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Game with no challenge removes challenges

Jigawatt

Arcane
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Aug 13, 2009
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in a desert, walking along in the sand
What amazes me is that on one hand, they want to elevate gaming to art, yet they praise modes that allow you to circumvent certain parts, treating them as consumerist products that they are entitled to own and manipulate as they see fit just because they paid for them. What a bunch of faggots.

To be fair, if you bought the Mona Lisa, you could paint over her face.
Regardless of ownership, if you deface a UNESCO world heritage cultural artefact you'll be put on trial in The Hague.
 

Black Angel

Arcane
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Wonderland
They should name it "game journalist mode"
8QSRWEv.png
 

Zombra

An iron rock in the river of blood and evil
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I disapprove of difficulty levels in general. Make one coherent, intended experience for your audience. Doing otherwise essentially splits development into creating and balancing two or more different games.

Once you've done that, it's fine with me if you want to go back and add Hard Mode or Tourist Mode or Ice Cream Eagle Mode to broaden your audience. For a AAA studio to do that makes perfect sense to me. It's only another million dollars of dev time; what do they care if they'll recoup it in casual sales anyway?

I usually play games on Hard anyway, turn off the UI and whatnot, so it'd be hypocritical of me to get mad at people who want Easy.
 

Iznaliu

Arbiter
Joined
Apr 28, 2016
Messages
3,686
Most game "journalists" have an inferiority complex and try too hard to elevate games to an artform, yet they fail to even try to reach the same standards of movie, music and literature critics. Did ever any film critic asked David Lynch to make his films less obtuse and offer a developer commentary to explain what is happening on mullholland drive, for example.

Is expected that music critics don't know the history of the genres they write about and all the classics and influential albums? Yet, that's what happens with most game "journalists" under 30 that the kind of Kotaku and Polygon employ.

The core problem is that game journalism is highly linked to the gaming industry. In any other journalistic field, this would be seen as a violation of the free press, but with games journalism, it is normal. It's not a problem that game journalists caused, its a problem that all media can have and usually does have, but which they solved to a degree (excluding tabloids). Since opinions are spoonfed to them by companies holding the ad revenue to keep them alive, their thinking skills atrophy and they become divorced from the actual playerbase.
 

RuySan

Augur
Joined
Jul 11, 2005
Messages
777
Location
Portugal
Some genres, like modern ARPGS (like the witcher or Bethesda games) aren't really affected by different difficulty levels, since it's just a matter of raising or lowering numbers (although there are better ways of doing this). But skill based arcade games is a totally different matter. The right level of fair challenge is hard to achieve, and asking developers to do that 3 or 5 times is ridiculous.

And Bravo! Game Journalist.
 

Falksi

Arcane
Joined
Feb 14, 2017
Messages
10,538
Location
Nottingham
Some genres, like modern ARPGS (like the witcher or Bethesda games) aren't really affected by different difficulty levels, since it's just a matter of raising or lowering numbers (although there are better ways of doing this). But skill based arcade games is a totally different matter. The right level of fair challenge is hard to achieve, and asking developers to do that 3 or 5 times is ridiculous.

And Bravo! Game Journalist.

That's why I was so disapointed with The Witcher 3. After the first 2 games I thought it could really evolve into something Codexian, where killing monsters isn't simply a case of levelling up, but instead having to meet certain criteria (oils/potions/traps/environemtal setups/etc.) would be the key to progression.

But when you read articles like these what hope is there? I think the journo's are essentially now rolling out an EA suit style brainwashing campaign to remove as much work from game development as possible.

Copy-paste nice looking environments and sell to the backwards masses. :(

And sorry people, but IMHO The Witcher 3 has hoodwinked a lot of people regards how much interactivity it has. Most dialogue options aren't choices, but are simply "give me more information"

Branching off from this, here's a good vid on silent protagonists, and the nature of interactivity from that POV............

 

Iznaliu

Arbiter
Joined
Apr 28, 2016
Messages
3,686
And sorry people, but IMHO The Witcher 3 has hoodwinked a lot of people regards how much interactivity it has. Most dialogue options aren't choices, but are simply "give me more information"

People don't want or care about real choice. They like the illusion of choice.
 

Falksi

Arcane
Joined
Feb 14, 2017
Messages
10,538
Location
Nottingham
And sorry people, but IMHO The Witcher 3 has hoodwinked a lot of people regards how much interactivity it has. Most dialogue options aren't choices, but are simply "give me more information"

People don't want or care about real choice. They like the illusion of choice.

Actually, you're right. But it doesn't even do that very often.
 

Plisken

Learned
Joined
Oct 8, 2017
Messages
255
Twitcher 3 is honestly popamole, but it is popamole made with some passion at least.

I honestly consider it the advanced form of games like legend of zelda. Contrary to nintendo nerd retardation, the ocarina of time was not a deep game, in any respect. It was however, a good adventure game. Twitcher is not dissimilar, although it could do without various hand holding mechanisms obviously put in place for an audience that stopped using their brains a long time ago.
 
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Falksi

Arcane
Joined
Feb 14, 2017
Messages
10,538
Location
Nottingham
Twitcher 3 is honestly popamole, but it is popamole made with some passion at least.

I honestly consider it the advanced form of games like legend of zelda. Contrary to nintendo nerd retardation, the ocarina of time was not a deep game, in any respect. It was however, a good adventure game. Twitcher is not dissimilar, although it could do without various hand holding mechanisms obviously put in place for an audience that stopped using their brains a long time ago.

I personally hated 90% of my time with TW3, but I agree that there's a decent game in there, can see why folk like it, and credit CDPR for the obvious passion they did put in to making it.

What amazes me though is how many AAA tropes seeped into the game (barren/pointless open world with little of substance to discover, filler loot, far less choices, don't worry about only being able to defeat enemies like the Kayran if you have a specific potion - just level up! etc.) yet how often I see it creditted with "this is how an RPG SHOULD be done".

Hopefully the casuals they snagged with TW3 will be ready for a game with more substence when CP 2077, or whatever they release next, is released. I'll gladly take TW3's flirting with AAA tropes if it means they've now a big enough fanbase to give us a more traditional, substance based experience.

Rule 1 for all RPGs - only make the world & game as big as it needs to be to include genuine quality substence. Spending 5 min running over barren wasteland & fighting Nekkers to have a 2 min cutscene where my dialogue options are simply "give me more info" over & over is not that.
 

Ash

Arcane
Joined
Oct 16, 2015
Messages
6,227
@Falski thanks for confirming that I shouldn't play Twitcher 3. As a gameplay enthusiast I've always had strong doubts. But yes, kudos for not being a microtrans-filled cash grab.
 

AwesomeButton

Proud owner of BG 3: Day of Swen's Tentacle
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I disapprove of difficulty levels in general. Make one coherent, intended experience for your audience. Doing otherwise essentially splits development into creating and balancing two or more different games.

Once you've done that, it's fine with me if you want to go back and add Hard Mode or Tourist Mode or Ice Cream Eagle Mode to broaden your audience. For a AAA studio to do that makes perfect sense to me. It's only another million dollars of dev time; what do they care if they'll recoup it in casual sales anyway?

I usually play games on Hard anyway, turn off the UI and whatnot, so it'd be hypocritical of me to get mad at people who want Easy.
I wrote pretty much this in the notes to a custom scenario I built for a game once. Also, I was too lazy to create difficulty levels : D

@Falski thanks for confirming that I shouldn't play Twitcher 3. As a gameplay enthusiast I've always had strong doubts. But yes, kudos for not being a microtrans-filled cash grab.
Falksi simply doesn't enjoy the kind of game Witcher 3 is - open world interactive movie with twitch combat - and he blames it on the game. The game itself is pretty good.
 
Joined
Mar 18, 2009
Messages
7,306
@Falski thanks for confirming that I shouldn't play Twitcher 3. As a gameplay enthusiast I've always had strong doubts. But yes, kudos for not being a microtrans-filled cash grab.

No, CDPR cannot into good gameplay. W3 has the least annoying gameplay in series though. There's this wonderful innovation called "jump button" too!
The only reason to play it is storytelling/atmosphere which it is in fact quite good at. Unless, of course, for you there's never a reason like that. I enjoyed it so much I could ignore its flaws in most significant aspect of videogames.
My chosen way to play was on hardest and using "all skills active" mod/cheat. Meaning you use those annoying limited skill slots only for mutagen synergies, all the skills you buy are always active. I was OP for a larger half of the game of course, but that was the idea. Expansion boss fights still kicked my ass though.
 
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Joined
Aug 10, 2012
Messages
5,869
Twitcher 3 is honestly popamole, but it is popamole made with some passion at least.

I honestly consider it the advanced form of games like legend of zelda. Contrary to nintendo nerd retardation, the ocarina of time was not a deep game, in any respect. It was however, a good adventure game. Twitcher is not dissimilar, although it could do without various hand holding mechanisms obviously put in place for an audience that stopped using their brains a long time ago.

I personally hated 90% of my time with TW3, but I agree that there's a decent game in there, can see why folk like it, and credit CDPR for the obvious passion they did put in to making it.

What amazes me though is how many AAA tropes seeped into the game (barren/pointless open world with little of substance to discover, filler loot, far less choices, don't worry about only being able to defeat enemies like the Kayran if you have a specific potion - just level up! etc.) yet how often I see it creditted with "this is how an RPG SHOULD be done".

Hopefully the casuals they snagged with TW3 will be ready for a game with more substence when CP 2077, or whatever they release next, is released. I'll gladly take TW3's flirting with AAA tropes if it means they've now a big enough fanbase to give us a more traditional, substance based experience.

Rule 1 for all RPGs - only make the world & game as big as it needs to be to include genuine quality substence. Spending 5 min running over barren wasteland & fighting Nekkers to have a 2 min cutscene where my dialogue options are simply "give me more info" over & over is not that.

What makes you think Cyberpunk won't be even more popamole than TW3? It's a slippery slope and I'm pretty sure Witcher 3 sales make it hard for corporate execs to ignore the allure. It sold 4 million copies on the PC alone, and probably as much or more on consoles - so, around 10 million copies, give or take. That's a lot of money.
 
Joined
Aug 10, 2012
Messages
5,869
I think it's the other way around - not that CDPR, now that they have the popamole mob's attention after selling 10 million copies of Twitcher 3, are ready to unleash a proper, deep RPG on their unsuspecting audience, but rather after seeing how many units they can move with this kind of design, how far can they get with dumbing it down even more.

I think of CDPR now as a less insulting Bioware. With Cyberpunk they might be ready to close the gap.
 

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