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SkeletonHero posted:It's amazing how pissed off people get about Hellblade because of that. People got real mad about trailers in The Last Of Us 2 having Joel in scenes when in the game itself it's someone else. I'd be wondering where all the people who learned this lesson back with MGS2 are, but apparently they're all still waiting for Death Stranding to secretly be Silent Hills.
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Jul 16, 2020 13:52
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But then when someone politely spoiler tags the real deal they get mad and refuse to play on principle because how dare a game developer lie to them! 
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Playing through while terrified of something that might not actually be real is incredibly on-brand for Hellblade
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Jul 16, 2020 13:56
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I legitimately never died in Hellblade so I never got to see if anything changed.
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Jul 16, 2020 14:03
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John Murdoch posted:This. The downfall of Telltale is well documented and shockingly it has gently caress-all to do with "everyone suddenly universally agreed with my opinion, that all of their games were trash garbage, and they instantly shrank into nothing and disappeared overnight Sales of their games were in steady decline. Clearly their financial model imploding is what killed them, but never changing or improving on their formula was a contributing factor. If every game sold like Walking Dead 1 they would have been fine. Their style was enough for some people, but clearly a lot of people who played their games at least once weren't interested in a second or third or x however many more servings of the same dish. Or at least not at that frequency.
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Jul 16, 2020 14:04
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Necrothatcher posted:I never understood the complaint that Telltale's games only offered the illusion of choice and that it's ruined if you peek behind the curtain to see how it works. Necrothatcher posted:Hellblade.
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Jul 16, 2020 14:12
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Tiggum posted:I never tried to peek behind the curtain. The curtain had holes in it. Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice is the latest Ninja Theory game, came out I think in 2017 and was a pretty good third-person swordfighting viking game. The major theme/gimmick was that the main character, Senua, had severe mental trauma and paranoid schizophrenia, and they did their best to take that seriously and impress it on the player. So you had a lot of voices whispering to you all the time, saw a lot of hallucinations, and the part that we're talking about - to put the player into a similar paranoid headspace, it implies early on that dying enough will cause your save to be deleted. It won't happen, and going by exact wording of the warning it's technically not a lie, but it got people riled up real bad.
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Jul 16, 2020 14:16
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LifeSunDeath posted:if I remember correctly, Telltale were going around saying their games had all this choice and that it effected future episodes of games etc, which it did not A lot of the time it affects character relationships and dialogue and if you buy into that it works pretty well. Kenny's with you for a lot of TWD1 no matter what you decide but your conversations can be pretty different. If you go in expecting radically different plot outcomes (which do tend to happen in the final episodes) then you'll be more likely to be disappointed.
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Jul 16, 2020 14:23
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Tiggum posted:What is Hellblade and what was the thing that it did/lied about? Hellblade has almost no UI elements and is told almost entirely from Senua's perspective. Senua suffers from severe mental trauma and you control her in the midst of a psychotic episode brought on by the murder of her lover Dillion to the Vikings. Early on in the game, it breaks the fourth wall for a single moment to deliver the following message about the rot growing on Senua's right arm: quote:The dark rot will grow each time you fail. If the rot reaches Senua's head, her quest is over and all progress will be lost Many game reviewers interpreted this as a permadeath mechanic, believing that if you died too many times your save would be erased. And indeed it was successful at inducing that paranoia within the player, as many first-time buyers still ask if Hellblade has a permadeath mechanic. But in actuality (major spoilers) it's an illusion. Technically everything in the message is true: The dark rot continues to grow, it eventually reaches Senua's head in the climactic battle with Hela, and the game erases your save once you finish the story. But by the end of Hellblade both Senua and the player's perspectives have changed. She learns to stop fighting the loss of her lover Dillion, and that nothing can be done to bring him back. Similarly, what you as the player feared in the beginning of the story (Senua's quest being over and losing your progress) actually represents her triumph in accepting Dillion's death and moving on with her life. The misdirection around the so-called permadeath message is one of the things that elevates the game for me beyond "pretty cool" to "still think about years later."
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Jul 16, 2020 14:28
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Doctor Spaceman posted:A lot of the time it affects character relationships and dialogue and if you buy into that it works pretty well. Kenny's with you for a lot of TWD1 no matter what you decide but your conversations can be pretty different. The secret about games with Choices is that the act of choosing itself is often the main appeal. Not gonna claim immediately following a dilemma with "haha sike they died anyway" is super smooth, but what I would take away from that is that the choice was never about mechanically picking between parallel realities where Steve was either eaten by zombies or not eaten by zombies. The choice was about characterizing the player character as someone who would either leave someone to die or put themselves at risk to save them instead. See also: Mass Effect, where the overwhelming majority of choices either never "mattered" or had incredibly minor outcomes down the line but were still notable for fleshing out each player's particular version of Shepard. Phigs posted:Sales of their games were in steady decline. Clearly their financial model imploding is what killed them, but never changing or improving on their formula was a contributing factor. If every game sold like Walking Dead 1 they would have been fine. Their style was enough for some people, but clearly a lot of people who played their games at least once weren't interested in a second or third or x however many more servings of the same dish. Or at least not at that frequency. All of that follows from the company making really, really dumb decisions and not people arbitrarily deciding they don't like TT games anymore. VVV Exactly. VVV John Murdoch has a new favorite as of 14:48 on Jul 16, 2020 |
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Jul 16, 2020 14:40
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The more well-known Telltale games continued to sell into the hundreds of thousands on Steam, they just weren't gonna catch lightning in a bottle like TWD1 again for all the expensive licenses they were buying up.
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Jul 16, 2020 14:43
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Just a heads up if anyone thinks about playing Hellblade because the stuff in this thread seems interesting: Play it with headphones. Trust me on this one!
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Jul 16, 2020 14:58
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There is seriously a market niche for telltale-style A games, it's just that they need to develop a better production pipeline for design and visuals and VA direction, and more judicious negotiation for licenses. Heck, you could probably pull off that tech with just Unity or Unreal. Naughty Dog is definitely not that, it's way too expensive and could never be sustainable.
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Jul 16, 2020 14:59
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John Murdoch posted:The secret about games with Choices is that the act of choosing itself is often the main appeal. Not gonna claim immediately following a dilemma with "haha sike they died anyway" is super smooth, but what I would take away from that is that the choice was never about mechanically picking between parallel realities where Steve was either eaten by zombies or not eaten by zombies. The choice was about characterizing the player character as someone who would either leave someone to die or put themselves at risk to save them instead.
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Jul 16, 2020 15:02
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Phobophilia posted:There is seriously a market niche for telltale-style A games, it's just that they need to develop a better production pipeline for design and visuals and VA direction, and more judicious negotiation for licenses. Heck, you could probably pull off that tech with just Unity or Unreal. I felt like Detroit: Become Human pushed the basic Telltale formula forward quite a bit - shame about all of the other massive problems it had.
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Jul 16, 2020 15:03
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Necrothatcher posted:I felt like Detroit: Become Human pushed the basic Telltale formula forward quite a bit - shame about all of the other massive problems it had. Yeah for all its faults, when you see the branches of each chapter of Become Human it's pretty impressive.
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Jul 16, 2020 15:05
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Morpheus posted:Yeah for all its faults, when you see the branches of each chapter of Become Human it's pretty impressive. How does it compare to Alpha Protocol? Because that game had a serious amount of variation, especially for things that weren't obvious explicit choices. You always had the same missions but they played out pretty differently depending on what you had and hadn't done.
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Jul 16, 2020 15:14
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Hel posted:How does it compare to Alpha Protocol? Because that game had a serious amount of variation, especially for things that weren't obvious explicit choices. You always had the same missions but they played out pretty differently depending on what you had and hadn't done. You could have some wildly different results when playing Detroit. One of the chapters has 30+ variations based on your previous actions, and which characters are even left alive at that point (someone can die the very first time you even get to play as them), and there are over 40 ending variations. Shame about the actual writing, though.
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Jul 16, 2020 15:36
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John Murdoch posted:The secret about games with Choices is that the act of choosing itself is often the main appeal. Not gonna claim immediately following a dilemma with "haha sike they died anyway" is super smooth, but what I would take away from that is that the choice was never about mechanically picking between parallel realities where Steve was either eaten by zombies or not eaten by zombies. The choice was about characterizing the player character as someone who would either leave someone to die or put themselves at risk to save them instead. Yeah, it's one thing if a developer lies, but the act of flavoring a story has value. I remember a really minor bit in Mass Effect where I was boarding a station and the security guy wanted me to surrender my weapons. I could choose to either do so, or point my gun at him and tell him hell no. The guy's boss came over the PA and told him to leave me alone, so I realized that regardless of choice, the outcome is "you pass peacefully, and keep your weapons." But the character who chooses to keep their head down and comply in that situation, is very different from the one who draws their gun and risks a shootout! Even if it's not reflected in gameplay it lets you flavor the storytelling.
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Jul 16, 2020 17:46
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I wish RPGs and other character driven games would follow through with things like that a bit more. Some way of making flavor/character choices feel a bit more weighty. Like imagine there's a range of options your character could go for but the ones available to you are dependent on how you've played your character. Or a reputation system that is just about how people react to you based on how you've acted in the past. Mass Effect's paragon/renegade system would have been a lot more fun if it was just a system of determining which badass things you could say or what cutscene triggers you had access to. I think RPGs have a great opportunity to reward players in pure roleplay ways that hasn't been properly explored.
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Jul 16, 2020 17:56
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Hel posted:How does it compare to Alpha Protocol? Because that game had a serious amount of variation, especially for things that weren't obvious explicit choices. You always had the same missions but they played out pretty differently depending on what you had and hadn't done. One of my favorite “not obvious choices” things in that was antagonizing Marburg. If you read his file and decide to be the kind of spy he hates when you first meet him, but are otherwise professional through the game, he knows you’re trying to play him and respects you for it. If you’re consistently an unprofessional dick to everyone, he hates your guts and you can kill him in Rome. Which boss fights you get in the last level are also hugely dependent on how you played the entire game, with some bosses straight up killing each other before you would have fought them.
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Jul 16, 2020 18:07
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alpha protocol was really good
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Jul 16, 2020 18:09
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Okay, TellTale shutting down because it's games were lovely was a bad take on my part, full stop.
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Jul 16, 2020 18:18
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Ugly In The Morning posted:One of my favorite “not obvious choices” things in that was antagonizing Marburg. If you read his file and decide to be the kind of spy he hates when you first meet him, but are otherwise professional through the game, he knows you’re trying to play him and respects you for it. If you’re consistently an unprofessional dick to everyone, he hates your guts and you can kill him in Rome. Which boss fights you get in the last level are also hugely dependent on how you played the entire game, with some bosses straight up killing each other before you would have fought them. I liked how if you turned up to the Embassy in full battledress the guards would just assume you're one of them and just wave you in, that was a great example of having a non-explicit, non-textual choice in the game that made a difference. Shame about the bug that set the "you shot your way in" flag if you went in stealthily though.
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Jul 16, 2020 18:26
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I think the main thing bringing Alpha Protocol down is that it didn't do well enough for "spy" to become a genre. Imagine a bigger budget sequel with more locations and divergence in gameplay, so you can go through properly as the three types of JBs. Actually, didn't Rockstar have a spy game in development? I remember reading about that before GTAv came out. Although, to be honest, I'm not sure I want to play a Rockstar spy game really
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Jul 16, 2020 18:35
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Phigs posted:Sales of their games were in steady decline. Clearly their financial model imploding is what killed them, but never changing or improving on their formula was a contributing factor. I'd say that their formula was not only not improving, it was regressing and going towards simplified graphic novel route aggressively. With the early Telltale releases (Monkey Island, Sam&Max) you still had typical adventure stuff like inventories, item puzzles, conversations and sometimes even minigames (Puzzle Agent). The needed activities to progress didn't have to happen in a certain order, and there were sometimes even different ways to solve things. When TWD was a massive hit, they ditched most of the adventure and puzzle elements to make stories simple enough so that you could not get stuck anywhere, nor were you required to think for a solution for more than 5 seconds. An adventure game where you could not get stuck, with each episode doable in 2-3 hours depending on how much you paid attention. The simplification of the gameplay obviously also allowed them to more closely control what the player could try to do, so they started to crank out games which really were closer to interactive animation series than actual adventure games, but due to very limited need to play test they could do them relatively quickly and with low resources. IMHO that was the point they lost it and finally over-extended.
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Jul 16, 2020 19:01
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As much as people say that your choices don't amount to anything big in Mass Effect, there are some bigger things in ME3 that rely on choices from previous games. Getting the good endings for Tuchanka and Rannoch is impossible if you din't make the right choices in the previous games and of the eight possible squad members in the game four of them could be dead. One of the ME1 characters is guaranteed to be dead (as both the Human ME1 squaddies are available in ME3, but one will die in ME1) and the survivor will be on your squad in the prologue but can die before rejoining your squad in the second half of the game. The two returning squaddies from ME2 could be dead as every one in ME2 can die. Only one returning character is guaranteed to be alive, the other three are new characters for ME3 and one of those is from a DLC so you could have as few as three available squad members. Sure, a lot of the choices amount to nothing and you'll never miss out on a mission because of a choice, the game will just sub-out a returning character for a new one (or not replace them with anyone) but some of the choices do have a decent effect on the game. And yeah, none of this has any effect on the ending other than adding to your score that unlocks the three ending choices.
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Jul 16, 2020 19:14
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tight aspirations posted:I liked how if you turned up to the Embassy in full battledress the guards would just assume you're one of them and just wave you in, that was a great example of having a non-explicit, non-textual choice in the game that made a difference. Or if you show up to the subway meeting in the stealth armor you get lectured about how if you really wanted to be stealthy in broad daylight in a public location, you’d actually just dress like a civilian and not a loving navy seal
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Jul 16, 2020 19:15
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Bogmonster posted:I think the main thing bringing Alpha Protocol down is that it didn't do well enough for "spy" to become a genre. Imagine a bigger budget sequel with more locations and divergence in gameplay, so you can go through properly as the three types of JBs. James Bond Jason Bourne Jeff Bridges
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Jul 16, 2020 20:03
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Cliff posted:James Bond Johnny Bravo
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Jul 16, 2020 20:16
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Jerry Bruckheimer
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Jul 16, 2020 20:35
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The new paper mario apparently still relies on consumable attacks and incredibly long puzzle boss fights with time limits. Why does Nintendo desperately want me to not play what used to be one of my favorite franchises?
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Jul 16, 2020 20:50
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Veotax posted:As much as people say that your choices don't amount to anything big in Mass Effect, there are some bigger things in ME3 that rely on choices from previous games. I agree. I was always pretty impressed by all of the Mass Effects (except Andromeda) and the inner workings although I will admit im kind of easily impressed.
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Jul 16, 2020 20:52
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Bogmonster posted:Actually, didn't Rockstar have a spy game in development? I remember reading about that before GTAv came out. Although, to be honest, I'm not sure I want to play a Rockstar spy game really They did, but it just all went quiet and I think they just shelved it.
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Jul 17, 2020 00:27
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Necrothatcher posted:I felt like Detroit: Become Human pushed the basic Telltale formula forward quite a bit - shame about all of the other massive problems it had. I think even that game is a bit too high budget for the niche that I am envisioning, D:BH has much higher production values than anything Telltale has ever produced. Der Kyhe posted:I'd say that their formula was not only not improving, it was regressing and going towards simplified graphic novel route aggressively. With the early Telltale releases (Monkey Island, Sam&Max) you still had typical adventure stuff like inventories, item puzzles, conversations and sometimes even minigames (Puzzle Agent). The needed activities to progress didn't have to happen in a certain order, and there were sometimes even different ways to solve things. I think it is precisely this kind of stripped down game design that can be pumped out en-masse that constitutes the niche. Something higher than visual novels, but lower than what Quantic Dreams or Naughty Dog specialize in. Telltale filled that, but they ran up too much overhead due to bad tech and production workflows, and overextending to too many licenses.
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Jul 17, 2020 05:18
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Heaven's Vault did a lot of the things that Telltale games promised with regards to a dialogue system and meaningful choices and attached it to a neat puzzle game about space archaeology and linguistics.
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Jul 17, 2020 05:52
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basically telltale games worked out a way to make funkopops for popular franchises i demand funkopops *jaw falls open into a wide faced smile, facial hair sprouts randomly across patches of my face*
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Jul 17, 2020 09:05
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I think I remember reading someone saying they only really made a profit on Walking Dead and Minecraft. GoT must have been expensive but I only heard bad things about it.
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Jul 17, 2020 21:14
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It was terrible because you’re adjacent to all of the canon characters but you can’t do a thing about it, so at the end of ep 1 Ramsey shows up and there’s not a loving thing you can do because he’s an important character and you’re literally filler.
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Jul 17, 2020 21:33
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yeah you're like the not-Starks just kinda loving about and occasionally talking to the Important Characters for a scene or two. I managed to get the equivalent of Sansa executed in the end.
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Jul 17, 2020 21:45
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Necrothatcher posted:I felt like Detroit: Become Human pushed the basic Telltale formula forward quite a bit - shame about all of the other massive problems it had. I didn’t really see it as having massive problems, it achieved pretty much exactly what it was going for- a lot of the criticism just felt like people had it ready since it was announced so they could dunk on David Cage because a lot of his prior games were bad or ridiculous. It didn’t sputter out like Indigo Prophecy did.
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Jul 17, 2020 22:08
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