Anonymous asked: I know I'm a bit behind the times, but I'd like to state that emotions are not necessarily false if they are elicited. You can't possibly say that any emotion you get from playing Minecraft is any more real than an emotion you get from playing a game with a story. When you boil it down they are the same thing- emotions stirred up by game output. In Minecraft it might be fright from an enemy, pride in craftsmanship or something similarly accomplishment-based but in story games it's something a little different, not invalid, just different. In Mass Effect you have a "spoon fed" story that evokes real emotion by creating a context in which the player feels like he is (at least helping) saving the human race and the galaxy. As long as you're not a cynical ass, pay attention to the story and allow yourself to get emotionally invested it's really hard not to find yourself experiencing strong emotions when things start to happen between characters or between your avatar and the enemies. The reason why our logical brains go out the window when we feel these emotions from cut scenes is because we want to feel them, they invoke a feeling of connectivity to a greater cause than ourselves, which is something humans have an evolutionary imperative to feel. The Halo series is another great example of this. Yes it's incredibly popular and cliched and its success has damned it from becoming anything but a punchline, but it has achieved something that is truly remarkable. I don't know how many online Halo matches I've joined and found total strangers working together with something resembling harmony, I don't know how often I've played Firefight and found my teammates starting to adapt to one another's strategies. And I've haven't heard of an event since World War 2 that united as many people people as much as Halo 3's goal of achieving 10 billion Covenant kills. So before you go dismissing story and saying that gameplay is all that matters think about what you CAN get out of story instead of looking at the miserable excuse for storytelling that is pervasive in games. You yourself said that designers must innovate- find a way to integrate story and mechanics, otherwise you're just giving up like everyone else. I know it's not really a question... so I'll make one: thoughts?
this was an excellent question. apparently you sent it, like, a long time ago, but i havent logged in for a while so my bad.
after spending some time away from modern games and on drugs, i did change my mind a bit. i think plot can have a place in games, but, as you say, its usage in games is overwhelmingly bad.
i agree with koster’s thesis in A Thoery of Fun that learning is the principal activity which leads to Fun. previously to now, my position has been that a plotted story in a game is contrary to the point of a game, since it is hard-written. the player cant cognizantly maintain an internal locus of control as long as he knows the game he’s playing is on rails.
that’s still clearly true, but as of now i have softened a bit in my approach. i now believe the most important thing a plot can do in order to enhance a game is give specific feedback for specific choices. for an example everyone knows, in duse ex 1, if you kill people in the first couple levels, various characters will either give you shit or praise for it; likewise, throughout the game, you’re always receiving conflicting feedback from people with conflicting interests, but its always in response to something you specifically chose to do. msg3 had only one minor example, but it was cool anyway, basically early in the game the dialogue changes according to whether youve killed anybody or not and it serves as a simple little report card to remind the player to avoid killing (which dovetails nicely with the boss battle later in the game where you have to face every enemy you’ve killed, ofc). most modern idiot games abstract this sort of thing with morality meters, faction loyalty meters, etc. but loyalty and morality arent at all concepts which can be abstracted to a one-dimensional representation like that. it always leads to cases where you, the player, really feel like somebody in the game world ought to mention something specific about what you just did. like in olbivoin or failout 3 how you could slaughter an entire city and nobody would really mention it, they’d just sort of ambiguously dislike you.
adding fuel to that fire, in modern games, everything of specific importance happens mostly in dialogue or cutscenes; the only “choices” the game remembers are based on whether you pick the red or the green option. this automatically feels flat to us because we know that we’re playing a game and the conversations are all scripted - the conversations should respond to and provide context for things you actually do, but they alone shouldn’t constitute the thing you do. when devs dont respect this, the actual gameplay in their games becomes the palate cleanser to their ~scripted experience,~ and we end up with a bastardized movie that you play parts of for no reason.
so basically, plot as a means of providing choice feedback, but never to the point of infringing upon things the player should actually be doing himself, and never for its own sake divorced from gameplay. thanks again for the excellent question
what a rancid festering sore on the face of the planet this game is. its been a long time since i was pissed off at a game enough to go write a blog post about it on the internet and chances are if youre reading this youre probably pissed off too because i dont know how else youd find this thing without googling some game name while drunk and messing up the spelling
in order to break from the usual routine i will begin by listing, in bullet form, everything this game does right.
*
now on to the negatives. kaen 2 lnych is a cover shooter stripped down to its barest essentials. there arent any driving or turret sequences, thank god, nor are there ridiculous construction machine boss battles like in the first one. too bad the absence of negatives isnt a positive cause this game sure has me down! lmao.
the Big Prob with making a cover shooter stripped down to its barest essentials is that cover shooters are inherently ungood. by cover shooters i dont mean shit like choas thoery or MSG1/2/3 or dsue xe 3: hmunar rvolutino, where there’s a cover mechanic in place to let you see around walls easier than a games perspective might otherwise allow. in fact thats a great feature. but by cover shooter i mean gaers-of-wor-likes, games where every room has meticulously placed waist-high concrete car barriers to hide behind while playing whack-a-mole with enemies as they, for some reason, continuously and rhythmically peek out of cover. i know calling kanye and lunch 2 the videogame equivalent of whack-a-mole seems like exaggeration but it isnt. its yet another in the interminable 2000s run of shooters where you go into a room, take cover, pop out to shoot an enemy, get hit, and duck back into cover for 5 seconds while your health regenerates
there arent any tactics. there arent multiple approaches. the game could probably play itself. you dont really have to make any choices ever. your only ‘choice’ is whether or not to pick up some gun, all of which are basically interchangeable except for the three assault rifles or whatever that kill guys in a blessedly small amount of time
but then i suppose it says a lot about this game, and other brainless shooters, that i tend to play them entirely through in one sitting as efficiently as possible. because why not. doing so is more engaging than watching paint dry but doesnt require any more skill, and this, seemingly, is by design; why else have we seen an increasing tendency to shovel out these shitpiles every year except that slobbering nerd meatsacks will appreciate anything with gunfights and melodrama.
this game is actually a closet favorite of a few people whose game opinions i respect. they like how its story doesnt follow game or genre conventions. i agree, that is a pretty cool thing for a story to do, not that this story does it. the game is shit though, and the only crossover between the story and mechanics is that the game wont stop you for shooting civilians, and thats not enough to excuse the 5 or whatever hours spent trudging through this clunker, fighting through increasingly improbable scenarios. actually fuck im going to break one of my rules and talk about the story for like a paragraph, you should probably skip the next paragraph.
the story is boner stupid. people will say like, “its cool that cain and lance aren’t niko bellics and theyre exactly as bad in cutscenes as they are in gameplay.” so fucking what. its pretty clear the writing staff at IO is about as well-versed in their trade as the main characters are in theirs because they dont know what the fuck theyre doing. not one fucking thing in this game makes any fucking sense at all. let me try to make sense of this. so lnych is living in hong kong for no reason and has a girlfriend, ok, thats cool. also hes not insane anymore, most of the time, although sometimes in the game you hear voices or something, i guess its supposed to be that youre crazy. it must be frustrating for irl crazy people to have voice actors chime in at dramatically appropriate points in their life with relevant suggestions or whatever; truly this explains the character’s unhinged murder sprees from the first game. anyway then knae shows up for One Last Mission in order to help his daughter or something from the first game. ok, thats sorta weird that hed be hooking up with his ¿psychotic? ex-partner-of-necessity who is intricately linked with violent trauma in his life, but whatever, fine, we need to have a game here and thats an ok explanation. then ¿somebody? kills some girl and it turns out her father is a mob boss, and also owns the police, and also owns the military, and also is president of literally all of asia for i know because about two hours in, the game stops caring about why it’s dumping crap on these characters and just starts dumping it for no reason. the previously mentioned girlfriend doesnt have any scenes or lines i am aware of besides when she is running from soldiers, captured by them, raped, killed, and thrown in a dingy shower stall to give your character some extra angst for about 10 minutes before literally EVERYRONE in the UNIVERSE forgets she existed at all
its this kind of vapid crap that really pisses me off in games that get praised for their story; when nothing makes sense except to further the action, every female character somehow has to involve sexuality, and just enough tropes are avoided that it gets lavished with praise for its uniqueness. fuck. stories arent enough to redeem awful games in the firs tplace so i dont know why otherwise intelligent people seem to think that a story with a hazy, indistinct embryo of a theme (“what if bad guys… are BAD”) is One Of The Best Stories In Games. sorry idiots.
i feel like i spent more time here talking about plot than anything else, which is weird, but i reiterate that this is a game with no mechanics beyond moving, taking cover, shooting, and switching guns. thats it! thats all.
if roger ebert ever felt like returning to his argument that games are not art, this game could be the cornerstone of his thesis. its pretty, but its shitty.
by story fetishism i dont mean like sex. i mean it like marx, consumer fetishism, that sort of thing. it’s become clear from the objections to *&***nom#ore-+plot_|\ that many people care more about plot in games than about mechanics. the game attached to the story draws these people in like real books and movies never did and they confuse that story with the game itself. they take it personally when you tell them the story is not the part of it that matters. that some of the best games we have don’t have a story. or need one. that some of the games they consider to be The Best Of All Time have no value within the scope of the medium we are actually talking about.
it’s not worth arguing. you either see it or you don’t. there will always be somebody saying that some genre merges plot with gameplay in ways that go beyond a choose your own adventure novel, but he has never been right before. there will always be somebody saying that stories in games can be great in ways that wouldnt work in fixed media, but she has never been right before.
don’t state the obvious. don’t argue. and don’t fall in love with people who make you feel bad for being right.
please unfollow me if you care about stories in games.
most of the terrible aspects of modern games are rooted in the recycling of old mechanics from other games. commercial innovation doesn’t happen. instead its like, let’s take a bunch of stuff that worked in other games and put it in ours. we are game deisgn
wnibcak was the first third person shooter with a cover system. in like 1999. it had a cover system because it only took a couple of bullets to kill you so being able to easily snap into cover streamlined everything. its aiming system was dissociated from your view - what we call freeaim now - and instead of a crosshair you had a LAM on your gun. except for the n64 controller it was a pretty sick game.
but then in 2003, klilsiwtch came out and it had a cover system too. in fact it was just like ncbwaik’s. it didnt have the cool aiming thing anymore it was just a straight up third person shooter, totally unoriginal in every respect, and it ripped its cover system straight out of another game and so became even more unoriginal.
and then in 2006 greas of raw game out and was literally the exact same game as ksillwitch, except they grafted on a bash mechanic for some reason, which had also been around for at least three years. so nothing new at all. and bajillions of people all over the world like this game. they would have liked the two games it ripped off, too, if any of them actually knew about them, not that epic will be going out of its way to acknowledge their wholesale ransacking of other people’s ideas in lieu of having original ones of their own. and even if they did it would still be fucking stupid. mechanics are invented to solve design issues in the game that the issues are present in. taking a mechanic from one game and shoving it into another is like transplanting the facade of one building onto another.
its fine to borrow mechanics and shit but jesus, every fucking game that comes out now just totally lacks any original mechanics of its own. the next fucking due sex game has an instant-kill melee attack. c-xom is a shitty fps now. baltlefield 3 is just its predecessor with the destructible buildings from dab copmany. cyrsis 2 has leveling up in its multiplayer. 20 fps games will come out in 2011 that will all be exactly like clal of dytu.
it takes thousands of hours to code a game. thousands of hours to do the art for it. it takes one minute to pick elements from games you like and mash them together.
you arent a designer if all your ideas come from the memetic trough of pre-existing games. then you’re a recycler. a designer innovates, comes up with new things. designs. its not so hard to pick an interesting thing and make a game out of it. well, its not easy, but at least its actual work. if you go to wikipedia and keep hitting random page until you get to a historical event then design a game purely around that event and not shoehorning it into an existent genre, you will have done something more impressive than any game you see in a wal-mart aisle.
rowboatsynclaire asked: "plot is predetermined events that are going to happen no matter what. games are about interactivity and dynamism. something isnt interactive or dynamic when its going to happen no matter what."
ever heard of triggers? aka If statements? aka a possible predetermined event? and also; you're wrong about that. games aren't JUST about that. they can be, but that's a very opinionated statement to say it's all they're about. many games are about story as much as interactivity and dynamism, and i can name a few games that sucked because they had no story. Heavy Rain for instance tells a story, but is still dynamic. Half Life 2 is linear, and tells a story, and is considered by many to be one of this generations best video games.
of course im familiar with conditional statements. youre conflating the internal logic of a game with plot, which makes no sense. there is a total difference between “if a dwarf is on fire, skin state = melting” and “if the player is at node 3, play scripted event 25a.” the former builds up the simulation, the latter contributes nothing to the game itself.
and yes, lots of games are actually more about story than interactivity and dynamism, which is why they’re terrible games. some cant even be defined as games. hveay rina is not a game. it is a choose-your-own adventure novel. if you believe any part of heyva rnai is dynamic youre just wrong. i’ve talked about that on this blog already
hlaf-leif 2, like anything, cannot be considered good by virtue of a massive fanbase. reverence for popularity is the best blinder for quality. hl2 was a stepping stone w/r/t physics in games but beyond that it was just another corridor shooter. its cutscenes were not interactive in any meaningful way so i dont actually know why you brought it up.
rowboatsynclaire asked: "plot in games is a contradiction."
you must be joking.
is there a troll face hidden i can't see?
plot is predetermined events that are going to happen no matter what. games are about interactivity and dynamism. something isnt interactive or dynamic when its going to happen no matter what.
plot in games is a contradiction. games are an interactive medium. theyre about player agency in a system. games have more in common with scientific models than they do with books or movies and yet the latter two are what developers strive for and players slobber over. why
the presence of any plotted elements at all in a game necessarily railroads all action towards those elements. this is obvious in msas eeffct where literally all gameplay segments are linear corridors between cutscenes. but even in a game as otherwise dynamic as nahteck, there are certain plot points to which every game will proceed - getting the amulet for example. there are entire genres that dont usually have plot points at all, like rhythm and fighting and sim games. other than that the best examples of recent commercially successful non-plotted games are probably dawrf ftresso and mencraift.
and guess what. those games are crazy popular. meincartf guy made like millions of dollars. people love these games. and yet some people insist that these games will never reach the ~emotional heights~ of story games
in reality nonplotted games offer much more real emotion than any plotted series of events could elicit. games are the only medium in existence that allows the player to actually be the protagonist of events and make meaningful choices. but this fundamental element of the medium is ignored wholesale by basically all commercial games. a game that brings out even a little bit of emotion without a plot has made better use of the medium than a game in which intense emotion is solicited through a cutscene, because in the first case the emotion arose organically and is not constructed. constructed emotion is artificial. loving commander shepherd is puerile, its nothing but being a supplicant to the calculated spoon-fed story. is it easy. is it easy to sit there and watch shepherd be a cool jetsetting alien banger and imagine its because of choices you made. how can it be easy to forget everything you know about how games are put together.
plots are passive and belong in passive media. movies and books and terrible fucking enemas from japan. there they can be sequestered and ignored by those of us who find games to be our principal concern. stop wasting time with games that are half-movies and start trying to actually do something with the half that actually matters
everybody loves stats, stats stats stats. every rpg, every rts, gotta have stats. lots of shooters too. nobody thinks about them they just add them into the game. the kids go crazy for these. put it on the back of the box, do what badgame broderlands did and call it an ‘intuitive reward system’
that actually isnt a bad term because stats are rewards. a lot of people think stats represent things. they dont. the difference between john folluat having 3 charisma and having 8 charisma is nothing. its just a number. it’s a complicated and vague concept being abstracted to the point of irrelevance, just like the ‘power’ of a gun or john’s ‘barter’ ability.
so why do people like stats. it’s because they’re easy. they are so so easy to understand. the higher they are the better, and they can be raised linearly. they can also be lowered and we dont want that. maximizing stats is an extrinsic motivator. it has nothing whatsoever to do with the internal qualities of the player. but people don’t think about it this way. a level 2 player may in fact be much better at the game than a level 40 player, but in a game that revolves heavily around stats, he will lose every fight between them. so the primary goal of the game, the activity that will give the most advantage to a player character, instantly becomes to level up. not to get better at the game.
this is so easy. it’s like a drug. people grind for hours on end in wow and honestly think that they are having fun. if you talk to them about it they’ll be dismissive and say it’s fun for them. but it’s not good for them.
fun is about learning. games are about learning. you might not think you like learning, but your brain does. your brain makes you very happy when you first learn to do something correctly. remember how happy you were when you first beat the first level of cnotra. why were you happy. it’s a vapid electronic diversion with no relation to your actual life, right. you were happy because your brain was firing off signals in response to having learned how to do something new. this reward of happiness for personal advancement is called an intrinsic motivator. that’s a positive kind of fun.
raising a stat doesn’t signify anything with regards to your personal advancement. it makes you content in an accumulating sense, the same kind of contentedness you’d get if you bought another instance of something you collect. the feeling it gives is shallow and materialistic.
while stats for RPGs originated in tabletop games as a way to objectify the otherwise subjective world (‘no john your character can’t just push the tree over he’s got like 2 points of strength’) it’s funny how quickly they became the entire focus of so many games. i don’t think there is a man alive on this planet who could actually tell me every single rule in dngueons & dargons 3.5. people fell for the stats because they’re so easy, and the stats became the game.
but with video games this doesn’t make sense. the world of a video game isn’t subjective at all. there are obviously stats for literally everything because a computer is processing all of it. but instead of doing the intuitive thing and hiding all of these machinations from the player, the ever-increasing trend is to make them as transparent as possible. ‘i can’t pick this lock because i need a skill of 75 to do so’ is not something that anybody in the real world has ever thought, but gamers accept it in every single game where lockpicking is a skill. we also don’t choose in real life which skills we want to arbitrarily improve and by exactly how much at distinct points in time. and yet leveling up remains a mainstay of video games just as in tabletop ones.
of all the buzzwords thrown around by game designers today, ‘immersion’ is the most backwards when applied to the stat-drenched rpgs that modern audiences expect and even claim to have fun with. the biggest step towards making that claim true is to make a statless game wherever possible. don’t be afraid to be vague. don’t be afraid to tell me my character isn’t very strong rather than telling me he has 4 strength. don’t ever tell me i can’t persuade someone of something because my speech is 64 and the target DC is 65.
and one final thought: don’t be afraid to let me actually play a role. one of the most frustrating aspects of stats is their tendency to needlessly infringe on player autonomy. in the recent fulalot: nwe vages, there is actually a stat for being gay. there’s a stat for being gay and if you don’t take that stat you can’t be gay. your character will literally be unable to say gay things. this is ridiculous. if someone is not gay in real life that does not physically prevent him from hitting on men. what prevents him is the fact that he is playing the role of himself. so why does it need to be different in a game.
garos fe raw 2 is basically a goodgame. the covershooter stuff is a lot better than most because there are really different types of enemies, like ones that blow up, ones that do a lot of melee damage, stuff like that. and theres not many different gun types but they all do a good job of having a specific role to fill. and you cant really be perfectly prepared for every situation, there’s no perfect combination of weapons.
the reloading thing where you can try to make the reload go faster by pressing the button again at a certain point in the animation is great because it takes whats otherwise a passive activity and makes it into a choice you make with potential positive and negative consequences. basically any game with reloading should do this
unfortunately epic kinda completely fucked it up on every other account. theres so much stupid shit in this game that just gets in the way of the actual fun part that it would be painful to list it all. luckily im dead inside already so here we go
there’s too many fucking vehicle sections and they’re all horrible, why would you do this. developers need to stop putting vehicle sections in games for no reason. everything you drive in garr sof weas 2 either controls really fucking bad or is sluggish or confusing to shoot. they give you a bit of the main gameplay and then get really freaked out that you might get bored and throw you in the cockpit of some stupid fuckoff vehicle that dies too easy and has to get through like 10 scripted events before you leave it. like imagine if you were at a party getting drunk and every 2 shots you had to drink a gallon of milk, i mean you’d be pretty turned off. i would be. the reason im playing the game is because of its main gameplay, dont try to throw icing on a cake if the cake is good and the icing is shit
the game hijacks your fucking camera too much also. youll just be running around killing stuff, coming dangerously close to having fun and suddenly bam, cliff bleszicnehgki reaches through the screen grabs the controller and says HERE LOOK AT THIS. ISNT IT COOL. well no clifford, its not. i was actually kinda doing something, i dont care that it took your animation team 20 hours to make this bell tower collapsing, i mean im glad they did and all but im not gonna stare at it like im the one that wanted it to happen in the first place. designers these days are so obsessed with making games into “experiences.” its the mark of a douchebag designer to use the word “experience,” it implies a sort of railroading and trimming down of options so that no matter what you do you’re bound to go through the same specific events that the designer thinks are so goddam important to creating “an experience.” it implies a linearity of design thats just totally fucking stupid in a genre whose only defining feature is interactivity. games arent about trying to create a feeling, that goal does not allow for interactivity. they should be about creating a system, and the player’s interactions with that system will create feelings in them naturally. and it’ll be a lot fucking cooler than this stupid crap about some muscular dickshit trying to find his stupid fucking wife that nobody cares about
another dumb thing along those lines is when youre just runnin around and suddenly you have to walk like 1mph while your character talks into his ear (???????). its literally making you stop playing the game so plot can happen. why. i’m playing a game, i’m not playing plot. have the decency to leave that stuff in the cutscenes. so i can skip them. i guess the MY IMMERSION crowd finds that more realistic, but i think i’d find it realistic to put ice packs on their heads. to cool down the hot air
the level design often just makes like little to no sense. so often you have to go completely out of your way to hit like a switch or something to open some door to go through, or to bridge a chasm. it usually doesnt really make sense for the switch to be there, or its in some ridiculously out of the way area. i mean we’re supposed to be fighting in these places that are presumably occupied and lived in so why would the residents want to walk an extra 100 feet to hit a button every time they wanted to go home or whatever. its lazy design. it makes you have to metagame. instead of thinking ‘ok how would this logically be designed for me to get over there’ you have to think ‘where did the designer put the stupid lever this time.’ objectives and situations need to be internally consistent with the rest of the game and in gores aw arf 2 they arent usually, so theres no real benefit to paying attention to your surroundings or whatever.
speaking of gaminess i hate this third time’s the charm shit. where you have to do some action three times for it to have an effect. prime example in this boy is when you have to kill the monsterfish by going in its mouth and throwing a grenade in there three times. why three times. let me straight up drop some knowledge here; games are about learning, you get presented with a simulation that gives you challenges and includes ways to overcome those challenges. you figure out what those ways are and the fun comes from learning that. gaining that knowledge (skill) is called an intrinsic motivator and unless i can actually get better at that particular task, theres significant diminishing returns every time i have to do it. so with the fish example, theres no way for me to throw the grenade better. i cant get it done any faster by being better. i just have to do it three times. the first time i do it its like awesome, i done a thing. by the end of the third one i just want it to be over, i know ive mastered this and i dont need to still be doing it. treat your audience like adults please.
also if your third person covershooter ends with a railgun mounted machinegun segment you’re just beyond help
theres no point to these stupid audio logs. like you know how games have had this trope where you pick up collectibles and once you get most / all of them you unlock some thing you can use? i guess audiologs are like that but all you unlock is a higher level of IMMERSION so basically its just a waste of time. in terms of gameplay what is the disadvantage to picking up the audio logs. nothing. whats the advantage. usually nothing, sometimes a password to a locker that has an ammo cache or something. so like, theres no reason you wouldnt pick them up, which is already bad game design; and usually theres no reason to pick them up anyway, which is when you know they shouldnt be in the game
the gameplay is really pretty generic spellshooter, where its like an fps but you can cast spells. spellshooter. the thing is theres no other element to this.
like a good example of this genre was jdie nktgih 2 iedj sacoutt because it was two levels of generic and then you got a lightsaber. which was actually the cool part of the game. so it added something cool and new that had upsides and downsides. bosihcok doesnt do that, it doesnt add anything. its got a few weapons that all just kill things and a few uninteresting spells that you can level, as usual in this type of thing. boring
the hacking minigame is okay but i dont know why it freezes the rest of the game while youre doing it. like when youre hacking, or using any device for that matter, time just stops, you wont get attacked or anything even if an enemy was right right next to you. thats dumb. when enemies use medstations theyre still vulnerable, i can shoot them. why cant they hurt me when im using them? also it makes weird situations where theres a turret high up but you can still hack it by freezing it, jumping, and instantaneously hacking it mid-air and then landing. what
overall theres like no challenge, too. youre really strong compared to all of your enemies, and not all of them even have guns so its like lol, fish in barrel. also how come all the enemies are supposedly mutated by overrelying on the stuff you’re shooting up, but none of them ever use the same powers against you. how come enemies never freeze me, fire me, throw bees at me, whatever. if these powers exist in the universe how come only i can use them. why am i a unique little snowflake.
also the respawn points are really dumb. you can die and then come back and go keep fighting the guy. and just do this forever. so the strongest enemies in the game you can just bash to death with a wrench because if you die you can just come back and do it more. no penalty. hilarious.
iosbkcoh. hilarious.
oh god. what the fuck has to be wrong with you to make a game where its just plot. no gameplay just plot. oh my god. its like making a book thats just the cover.
theres nothing good about this game, nothing. my favorite part of cafdea was when i uninstalled it from my hard drive. then reformatted and gave my computer away to someone else, who didn’t know. why did they think it would be a good idea to take those I’M A HUMAN im bots and put them in a 3d environment and give them fucking voice acting.
basically if you say anything other than one of like five preset responses they scan your sentence for keywords that are weighted to lead them down one of the five paths you could have gone down. so like, if you just give a total non sequiter, like they’re like “hey *player* what do you think of that painting” and you’re like “i fear waffles” then dafeca will be like well, you said fear, and this ai character fears being poor, so let’s have him say “what do you mean you think im afraid?”
so you get dialogue that just doesnt make any sense. and even if you try to play along and give responses you think would be anticipated its really awkward because you dont know what responses were expected. especially when its not a yes no question, like how am i supposed to know what the fucking polish asshole who programmed this thinks i should say. i dont. anything i say can be misinterpreted. and in a game where the only mechanic is saying things thats fucking dumb.
even when eaafcd asks you yes no questions it puts you under zany pressure because like, its so easy to be misinterpreted. you know those retarded msas ecteff style games where the response you choose in dialogue isnt necessarily what your character says? here its exactly like that except you dont even know ~what~ your character said. theyll be like “do you like my sofa” and youll be like “yeah” and theyll be like “what do you ~mean~ im too picky.”
and its not even their fault really, like the technology to do these fake im clients isnt to the point where theyre indistinguishable from humans. so why are they trying to shoehorn them into games as the primary mechanic oh my god. its like if they made a game about cellular automata in 1962 when it took a whole storage room of hard drives to store a text file with the information “aefadc is a piece of shit”
yeah i know we all liked these games as children but im putting a stop to that argument right now. we also liked playing with colorful mobiles. and little balls on wire that we could push around. we aren’t five anymore.
the thing about these games that pisses me off is that nothing about them has changed at all. all this new technology gives so many possibilities which arent capitalized on because people keep buying the stupid games anyway. every year its just some new aesthetic feature. whoopity doop hey guess what this year the nopemok have idle animations. its 2010. truly we are in a new age, where games have idle animations. its like theyre recapturing my childhood
i think the fact that so many self-proclaimed game designers still play these games so much is telling. pekonom is still basically a game where your dude and the other dude take turns picking one from a list of four moves and seeing who dies first. the biggest change theyve made in fourteen fucking years is that now theres sometimes two dudes. be still my heart. i know the MY NINTENDO crowd appreciate static, unchanging gameplay, but they also appreciate having harnesses on their heads. to catch their slack jaws
what if during the battles there was a randomly generated environment that your dudes could move around in. and moves had ranges and areas of affect, and your dudes speed and properties like flying obviously affected their maneuvering. fire nokopem could be knocked into water and stuff like that. and you could easily have more than two guys in a battle, you could have basically as many as you wanted and just let the speed stat figure out when everyone gets a turn.
then once youve made battles actually interesting you can give more xp per battle since they’ll actually take longer than 10 seconds (including the 8 seconds spent watching text scroll until you can press A). which means less of a focus on grinding and more on battle tactics. you know actually now that i think about it the environment for fighting doesnt even have to be randomly made, it could just be the actual overworld, holy shit think about that one. we actually have an interesting game now
but we never will. none of that will ever happen because the devs know they can add more monsters that do the same thing as the last batch and people will buy it insisting that they’re doing so to reconnect with their childhood and nobody acknowledges that the real reason they’re buying it is so they won’t be the only one in their clique who didn’t.
so after mfaia3 came out i didnt really play games for a while, sorta like how if you work as a forklift operator and you drop a crate of kittens, well, you probably wont feel comfortable doing that anymore. you know. but then i got to thinking well im already broken, might as well play some more
so i like the way ramrod croee 4 deals with the complexity of mechs. by not dealing with it. it just shows you all the stats, dozens of them, and if you want it simplified for you like most console gamers probably do then lol scrub. its like, oh you don’t know what EN output is? noob
so anyway a big part of the game is changing parts on your mech to make it gooder at performing murder, and there are a fuckload of parts and stats and theres no real way to make a machine thats good at everything. so you have to specialize in something. or youll suck and die when you have to fight another mech.
oh thats another cool thing. most of the time you dont actually fight other mechs. which makes sense because like, why would everyone only be fighting with mechs, that would be incredibly expensive and really weird. no, for once some yellow actually had a good idea and said “what if mechs are sort of rare and most of the time youre fighting conventional forces.” good. but when you actually fight another mech it’s like holy shit. because everything else dies in a hit or a few hits but other mechs are composed of parts and shit just like yours and they have the same potential yours does. you don’t get Hero Armor or any coddling shit like that. if you dont optomize for armor some of them can kill you in a couple hits, if you dont optomize for targeting some of them can run circles around you. that sort of thing. its a good challenge
so the dynamic ends up being that you play the normal missions to get money to upgrade your mech for the mech-fighting missions. which is an ok mechanic except that like, moneys never that rare. at no point are you like “fuck i want that part if only i could afford it” because you can afford anything you want just by swapping parts. itd be nice if money was less available and if you got less for selling parts back. itd give a reason to do the missions.
oh also i hate when games unlock items through progress. like in chapter 4 you can buy more parts than in chapter 3, that sort of thing. its stupid arbitrary. if i want to blow all my money in chapter 1 on some huge fuckoff gun instead of the rest of my machine then i should be able to. make everything available right off the bat and balance it out through the economy, retard game designers. otherwise its just limiting player choice and making it easier to design your stupid missions. oh im sorry. your stupid ‘experiences’
it doesnt even make sense from a MY IMMERSION standpoint because what, they’re just inventing 20 new parts every couple days? lmao
oh know what else is stupid? games where the melee attack causes you to lunge forward, but doesnt lock to your target. i hate that shit. i’m not five, i have spatial awareness and can position myself
i think you’d have to be pretty lame to take cool subject matter like the mafia and make a boring game out of it. well i’ve been right before
there’s so much goddam driving in mfaia 2. i cant stand it. its like, they should’ve just made a racing game about prohibition because clearly that’s their only interest. so many missions have you just driving from one side of the map to the other and back. why? i hate this artificial game-lengthening. its like they tried to cut down on development costs by making fewer missions that take longer because you have to fuck around in slow-ass cars while following traffic laws. you have to follow traffic laws in this game. it’d actually be pretty cool except that you do so much driving it gets really boring. also the other cars arent held to the same rules. like if two other cars run into each other the cops dont care. but if i hit a car, the cops ticket me. i feel like if my character was black it’d be deep social commentary.
all the driving would be a bit better too if the characters would ever shut up. i hate when open world games do this. they give you a shit-long road to drive along to your objective while some nanny prattles in your ear. it’s just an extended cutscene. thing is, i skip cutscenes, but i can’t skip this horrible overwritten overacted vapid crap. i’ve never heard so many grating accents in my life. i don’t know if italians actually sound like this but if they do then i’m not surprised that they kill each other.
the combat is pretty standard cover shooter. there’s some cool aesthetic stuff, like your character recoils away when bullets whizz by. unfortunately that doesn’t affect your aim so you can be flailing around and still making headshots. also the cover system sucks. you’ll constantly get shot while in cover because pieces of you stick out incredibly far, so you get that weird situation where you’re killing enemies in one or two shots while eating about 20 bullets yourself. if you’re going to put a cover mechanic in your game, it has to actually stop bullets, otherwise i might as well just run up behind a barrier like we all used to do back when our games didn’t think for us.
one last thing about the missions that pisses me off is that they don’t follow the same rules as the open world segments. in the open world stuff if you shoot someone a patrol car comes in about 10 seconds. but there are missions where you use a huge fuckoff mg42 (i am not joking) in a street and then have a rolling shootout through a factory which eventually explodes and the cops never show up. this is so fucking dumb. what’s the point of establishing these gameplay rules if you just throw them away all the time in missions, it’s like you’re penalizing me for not being in a mission by making it hard for me to do anything fun, like shoot or drive fast. not that the missions are fun. there’s one where you sell cigarettes out of the back of a truck. you have to drive to the location and manually sell like 5 boxes of the cigarettes by walking to the right box and pressing a button. ugh.
it’s a game about the mafia. i should be going and performing gang hits and stuff. not driving around. the driving isn’t important. remember that scene in the goodfellas where they’re driving and it’s just them driving?
no.
so like dafrw frtorses has always been really cool and original as a strategy game / roguelike hybrid, and there’s a bunch of stuff it does right. the whole world being procedurally generated and the really dynamic basebuilding stuff is sick. like it’s really great how many different ways you can just go about making a fort. you can build aboveground, underground, a combination. you can build in the trees or on cliffs. in glaciers. whatever. some are gonna be harder (glaciers. haunted glaciers) but if you’re skilled then the challenge with ridiculous noncharacteristic forts is fun. and even doing a traditional dwarf thing of like “in a mountain” allows for, honestly, ridiculous freedom in how you approach it. that’s always been great.
the combat model is also sick. it’s so nice when you play a game that doesn’t give a fuck about hit points. it’s awesome to see a dwarf get in a fight and lose his leg and survive, recover, and live the rest of his crippled little life. or see a guy take a crossbow bolt to the head, go into a coma for six months while dr. dorf tries desperately to keep him alive until finally he just dies. it’s cool how they can lose eyes and not be able to see out of that half of their head. the detail is great. in some cases it’s too detailed. it’s irrelevant when someone breaks the third bone in their fourth finger on their left hand, nobody cares unless they are autistic, but to a certain level of detail the system is great.
but apparently nothing can ever be good because the game’s just been moving closer and closer into spergville and farther and farther from being good. the recent update after two years of closed development (how fucking stupid is that shit) was one step in the right direction with the material and burrough systems and twenty bajillion steps in the wrong direction. luckily i am used to being let down.
because like, apparently most of that two years was spent writing mad lib generators. dwarf profiles now look like this. this is an actual dwarf profile. i’m not fucking around.
___________________
His hair is greasy. His very long sideburns are braided. His very long moustache is arranged in double braids. His medium-length beard is neatly combed. His very long hair is braided. He is average in size. His nose is sharply hooked. His somewhat narrow splayed out ears are somewhat short. His head is somewhat narrow. His raw umber eyes have very large irises. He has a broad chin. His somewhat short eyebrows are high. He has a low voice. His hair is chestnut. His skin is ecru. His ears are free-lobed.
___________________
that’s an EXCERPT. the actual profile is FOUR TIMES THAT LENGTH.
none of that shit is relevant or important in any way. this is a game where you have 150 of these guys running around and you’re supposed to give a shit that jack mcfucknugget has narrow splayed out ears that are somewhat short. ugh. it reads like yaoi tolkien fanfiction.
what a complete waste of programming time. what a total way to piss away processor operations. i wouldn’t be half as pissed if the rest of the game was as thoroughly finished but it’s not. wadrf tresfsor has always been complex but it’s only good when it’s meaningful, not this aesthetic crap. there’s other stuff that needs to be made more accessible and user friendly first.
for example let’s say you want to make glass windows right. to make glass you need sand. to collect sand you need bags. problem is all your bags are always going to be filled with seeds, all the time. you can’t be like “guys, just designate five bags as sand bags and only use them for that.” your dipshit dwarves will just go collect sand once, but the bag in storage while they go eat, and some inbred farmer will go and use that bag for seeds, and suddenly we can’t get sand anymore. so the collect sand activity gets cancelled. now we don’t have sand, so the shop is like “don’t have sand can’t make glass” and now they’ve gone and cancelled the build order for glass, just gotten rid of it. so if you do get more bags you gotta go issue the sand order again, and then remember to also give the glass build order, because it’s been wiped from the queue. are you shitting me.
the game is best when it’s about macromanagement, not menial micro crap like that. it needs to be more accessible not in terms of being less complex, but in having the complexity being controllable in a logical way. ideally the game should be about setting up as solid an infrastructure as possible and then being able to forget about it so you can focus on expansion and combat, things that are actually fun. instead you have to constantly go back and reset values in your infrastructure and god help you if you forget to do anything because if any one link in the chain breaks you get 10 different assholes bitching at you about how they can’t do their job because that other guy didn’t do his.
the material system is cool, how everything is made from a material with a hardness value, a melting point, etc. that’s going to lead to great things. but why is the developer working on mad lib generators for dwarf physical appearances when we still don’t have intra-fort contact, when sieges still just show up at your door without actually coming from somewhere. why isn’t there a worldwide economic system being worked on first. why can’t we send out exploratory units or even sieges of our own. these are all things on the agenda for the game, but instead toady just spends two years writing dwarf nose generators and making blog posts about his cat.
and the part that’s really funny is people pay him to do this. people pay him and he develops the complete wrong part of the game. what’s worse, people like that. people say they’re fans of fawdr ssrerfto but then say they like the mad lib stuff and that just shows that they never understood what made the game good in the first place. it was, and still is, the ultimate sandbox game, basically the definition of what that word should mean. that’s why it’s so frustrating to see it heading down the path it is, towards meaningless autistic representations of menial details.
maybe i can never love again
