to be weird and awkward, so it wasn't too far from the original version. Please correct me if I'm wrong, as it's a pretty fuzzy memory at this point.
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Oct 25, 2016 22:10
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Red Bones posted:This is how you end up with a game like Final Fantasy 13, which has a character who shows up, is turned into a boss fight, dies, is resurrected offscreen, shows up in a cutscene, and then is killed again in another cutscene. I played this game and still don't have any idea who you're talking about. To be fair, I went through a lot of weed playing that game And yeah Diablo 3 (especially on PS4) is super super good now, like wow it's so good.
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Oct 25, 2016 22:14
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A halfway-engaging story is like a bonus. Gameplay is king. Although giving your characters/world a little personality goes a long way sometimes- Dante in DMC3/4 comes to mind.
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Oct 25, 2016 22:46
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Witcher 3's gameplay is middling at best but IMO it gets along nicely thanks to the writing, story, and personality, so it's not a universal rule
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Oct 25, 2016 22:52
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Yeah, but arguably the interactive aspect of the story is what makes it so good. So I would easily call the combat mediocre, but the branching conversation are part of the gameplay and they are excellent. Edit: I'm not trying to split hairs, im saying that if Witcher 3 didn't have the choices that impacted the story, despite the quality of its story, it would really care as much.
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Oct 25, 2016 23:05
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Black Lodge Palpek posted:LA Noire was pretty cool as an interactive police drama. The cases were great and writing was legit and the overarching reveal was good. Too bad about the open world but you could also just let your partner drive everywhere and treat getting to the crime scene as a loading screen or something. You still had to do the action scenes though. While it's totally fine for 'interactive fiction', from a game design perspective it was a really dick move to have TWO crime sprees where you can't possibly get the right man because it's some totally unrelated guy who's really behind it. It really feels like the game's undermining your detective work, which would be fine in a film or tv series, but is frustrating in a video game. It should be the player who solves the mysteries, not cutscenes. precision posted:Even when they're bad, I like stories in games. I'd rather have zero story than "Wow, this story sure is cliched huh? Meme!" like some indie games have. Lurdiak fucked around with this message at 23:17 on Oct 25, 2016 |
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Oct 25, 2016 23:14
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Lurdiak posted:While it's totally fine for 'interactive fiction', from a game design perspective it was a really dick move to have TWO crime sprees where you can't possibly get the right man because it's some totally unrelated guy who's really behind it. It really feels like the game's undermining your detective work, which would be fine in a film or tv series, but is frustrating in a video game. It should be the player who solves the mysteries, not cutscenes. Yeah this was really stupid and kind of soured an otherwise good experience retroactively.
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Oct 25, 2016 23:15
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Lurdiak posted:
This is the absolute worst, yeah. Criticising yourself for being lazy and thinking thats enough to get away with it is insulting to your audience and yourself.
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Oct 25, 2016 23:22
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What games do that?
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Oct 25, 2016 23:25
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Jay Rust posted:What games do that? Like every game on newgrounds, and a significant portion of no-budget indie titles on Steam.
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Oct 25, 2016 23:31
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Lurdiak posted:I'd rather have zero story than "Wow, this story sure is cliched huh? Meme!" like some indie games have. Well, yeah. Snak posted:Yeah, but arguably the interactive aspect of the story is what makes it so good. So I would easily call the combat mediocre, but the branching conversation are part of the gameplay and they are excellent. It's true, Witcher 3 would be much better as a visual novel
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Oct 25, 2016 23:34
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Snak posted:Yeah, but arguably the interactive aspect of the story is what makes it so good. So I would easily call the combat mediocre, but the branching conversation are part of the gameplay and they are excellent. I played about 4 hours of Witcher 3 about 6 months ago and just went away from it to more interesting games. From a game-play point of view it is utterly mediocre, no better than Ubisofts latest open-world collectaton and i don't really give a poo poo about the story. The praise it gets is bewildering to me. I presume the people who love it play maybe 2 games every year.
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Oct 25, 2016 23:35
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spudsbuckley posted:I played about 4 hours of Witcher 3 about 6 months ago and just went away from it to more interesting games. Well yea if you don't like the gameplay and the story you aren't going to like the game. lol comparing the gameplay to the crapfest that is assassin's creed though
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Oct 25, 2016 23:42
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Lurdiak posted:Like every game on newgrounds, and a significant portion of no-budget indie titles on Steam. Are you being sarcastic, I can't tell.
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Oct 25, 2016 23:43
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I tried to like Witcher 3, I really did, but the combat was so bad I eventually gave up on it.
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Oct 25, 2016 23:43
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spudsbuckley posted:I played about 4 hours of Witcher 3 about 6 months ago and just went away from it to more interesting games. If we're talking strictly gameplay, hell, it's significantly worse than, for example, Far Cry: Primal. It is kind of hard to get a feel for why people praise that game so much unless the game is Extremely Your poo poo. It's like the opposite of Divine Divinity in that regard, because that's a game where the story is really dumb and bad but the gameplay makes up for it so much that everyone is on its jock.
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Oct 25, 2016 23:42
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Bicyclops posted:This is one of the worst examples, actually. Like, people who clearly didn't know how to direct voice actors did the cut scenes for Final Fantasy X (and hell, a different company did most of the cut scene animations), plus, it's super weird that in every Final Fantasy game, you get right to the end of the story and then spend 40 hours doing sidequests that are almost all about the numbers and statistics. It's still a good game, but the method of storytelling suffers because of it. I'm not saying FFX is well-directed by any means but the series as a whole is known for long cut scenes breaking up the gameplay and it is generally popular. Same with MGS. MGS2 in particular is very popular around here and it's a game full of 15+ minute cut scenes that don't always feed into the gameplay. I'm not trying to say that that is the best way to build a game narrative but people seem to enjoy it, and I count myself among them.
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Oct 25, 2016 23:48
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ONE YEAR LATER posted:Are you being sarcastic, I can't tell. Why would I be sarcastic about a well-known fact.
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Oct 26, 2016 00:01
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I hate when game characters quip about how long and tedious the dungeon they're currently going through is. If you know your dungeon is boring then why put it in? Or maybe you could shorten it? I guess it might just be the writers making fun of the programmers, but I'm not quite sure if that makes things better or worse.
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Oct 26, 2016 00:11
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No see it's meta
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Oct 26, 2016 00:12
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Lurdiak posted:Like every game on newgrounds, and a significant portion of no-budget indie titles on Steam. I too hate it when bad games are bad
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Oct 26, 2016 00:13
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tap my mountain posted:I too hate it when bad games are bad Some of them are perfectly adequate in the gameplay department, but for some reason they feel the need to have a story, and then to point out that it's a bad one. It's horrible.
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Oct 26, 2016 00:21
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Programmers don't write too good, I guess
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Oct 26, 2016 00:23
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"This thing that's happening is cliche / like something out of a movie / like something out of a video game" is funny when it is applied to general cliches like a character in-game saying "press the select button to open the menu", annoying when it's applied to negative ones like commenting on how an actually long dungeon is very long.
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Oct 26, 2016 00:26
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What about the line 'this isn't a game!' in a tense situation
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Oct 26, 2016 00:27
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Jay Rust posted:Programmers don't write too good, I guess It's worse than a lack of skill. I could forgive a bad story sincerely told, trying to lampshade it with "This is stupid, I didn't even try so you can't criticize me" is just creative cowardice.
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Oct 26, 2016 00:29
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Like in Blood Dragon where they have that joke that long-winded tutorials are so bad, god i bet you wish games didn't have them, they're just so tedious and just go on and on while you're just trying to get to the game, god wouldn't it be super hilarious if this were also a long-winded tutorial that you wish you didn't have to go through just to get to the actual game?
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Oct 26, 2016 00:30
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Earthbound was pretty funny and/or horrifying when it was being meta. I haven't experienced games trying to lampshade tropes or game design flaws that I can think of much besides that, though. Like there are a few joke dungeons/bosses in Chrono Trigger the characters comment on, I guess?
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Oct 26, 2016 00:32
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Also I guess some of the Zelda games have a sort of "Oh, I guess you already knew how to do that. How?" built into the tutorial.
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Oct 26, 2016 00:33
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Every now and then I see recommendations for Secrets of Grindia for people who like Secret of Mana but then I try the demo and the writing is just as atrocious as the title and I never make it to gameplay. And then Evoland was nothing but "hey remember this outdated thing about JRPGs!?" except they were ten times worse about the things they were "lampooning".
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Oct 26, 2016 00:56
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Every video game has a story, the story of you playing it. 
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Oct 26, 2016 00:58
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fruitpunch posted:Like in Blood Dragon where they have that joke that long-winded tutorials are so bad, god i bet you wish games didn't have them, they're just so tedious and just go on and on while you're just trying to get to the game, god wouldn't it be super hilarious if this were also a long-winded tutorial that you wish you didn't have to go through just to get to the actual game? Was the tutorial in that super long? I remember it being pretty short, like "oh haha it's a tutorial, oh ok it's over now"
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Oct 26, 2016 01:04
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is killing floor a Left4Dead clone? theres a new one coming next month that i've seen mentioned a lot but it just looks like a zombie horde mode game
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Oct 26, 2016 01:07
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Real hurthling! posted:is killing floor a Left4Dead clone? theres a new one coming next month that i've seen mentioned a lot but it just looks like a zombie horde mode game The original Killing Floor was zombie horde mode. I haven't played KF2.
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Oct 26, 2016 01:12
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Bicyclops posted:Earthbound was pretty funny and/or horrifying when it was being meta. I haven't experienced games trying to lampshade tropes or game design flaws that I can think of much besides that, though. Undertale was basically an entire game extrapolating on that.
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Oct 26, 2016 01:13
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Bicyclops posted:Earthbound was pretty funny and/or horrifying when it was being meta. I haven't experienced games trying to lampshade tropes or game design flaws that I can think of much besides that, though. Like there are a few joke dungeons/bosses in Chrono Trigger the characters comment on, I guess? Stanley Parable's humour is mostly from that. Hell, The Stanley Parable Demonstration has a lot of demo-specific humour (as well as the best button ever).
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Oct 26, 2016 01:18
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