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I've been playing a bunch of King of Dragon Pass in anticipation of the follow-up game and there are so many little things throughout the game it's ridiculous. If you don't know already, KoDP is a strategy game where you take control of a bronze age clan of pseudo Celtic/ viking types. The strategic layer is actually only half the game though. The other half is composed of elaborate choose your own adventure scenarios placing you in difficult societal situations, and those are the bits that give the game its character. There are two little things I love. It's important to understand the culture of the setting. You're dealing with what are in essence no more than about a thousand highly superstitious, xenophobic, authoritarian rednecks. So often, situations are dire. There's plague in the clan, how do we address that? Bandits are plaguing us, what do we do? The primal forces of chaos are eating our sheep! You're offered a range of responses, and because your economic, religious, diplomatic, and military situations are always shifting, one single metagame response isn't always the right one. For instance if you're military is weak, you might pay tribute to bandits, but you could also just crush them outright. Chaos might be dealt with by appealing to a militant order of warriors that do nothing but get wasted and rip it to shreds, but if you're broke, you could sacrifice to the God they fight for instead, hoping for divine intervention. But sometimes you deal with more domestic situations. Two of your soldiers were drinking together, one insulted the other. Being upstanding barbarians, this means they have to duel, right? Well one of their wives, annoyed at the possibility of wonton bloodshed, brains her man with a branch before he can go get himself killed over a drunken dust up. Again, you are given several options for dealing with this, but one of them is just, "gently caress off with this poo poo we are trying to run a clan here, go figure it out you babies." and that can and does work. The other one concerns combat. Fighting is actually not the point of the game. It's actually about creating the foundations of a more civil society. But fighting will occur. It's pretty uninvolved most of the time. You allocate a certain number of dudes, pick their strategy, and hope for the best. But you also have nobles. They're your advisors during events, they have stats, and some predetermined personalities. And they fight right alongside your redshirts. So sometimes you'll get a brief description of a situation one of them is dealing with mid fight, and you can provide input. Most of the time it's pretty standard stuff like this guy is cut off behind enemy lines, what should he do? And you'll want to pay attention to what the noble is good at. Obviously don't ask a guy who's good at straight up combat to use magic to escape. But one noble I had, instead of bog standard battle situations, would continuously recall weird vague prophetic visions that you'd then have to try to interpret to keep his rear end alive. And it kept happening to him. Every time he went into battle he'd recall another one. And he'd just hulk out and cleave everyone down, because his combat stats were so godly. But those battle events can be absolutely lethal to one of your leaders, so having only these ephemeral images and omens to work with not only puts you right in the head of the character, but also adds a cool wrinkle to what is, in essence, just a throwaway set of text boxes to make combat more engaging. The whole game is like that. It forces you into the mindset of another culture. In fact, if you resist that mindset and try to play it with a modern perspective, you'll often gently caress yourself because the societal expectations are so much different than ours.
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Jun 24, 2018 07:29
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I think a system like that would benefit more than just visual novels. Am I right in understanding that the player choices aren't totally explicit about the mechanical outcomes? Partial but not complete obfuscation is such a cool concept I'm surprised more story oriented games haven't tried it.
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Aug 17, 2018 06:37
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Pillars of Eternity 2: The setup involves you being brought back from the dead to help the gods and recover a bit of your soul to return fully to life. But you are given free reign to say no. If you do you get exactly what you want and die, game over. I love games that dangle stupid choices in front of the player and dare them to opt in.
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Mar 10, 2021 00:56
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GG Strive:\ In typical anime fighter fashion, there’s a lot of shouting the names of supers. I play Leo, he has a flash kick analog. If you use it to end a match, the bark changes to a long, victorious version. Makes you feel like a badass when you kill with it.
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Jul 25, 2021 15:02
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I don’t even know how something like that passes QA at all. I get that mistakes happen but hoo boy. Hades boss chat. When you unlock all three sisters as the first potential boss and Zagrius starts guessing which one will show up is always a hilarious riot.
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Aug 14, 2021 20:56
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ImpAtom posted:Hades is extremely widely lauded for its sense of progression. It isn't going to work for everyone but it is basically held up as the ideal of getting people to keep going in a game that kills you frequently. It's fine that someone dislikes it but it's also a pretty niche opinion considering. Something I think Hades gets very, very right is that even outside of the gentle ramp offered by the mirror and god mode if you use it is that you can just bump your dumb face into some absurdly broken poo poo through merely playing, so the progression isn’t the only thing compelling you to keep going. I personally didn’t care whether I won or lost because the mere act of mixing and matching boons with weapons was a joy all on its own and while the weapons themselves are lightly tied to progression, gods/boons mostly aren’t with one big exception. Slay The Spire does this too. Leaving fun broken poo poo in breaks up the pace a little and helps players think outside the box when doing more runs.
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Aug 15, 2021 23:22
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Riatsala posted:I adore a lot about Persona 5 but one detail I love are the DVDs you can rent. Mechanically they're only there to raise certain social stats, but they put a lot of love into making spoof versions of popular shows. Not only do they have great knockoff names (The Running Dead, Not-Hot Betsy), when you watch them you can overhear a few seconds of dialogue poking fun at the show they spoof. Also I love Morgana's reaction to each show, like lecturing you not to act like the teenagers on 90210. Along these lines, there are so many items with sorta kinda useless functions that exist only for flavor and they’re awesome. Each vending machine scattered around the world will only have a selection of three drinks, and those drinks usually only restore a pittance of HP and aren’t worth getting, but they’re obvious parodies of real brands and it’s clear the localizers or writers had a ton of fun making up stupid names for drinks. Also, some of the vending machines have SP restoring items in them, which is good early on since SP loss is your real bottleneck. Not so much after the first palace but eh. Another funny little thing, one of your buddies comes over during the Summer break, and you can hang out with him while he’s there. This interaction is less to raise your confidant level, which is something you’ve been trying to do for the entirety of the game, and more for flavor. But what’s neat is that you can continue hanging out with him after the first event, which is strictly speaking non optimal since it’ll eat up your next timeslot, and your given the option of what to do when continuing. If you make coffee, something you’ve been doing for most of the game at this point and should know how to do, you’re given the option to “put some love into it” or to “make it as you were taught.” If you “put love into it” he spits it out and acts disgusted. But it goes beyond a gag. Instead of La Blanc Coffee, which you normally get in your inventory after finishing, you get Bitter Coffee instead. It’s functionally the same thing, but a nice little detail nonetheless.
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Nov 2, 2022 15:15
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Agents are GO! posted:Destruction and Physics ate what make combat in Control so satisfying, watching the environments just getting wrecked. Along those lines, Red Faction Guerrilla remains an under appreciated Gen for all the stupid poo poo you could get up to destroying buildings.
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Jan 7, 2023 18:26
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credburn posted:I felt so overwhelmed by Wasteland 3's opening. I remember how important min-maxing was in Wasteland 2; Wasteland 3 is like, Here are seventy skills, you must specialize in two!* I don't know what kind of NPCs I will meet, who will join my party, etc. It's very stressful I wanna say it's an rpg with emphasis on the RP. But snark aside it is kind of a bummer that this is the typical feeling when shown such a big list of skills. I do the same thing. Only RPG that ever threw a wall of decisions at me early but didn't feel overwhelming was Pillars of Eternity II. But that game is also fantastically balanced.
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Apr 12, 2023 16:19
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bewilderment posted:Scarlet Hollow does this the best as a CYOA/VN kinda game where you have just seven skills to pick from at the start and each of them has significant content behind it, but you can only pick two of them. Is this pc only? It looks awesome. Right up there with Road Warden in terms of narrative games I'm interested in.
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Apr 13, 2023 17:08
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The regenerating item thing is a good idea and encourages you to use your stuff without being concerned you’ll be hosed later. But honestly if RPGs are gonna have items and avoid the trap of people hording, just make items extremely rare in general and give them highly potent effects. If you know what you’re getting into right off the bat, you’ll be less likely to horrde. I think the commonness of items almost makes hording worse, because you’re dealing with buckets of poo poo getting dumped on your head and never really knowing which things are actually useful vs which are not. If you know from the jump that items can/will save your bacon, and in fact might be necessary in certain situations, you’ll use them. Obviously something that focuses on finiteness like that would have to be carefully curated in such a way that ther’es a balance of encounters to items found so that you don’t end up in an untennable situation, but it would be a kinda novel approach to the problem. I try to use items in all RPGs these days because their usefulness is so variable from game to game that I’d like to see what’s going on in there.
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Apr 17, 2023 17:41
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:If they're rare then you'll be more inclined to hoard, because of the fear that you'll need it later. Really, I think the problem with item hoarding is that many games make it hard to know, going into a fight, whether items will make a material difference. And if they would, you often figure that out too late, die, and try the fight again, and now you know it well enough that you don't need the items anyway. In a roguelike context I agree with you but permadeath will change a lot of your decision making around item use. I guess my psychology around items is weird because if I noticed that they were rare, I would use them because of that rarity offering perceived value. Maybe other people don’t really think that way lol.
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Apr 17, 2023 18:05
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I have a lot of little things I could nominate as best little thing in Octopath Traveler II. A whole lot. But one in particular stands out. Partitio, the merchant character, lives in a dying town. His response to its misfortune and poverty is to start a no-poo poo socialist revolution. But that’s not my favorite part. My favorite part is when he has the onset of his extremely anime revelation and dedicates himself to that revolution. This stuff is cornball as hell in every game that ever does it, but along with his hammy speech, this is what you hear: https://youtube.com/watch?v=Fx3aOckU0UY&feature=share I genuinely don’t know if this is parody, but this tune played straight while a guy with a hillbilly accent amps up to destroy literal capitalism—game is not subtle about this—hit me in such a bizarre way. I am not a game music person, but everything about that moment was so bizarre and sort of self-aware. Parody or not, it got me. Equally hilarious and awesome and cheesy, somehow affecting and brazen. Honestly, OT2 is like that in general. Most of the things I’d praise it for have a lot to do with its genre savvy and self-awareness.
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Apr 18, 2023 14:49
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Owl Inspector posted:Stranger of paradise doesn't have any consumable items and that's great. I realized at the end of wo long fallen dynasty that I had used a total of 1 consumable over the course of the entire game, and it was because I was trying to heal and had tabbed over to the wrong thing by accident. I'm playing SOP now that it's on steam and I do not miss consumables at all. they are really just cruft in many cases. I don't see anything wrong with going the no consumable route, but I think consumable bloat is kinda cool. It's really neat and flavorful even when ultimately useless. Persona 5 is really brazen about this, to the extent that there are literal multiple items that do the same thing with different names. But they pull you into the world of the game. Really I think the biggest issue with consumables is that they are too often outdone by abilities the player will get inherently and that's why people don't use them, besides the hoarding tendencies.
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Apr 19, 2023 19:34
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Red Minjo posted:SMT/Persona are basically the only series where I will consistently use items, because dealing proper elemental damage is more than just an extra bit of damage, it's an extra turn, and that extra turn is also going to be more effective than a normal turn. Pulling out the limited-carry items and nullifying an attack is more than just not having to heal later, taking one of your turns for one of theirs, it can actively rob multiple turns from the enemy. The SP economy is also tuned such that I will prefer going into my inventory to find status curatives instead of just using the cure skill. It's also default sorted to group similar effects together instead of just being a random pile of junk like a Skyrim. All-around well designed game for me to actually use my poo poo. Oh hell yeah. They were the key for me to beating the terrible redesign of that stupid loving robot fight in Royal.
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Apr 19, 2023 20:21
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Vic posted:I was hoping we didn't have to go into internety passive aggressive accusatory nonsense over this. I didn't specify videogames either. What I meant is I really wanna see more stuff like the Last Of Us tv series thing. Not soulless, market researched, commitee approved, trending, pandering, sanitized, cis-male-gazey stuff. Diversity should be more than ticking boxes but unfortunately that's all it ever will be for most developers because anything beyond that requires actual empathy and when they're doing it for headlines and praise it turns it into a mercenary act.
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Apr 20, 2023 22:23
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Cythereal posted:And yet, I'll take being pandered to over being ignored and not represented. Cheers to that. Disability rep is basically non-existent in games so I feel you. e: like The Surge has your character in a wheelchair at the beginning, then nullifies the whole deal by putting him in an exosuit. So like okay the only way to make him worth playing is to take him out of the wheelchair? Real cool, real cool. Whenever blind people do show up in games it’s generally patronizing. Vessels for spiritual enlightenment, badass warrior types, but never, you know, just blind people being people. And I struggle to think of any other disabilities that are commonly even seen in games at all. unattended spaghetti has a new favorite as of 00:40 on Apr 21, 2023 |
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Apr 21, 2023 00:35
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:Which is why the lead protagonist in Waves of Steel uses a wheelchair. I remember what inspired me to do this, too: a tweet making the rounds about how one of the chair options in the most recent Animal Crossing was a wheelchair. The tweeter specifically said "I feel seen", and goddamn if that wasn't a powerful phrase. Sick. Thank you for that. I don’t want to create a massive derail here but I feel like in the last decade we’ve made some serious progress for helping minorities get representation, hearing their stories, etc etc. But I feel like disabled people have been pushed to the fringes of even that forward movement. It’s kinda disheartening, cause it feels like wait your turn. And it’s not like Imma crow about it when other people are getting a well-deserved leg up, you know? Either way, thanks for giving a poo poo. And if you ever wanna bolt TTS onto your game and would like a tester with some poo poo vision, say the word. Haha. Kitfox88 posted:I liked Woozie from GTASA cause he's super chill and a huge bro, but they also did a lot of 'haha he's blind get it' jokes which even at the time felt a bit eugh. i do wonder how actual blind people felt about his portrayal tho I can’t speak for all blind/visually impaired people but it being Rockstar I’m not hopeful. It’s unfortunate because there are games that cater specifically to blind people, but they’re extremely dumbed down and basic in execution. I’m lucky I have enough functional vision that I can kinda muddle through things and get by, but others aren’t so lucky. So it’s a funny situation where I bet the target demographic didn’t even get much access to the depiction in the first place. But everyone’s got their own tolerances and patience for these kinds of things. unattended spaghetti has a new favorite as of 00:50 on Apr 21, 2023 |
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Apr 21, 2023 00:45
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:Depending on how impaired your vision is, the game might be playable! One of my playtesters has severely reduced vision (relies heavily on a screen magnifier, for example) and is able to play. Yeah I'm not nuts about that phrasing lol. Inefficient and kinda crass at once. The Sekiro blindfolded run was loving virtuoso poo poo.
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Apr 21, 2023 01:32
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). It doesn't help that a "blind run" of a game means "I'm running this without having played the game before", and also there's been a bunch of speedrunners doing blindfolded runs of games as stunts, where they've learned the game well enough to play it despite lacking essential visual cues.
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AzMiLion posted:It's me, I'm the <10% vision playtester. Man I’m saying. Retro aesthetic is amazing for being easier to see. High enough contrast and the simplicity can be a strength. I’m glad there’s so much good retro poo poo out there these days. Re: Surge, thanks for all the info on it. I liked what I played but definitely didn’t play for long enough to pick up on any subtext. Cool game though. Very unique combat.
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Apr 21, 2023 03:03
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Lobok posted:Insomniac truly does seem to give a drat. Along with Naughty Dog and Santa Monica, they have also been doing impressive stuff with accessibility features. TBH Santa Monica did a pretty poor job on Ragnarok. They put in a wide variety of features, many of which were very half-baked. But the press/non-disabled people aren’t going to know the difference so they’ll probably still get the good PR for it. Naughty Dog is currently the gold standard, but Street Fighter 6 and Diablo IV are doing some wild and innovative accessibility stuff, and are creating some very smart design that provides access while never impacting difficulty in the first place, which is all people looking for accessibility options really wanted. I’ve bitched about this in other places, but whichever rear end in a top hat game journalist misused the term accessibility when what they wanted was an easy mode for Sekiro really hosed up the entire conversation around it for those of us that actually use these kinds of options in practical situations.
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Apr 21, 2023 17:27
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Lobok posted:Ah well that sucks. I didn't use them for Ragnarok the way I did for Miles Morales but I saw a lot of similar things listed in the menu and just assumed. Yeah this isn’t me calling you out. It’s just that that’s what I thought of when I made that initial post about diversity usually just being box ticking. Accessibility is in an interesting place right now where there is no codified standard. So developers are home rolling solutions to varying degrees of success. But I feel like as a disabled person I should probably call out the developers who do it poorly because this stage of progress for it is really important, since whatever standards come out in the wash will stick for a long while. I swear the person who builds a middleware option will make loving bank though. It’s not better than designing options for the game itself from scratch, but the developers who care would’ve done that anyway. Middleware would at least insure a baseline of quality even when devs hacksaw the stuff in carelessly.
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Apr 21, 2023 17:47
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oldpainless posted:Before accessibility/diversity there weren’t even boxes to tick! Stop complaining!! Nah. Lobok posted:To your point about the Sekiro difficulty-accessibility confusion, I also think labelling all these options as "accessibility" does them a disservice. I use the shader options in Rift Apart for crates and Raritanium not because I have any vision impairment but because I just prefer not to pixel hunt for that kind of stuff. There's an option to bind 50% game speed to a shortcut and I was only toggling it on & off in combat to add some slow-mo style. Yeah when people break out of their boxes and get imaginative, what you find is a lot of options have wide applications beyond helping out players with difficulties. I’m really glad we are seeing some innovative and interesting stuff come out of this and it’s only going to get better. unattended spaghetti has a new favorite as of 18:00 on Apr 21, 2023 |
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Apr 21, 2023 17:55
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Oxxidation posted:on any difficulty other than professional you can parry anything coming your way just by holding down the button, though there's a perfect-parry window that automatically staggers any melee attackers and (i think) reduces your knife's degradation. on professional you can only parry within that perfect window, so that video was probably done on the lower difficulties Interestingly this is how parries work in SF6. Minus of course the difficulty portion.
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Apr 23, 2023 17:58
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I never have cared about fighting game ephemera like that but I gotta admit something about Street Fighter has always slightly drawn my interest. I guess it's the fact that Dan exists at all.
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Apr 24, 2023 22:49
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BioEnchanted posted:I've heard that, but I have 1 so figured I might at well get around to it as I do want to see how the stories unfold, even if they aren't as good as Live a Live or Octopath 2. OT1’s problems had a lot more to do with game structure and formula than anything inherent to the game itself. As long as you don’t mind how completely transparent and rigid it is about its structure, it’s a perfectly fine game. II outshined it by a tremendous amount, but I don’t think the first game is bad by any means.
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Apr 26, 2023 22:19
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Artemis J Brassnuts posted:Interesting to hear people say Octopath 2 was so much better. I liked 1 but bounced off the demo for 2 because it just felt like more of the same. The one most people seem to care about is non-missable party banter which can be reviewed in any tavern at any time. To me though the biggest things are a break from the formulaic structure of the first game. In OT1, it was always this: Enter town, find problem, go to micro dungeon, fight boss, chapter end. On top of that the way the map was laid out made the structure even more apparent because the progression of difficulty went inward from the outside ring. More path actions so you can do things the way you’d like. Day/night cycle allows for lots of secrets. Removal of purple chests thank gently caress. Cross path stories that are their own mini chapters in and of themselves. Better story, imho. Though I don’t mind OT1’s basic feel. At first blush it does look like more of the same but they learned all the right lessons from the first to the second. I couldn’t even call it a refinement, because they precisely targeted every deficiency of the first game. But if you don’t give it a little time it might look like more of the same for sure. e: Oh, and waaaaay more dynamism in cutscenes, too. If OT1 was a cover band, OT2 is an artist reinventing the tune, is the way I’d put it. unattended spaghetti has a new favorite as of 15:09 on Apr 27, 2023 |
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Apr 27, 2023 15:06
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Artemis J Brassnuts posted:The thing about accessibility-adjacent sliders (arachnophobia, tinnitus, etc) is that not only is nobody forcing people to turn them ON, nobody is forcing the developers to put them IN, either. With a few exceptions, nobody comes to my desk and is like “drop what you’re doing and help out with the key rebinding code”. It’s more often that I, when working on a feature, think “oh this would suck for people who are different than me in ways X Y and Z” and I come up with a few possible mitigation plans. I present those to production and we agree on something and roll the time into the standard workload. I’m as anti-capitalist as anyone around here, but if you can’t convince developers to include accessibility options for the myriad reasons that it makes good sense like for instance their being used in novel ways other than intended, making the game mmore inviting overall, creating bespoke experiences for a wide range of players, or yeah, because it’s a cool and good thing to do, then at the least I think it’s worth remembering that disability encompasses a huge range of variance and there are untapped market segments that you just couldn’t reach if you didn’t bother. When all else fails, appeal to the mercenary nature of commodities. On the spider thing, as an actual visually impaired person I kinda roll my eyes a little, but who gives a good god drat? If developers want to find strange ways to be inclusive and welcoming, I’m never going to poo poo on them for attempting it, even if it doesn’t appeal to me, personally. The whiny contingent of bigotted assholes that feel the need to patronize and gatekeep the experiences of people who are not like them for the sake of developer “vision,” are just exclusionary dickheads, no two ways about it. Wanna know how to spot the rear end in a top hat? Propose that perhaps this doesn’t effect you personally, nor should it. It’s stunning how many people will double down in that instance, rather than going oh poo poo maybe I didn’t think about that.
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Apr 29, 2023 21:11
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CJacobs posted:Accessibility based design also provably doesn't stifle creativity. Several countries already have to 'restrict' what they put in their video games and yet still creatively include those elements. Capcom have been releasing entirely separate dismemberment free versions of Resident Evil since the 90s (you might know of it, it's called Biohazard). Recently Elden Ring managed to secure a CERO D in spite of this dismemberment happening directly in front of the camera, not to mention several of the enemy types. It seems like these developers are doing just fine at implementing creative twists on taboo subjects. Really fascinating stuff, some of which I didn’t know. Hey btw I didn’t get a chance to say so last time this came up in the thread, but I loved your Surge/BB vids dude. Meant to say so before, but forgot. Hope you’re still making stuff. LPs have been really good for me when a game poses an unrealistic barrier for me to work around. Funny side thing about that, Souls/Sekeiro of all things are actually closer to being accessible than you’d think. But that’s a whole other thing.
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Apr 29, 2023 21:31
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BioEnchanted posted:It also betrays a type of laziness/lack of imagination. "Oh, just throw a spider in there". Come up with something interesting, it's easy to exploit such a universal phobia (as even if people aren't arachnophobic, they may still have a knee jerk reaction to it). The spider level in Nioh is a neat level structurally and the cobwebs changing the layout of the town so that it's unrecognisable to navigate is a cool use of the enemy type, but the other yokai are just more interesting. Again, I’m bullish on whether I’d call spider-removal an issue of accessibility, per se, but calling it a failure of imagination is incredibly insightful. On its face ableism of any sort is precisely that, a failure to consider experiences of being that are unlike on’es own. It’s the digging in that ends up being the problem, rather than the ignorance.
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Apr 29, 2023 21:42
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SerthVarnee posted:Well since we're talking about accessibility, I feel like now would be a good time to link you to 2 day's of conference stream from the Games Accessibility conference that took place in London 24th -> 25th of April 2023. I should reclarify that even though I have my own limits and considerations about what I would personally like to see developers care about/think they should care about, I think it’s always a good thing when games find ways to broaden their inclusiveness.
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Apr 30, 2023 15:39
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thebardyspoon posted:One thing that kinda sucks is some studios don't want to spend the money/time but do want the kudos or the perception and the idea that they're trying to do better with accessibility. I had a job as head of QA for a company and they said they really wanted to focus on accessibility with the big game they were working on and the publisher also had a bunch of accessibility guidelines they were gradually building over time, when I was there they were still very nascent though. Either way they wanted the game to be adjusted to be adhering to them as they came into place, a lot of them were common sense things that you'd expect but they also wanted to be "pushing the field forward". Yep. This matches my experience in venues outside of gaming and I’ve suspected that this is happening at a lot of companies. I think this type of attitude is a AAA problem, mostly, because in my experience AAA games are both likely to have the most options and also likely to have the poorest design for those options. GoW:R shouldn’t have gotten all the credit for its half-baked accessibility poo poo. This is also why I’ll always argue for a middleware accessibility solution. If anyone actually gave a gently caress they’d design from first principles, but at least a middleware option would secure a baseline for lovely devs that don’t care very much, so they can check their boxes and an expectation of quality can exist, instead of all this reinventing the wheel, sometimes in very cynical ways. I’m super salty about Ragnarok because Sony had set a precedent with TLoU II so I expected to see a similar bar for quality, but either Sony doesn’t care that much what their internal studios do or Sony Santa Monica just uncritically borrowed the work from ND and didn’t think very hard about how those features could be repurposed for GoW. Also, loving hire consultants people. Though that’s another can of worms since the pool of disabled consultants is hilariously, embarrassingly small. I’d really like to see some numbers on how much they’re paid though, since I bet they’re beeing seriously lowballed for their expertise.
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Apr 30, 2023 16:13
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Kanfy posted:The only memory I have of having a bad time with video game spiders was in Dark Messiah, it's been a long time but those things were very lovingly designed and realistically animated, would actually crawl on walls in places like spiders do, and literally jump at your face while making unpleasant hissing noises which is just not a cool thing for a spider to do. Or anything else, really. I love how video game spiders have a lexicon of noises that are relatively common from game to game but have been more or less invented whole cloth for games specifically. I dunno if even movie spiders ever make the weird rear end noises game spiders do.
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Apr 30, 2023 19:37
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credburn posted:Funny Games did the "you could have turned this off" thing way before any of these examples. Wondered how long it was gonna take for someone to mention that movie. I personally hate the weird complicity and judgment in works like that. It's not as clever as it wants to be and ends up profoundly nihilistic as a result. I really don't care what particulars are involved in delivery when part of the goal is to instill guilt in the observer or player. Maybe that hits different for other folks but it just comes off patronizing to me. Morpheus posted:The more I play Last of Us 2 (just finished Day 2) the more I just want to play a game that has very light narrative, exploring a big city with zombies, solving traversal puzzles to get useful survival loot and stuff while practicing fight or flight on zombies. It's by far my favourite part of the game. Speaking of complicity and statement. Lol. Great combat though. I agree totally. I'd kill for an open ended version of that game with objectives that can be tackled in whatever way the player wants. If the Factions thing ever actually comes out I'd just play it against bots forever.
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May 8, 2023 16:29
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Snake Maze posted:Yeah, I think undertale’s route works perfectly in the context of the game, assuming the player decides to do it on their own. Disco actually handles complicity and manipulation of player emotions really well come to think of it. Having all the bad poo poo you did be past tense let's the game have its cake and eat it too because the player can seek redemption but the amnesia is good cover to say yes you did in fact do this terrible poo poo, you just don't remember it.
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May 8, 2023 23:19
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Tiny thing for FFXVI. You can hold a button to auto-face your objective. For as much weird uproar there was about… well… tons of bits of XVI, some of which were around poor understanding of accessibility, I gotta say this is an awesome accessibility feature that was probs so simple to put together. And it builds off TLoU II, GoW:R, and other games which offered a navigation assist similar to this, though GoW:R’s was an underbaked piece of poo poo and TLoU’s was more sophisticated, since it actively tries to triangulate a route toward the objective, waypoint by waypoint. Anyway it’s nice that I can negotiate the environment without getting massive eyestrain staring at a minimap that isn’t there in the first place. But I don’t think Square even intended this to be an accessibility feature. I think FFXVI as a whole has a very muddled message in terms of its accessibility, tbh. But I wish rear end in a top hat game journos would at least try to point out things like this, rather than arguing about what the rings did or did not mean. They should have been menu options because offering a helping hand then undercutting it with a truly artificial constraint is a bad look. Oh one other thing. Mantling up bits of the environment is automatic. gently caress yes don’t make people press buttons for no reason. I always found it hilarious how TLoU II and GoW:R both had scads of environmental interaction points for climbing and whatnot, and then they added an accessibility feature to circumvent their stupid design. Pressing a button to vault something doesn’t add gameplay it adds tedium and a possible pain point for disabled players that has literally no reason to exist. Square was smart to just make all that stuff automatic based on proximity.
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Jul 2, 2023 16:34
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haveblue posted:In TLOU2 don’t you have a choice to mantle or take cover at any given waist-high obstacle? So it’s not just a button press on your path, there may be a consequential decision associated with it Yeah your’e totally right I thought of this after and forgot while posting. Point def holds for GoW though.
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Jul 2, 2023 20:15
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oldpainless posted:My first impression of the game was incorrect Tbh I thought it was a hilarious troll when you posted it lol
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Jul 5, 2023 04:07
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BG3: there are these flowers you encounter that are said to have anti magic properties. If a spell caster picks one up they can't cast, full stop. If one of the flowers is on the ground and a caster enters it's vicinity, they can't cast, full stop. Some time later my partner and I encountered a gate guarded by a couple of eye turret things that launch magic projectiles at you if you come too close. We checked to see if they had sight lines and could be snuck past. They did not. Our rogue had a hood that permits invisibility however. So we made him invisible, gave him a couple of the flowers, chucked them up on top of the turrets, and low and behold, no magical traps. What makes this even more clever on the part of the designers is that all objects in the game have hit point values. When they are thrown, they take some damage. So for instance if you throw a bottle full of something, the bottle takes one point of damage, which destroys it and causes an on destruction effect, which in the case of a potion would be spilling the contents in an aoe at the point of impact. But the flowers? They've got 22 health, pretty much guaranteeing they won't be destroyed if thrown, like in our specific instance. unattended spaghetti has a new favorite as of 16:52 on Oct 21, 2023 |
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Oct 21, 2023 16:47
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sebmojo posted:Doing this occurred to me only a long time after I'd done it the hard way What did you do? It seemed pretty tough to deal with them otherwise.
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Oct 22, 2023 04:24
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