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Exactly. They could have had a lot of fun with the irony that a mass of sapient toxic cells was a better brother than the real Alex Mercer. Thinking about it, the plot of Prototype 2 made the exact same mistake as Obscure 2, taking someone likeable, and making him a weird sexpest for no reason, Alex's weird obsession with Prototype 2 protagonists 16 year old daughter and trying to make her his virus queen and Kenny in the Obscure series becoming a plant monster and raping Amy offscreen to create a hybrid offspring. It's practically the same thing. BioEnchanted has a new favorite as of 19:27 on Jan 10, 2020 |
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Jan 10, 2020 19:20
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Yeah, its a shame Prototype 2 just ended up having a generic military dude as the protagonist.
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Jan 10, 2020 19:29
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BioEnchanted posted:Exactly. They could have had a lot of fun with the irony that a mass of sapient toxic cells was a better brother than the real Alex Mercer. Oh I love that plot and haven't seen it through the lens of a video game. There's a lot of potential there. Yeah totally squandered stuff.
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Jan 10, 2020 19:37
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oldpainless posted:In just cause 4 it’s hard to get anywhere quickly and the driving feels off Avalanche is so odd as a developer, Mad Max proved that they can actually make a decent driving engine that's fun to play around with but they keep doing a lovely job on that with Just Cause, which is supposed to be their flagship series.
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Jan 10, 2020 21:02
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Hel posted:Avalanche is so odd as a developer, Mad Max proved that they can actually make a decent driving engine that's fun to play around with but they keep doing a lovely job on that with Just Cause, which is supposed to be their flagship series.
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Jan 10, 2020 21:21
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The weird thing is that Prototype 2 actually has some pretty good writing in spots. My favorite is still a side mission where Heller goes undercover as a helicopter pilot and ends up transporting a bunch of rear end in a top hat scientists who start yukkin' it up about how they're working on a virus to keep the underclasses down or somesuch, and the objective changes to "gently caress over the eugenicists" which you accomplish by flying way up in the air and then bailing out of the 'copter.  But then all of the other side content is just the same insultingly stupid "military dudes are jocks, scientists are nerds" bullshit over and over.
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Jan 10, 2020 21:55
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BioEnchanted posted:Exactly. They could have had a lot of fun with the irony that a mass of sapient toxic cells was a better brother than the real Alex Mercer. My personal headcanon is that Alex survived the events of Prototype and had fled the city before Virus-Mercer woke up, and Alex Mercer is the real villain of Prototype 2 while Virus-Mercer is off somewhere else just pretending to be a human. After all, there's nothing in the game disproving that. And I refuse to believe otherwise.
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Jan 10, 2020 22:26
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Also at the risk of ruining the thread, I'm going to open my big dumb mouth about Dark Souls. I've been watching some randomizer streams lately and the end result was me asking a bunch of questions about how Dark Souls works and looking up the answers to those questions on the wiki. I'm now frustrated because I think new players would be way less intimidated by the game if you just told them two things: How to join the Way of White covenant and what it does (it deflects invasions away from you) and I guess also don't worry about leaving covenants/joining different ones and such. And to not worry about humanity too much, go ahead and pop them on the regular and also spend it on bonfires, it's nbd and humanity is super useful in all sorts of ways. Also there's apparently an NPC summon for most of the bosses? John Murdoch has a new favorite as of 23:23 on Jan 10, 2020 |
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Jan 10, 2020 23:18
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John Murdoch posted:Also at the risk of ruining the thread, I'm going to open my big dumb mouth about Dark Souls. See I love that about darksouls, it's a modern game that fosters tons of discussion amongst nerds to discover it's secrets rather than just signposting them for you. Getting my friends into the game, then receiving a ton of frustrated texts and then answering them as well as I can, and then several days later getting more texts about stuff much deeper in the game is satisfying.
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Jan 11, 2020 00:24
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John Murdoch posted:The weird thing is that Prototype 2 actually has some pretty good writing in spots. My favorite is still a side mission where Heller goes undercover as a helicopter pilot and ends up transporting a bunch of rear end in a top hat scientists who start yukkin' it up about how they're working on a virus to keep the underclasses down or somesuch, and the objective changes to "gently caress over the eugenicists" which you accomplish by flying way up in the air and then bailing out of the 'copter. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NuS6ZJrfZXQ It’s jank as hell at times and has a really dumb story, but Prototype 2 will always have a special place in my heart for making me go “hey this map is a lot shorter scale than in the original” at first, then giving you most of the original game’s map for the last act.
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Jan 11, 2020 00:32
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Dewgy posted:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NuS6ZJrfZXQ It really nailed the different feelings of neighborhoods in the yellow zone, too, it was such a good map.
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Jan 11, 2020 00:47
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Olaf The Stout posted:See I love that about darksouls, it's a modern game that fosters tons of discussion amongst nerds to discover it's secrets rather than just signposting them for you. Getting my friends into the game, then receiving a ton of frustrated texts and then answering them as well as I can, and then several days later getting more texts about stuff much deeper in the game is satisfying. I might agree with that stance if I was talking about literally any other part of the game. And even then, people have so thoroughly documented every last little piece of information about the games that that sort of magic has vastly diminished. John Murdoch has a new favorite as of 01:20 on Jan 11, 2020 |
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Jan 11, 2020 01:16
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John Murdoch posted:Also at the risk of ruining the thread, I'm going to open my big dumb mouth about Dark Souls. Covenants were kind of a mess in general for the first Dark Souls. Not sure if they fixed it in the remaster, but even if you looked it up and knew what they did a bunch of things like the Dragon and Gravelord covenants had mechanics which were outright broken.
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Jan 11, 2020 01:22
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NoEyedSquareGuy posted:Covenants were kind of a mess in general for the first Dark Souls. Not sure if they fixed it in the remaster, but even if you looked it up and knew what they did a bunch of things like the Dragon and Gravelord covenants had mechanics which were outright broken. As someone who just read the wiki on this exact topic, apparently they did fix Gravelord especially to actually function and I assume cleaned up Dragon too. Knowing nothing about any of the covenants going in, I will say that the PVP stuff actually sounds super cool and varied. Still not something I'd ever plan on engaging with, but still.
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Jan 11, 2020 01:25
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Invasions are also not really a big deal at all, I never understood the apprehension about them. 9/10 deaths* on any given new players run are still gonna be to the AI or stage hazards yet people act like they're some horrible unbalanced gimmick used to endlessly terrorize the exact same new players *Or more
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Jan 11, 2020 02:53
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The things I like about the Souls games are exploring the world and learning how various enemies work, and invasions screw with both of those.
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Jan 11, 2020 03:37
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Hel posted:Avalanche is so odd as a developer, Mad Max proved that they can actually make a decent driving engine that's fun to play around with but they keep doing a lovely job on that with Just Cause, which is supposed to be their flagship series. Also a perpetual thing dragging down the Just Cause series: No Coop. For whatever reason the developers are just so utterly against it, even though players went in an made a pretty popular multiplayer mod for 2 and 3. (The one for 3 even got semi-official support and is available on steam as a free addon/dlc for the game.) It's so strange to have them go a decade+ just going 'nuh uh' to the people asking them for the ability to play it coop. I don't give a poo poo about balance etc, the game is almost purely about doing stupid poo poo like attaching cows to windmills and watching them whip around.
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Jan 11, 2020 04:11
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Doctor Spaceman posted:The things I like about the Souls games are exploring the world and learning how various enemies work, and invasions screw with both of those. You can play offline, stay hollow, only become human when you need to kindle a bonfire or ask summons for help then go back to being hollow, etc Like I said, basically a non-issue E: you could also always fight the invader for an exciting and awesome time!
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Jan 11, 2020 04:17
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It's almost like people don't have a clear grasp of how Dark Souls works for some reason, leading to misapprehensions that erode their enjoyment of the game. Thinking emoji. Also when people talk about Dark Souls they're inevitably going to bring up some cah-razy invasion story and not the time they walked through Undead Parish and nothing of note happened. To an outsider looking in, the invasion stuff comes off as way more wild west than it actually is. Hence my point that you can dispel a lot of those assumptions with a few basic pieces of information that the game struggles to convey. VVV Also that. If you already don't like PVP, assholes showing up specifically to be assholes to you aint gonna turn your opinion around. VVV John Murdoch has a new favorite as of 04:33 on Jan 11, 2020 |
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Jan 11, 2020 04:25
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KingSlime posted:Invasions are also not really a big deal at all, I never understood the apprehension about them. A huge reason for this is that at the height of dark souls' popularity it didn't take long for nerds to figure out several key meta strategies that would let them invade and terrorize low level areas like the undead burg as minimally as possible. So a lot of new players would start their play through, and the instant they would gain humanity would be instantly invaded by giant dad or naked chaos sword wielding players they had no hope of fighting back against, and killed. It made the undead burg, and basically any other low level area, miserable to play through especially if you needed help too kill the gargoyles. On the surface, invasion mechanics aren't really a bother because statistically there's so many people you probably aren't going to be invaded very often, and when you do it's probably going to be by someone in your skill range. However - when the entirety of, say, the reddit dark souls playerbase is geared specifically to make as many people as they can miserable and sit there for hours spamming their red eye orbs so they can kill as many people as possible, it becomes more and more likely that you're going to get invaded by someone who just spent an hour collecting items from mid-game stages at soul level 1 solely so they could gently caress you up.
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Jan 11, 2020 04:31
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John Murdoch posted:Hence my point that you can dispel a lot of those assumptions with a few basic pieces of information that the game struggles to convey. personally, i like that it's obtuse. half the fun i get from the Souls games is struggling to figure out mechanics work. call me crazy...
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Jan 11, 2020 04:33
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Dash Rendar posted:personally, i like that it's obtuse. half the fun i get from the Souls games is struggling to figure out mechanics work. call me crazy... And yet the Undead Asylum still has tutorial messages explaining what the buttons do.
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Jan 11, 2020 04:34
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John Murdoch posted:It's almost like people don't have a clear grasp of how Dark Souls works for some reason, leading to misapprehensions that erode their enjoyment of the game. Thinking emoji. 
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Jan 11, 2020 05:03
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Dash Rendar posted:personally, i like that it's obtuse. half the fun i get from the Souls games is struggling to figure out mechanics work. call me crazy... Myazaki said that's definitely intentional. It doesn't have to be everyone's cup of tea, but having to piece together poo poo makes me feel like a kid again. That's a pretty impressive feat given that weed has failed me in that regard for years now E: it's not a perfect game and not everything in it is made better by being vague, it succeeds when it's done in a way that is fun and meaninful rather than irritating. Which I feel applies to most of dark souls KingSlime has a new favorite as of 05:17 on Jan 11, 2020 |
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Jan 11, 2020 05:13
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John Murdoch posted:And yet the Undead Asylum still has tutorial messages explaining what the buttons do. I think that's good, and am glad that the basics are covered in each game. I am not bothered that other things are obtuse. I definitely fell victim to accidentally making my first run of Dark Souls 2 harder by forming a bond with that obelisk thing in Majula. I also completed an entire run without knowing that power stancing was a thing... But I hear what youre saying. edit: ^^^^ yeah i got that nostalgic kid-like feeling with the game too. figuring out how to rig world tendency in Demons's Souls was like discovering the ark of the covenant or something
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Jan 11, 2020 05:23
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Whoever thought that underwater stealth sections in Shadow of the Tomb Raider were a good idea should be fired. Out of a cannon.
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Jan 11, 2020 05:44
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I mean, going back to the whole reason I brought it up in the first place, I just think you could make like 4-5 small tweaks to the early game of Dark Souls so as to not totally lose new players before they even have a foot in the door and then I wouldn't change much else about it. People seem to act like it's an all or nothing thing. Covenants as a system can be less cryptic without removing or ruining the magic of the more hidden ones. Some areas could be easier to navigate, but that doesn't mean I want a giant glowing arrow pointing the way to Ash Lake. In general I think people would adapt to the challenge of the game more easily if they weren't distracted by stuff like worrying about getting ganked by invaders or whatever. Really I just think it's silly to have some optional mechanics that seem tailor made to assist struggling players, but to then obfuscate those things the same way the game does with everything else. It's a bit self-defeating.
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Jan 11, 2020 07:04
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One small issue I'm having on the Xeno'jiiva fight in Monster Hunter World is how differently it's staged from all the other ones. You go to a new area that's virtually an arena and travel by wingdrake right to it- there's no tracking, hence not much chance of getting research on the thing (which, to be fair, is marked as "????" in your notes because you don't even know what it is.) That's a minor thing, but a bigger problem is when you get a retreat, there's a very short interval before you automatically travel by wingdrake to another part of the map and the fight pretty much instantly starts again. There's just barely enough time to use a whetstone if you hurry, any other prep you'd normally do between stages of a hunt is pretty much out the window (Unless you faint, of course.) It's a bit annoying on that level, though the fight itself has been pretty fun.
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Jan 11, 2020 08:44
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John Murdoch posted:People seem to act like it's an all or nothing thing. not at all where i was going with that. sometimes people post a PYF little thing dragging down a game and i'm all like "huh, that's funny--i loved that"
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Jan 11, 2020 08:50
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Maxwell Lord posted:One small issue I'm having on the Xeno'jiiva fight in Monster Hunter World is how differently it's staged from all the other ones. You go to a new area that's virtually an arena and travel by wingdrake right to it- there's no tracking, hence not much chance of getting research on the thing (which, to be fair, is marked as "????" in your notes because you don't even know what it is.) That's a minor thing, but a bigger problem is when you get a retreat, there's a very short interval before you automatically travel by wingdrake to another part of the map and the fight pretty much instantly starts again. There's just barely enough time to use a whetstone if you hurry, any other prep you'd normally do between stages of a hunt is pretty much out the window (Unless you faint, of course.) It's a bit annoying on that level, though the fight itself has been pretty fun. I think it would be improved by having the wingdrake to the second phase be manual instead of automatic. Still, I think they at least made it so you can't cut off the tail in phase 1. In any case as special fights go it's 2000% better than Zorah Magdaros.
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Jan 11, 2020 09:46
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KingSlime posted:E: you could also always fight the invader for an exciting and awesome time! Same thing with being ganked in MMOs. I enjoy PvE and I enjoy PvP, just not at the same time.
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Jan 11, 2020 10:22
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John Murdoch posted:I mean, going back to the whole reason I brought it up in the first place, I just think you could make like 4-5 small tweaks to the early game of Dark Souls so as to not totally lose new players before they even have a foot in the door and then I wouldn't change much else about it. I mean the game as is became one of the biggest and most influential of the decade so maybe they got it right?
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Jan 11, 2020 10:36
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Ugly In The Morning posted:It really nailed the different feelings of neighborhoods in the yellow zone, too, it was such a good map.
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Jan 11, 2020 11:53
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Replaying through FF7 on the Switch. Something I have to say is that the main quest direction of this game is an absolute mess. At almost no point after the Midgar intro is it ever 100% clear where you're supposed to be going, or even really what you're doing, as you stumble across the continents. Sometimes you'll arrive at a location and there's just nothing there as you've broken the linear sequence the game operates on. Other times you'll leave locations wondering if you didn't really miss something since, while something plot-related happened, progression-wise you didn't get anything.
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Jan 11, 2020 15:46
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MiddleOne posted:Replaying through FF7 on the Switch. Something I have to say is that the main quest direction of this game is an absolute mess. At almost no point after the Midgar intro is it ever 100% clear where you're supposed to be going, or even really what you're doing, as you stumble across the continents. Sometimes you'll arrive at a location and there's just nothing there as you've broken the linear sequence the game operates on. Other times you'll leave locations wondering if you didn't really miss something since, while something plot-related happened, progression-wise you didn't get anything. I've always wished that FFVII was just the Midgar sequence but 70 hours long.
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Jan 11, 2020 15:51
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Necrothatcher posted:I mean the game as is became one of the biggest and most influential of the decade so maybe they got it right? Something can be both influential and flawed.
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Jan 11, 2020 15:56
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Riatsala posted:I've always wished that FFVII was just the Midgar sequence but 70 hours long. There's so much potential in the entire Midgar setup that the game just kinda short-changes. I guess CG budget was a big constraint at the time.
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Jan 11, 2020 15:57
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the dark souls covenants always seemed so half assed. there's a whole world of ideas and concepts for different styles of pvp or pve and they end up not just re-using the worst ones but often have redundant poo poo in the same game! often they'd have covenants that depend on reacting to invaders just be functionally trash because invasions ended up being so limited that few people bothered to join the "defend me from invasions" covenant (or they'd just play hollowed or offline), while the "defend the other faction" players had to sit forever hoping they'd be lucky and respond to an invasion, but nobody is invading since its such a chore to do so they just pvp using other covenants or methods. a lot of those covenants also had a real narrow level range you could hope to do things in it, "invade people in this area" ones in particular. so either you halt your game to farm ranks or you just say gently caress it and move on for good. they had a few that were neat but most of them had some gimmick that was either uninteresting, essentially just "literally same invade mechanics but you're a different color i guess", extremely specific, or just didn't loving work. pretty sure there were a few that did literally nothing. i miss the rat covenant. that one involved forcing people to invade you to have to clear a gauntlet but mostly meant you clowned on them instantly with a pile of rat friends / a big angry elephant man and laughed. they didn't lose anything from it either except dignity.
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Jan 11, 2020 16:15
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rydiafan posted:Something can be both influential and flawed. Exactly correct my president
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Jan 11, 2020 17:25
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Every time Apollo Justice appears he seem to have an entirely new backstory. First he's connected to a troupe of magicians, then he's old friends with an astronaut, then it turns out he was adopted by a foreign revolutionary. In Ace Attorney 9 it'll turn out he's from a clan of vampire prosecutors.
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