When a game offers me a chair, and then presents me with some sort of beautiful vista that I can view alongside my character, I feel disappointed and cheated. When I tell my video game character to sit down, I just want a frontal view of my video game character, sitting. I don’t play video games to go outside. I want to watch a person sit in a chair, and think, “must be nice, sitting in a chair like that,” forgetting that I, the game-player, am sitting in a chair that is most likely far more comfortable than any to be found in a video game world.
Important Bloodstained chair sitting update: I have found the shard that lets you summon a chair, just for sitting in. This chair cannot hurt enemies or otherwise do anything, as far as I can tell (though if you try to summon a chair on a slope it’ll do a harmless physics tumble around the level geometry).
chair-summoning is elite level sitting. The bloodstained lady summons that chair, and somewhere and amish person crashes to the floor beside their dinner table
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I am playing FFXV and I have mixed feelings about it, but I don’t have mixed feelings about sitting in this chair with this bird outside the stores
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the one thing modern Final Fantasy design has really nailed is the joy of just chilling for a minute between tasks and enjoying how pretty your characters are.
I know the danger is “this will let the player break out of the incredibly elaborate psychological addiction loop we trap them in to make money” but modern triple A really needs moments that let the player chill and collect for a little bit. in superhero comics and movies I never care about the big action (well, maybe if it’s an artist I really like). i care about the small moments of superman and batman bickering about metropolis’s best coffee shop or something.
a bench with a big fiberglass bird is the future of video games, is what i’m saying. games cannot be taken seriously as art until we have more benches with fiberglass birds.
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Sitting in chairs in Bloodstained is actually quite powerful because it is part of what you need to do to execute a glitch that allows you to go out of bounds.
@esper I agree! I love letting Ignis drive me around so I can just pan the camera and look around (especially now that I can do it at 60fps on PS5)! And agreed on the superhero comics, the best X-men issues are the ones where they’re just hanging out!
The thing that takes me out of it a little bit (for FFXV) is that the characters just don’t have that much to say to each other. Like they are mouthing conversations to each other that look *extremely interesting on the road but you never hear them (I do enjoy watching them do that though for what it’s worth), and they mostly just comment on the weather when you’re walking around. Let Square Enix hire some of Rockstar’s dialogue writers to fill some of that out and we will really be talking lol
@buglehawkem That is so hilariously in character for that game. What a beautiful mess Bloodstained is.
In Spelunky 2 you can sit in the lobby with your buddies before heading into the caves.
In Genshin Impact you can share a meal with yourself.
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I swear I hit enemies with chairs in bloodstained!?
@tombo I task you with producing evidence of this driver walking around and sitting in chair-ness, I’d love to see it. I reckon you could make a pretty good video essay about that.
anyway you can sit on this bench in nier automata also
https://twitter.com/necrosofty/status/1236159150255517696
Instead of answering the question I would like to complain about a game where you cannot sit in the chair.
In THE WITNESS you cannot sit in chairs and it bothered me greatly. Part of the concept of THE WITNESS is you find yourself on an island but you are not the first person to visit this island, and you find things other people left behind. One of the things you find left behind are COMFY CHAIRS. Someone visited the island and put cushions and comfy chairs in various places and then just hung out sipping mix drinks and looking at the pretty scenery. You encounter the first comfy chair within minutes of the game starting. You CANNOT SIT IN THE COMFY CHAIRS. The game otherwise puts a lot of attention into imbuing the space with an innate sense of reality and the fact you can’t sit in comfy chairs BETRAYS THE INNATE SENSE OF REALITY. It is like putting a dog in a game and then not letting you pet it. It is five years later and I am still annoyed about this
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Oh man, I just started Bloodstained this week. I was expecting it to bear the stench of “not quite it,” but I’m really enjoying it.
In Nioh, there’s an emote where you sit down on the ground and have a cup of tea. No chair, but the ground is nature’s chair. It is enjoyable to do whenever there’s downtime.
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@mcc Yeah what’s up with that. That’s a game that should let you sit in chairs. “Just sort of hanging out on the island” is 99% of that game. They could even have put an environmental puzzle you could only see if sitting in a chair! Would’ve fit so well!
In the MMOs Final Fantasy 14 they had chair sitting.
Final Fantasy 11 eventually added a /sitchair emote with a multiple unlockable chairs
even an invisible chair
this dude is Tanking while sitting in a chair lmao
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I thought it was cute that you could sit on a bench in Hollow Knight. I did not play more than 20 minutes though, so I wasn’t sure what it actually did, but it’s a nice touch nonetheless.
Also, while it’s unfortunately not quite chair sitting, I feel like my favorite implementation of sitting has to be from Death Stranding. I think that game really did a great job of making you feel exhausted. In no other game have I ever planned out when I would sit and literally just rest to just admire the view. I really felt like I was resting IRL also, which was a weird thing.
I wish you could sit in the chairs YOU BUY WITH YOUR OWN GEMS in Hades, but my man Zagreus is almost never tired.
No game is truly complete until you can sit in a chair.
