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I started Nier: Automata today. It's definitely a game I wouldn't even try normally because it's very anime which really isn't my thing, but I heard good things about it (a recent discussion in a thread here on SA about it having a kind of similar setting to Horizon: Zero Dawn to be precise) so I decided to give it a shot. I went in completely blind except for checking out Before I Play, and I'm definitely having fun so far. It's very anime, like I said, with the main character and her sidekick being teenagers, albeit androids, with revealing outfits and constant upskirt shots and whatever, but sure. I like the gameplay so far. Kinda gated overworld exploration (haven't gotten very far yet but I assume things'll open up sooner or later) with a dark souls kind of combat combined with bullet hell shenanigans. It's fun. So I do the tutorial quest, get to the main hub, go on my first real adventure and eventually make it to the desert. The machines are showing more and more signs of sentience, which is cool and obviously part of the larger plot. We fight a bunch of them in the desert, meet one that flees from us obviously scared of us, we give chase and meet a bunch of others that respond way too human and eventually get into this cavern where there's a bunch of machines mimicking caring for babies, strollers and all. My sidekick keeps reminding me this is just them mimicking human behavior for some unknown reason and we still have to take them out. Cool, I'll play along. Then all the machines form this weird anime womb thing and plop down a completely humanoid character (without all the naughty bits) and it... just... stands there? I can toggle my lock on him, walk around him, and it just stands there? My sidekick tells me we have to destroy it anyway because it's a machine. So at this point I'm thinking maybe if I don't attack him/it, because obviously there's more to this, something cool will happen? Nope... I literally got up to grab another beer and got back and nothing happened. I have no choice but to attack it to continue the game. I get that it's not a proper RPG but at least have it/him, or even my sidekick, make the first move or use a cutscene or whatever to establish why I'm attacking this completely passive character that the game gave me plenty of reasons to try to talk with or whatever. Then after the (very fun) battle you contact your superiors and there's a line telling them "Unfortunately we couldn't capture it." or whatever. gently caress you, game, I wanted to and there was every opportunity to but you didn't want me to. Really, if they just had the sidekick make the first move to aggro it, or have it aggro us, that would've been so much better. I just feel cheated. Like, just have a cutscene of me and my sidekick attempting to take the humanoid with us at which point it defends itself or something? Taeke has a new favorite as of 22:36 on Apr 27, 2021 |
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Apr 27, 2021 22:33
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Did you need more reason beyond "It's a machine, go make it dead"? Attitudes like that (serious late game spoilers)last chanceare why we lost the war and humanity was eradicated 
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Apr 27, 2021 22:39
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Not reading the spoiler but at that point in the game, with the info given to me so far, yeah I would like a bit more motivation to kill especially because apparently their sentience seems to be a new development at that point, worthy at least of a different approach than going full murder hobo. Even if I accept the nature of my character and my peers, they and myself have shown ourselves to be laser-focused on the job we were assigned but essentially curious teenagers nonetheless. Literally the last email I got was from my peers talking about a new kind of astrology involving Venus and isn't that interesting, wow?! My interactions with my companions have shown us both to be curious and willing to think outside the box as well. So maybe there's a very good reason for us to go all out murderhobo, but what I'm saying is that they haven't shown or told it to me. In fact, they've given me every reason to believe that encounter would and should have gone differently at that point of the story, with the interaction with our superiors to cement that. You can't even explain it as an act of self preservation because we're pretty much expendable, so an attempt to communicate with this new form of machine would seem worth the risk of losing two android bodies and maybe 30 minutes of their memories. I'd almost call it a bad case of show don't tell but it's not even that. It's just mismanagement of expectations and (dare I say it?) bad story telling. I'm not saying it's a bad game. I'm really enjoying myself, but it just irked me.
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Apr 27, 2021 23:23
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According to an interview the devs were originally planning to have one a goofy Bad End given out for doing what you did, but they couldn't come up with one they liked.
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Apr 27, 2021 23:30
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The incongruity between a lot of what you do and see and what characters say in early Nier Automata is completely deliberate, and you'll understand that more as you go through the game.Ugly In The Morning posted:It’s like how World got tons of praise for doing things that had been standard in games since 2010. Every single Monster Hunter game was made in 2006, and they've just been staggering releases ever since. The fact that Monster Hunter games were released before then was the result of a completely unrelated time warp.
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Apr 28, 2021 00:51
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there's a fishing minigame but i die if i eat the fish. MODS
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Apr 28, 2021 01:05
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Perestroika posted:And another one for MH Rise, cause I just ran into it: Monsters that have lots of attacks that propel them a long distance away from the player. Just hunted one where i spent 90% of the time just running after the slippery bastard cause it constantly retreated out of range. And then the loving thing ran away to a different part of the map five separate times, too. Despite having systems that I enjoyed, this specifically was why I stopped playing Dauntless. Most of their monsters had some bad combat design, but the worst of them were entirely based around hit-and-run attacks the entire battle. When I found I was doing more chasing than actual combat during a hunt, it sort of hit me that the monster combat design was just poo poo, and started appreciating the way it's designed in MH way more. Though I guess there are still monsters that do that sometimes, judging by your experience.
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Apr 28, 2021 04:17
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Dragon Ball Z Kakarot: the regular enemy encounters do not have enough variety.
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Apr 28, 2021 04:39
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Now that I've had time to digest it, I think I'm finding myself a bit disappointed with Fallout 4's Nuka World DLC. Looking back on the experience, it was pretty unfocused and shallow...and I know the kneejerk reaction is to say "that's Bethesda for you LOLOLOLOL" but Far Harbor certainly wasn't. Hell, even the robot DLC wasn't. (And large swaths of the main game are pretty good too, don't @ me.) I think the main problem is that they wasted a ton of time setting up the whole intricate structure of becoming a raider warboss, and that's the least interesting part of the DLC. Even if you were actively trying to be a piece of poo poo raider and take over the Commonwealth or whatever it's pretty dull. The actual meat of the content is very compact and often under-detailed by comparison. I think what I would've vastly preferred is basically a goofier take on Dead Money. Bethesda brings back their Nuka Cola super fan character from 3, but she's relegated to a collectible-focused side quest. One that ends with meeting the cryogenically preserved head of Walt CocaPepsi, naturally  and obtaining the secret Nuka Cola recipe. That feels like it should've been the core premise rather than the infinitely more convoluted "the Lone Wanderer blunders into a raider society, is set up to kill their leader that everyone was tired of and is crowned the new boss, then has to try and please everyone without getting their throat slit...this all takes place in a disused theme park because ???"Maybe there's a bit more intrigue hiding in the many, many terminal logs but unsurprisingly I do not have the patience to both with those. Especially when they like to throw 5-6 of the drat things onto a terminal and it's basically just a pre-war journal of some poor schmuck who probably died horribly but in an ironic way. John Murdoch has a new favorite as of 07:32 on Apr 28, 2021 |
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Apr 28, 2021 07:29
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Nier Automata and also Nier are at their best when you, for lack of a better word, try not to be too clever for them. Or generally, I've found that "I bet I get a different, cooler outcome when I second-guess the motivations as presented" is an attitude that serves you better in Western-developed games than in Japanese ones; and the Nier games in particular specifically play on gaming and game story conventions. It's not unlike in Spec Ops: The Line, you the player probably think "it would be better to not do a war crime" but not doing a war crime isn't how the story goes. Basically, you're not supposed to think about the protagonist's actions in the sense that you the player make the character make morally right choice, you're supposed to take motivations at face value, make the character do a bad thing but as a player question it, then later you find out why you were justified in questioning it. My Lovely Horse has a new favorite as of 07:36 on Apr 28, 2021 |
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Apr 28, 2021 07:32
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My Lovely Horse posted:Nier Automata and also Nier are at their best when you, for lack of a better word, try not to be too clever for them.  How often do western games encourage you to second guess narrative motivations, to the point where it matters along national lines? Nier in specific, the first game rather than Automata, is presented pretty clearly through the lens of the main character and doesn't hide or shy away from making his motivations transparently clear to the player, even if later playthroughs reveal more about what's going on behind the scenes to allow the player to piece together a bigger picture and figure out things that would, later, be confirmed in Automata even if you don't go out of your way to read all of the extra-canonical materials. In contrast, there's not really a point in automata where the game doesn't ask you to question why you're doing what you're doing and why you're following the orders you follow.
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Apr 28, 2021 07:57
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Perestroika posted:And another one for MH Rise, cause I just ran into it: Monsters that have lots of attacks that propel them a long distance away from the player. Just hunted one where i spent 90% of the time just running after the slippery bastard cause it constantly retreated out of range. And then the loving thing ran away to a different part of the map five separate times, too. What weapon are you using? I started out trying gunlance because I liked the idea of big explosions but boy you're slow, which makes it pretty difficult if you don't know a monster well enough to anticipate how it will move. I had a lot more fun once I started trying weapons that were more mobile.
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Apr 28, 2021 09:07
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I don't know if I have some mental issues or what, but one thing dragging down some games is my almost complete inability to sympathize with the character I'm playing and understand why they do the things they do. I've ragequit Horizon Zero Dawn about 4 times now because I thought that Aloy was so inconceivably stupid in certain cutscenes (as three examples, the child intro, grabbing the thing off the corpse and putting it on HER OWN HEAD and the cultist base infiltration when she ignores the instructions to look at Hades and also all the backtalk at the guy), even though after some hard thought days afterwards, I can sorta see why the devs would make her do the things she does.
Ambaire has a new favorite as of 09:28 on Apr 28, 2021 |
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Apr 28, 2021 09:26
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Nuebot posted:In contrast, there's not really a point in automata where the game doesn't ask you to question why you're doing what you're doing and why you're following the orders you follow.
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Apr 28, 2021 09:41
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My Lovely Horse posted:Yeah but my point is, in gameplay it makes you follow the orders no matter how you feel about them. And I've found it's generally Western games that allow for questioning situations to the point where they let you attempt to resolve them in different ways, and actively advertise that as a gameplay feature. Some RPGs do; and some of those games are even Japanese! Like Dark Souls. But most Western games on the whole don't any more than most Japanese games don't, and Automata isn't really an RPG either, there's no real assumption that you would have been able to. Like you mention Spec Ops but that game's big moment, you can't do anything but the thing you're meant to do either; and I'm pretty sure it's not Japanese.
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Apr 28, 2021 09:49
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It's kind of an unhelpful generalization since only a specific subset of Western RPGs even do the branching outcomes thing. In most narrative games you're actively participating in the retelling of a story. Fourth wall breaks in video games are almost never impressive to me though. I don't think it's particularly clever whenever it happens because I've read enough bad undergraduate writing in my lifetime to know that metanarratives are one of the easiest and laziest things to make your story about.
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Apr 28, 2021 09:59
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Just as many Western games as Japanese games do the thing where the character is doing things for reasons that aren't abundantly clear at the moment (and are more than just 'because it's a game), it's bizarre the ount of circle jerkery that goes on over Automata, which is a pretty good game but treated like it's the greatest philosophical work of our time.
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Apr 28, 2021 12:37
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Quote is not edit
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Apr 28, 2021 12:37
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I find it more puzzling that in a form of media that is generally built on pure entertainment and features precious little in the way of philosophy or metacommentary that goes beyond the purely referential, as soon as there's one example that does have even the smallest amount of either you're socially barred from engaging with those aspects because you're pretentiously circle jerking.
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Apr 28, 2021 12:59
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Nuebot posted:How often do western games encourage you to second guess narrative motivations, to the point where it matters along national lines? N:A gets points for making the backstory more complex but it does at times feel like that's  's only strength. Have an enemy yell "you're the real monsters", a character recite the Ship of Theseus to you, a sidequest end with a fade to black and "Later... everybody involved lost their winning lottery tickets and bled out from a papercut" text boxes, and it's hard not to roll your eyes. Then he hides behind the "you're right, I'm the shittiest writer :^)" armor when asked about itand I still lol at chapter select being an in-game "here's how the story would look if structured properly" post still a fantastic game, but carried more by its design and atmosphere than the writing imo
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Apr 28, 2021 13:26
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A two-fer: Flashlights that have insanely short battery life, even though they have no mechanical use or benefit or anything. I'd understand it if the flashlight provided some mechanical benefit like puzzle solving, harming enemies, etc etc. But it just feels like so many games have flashlights with <1 minute usetimes because 'that's just how it is.'. (Even though they'll recharge without issue in the background.) And the cliche 'You triggered a plot flag, so the area you went through now instantly auto-populated with new enemies, because you have to backtrack through it.' (Can you tell what game I'm playing? --------------- Prey 2017 ----------------- ) Honestly, I wish developers would stop with loving wiggly menus and weird effects on text and the like. If you have to have them: fine, but atleast let there be a toggle. SubNat has a new favorite as of 18:18 on Apr 28, 2021 |
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Apr 28, 2021 18:15
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SubNat posted:A two-fer:
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Apr 28, 2021 20:45
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Flashlights in Dead by Daylight are good for maaaaaybe 10 seconds without substantial add-ons. Which makes sense given they are constructs of the Entity and not real flashlights.
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Apr 28, 2021 20:51
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CordlessPen posted:I get why they obviously had to do it the way they did, but Alan Wake will always crack me up with its one-two punch of super obnoxious Energizer product placement and comically short flashlight battery life. Everyone focuses on that and not that Energizer is the brand to trust when you're being attacked by immortal shadow monsters. Strips the immortality right off it Can't say that about Duracell
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Apr 28, 2021 21:10
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Len posted:Everyone focuses on that and not that Energizer is the brand to trust when you're being attacked by immortal shadow monsters. Strips the immortality right off it You're using the duracells wrong.   Of course the Kirkland batteries do 1% more damage.
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Apr 28, 2021 21:15
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CordlessPen posted:I get why they obviously had to do it the way they did, but Alan Wake will always crack me up with its one-two punch of super obnoxious Energizer product placement and comically short flashlight battery life. Hey, the batteries only drain in seconds if you use the magical power mode that focuses the light and burns the darkness off supernatural entities. 
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Apr 28, 2021 21:55
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John Murdoch posted:Hey, the batteries only drain in seconds if you use the magical power mode that focuses the light and burns the darkness off supernatural entities. That's honestly the exact situation in which I'd want batteries that lasted longer tbh 
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Apr 29, 2021 00:32
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Resident Evil 2 Remake is a helluva game overall but it occasionally whiffs it. I just ran into a very annoying checkpoint placement, where if you die during a particular miniboss sequence it sets you all the way back to the start of the room. But that's a pain, because it resets all the item collection in there as well as the room's puzzle. And then you have to wait through the whole timed boss entrance again before it even shows up in a damageable form. And then you spend five minutes blowing your arsenal at it only to realize you're actually supposed to flee it to lure it into a setpiece trap sequence, so you let it kill you so you can start over once again At least they put a checkpoint at the start of the trap segment for when you inevitably home run yourself with a swinging seatainer the first time you set the trap, but why couldn't they give you that useful of one the first time around?
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Apr 29, 2021 02:39
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What are the worst examples of protagonist incompetence? Where the hero actively screws themself despite ample warning? There is the moment early on in Dying Light where the hero destroys a cache of anti-zombie meds while stuck in a quarantine city full of zombies, and he's actively suffering from a zombie bite. He could have ignored his orders from the get-go and used the cache as leverage. A minor fix would simply have him fail to secure the meds so the rest of the plot is the same but without the stupid justification.
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Apr 29, 2021 10:10
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Inspector Gesicht posted:What are the worst examples of protagonist incompetence? Where the hero actively screws themself despite ample warning? Legrand Legacy's Arena: The party leader (not the first playable character) declares we will use our new boat to take a one way trip to the closest possible port. Noone has ever successfully landed at this port and gotten passage out of the city in 15+ years. She declares this will be much faster than going literally anywhere else including several suggestions by the captain. We then enter the town and yep, only way out is the boat you came on. They do however offer to let us through if we become champion of the arena. This is not a haha fun times arena, this is full contact fight to the death. The game keeps hammering this point to you, down to mentioning the previous idiots the boat captain helped came here, had the same idea, and all died. The party leader goes "yep, and also you all including this former slave forced to fight daily in a similar arena has to join" so that she can.... raise her chances? Anyway you finish this entire ordeal to find out no, actually the champion can't leave the city either, you know something everyone would have know the entire time and thus meaning this whole thing is a complete waste of time. A party member then does the only sensible thing in a JRPG like this and murders the mayor and starts a revolution. In this cross fire angry people find the arena champion and plan to kill him. He then gives an impassioned speech that by staying arena champion he was preventing other people from suffering like he did. Which, fair, since he explicitly killed all those people who fought him instead of just surrendering or letting them limp away in defeat which was not only an option but both things happen in the tournament plotline. Welp the people decide this is fine, no good really, and he gets to live in peace. Oh and this whole process takes in story time at least a week which is about how long the safer destination the boat guy wanted to take you to would be. In fact, that guy beats you to that destination.
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Apr 29, 2021 10:47
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Inspector Gesicht posted:What are the worst examples of protagonist incompetence? Where the hero actively screws themself despite ample warning? https://i.imgur.com/uO9vElB.png
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Apr 29, 2021 11:04
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Inspector Gesicht posted:What are the worst examples of protagonist incompetence? Where the hero actively screws themself despite ample warning? the part of the first phoenix wright where he shows von karma the decisive evidence he has that he murdered someone before the trial and von karma goes "lol thanks for showing me this, coulda been bad for me" and tases him and takes it. what was even the plan there...?
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Apr 29, 2021 11:09
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Inspector Gesicht posted:What are the worst examples of protagonist incompetence? Where the hero actively screws themself despite ample warning? Spec Ops: The Line. There's also Shadow of the Tomb Raider where Lara is given plenty warning that removing the artifact will lead to disaster. She removes the artifact. Then there's the Last of Us Part II. Ellie is given a lot of chances to not escalate things.
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Apr 29, 2021 11:21
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Stexils posted:the part of the first phoenix wright where he shows von karma the decisive evidence he has that he murdered someone before the trial and von karma goes "lol thanks for showing me this, coulda been bad for me" and tases him and takes it. what was even the plan there...? Probably the sort of 'ha ha, I have preemptive decisive evidence that puts you into a corner' showboating that Phoenix is constantly on the receiving end of. I can't imagine that you'd get a lot of that without wanting to administer it yourself, and slowly painting them into a corner by the seat of your pants in Phoenix's usual way just isn't the same. But I feel like this discussion has to acknowledge an important divide, because I think there are three different types of protagonist incompetence: 1. A move that you're meant to think is boneheaded and that you curse out the protagonist for. Phoenix waving the evidence in Von Karma's face is one of these; for a lower-level but much more persistent example, I would put forward 'every Squall line in Final Fantasy VIII', the guy's got a serious case of foot-in-mouth disease and it's meant to be cringey. 2. Actions that the developer clearly didn't think too hard about that turn out immensely frustrating. 'Hiding a zombie bite' is the classic, I would also put forward the more general 'any time the protagonist gets reckless and things go south while they're off being violent' (although sometimes that is instead type 1). However this must not be confused with 'I the player have a perfectly logical way to solve this problem', which is often the developers thinking about the issue much more than said player. 3. Actions that you're supposed to think are good, or at least admissable, despite clearly problem elements that the game doesn't seem to address. Personally, I often find these the most frustrating. While a lot of archetypal examples are from much more optimistic stories ('let's befriend the obvious bad guy, and turn him to good with the power of friendship'), I think the worst of these I've instead seen come from the more adult and more player-choice-oriented games, like Fallout and Mass Effect. Although any game with a lot of story and protagonist decisions, implicit or explicit, is going to suffer from this to some extent--I'm pretty sure most FFXIV players will be able to point to one moment where the player character or major supporting cast does/says something that's presented positively but didn't feel like it to that player. Cleretic has a new favorite as of 12:04 on Apr 29, 2021 |
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Apr 29, 2021 11:56
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Cleretic posted:2. Actions that the developer clearly didn't think too hard about that turn out immensely frustrating. 'Hiding a zombie bite' is the classic, I would also put forward the more general 'any time the protagonist gets reckless and things go south while they're off being violent' (although sometimes that is instead type 1). However this must not be confused with 'I the player have a perfectly logical way to solve this problem', which is often the developers thinking about the issue much more than said player. If there's anything i learned from 2020 it's that this is completely realistic my boss was walking around the office bragging that he was at work despite not being able to smell or taste "i've probably got it but i'm not going to take a test and be forced to sit home for two weeks"
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Apr 29, 2021 12:03
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Cleretic posted:I would put forward 'every Squall line in Final Fantasy VIII', the guy's got a serious case of foot-in-mouth disease and it's meant to be cringey. And Squall is probably the most competent of the protagonists!
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Apr 29, 2021 13:18
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Len posted:If there's anything i learned from 2020 it's that this is completely realistic 2020 proved that every stupid action people do in disaster movies is realistic.
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Apr 29, 2021 14:07
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Alhazred posted:Then there's the Last of Us Part II. Ellie is given a lot of chances to not escalate things. I was gonna post this one. The last section lost me because Ellie already got to see how monstrous things got when she went out for revenge, then basically got handed a free chance to go back to a peaceful life. Then she basically goes "I'm gonna try it again, surely things won't go to hell this time" at literally the first possible opportunity, while I as a player am just thinking this makes no sense, it just feels silly.
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Apr 29, 2021 17:35
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Captain Hygiene posted:I was gonna post this one. The last section lost me because Ellie already got to see how monstrous things got when she went out for revenge, then basically got handed a free chance to go back to a peaceful life. Then she basically goes "I'm gonna try it again, surely things won't go to hell this time" at literally the first possible opportunity, while I as a player am just thinking this makes no sense, it just feels silly. During the last fight I was basically like  I don't want to do thisBut at that part of the game Ellie isn't a rational person. She has gone through so much poo poo that she was bound to snap.
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Apr 29, 2021 17:46
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Inspector Gesicht posted:What are the worst examples of protagonist incompetence? Where the hero actively screws themself despite ample warning? I'm a big fan of Starcraft 2: Wings of Liberty on this one. You play as Raynor, who's buddies with Tycus. Between missions, you can talk to other people on the ship for lore/background/whatever Literally every single person on the ship you can talk to either says "I don't trust that Tycus guy", "I'm a psychic/empath and know for a fact Tycus will betray you," or even my favorite "I, Tycus, can't be trusted and will betray you" And it STILL catches him off guard in the last cutscene
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Apr 29, 2021 18:31
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