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Speaking of Prey, as much as it's my GOTY so far it does suffer from a design decision that I also really disliked in Dishonored and Bioshock: randomized equipment. The actual drop locations are fixed but with a few exceptions the actual chipsets are randomized each playthrough. Which is a problem when they have such a variety in effects and power that are also highly dependent on your playstyle; in Dishonored the bone charm that lets you choke people out almost instantly can more or less make or break a nonlethal playthrough, same with the chipset that lets you passively recover psi energy in Prey if you're doing a Typhon run. Plus it added an odd wrinkle to Dishonored where the DLC would add more bone charms to the pool but not add more actual places to get them, and since a lot of the ones it added were worthless tiny stat bonuses it was actually better to not get the DLC so you had better odds of getting good charms.
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Sep 27, 2017 02:47
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New Butt Order posted:Chvron Questing is also awful for level design. There's plenty of quests in the later Elder Scrolls games (though the Bethesda Fallouts are even worse offenders) where you wouldn't be able to complete them without the compass pinpointing the specific item you need surrounded by other identical looking items, or stuffed in a container that looks like every other container, or you simple weren't given enough information to find what you were fetching without it. Shortly after watching HBomberguy's video essay on Fallout 3, and his point about blindly following quest markers, I started turning them off. I played through Deus Ex: Mankind Divided without quest markers, and Prague in-game was made far more memorable for it. I actually got to notice things about the map, like how goddamn maze-like and confusing it is to get to a lot of places because it's easy to get turned around and pass the big 23 on Hlavni Street four times before you get to where you need to be.
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Sep 27, 2017 02:53
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One more reason Prey rules is that its quest markers have diegetic explanations (either locations marked on your map by other people or you follow automatic tracking beacons you can use security computers to activate) and neither is foolproof since people can give you bad info or you might follow a beacon only to find that person has removed or disabled their tracking device. Also these are all completely optional and should you choose to you can disable them all (again in-game rather than some menu setting outside of the game world) and navigate on your own.
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Sep 27, 2017 03:09
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I didn't like that sometimes the recycler charges wouldn't do jack poo poo, and pull in only 1/3 of my enormous garbage pile of corpses and office equipment. Even though I threw it square in the middle. Now I have to use another one, bummer
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Sep 27, 2017 17:35
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Inco posted:Shortly after watching HBomberguy's video essay on Fallout 3, and his point about blindly following quest markers, I started turning them off. I played through Deus Ex: Mankind Divided without quest markers, and Prague in-game was made far more memorable for it. I actually got to notice things about the map, like how goddamn maze-like and confusing it is to get to a lot of places because it's easy to get turned around and pass the big 23 on Hlavni Street four times before you get to where you need to be. I turn quest markers off for a ton of games* but Bethesda just makes it impossible. As others have said, a lot of the time the chevron is really the only indication for what you're meant to be doing, if it's gone you'll inevitably do something sliiiiightly out of order and break the quest triggers for the rest of the game. I mean, once in Skyrim I managed to permanently lock my 80+ hour character in a prison because I tried to open the door too quickly, if I'd been on a console and unable to cheat my way out I would have been livid. * Not just quest markers, though - Breath of the Wild lets you turn off pretty much the whole UI and it's my favorite thing ever.
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Sep 27, 2017 17:46
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food court bailiff posted:* Not just quest markers, though - Breath of the Wild lets you turn off pretty much the whole UI and it's my favorite thing ever. Playing BotW with the minimal HUD is probably the greatest experience I've had with a video game, ever.
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Sep 27, 2017 18:28
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food court bailiff posted:I turn quest markers off for a ton of games* but Bethesda just makes it impossible. As others have said, a lot of the time the chevron is really the only indication for what you're meant to be doing, if it's gone you'll inevitably do something sliiiiightly out of order and break the quest triggers for the rest of the game. I mean, once in Skyrim I managed to permanently lock my 80+ hour character in a prison because I tried to open the door too quickly, if I'd been on a console and unable to cheat my way out I would have been livid. Do you...do you not save in a new file every time?
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Sep 27, 2017 18:58
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Slime posted:Do you...do you not save in a new file every time? When I log off, yeah. But that means that if I spend 2 hours exploring and doing quests only for one to fail to trigger properly at the very end, that's two hours of progress lost unless I get lucky with an autosave.
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Sep 27, 2017 20:11
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Not saving roughly every 15 minutes is a risky proposition in Bethesda rpgs
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Sep 27, 2017 22:03
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HDDs have been standard on consoles for three generations now, I don't get why so many games are stingy with auto/quick saves and save slots like we're still having to cram everything into a few kilobytes of space on a proprietary memory card. Prey did it right with having three autosave files and three quicksave files that it automatically cycles through so if a file get corrupted or things go horribly wrong you have five different backup points to fall back on no matter what.
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Sep 27, 2017 22:21
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I'm not excusing how buggy they are, but the fact that they are buggy isnt exactly a state secret at this point. Kinda feel if you lose more than 15-20 minutes progress in a Bethesda RPG at this point then thats on you. I mean, you wanna tell be about the first one you played that made you lose an hours worth of play, then sure. But if you are playing an RPG by the company who are known as "The guys who make the buggy and unstable RPGs" and you arent saving often (and using at least a 3 save system rather than overwriting the same slot every save) then I dunno what to tell you. Save often, because poo poo will crash. Rotate slots because its possible poo poo will gently caress up in ways that will not be apparent immediately, and you dont want to overwrite your only save with a save where a game breaking bug has occurred. I enjoy Bethseda RPGs and I run a 4-save system (not including the save after intro just before you are asked to confirm character creation so that on future runs I can just to that point and change settings without having to do the intro again). One save that only gets updated after the main quest (or a major sidequest) has been advanced and three save slots I rotate as appropriate. Never lost a significant amount of progress (although in fairness I've been generally lucky and not encountered terribly many actual game-breaking bugs, most of the ones I've had have been more funny than infuriating). Although it does remind me of an annoyance with their games (and similar games by other developers); If your open world game has a lengthy tutorial that will be largely the same every playthrough before opening up into a sandbox... Let me hit "New Game (experienced)" or something to start a new game at the end of the intro, confirm my character set up and get rolling. Dont expect me to sit through the intro on a game you encourage multiple playthroughs of multiple times... Thats FO3s opening vault (that one had an "optimum path" save made, grabbed the medicine bobblehead and snuck past the overseer so there were more options for the "trouble on the home front" quest), oblivions dungeon, Skyrims dragon attack/caves, NVs Goodsprings (Yes, its technically not Beth). these are games that encourage multiple playthroughs but the opening is very static. Let me skip the goddamn opening if its my third character already...
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Sep 27, 2017 22:34
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SiKboy posted:I'm not excusing how buggy they are, but the fact that they are buggy isnt exactly a state secret at this point. Kinda feel if you lose more than 15-20 minutes progress in a Bethesda RPG at this point then thats on you. I mean, you wanna tell be about the first one you played that made you lose an hours worth of play, then sure. But if you are playing an RPG by the company who are known as "The guys who make the buggy and unstable RPGs" and you arent saving often (and using at least a 3 save system rather than overwriting the same slot every save) then I dunno what to tell you. Save often, because poo poo will crash. Rotate slots because its possible poo poo will gently caress up in ways that will not be apparent immediately, and you dont want to overwrite your only save with a save where a game breaking bug has occurred. I enjoy Bethseda RPGs and I run a 4-save system (not including the save after intro just before you are asked to confirm character creation so that on future runs I can just to that point and change settings without having to do the intro again). One save that only gets updated after the main quest (or a major sidequest) has been advanced and three save slots I rotate as appropriate. Never lost a significant amount of progress (although in fairness I've been generally lucky and not encountered terribly many actual game-breaking bugs, most of the ones I've had have been more funny than infuriating). There always a mod for it in the first week and a save game you can download day-of. They really should just build it in.
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Sep 27, 2017 22:59
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I thought New Vegas let you walk straight out of Goodsprings.
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Sep 27, 2017 23:48
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All of them, except Skyrim, had a prompt at the end of the tutorial that asked if you wanted to recustomize your character or exit. So you just ran it once, saved at the end, then used that save as a jump off point for every subsequent character.John Murdoch posted:I thought New Vegas let you walk straight out of Goodsprings. It does. You can finish talking to Doc, then walk right out of town.
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Sep 27, 2017 23:53
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Skyrim actually makes an isolated save file right before the execution scene, but you still have to do the lame Helgen tutorial level. But yes, it is a problem fixed by the very good mod Live Another Life.
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Sep 27, 2017 23:58
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RyokoTK posted:Skyrim actually makes an isolated save file right before the execution scene, but you still have to do the lame Helgen tutorial level. I guess mods don't really count but mods like Live Another Life and Alternate Start are always very important to Bethesda games because the imperial city sewers, helgen, the pre-freezing flashback all that poo poo sucks after the first time you do it. So the mods come along and provide a very useful, important service. Then feature creep sets in and after a few version updates the mods inevitably have a million features no one cares about if all they want to do is skip the intro segment, and there's no way to just skip the intro segment anymore because all those versions are out of date and break the game. The fallout 4 mod in particular is especially annoying because it went from being a simple skip the start mod, to an alternate start mod, to having its own lovely starting segment and an over-complicated system for picking how you start that drops you off in the final location of the game before you get dumped at whatever random location you pick. TF2 HAT MINING RIG posted:Lots of games now have ridiculous save file sizes. gently caress save files and the inability to choose where your saves go because they always default to my small SSD which has like a tenth of the storage space of my massive hard drive where the games are installed. Nuebot has a new favorite as of 04:25 on Sep 28, 2017 |
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Sep 28, 2017 00:41
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Guy Mann posted:HDDs have been standard on consoles for three generations now, I don't get why so many games are stingy with auto/quick saves and save slots like we're still having to cram everything into a few kilobytes of space on a proprietary memory card. Lots of games now have ridiculous save file sizes. That last Deus Ex had like a ten save file limit lol.
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Sep 28, 2017 04:05
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Guy Mann posted:HDDs have been standard on consoles for three generations now, I don't get why so many games are stingy with auto/quick saves and save slots like we're still having to cram everything into a few kilobytes of space on a proprietary memory card.
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Sep 28, 2017 07:06
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Samus Returns: SR has the same problem as Breath of the Wild; you don't meet new enemies the further you go on, just the same ones with a different colour-scheme. Area 3 is a slog, longer and harder than the areas that become and after it. You fight 10 metroids, no new types are introduced, and a number of them drag out the fight by moving to another room. You only get two new power-ups in this level and it feels like your progression has come to a halt. Backtracking doesn't have the same ring to it because there are more collectibles but they have less value apiece. For some reason instead of getting 255 Missiles and 12 Energy Tanks like a lot of Metroid games, you get 261 Missiles and 10 Energy Tanks. It really feels like Samus should be able to take more hits. The circle-pad is used for both movement and aiming, and to freely aim missiles you have to hold down both shoulder buttons. The control-scheme is complex as it is but enemies are much more aggressive than previous 2D outings so you're liable to gently caress up while under fire. There's also a setpiece with an advancing wall of death that speaks for itself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3uExKODzK-4 Inspector Gesicht has a new favorite as of 09:39 on Sep 28, 2017 |
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Sep 28, 2017 09:19
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John Murdoch posted:I thought New Vegas let you walk straight out of Goodsprings. I'm pretty sure this is entirely down to Obsidian's approach of designing the game around the assumption that the player will murder every NPC as soon as they see them, so there's very few forced interactions or uninterruptable sequences.
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Sep 28, 2017 09:27
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Fil5000 posted:I'm pretty sure this is entirely down to Obsidian's approach of designing the game around the assumption that the player will murder every NPC as soon as they see them, so there's very few forced interactions or uninterruptable sequences. "Look Through Crosshairs" remains one of the very best game design philosophies out there.
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Sep 28, 2017 11:19
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Inspector Gesicht posted:Samus Returns: Isn't the missile/tank situation just some cash-grab Amiibo bullshit?
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Sep 28, 2017 11:56
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There's also an enemy that drains your Aeion meter and disables your Aeion abilities. One of your abilities is Rapid Fire, which is the only way to kill said enemy that disables it. Why the gently caress would you introduce Ornstein and Smough (They're fairer than this guy) into a Nintendo game? Diggernaut has a dozen phases and even when you look up a video you're still going to get hosed because a single mistake knocks off a quarter of your health. Even if you suction your self to the ground you still risk getting sucked up, and you have to be on the ground because leaving bombs for him to vacuum up is the only way to damage him in this phase. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0MlYfz6D58 Yes, I beat him in the end, but there is something badly wrong with how much damage you receive. I really hope there is some kind of balancing-patch in the works because this schizo difficulty curve isn't fun to play or replay, coming from someone who beat all the Souls games. Inspector Gesicht has a new favorite as of 14:51 on Sep 28, 2017 |
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Sep 28, 2017 14:09
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As somebody who played the original on the GB way back the second the counter mechanic got introduced I knew Mercury Stream was about to finally finish loving up both halves of the Metroidvania genre.
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Sep 28, 2017 14:21
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Barudak posted:As somebody who played the original on the GB way back the second the counter mechanic got introduced I knew Mercury Stream was about to finally finish loving up both halves of the Metroidvania genre. it's getting good reviews 
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Sep 28, 2017 14:47
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Lunchmeat Larry posted:it's getting good reviews Has a Nintendo game ever gotten bad reviews? Especially ones based on existing franchises? Even a glorified tech demo like Luigi's Mansion got 4/5s pretty consistently, you have to make a total trainwreck like Pokemon Channel to get people to turn on them.
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Sep 28, 2017 15:04
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Guy Mann posted:Has a Nintendo game ever gotten bad reviews? Especially ones based on existing franchises? Even a glorified tech demo like Luigi's Mansion got 4/5s pretty consistently, you have to make a total trainwreck like Pokemon Channel to get people to turn on them. Sticker Star is especially hated by the fanbase.
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Sep 28, 2017 15:07
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Lunchmeat Larry posted:it's getting good reviews Its bad mechanics bolted onto an ancient game that was never very good. I dont care if that makes me outside the standard review sphere, but as you can see on this page almost everything new about the game sans graphics and map arent super well thought out and many of the games old flaws like its map design having to serve its kill em all miniboss mechanic arent rectified either. Its not a terrible game, but five minutes of its start/stop pallete swap enemy gameplay is going to make it very clear this one is for genre fans.
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Sep 28, 2017 15:18
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Guy Mann posted:Has a Nintendo game ever gotten bad reviews? Especially ones based on existing franchises? Even a glorified tech demo like Luigi's Mansion got 4/5s pretty consistently, you have to make a total trainwreck like Pokemon Channel to get people to turn on them.
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Sep 28, 2017 15:19
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Barudak posted:Its bad mechanics bolted onto an ancient game that was never very good. I dont care if that makes me outside the standard review sphere, but as you can see on this page almost everything new about the game sans graphics and map arent super well thought out and many of the games old flaws like its map design having to serve its kill em all miniboss mechanic arent rectified either. I like Metroid games but this one is definitely rough. Better than Other M though
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Sep 28, 2017 15:27
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Barudak posted:As somebody who played the original on the GB way back the second the counter mechanic got introduced I knew Mercury Stream was about to finally finish loving up both halves of the Metroidvania genre. It was my first metroid, but I was completely uninterested with this one. It reminds me too much of that castlevania 3ds game. The one where they got rid of all the cool interesting/stuff monsters to make it more god of warish. Inspector Gesicht posted:Sticker Star is especially hated by the fanbase. I don't think I've ever been as disappointed with a game than sticker star. Like, I understand that changing the combat system to mix things up is fine - I think on paper having to resort to using different things constantly is cool instead of just getting cozy with one badge setup for 90% of the game. But not being able to choose targets is still bad, and gets rid of a lot of the strategy. And that it looks beautiful - but somehow, there is no charm at all when you play the game. It's just paper mario, on top of a generic mario format - just straight up go save peach without any interesting poo poo going on. I disliked it so much I dismissed color splash when it first poked out, but oh god that game had some really bad moments - but it actually made me feel like maybe the series can turn it self around.
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Sep 28, 2017 15:39
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scarycave posted:It was my first metroid, but I was completely uninterested with this one. It reminds me too much of that castlevania 3ds game. Mercury Stream seems really adept at adding melee combat mechanics to games that either dont work as intended or are functionally counter to the design of the game. Im genuinely amazed they got to do this after the Castlevania garbage on the 3ds they churned out.
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Sep 28, 2017 15:45
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Inspector Gesicht posted:Sticker Star is especially hated by the fanbase. Sticker Star is a profoundly bad and unfun game. The idea that Nintendo games don't get bad reviews is honestly pretty dated. Sure, they've got a better track record than most companies, but for every Breath of the Wild there's a bunch of crap like Hey! Pikmin and Starfox Guard that people forget all about the week after it flops.
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Sep 28, 2017 15:49
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Barudak posted:Mercury Stream seems really adept at adding melee combat mechanics to games that either dont work as intended or are functionally counter to the design of the game. Im genuinely amazed they got to do this after the Castlevania garbage on the 3ds they churned out. I'm okay with the melee counter because it's a good way to balance not being able to move while aiming.
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Sep 28, 2017 16:10
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Guy Mann posted:Has a Nintendo game ever gotten bad reviews? Especially ones based on existing franchises? Even a glorified tech demo like Luigi's Mansion got 4/5s pretty consistently, you have to make a total trainwreck like Pokemon Channel to get people to turn on them. Metroid Other M.
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Sep 28, 2017 16:13
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Nintendo games get bad review scores all the time. Remember when Gamespot gave Twilight Princes a 8.8?!
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Sep 28, 2017 16:17
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The counter mechanic runs opposite to the exploration and backtracking. It makes often the fastest way to deal with enemies to just wait, counter, shoot, move on which isnt a great pattern in a game with lots of enemies and lots of corridors you have to traverse over and over. If the issue with enemies in the game is that they dont merit lots of consideration once you get their singular gimmick in a game where combat isnt the main draw youre actually doing it right. Mierenneuker posted:Nintendo games get bad review scores all the time. Remember when Gamespot gave Twilight Princes a 8.8?! Yeah, giving it a score that high was a bad move.
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Sep 28, 2017 16:26
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Federation Force got pretty mediocre reviews didn't it?
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Sep 28, 2017 21:46
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It's weird that they made a Metroid-spinoff about the faceless red-shirts you usually find dead in the first level.
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Sep 28, 2017 21:59
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I liked the way the melee attack worked with the ice beam to finish off enemies. But I almost never remembered to use it as its primary intention as a counter, and after getting a few more beam upgrades I stopped bothering with with the Ice Beam. The 360° aiming was interesting but by the end of the game I ended up wishing it aimed like Super Metroid or the GBA Metroids.
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Sep 28, 2017 22:03
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