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Control does remind me of one double whammy though: 1: Games where you have to hold the use button to do basic interactions, serving no point beyond making you stand there for a bit. The more things to interact with in a game, the more tediously pointless it feels. (The exception is if the character actually does something / animates while you do it, like if you're interacting with a large object etc. Then spending some time is completely fine.) 2: Games where your character doesn't directly interact with items, yet has to be super close to them for the interact prompt to happen at all. And invariably you'll end up stopping like an inch too far from something to interact occasionally. It's one aspect of Control that grates quite a bit. Collectibles and the hundreds of chests in the game all demand you stop close to them, and press and hold. You should just be able to tap the button and be on your way, extra so since you don't even get the items from the chests you open directly. You stand very close to them. You stand there for a moment while the 'activate item' bar fills up. Then open them telekinetically, removing any reason as to why you'd need to stand so close. Then it fires out it's contents as a pickupable object. Which you might need to take a steps over to pick it up. Why couldn't it just be: Tap interact button. Jesse snaps finger, chest bursts open, item pops out and flies right at you, straight into inventory. Doable while walking or even running past. I guess Control is just extra bad in this regard because you never give a poo poo about anything you get out of chests etc. Since there are no treasures or special items or anything to get out of them. It'll just likely be another mod, maybe this one is 6% more energy instead of 5% energy, etc. (The whole inventory and modifier system has been covered enough by this thread in the past, so no need to compound to that.)
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Sep 25, 2020 16:01
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What I really want with the Control pickups is an "auto-dismantle" option that just straight up converts them to their components if they're mod types I confirm I'll literally never use, if I already have three of their type at equal or greater power, etc, without me every having to interact with them at the menu level.
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Sep 25, 2020 16:08
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SubNat posted:Control does remind me of one double whammy though: I don't think this applies to Control usually but I can give a pass for games that do this if there is a good chance of there being things in the environment that you can interact with during combat that you wouldn't want to accidentally interact with if interaction only required a quick button press.
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Sep 25, 2020 16:17
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Been watching a stream of the Mafia remake and Sam and Paulie both look like Jimmy Fallon clones and I loving hate it.
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Sep 25, 2020 16:27
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Captain Hygiene posted:What I really want with the Control pickups is an "auto-dismantle" option that just straight up converts them to their components - - - "Only keep [1] strongest version of [mod]" would be very nice. Or just have a system where getting more mods of a certain type powers it up or something. So that instead of getting 50 different MaxHP+ mods you get 1 that gets stronger the more of them you pick up, treating them as XP. Though functionally both of those would end up with the same end result for the player. (Having mods level up could let you specialize them down the road though, to fit your playstyle even more.) I probably imagine I mentioned this back when the game originally came out, but the inventory system feels a lot like they were planning on having something more complex, then fell back on just a trillion generic mods to save development time. (Unique mods etc. Maybe even have some weapon types be unlockable through finding them. Having the weapons just be made from a menu feels like they went 'oh poo poo we really need to chop off a couple hundred hours of devtime -somewhere-'. Putting the focus on the OoP segments is absolutely worth it in exchange though. Lobok posted:I don't think this applies to Control usually but I can give a pass for games that do this - - - Yeah, completely understandable in some games where interaction in-combat would be an issue. (Though it's something you can avoid by simply having some things not be interactable in combat, only combat relevant items.) Control really isn't a game like that though, and if jesse just did a 'snap, chest pops open.' then even interacting with collectibles and chests in combat would be a non-issue as it wouldn't break flow or leave you vulnerable either.
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Sep 25, 2020 17:01
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Playing through Skyrim again and I am always surprised how a game can make the reward chests at the end of a dungeon so useless. There is almost never anything useable in them. Just weird to have to decide whether even looking at the end reward for a section of the game is worth the few seconds it would take to even check the contents.
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Sep 25, 2020 17:02
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SubNat posted:"Only keep [1] strongest version of [mod]" would be very nice. That was my first thought, but on this run I found it most fun to tank up with three similar mods, so I'd be wanting to collect a few full sets to swap in depending on the situation. So I'd want that option open (in this ultra complex, customizable inventory system that no one will ever actually make).
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Sep 25, 2020 17:53
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Final Fantasy XII and by extension Zodiac Age might be my favorite FF based on mechanics alone, but the central cast of 6 have like 2.5 personalities between them, and they're all Valium addicts by the sound of it. If you had to boil each of them down to 2 or 3 traits, I guarantee you the words "serious" "reserved" and "subdued" would come up more than anything else. The key exception being when the boob rabbit writhes Also I appreciate the new orchestral arrangements in Zodiac Age but they clearly couldn't do anything about the voice acting, so the bad compression combined with the aforementioned delivery feels like taking a group call from your 6 depressed friends.
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Sep 25, 2020 18:23
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Manager Hoyden posted:Playing through Skyrim again and I am always surprised how a game can make the reward chests at the end of a dungeon so useless. --- Random loot lists baybeeeee~ I do recall that the last time I played it, I had a mod that tweaked the end-of-dungeon chests to be more interesting. But vanilla bethesda games are all about using as many hands-off randomized systems as possible to make sure almost no rewards or anything are ever memorable or particularly satisfying. After all, why put in any effort into making unique stuff for a dungeon that a significant chunk of players might never interact with? With them it always feels like it's less 'quantity over quality' and more 'quantity, quantity, quantity, over quality'. I can't really remember how Skyrim was unmodded, though a huge chunk of that has to do with the whole 'the game will have it's 9th anniversary in around 2 weeks.' (Show of hands: who's expecting a SKYRIM:WE'RE RERELEASING THIS FOR THE 3RD GENERATION IN A ROW next year?)
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Sep 25, 2020 18:28
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The Ivalice meta-setting needs another go around. Perhaps with 60% less grinding, 50% less fetch-quests, 90% more cast dialogue, and 0% obtuse mechanics that screw you out of a cool item, character, or event because the window of opportunity is as fast as the Flash in bed.
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Sep 25, 2020 18:31
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Riatsala posted:Final Fantasy XII and by extension Zodiac Age might be my favorite FF based on mechanics alone, but the central cast of 6 have like 2.5 personalities between them, and they're all Valium addicts by the sound of it. If you had to boil each of them down to 2 or 3 traits, I guarantee you the words "serious" "reserved" and "subdued" would come up more than anything else. The key exception being when the boob rabbit writhes
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Sep 25, 2020 18:47
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Riatsala posted:Final Fantasy XII and by extension Zodiac Age might be my favorite FF based on mechanics alone, but the central cast of 6 have like 2.5 personalities between them, and they're all Valium addicts by the sound of it. If you had to boil each of them down to 2 or 3 traits, I guarantee you the words "serious" "reserved" and "subdued" would come up more than anything else. The key exception being when the boob rabbit writhes The child characters are superfluous and tacked-on but they're also the only ones who show any sort of enthusiasm about this vibrant world. And whenever they do, at least one of the adults is there to patronizingly chuckle at these hick rube teens who have somehow never been to an ancient king's forbidden holy tomb, haha. NONE of you have been here before!!
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Sep 25, 2020 18:50
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My Lovely Horse posted:I think everyone knows about how Vaan and Penelo were kind of shoehorned in as young identification figures and Basch was initially supposed to be the protagonist, and a lot of people agree that it hurt the game. I usually go one further and say the game should have been set up for a party of four like in oldschool Final Fantasy games. Basch, Balthier, Ashe and Fran would have made a good party and as a bonus mapped nicely to knight/rogue/white mage/black mage archetypes. A HUNGRY MOUTH posted:The child characters are superfluous and tacked-on but they're also the only ones who show any sort of enthusiasm about this vibrant world. And whenever they do, at least one of the adults is there to patronizingly chuckle at these hick rube teens who have somehow never been to an ancient king's forbidden holy tomb, haha. NONE of you have been here before!! I can't for the life of me decide who is the protagonist of this story. Everyone but Fran and Penelo have some claim to the title. Funny enough that I actually like Vaan and Penelo more than the other party members, aside from Balthier maybe, since they occasionally emote. It feels like the adventures of 4 jaded 30 somethings and the two rascals they babysit.
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Sep 25, 2020 19:06
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Riatsala posted:It feels like the adventures of 4 jaded 30 somethings and the two rascals they babysit. FF12 suffers from a bad case of anime age and Ashe is closest in age to Vaan (19 and 17). Balthier is 22 which makes probably the least sense here, Basch is 36
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Sep 25, 2020 19:12
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I think all Final Fantasy games suffer from that. Especially with Auron who looks like he’s pushing 60 but is really like 30.
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Sep 25, 2020 19:22
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Riatsala posted:It feels like the adventures of 4 jaded 30 somethings and the two rascals they babysit. I also harbor this private theory that FFXII is actually a fantastic example of storytelling through gameplay. Every time the grownups decide on their next move, they send Vaan to town to stock up on potions and take Balthier's vests to the laundromat. He's the party gofer and that particular job is all in the player's hands.
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Sep 25, 2020 19:23
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moosecow333 posted:I think all Final Fantasy games suffer from that. Especially with Auron who looks like he’s pushing 60 but is really like 30. To be fair to Auron he is recently deceased, he looked a lot younger before Yunalesca murdered him
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Sep 25, 2020 19:37
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The thing that bothered me the most in FF12 was that you couldn't invert the y-axis and I don't want to bother downloading the remake if they kept that in.
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Sep 25, 2020 22:14
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I know which version of vertical looking I like, but I can never remember if it's called "normal" or "inverted" without checking.
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Sep 25, 2020 22:55
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Riatsala posted:I can't for the life of me decide who is the protagonist of this story. Balthier explicity says he is the main character and who am I to disagree?
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Sep 25, 2020 23:09
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Balthier can't be the main character because his voice lines sounded like they were recorded in a tin can
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Sep 25, 2020 23:49
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AC: Origins does this thing where you have to be very close to something in order to interact with it. Ok, that makes perfect sense. But the UI is laggy. If you want to open a chest, you have to run up to be right next to it (but not too close for some reason) and wait half a second for the prompt to come up. If you're too close, or looking the wrong direction, or who knows what else, the prompt disappears. I've lost count of how many times this has happened: see a chest and run up to it start hammering the interact button as soon as Bayek gets close to the chest but nothing happens by the time the game notices and starts to display the prompt, stabby dumbass has taken another step forward and is now standing behind or on top of the chest the prompt disappears and the chest is not interact-able until you gently caress around with positioning for another 30 seconds AC is not the only game guilty of this garbage. I saw similar behavior in the Darksiders II remaster, and ended up quitting the game over it. The terrible UI lag made one of the boss fights nearly impossible. e: Just read all of SubNat's post about Control. It's guilty of this as well. Why is the industry pivoting to laggy interfaces? Azathoth Prime has a new favorite as of 00:02 on Sep 26, 2020 |
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Sep 25, 2020 23:58
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Azathoth Prime posted:AC: Origins does this thing where you have to be very close to something in order to interact with it. Ok, that makes perfect sense. But the UI is laggy. If you want to open a chest, you have to run up to be right next to it (but not too close for some reason) and wait half a second for the prompt to come up. If you're too close, or looking the wrong direction, or who knows what else, the prompt disappears. I've lost count of how many times this has happened: The new Avengers game does this, with trying to open chests but punching and kicking the air instead.
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Sep 26, 2020 00:37
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Your Gay Uncle posted:The thing that bothered me the most in FF12 was that you couldn't invert the y-axis and I don't want to bother downloading the remake if they kept that in. There is zero excuse for not being able to invert both axes, but I keep running into games in TYOOL 2020 that only allow one or neither. The weird thing for me is, at some point in the last few years I had a complete 180 on my strong preference for which way I prefer. The funny thing is that Splatoon 2 came out before that switch and my muscle memory in it is so ingrained that I play it opposite to every other game. If I consciously remember that I get all sorts of hosed up and can't do anything right, but switching its convention screws me up even more somehow.
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Sep 26, 2020 00:53
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I think I might like normal with a mouse and reverse with a controller. Maybe?
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Sep 26, 2020 00:55
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I guess it's Normal for me now, press the stick in the direction I want the camera to go. I think it must've been some first-person games that convinced me, it always felt more natural in them and at some point I stopped reversing convention in third-person games. It's just weird how strongly I was in favor of Inverted before suddenly switching.
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Sep 26, 2020 01:00
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So what terrible about Shadow of War in 2020, since it's on sale for ten bucks? I expect the story to be as skippable as the previous game. In Mordor I only really had to engage with the Orc economy twice because the plot said so.
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Sep 26, 2020 01:03
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There's a point where it cuts to the map to indicate that you're done with the section of Mordor you're currently in and then zooms back and just sort of keeps zooming for a bit revealing more and more dor and you either go "hell yeah, I get to do that that many more times??" or go "hell no, I'm not doing that that many more times"
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Sep 26, 2020 01:06
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Inspector Gesicht posted:So what terrible about Shadow of War in 2020, since it's on sale for ten bucks? The plot is bad and the pits where you can order orcs to fight each other don't really work but the rest is good.
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Sep 26, 2020 01:16
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I hate that the arena fights in Borderlands 2 scale to your level, because they are already longer and harder than the similar fights in the first game, plus enemies in general in the sequel hit harder and can no-sell your shield entirely, so the arena just feels broken and frustrating to play. Like I tried it at level 19 when it said it was a level 18 fight, got my butt kicked but lasted to the fifth round and decided "Eh, I'll do it later when I'm stronger". Now the enemies are all harder variants, all are at level 23, and it's next to impossible to even get through the first round. No other sidequests scale like that and it just feels unfun.
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Sep 26, 2020 01:32
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rydiafan posted:I know which version of vertical looking I like, but I can never remember if it's called "normal" or "inverted" without checking. It depends on the game! Content: any game that has "press X to play a canned animation" to flip a switch or climb a ledge or whatever. It's not gameplay, it doesn't add to a characters abilities, it just slows things down and gradually grows more and more annoying as you see it repeated over and over throughout the game.
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Sep 26, 2020 01:37
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Some Goon posted:It depends on the game! Please tell me what games consider "mouse forward = look up" to be inverted, so I can shun them for being so wrong.
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Sep 26, 2020 01:44
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Karma Tornado posted:revealing more and more dor 
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Sep 26, 2020 02:29
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buddhist nudist posted:Yeah, as long as you actually try to play it like a stealth game, you're probably gonna get low chaos. You have to kill over 20% of all human NPCs across all missions to trigger high chaos. I've  ed about the Chaos system like a million times at this point so I won't ramble on unnecessarily, but a big problem is that regardless of what the game itself thinks there are achievements for doing 100% pacifist ghost runs. I think it would've served the game better to keep all the nitty gritty details of the system obfuscated until at least a second playthrough, because players will absolutely get hung up on that stuff if you give them reason to and Dishonored does, repeatedly.
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Sep 26, 2020 02:44
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I'm an idiot person that has to knock all the side mission icons off the map and AC Odyssey is hell for that. I can't tell what is repeating and what's not so I think I'm finally just gonna play an AC game doing the things I wanna do and skipping the rest. By the time I finish one a part of the map I've switched which army controls it like 3 times which sucks because I was trying to let the Athenians control all the land to stick it to the dickhead Spartans but it's to much work and the Athenians are useless apparently.
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Sep 26, 2020 03:00
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Manager Hoyden posted:Playing through Skyrim again and I am always surprised how a game can make the reward chests at the end of a dungeon so useless. There is almost never anything useable in them. Just weird to have to decide whether even looking at the end reward for a section of the game is worth the few seconds it would take to even check the contents. Skyrim has the loot quality of a placed items game and the loot system of a randomly generated loot game. It really does not work at all even before you consider that player crafted stuff is just better anyway most of the time. It really needed to have interesting bespoke and hand-placed loot like in a Baldur's Gate or whatever. Morrowind was a little bit like that,m some hand placed items and some random loot. I don't know why they didn't go deeper down that route. Random chests can contain random stuff sure, but getting some unique cool item out of a specific dungeon would make exploration so much more worthwhile.
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Sep 26, 2020 03:16
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So I loved Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey even though I found the game to be on the overly hard side and recently picked up the 3DS remake and oh man the added content is kind of bad. There's a bunch of really nice additional stuff that makes the game easier you can get early on, upgrades that give you more stuff for negotiating with demons and whatnot. But then once you hit the second area the game kind of goes to hell, after you finish an early plot point the new fancy story NPC shows up and her art style and visual design completely clashes with the aesthetic of the rest of the game, which gets really annoying when she's supposed to be wearing an enhanced version of the same armour your character does but aside from the magical girl style summon she does to conjure her mask out of nowhere (which has a more demonic techno look to it rather than the steampunk retro style of the other suits) it just doesn't scan. And then she promptly talks poo poo while her AI buddy calls her dude and then she kills you in an unbeatable boss fight. Then you wake up in a new area with your demons still dead, revived by a newly designed demon who looks like a super cartoony little anime girl - which again sticks out from the rest of the game's demon designs like a sore thumb - and the game introduces you to the new content which is kind of a frustration to play through. I was like, level fifteen when I first got to this place? The enemies were level sixteen and seventeen, not that weird. Except for the fact that there were random level twenty two encounters and, on the second floor, an even more absurd level twenty eight one that was immune to all physical skills and could cast reflect on its self  . So the difficulty isn't so much hard as it is dramatically inconsistent, the new designs I've seen so far don't even look like they attempted to make them fit and then I get to the first boss and I have a clear bias, I like this game and I like it's writing. Usually in this game you meet a big boss demon and they'll go on a bit about how humanity is destructive and foolish or whatever, pretty standard stuff. This new boss, instead, is a water nymph; her entire dialogue was a series of "I'm so wet" jokes and I just don't really have any interest in continuing on if the rest of the new content is just going to be more of this.Oh and the maps are terrible, the first two levels of this dungeon are conveyor belt teleport mazes with hidden doors you can only access from one side.
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Sep 26, 2020 05:42
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My Lovely Horse posted:I think everyone knows about how Vaan and Penelo were kind of shoehorned in as young identification figures and Basch was initially supposed to be the protagonist, and a lot of people agree that it hurt the game. I usually go one further and say the game should have been set up for a party of four like in oldschool Final Fantasy games. Basch, Balthier, Ashe and Fran would have made a good party and as a bonus mapped nicely to knight/rogue/white mage/black mage archetypes. I think Vaan manages to redeem himself by the end, it's just that he (and Penelo but who gives a poo poo about her) are an entirely different kind of hero to the rest of the team. Everyone else in the party is there because they're Somebody Special; they have some important personal connection to the core story, either to a group or another person, that means they were always going to be involved somehow. Final Fantasy's full of those; Cloud, Tidus, Terra and about half of the cast of FFVI, all four party members in FFXV, most of the twelve party members of FFIV. You look at those characters and there is NO confusion about why they're there. Vaan is different, because he's Nobody Special. He's just some random dude, there by chance, who's a hero because he does what's right; there was no guarantee that he or anyone would step up to fill those shoes, and yet here he is. Final Fantasy is also full of these, mostly in the supporting cast but some leads are there too: Bartz, Zidane for the most part, Locke and the other half of FFVI, the whole lineup of FFII, about half of FFX's party, Tifa and basically every member of VII's party who joins after Aerith. There can occasionally be confusion about why these people are here, but most of them manage to shake it off fairly quickly. Vaan takes a lot of the game to shake it off, and I think that's a detriment to the game. By the end of the game he has Done Things, the game's world as a whole is better off for his presence in this group, but for especially a lot of the early-game he's just sort of there without reason. I think the game would've improved if he had a clear, even if not especially good, reason for the party to keep him around. Maybe him being a sneaky little street rat strikes Balthier as a generally useful skillset to have around for stealing, or something.
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Sep 26, 2020 06:19
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Cleretic posted:Vaan is different, because he's Nobody Special. He's just some random dude, there by chance, who's a hero because he does what's right; there was no guarantee that he or anyone would step up to fill those shoes, and yet here he is. He's the brother of Reks, a soldier serving under Basch and who was a witness to Basch's supposed betrayal.
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Sep 26, 2020 06:36
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Much like Bartz is the son of one of the Warriors of Dawn and Zidane is whatever the gently caress, Garland's lab project or something. If anything Vaan is the first FF protagonist after IV that doesn't have a huge personal connection to the core story. And that covers 15 years of games which was the vast majority of the series' lifespan when XII was released and is still close to half of it today. He's basically revolutionizing the idea of what a FF protagonist is by being Nobody Special, and I know I for one was waiting the whole game for a reveal that never came.
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Sep 26, 2020 08:49
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