@“JoJoestar”#p86118 I get it, I think it's rigid game design too. I was just trying to make the most of it I guess.
Beat Super Mario Galaxy (story mode, not the full 120 stars) for the first time the other night. The Switch port control scheme approximates the Wiimote a lot more seamlessly than I expected. I agree with the common skeptics’ complaints popularized by ABDN of yore: Mario’s too floaty and imprecise, the level designs are too rigidly segmented and handholdy, the difficulty level and endless tutorials feel downright patronizing. (There’s also a ton of design artifacts that do almost nothing in this game but are there because it’s expected: 1-Ups, coins, arguably the triple jump, etc.) When it’s good it’s good though, and I enjoyed dipping into the little candy-bowl levels well enough. Most of all I was not expecting the game to end with ||the Big Crunch and rebirth of the universe, complete with Mario emerging from Rosalina’s goddess-womb||. Thanks for that, Yoshiaki Koizumi!
@“Kez”#p86119 Yup this sounds exactly like every Rockstar game ever. When I finally played GTA3 for the first time not that long ago it all finally clicked and I realized these things have not evolved in any meaningful mechanical way in 20 years - just added more appealing distractions. It’s always a struggle trying to explain to people why these pop-culturally iconic megahit games are just so goddamn boring to me without sounding like a snob!
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@“Kez”#p86119 The shooting is so dull as well, lock on and tilt slightly upwards for instant headshots - just like every Rockstar game since GTA…4?
Yo!!! So I booted up TLoU2 recently, since it got brought up, and poked around in the settings and did that game always have gyro aiming? I turned it on and cranked the sensitivity way up, and it *does* handle like Splatoon with the addition of stick control over the Y axis. I would have played the whole game and others like it like this if it'd been in there from the start, and think it could naturally add tension to those cowboy duels.
All these sega apologists on the podcast finally got me curious… so I downloaded the genesis collection for switch and I've been playing Phantasy Star IV: The End of the Millennium (originally published by Sega for the Sega Genesis in Japan On December 17, 1993…).
I know this game didn't invent any of these ideas, but it's funny playing this in a post Horizon: Zero Dawn world.
I thought RDR2 was more successful than other rockstar games in that it's more openly about just inhabiting a place and going along with a story. It wound up in the usual rockstar trouble in that regard in the lead up to the Cuba section when it was probably open world overgenerous with missions, so it was like yeah yeah we get it Van der lind is fucking it all up we know
It's difficult to think of a way the game could use the huge, detailed environment efficiently from a #gamedesign standpoint while also giving us mutants what we (or at least me) value more, which is that atmosphere and sense of place. There needs to be slack and emptiness for that to work, but that's ofc at odds with having lots of "cool" gamer shit to do
LA Noire was good with having just lots of unused and nonessential space around you all the time, that was good
@“edward”#p86048 I can almost beat Castlevania 1 without losing a life, but in the last level there's the part where a bunch of birds fly in dropping fleamen constantly during a tricky platforming area and it is hands down the most bullshit part of the game, I have never not died there
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@“yeso”#p86130 inhabiting a place (…) atmosphere and sense of place
It's interesting that you frame it this way because it's not like I wanted something different out of this game, really. I love trivial, low stakes, mundane game experiences, in fact I come from having a great time driving a truck with barely functional controls in Mundaun. The thing is, the way this game handles my presence, presents me with tasks and orders me around was so alienating and annoying that there was extremely little space to me actually feeling and enjoying that atmosphere and sense of place inside of the missions themselves. When I wasn't inside a mission it was better but it was impossible for me not to notice the disconnect between both sides.
Death Stranding is an example of another idiosyncratic slow-paced open world game which did a much better job at presenting ideas and incorporating them in the tissue of the main design. Slack and emptiness are necessary and enjoyable for me too, but I would argue that RDR2 doesn't provide much of that once you hit a mission marker, because it adopts the shape of a suffocating and obnoxiously specific set of instructions. It's the opposite of letting me inhabiting anything, really.
Maybe what I said was interpreted as me wishing a more conventional and typically AAA design out of this game, which isn't the case at all. I don't want to chain kills or do combos or engage with upgrade systems, I would argue that'd be against the whole tone and atmosphere of the game, and the funniest thing is that ironically that's already implemented in the game via the atrocious medal system which rewards you with ranks by beating your playtime replaying missions. My argument would rather be that I don't think RDR2 is particularly coherent with what it presents to the player.
@“GigaSlime”#p86136 If you grab the clock near the beginning of the level you can use it to freeze those dudes and run to the next screen. There is a holy water in the Dracula boss fight room.
Btw yeso I hope I‘m not being annoying by zeroing too much on what you’re saying, I‘m just finding the conversation interesting and you’re making thoughtful points. Just in case this bears saying!
@“JoJoestar”#p86145 yeah I think we‘re in agreement. The controls in RDR2 are maybe overcomplicated. I’d guess it's at least in part to keep Arthur moving “cinematically” instead of video game character pinging around everywhere
I think this is an interesting topic we're on and it has me wondering how some open world games lend a sense of space to the game and in some that aspect recedes and you can kind of see what's basically like a menu system or a big pac man level underneath it.
I've never gotten any sense of place from an assassins creed or a post 2 far cry. Bethesda games after morrowind aren't too hot either for me. And I don't know that it's an issue of scale either: that small opening area of The Witcher 3 was better than the game proper imo wrt to place and atmosphere. And Bully and _Pathologic 2_ for example despite being smaller and more apparently "game board" kind of layouts are stronger
I wonder if its a video game mountain problem. The open worlds I like are mostly flat, but the environments with mountains are bad. They just never get the scale of a mountain right. The ones in Skyrim are like an average landfill in Illinois to scale
I didn’t even enjoy Death Stranding (too much fidgety menu-based micromanagement) but it’s definitely along with Breath of the Wild one of the rare open world games that feels like it’s actually using all that space mechanically, and thus like you the player are actually inhabiting it, compared to the Rockstar approach where all the visually detailed game space in the world still just feels like a pointlessly elaborate prop for a series of ho-hum action game objectives. Also really not a fan of how Rockstar’s resource economy is so routinely unbalanced and trite. The games really aren’t developed with any sense of systemic cohesion at all, they’re just “GTA3 but with More”. GTA4, RDR1, all of them just inevitably ended up losing me at a point not that far in where it felt like nothing I did mattered, there was no skill or difficulty escalation, and all the game offered me was either A) aimless chaotic fucking around like a Lego set where you can only build scenes of blasé cinematic violence, or B) a series of solidly written but mechanically dull linear story missions spaced out by a bunch of inconsequential travel time.
_LA Noire_ also lost me with the way it arbitrarily grades every single dialogue choice for perfectionists. I’ve been thinking about trying to get back into it lately (Rockstar games are a good fit for the Switch) but I’m pretty certain that will put me off again.
that's true, the stories rockstar seems to want to tell in recent years are well-supported by the game environments, writing, and voice acting but at odds with the palette of dumb shit they have you do to get through it yeah
LA Noire at least gives you stuff to do that's mostly calibrated to what the game is about even though it does get to be a fussy chore
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@“yeso”#p86159 The ones in Skyrim
This never bothered me until I checked out Skyrim VR. I was expecting to be in awe of the rolling hills and landscape but everything seemed laughably small, like one of those model towns. VR definitely adds a sense of size relative to you, and in Skyrim what I was okay with perceiving as far away and big on a screen was obviously fairly close and little.
@“Kez”#p86216 This reminds me of Tetsuya Takahashi claiming the combined world map in Xenoblade is roughly the size of Japan, which… idk if anyone’s measured it but I’m a little dubious? I think it was confirmed that the sequel, which is supposed to take place across an entire planet, did have one of the largest maps of any open world game ever made at that time (2015).
Open worlds definitely never feel as huge as games want me to believe they are. The entire map of _New Vegas_ feels like a single valley, and like _RDR_ it corresponds to a measurable real-world space so it’s not just an abstraction. (_Xenoblade_ benefits from having fantastical settings and taking full advantage of that for visually creative and interesting-to-navigate topography that couldn’t exist in real life. That series’ level designers worked on _Breath of the Wild_, so their backseat influence on the last several years of open world games is greater than many people realize.)
Making me wish I could see the mountains in Horizon Zero Dawn in VR.
Not a chance xenoblade is anywhere close. Japan is 145,000 sq miles and while I couldn’t find a number for original chronicles , chronicles x is 136 sq miles, to put it in perspective. Haven’t played horizon but isn’t death stranding the same engine and a similar scope? Even that game has the small mountain problem
MS flight simulator 2020 gets it right but that’s ofc bc it’s the actual world 1:1
Horizon VR: Giantess Simulator