- Location
- The Hague
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Controversial gaming opinion: video games are good.
What are controversial gaming opinions you have?
Xenoblade X is a Like a Dragon-like.
It's an RPG from Japan with a main story that has some neat dramatic moments, but really isn't the main attraction, while being densely filled with sidequests with quirky city residents that actually manage to be consistently funny.
It's an RPG from Japan with a main story that has some neat dramatic moments, but really isn't the main attraction, while being densely filled with sidequests with quirky city residents that actually manage to be consistently funny.
tankdrop24
Tread First into Hell
- Location
- The Center of the Universe: Toronto, Canada
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Stellaris needs more smaller scale Origins that are focused on the history of an Empire Pre-FTL rather than some crazy sci-fi thing happening.
Like, yeah, I'm glad the big, mechanics heavy origins are there. It's cool to be able to start as a Clone Army, or having a Gateway in orbit, or whatever. But it deeply annoys me there's no difference between 'our planetary government evolved out of an equivalent to the UN' and 'we united our people in a massive war' or 'A new religion swept aside all prior forms of government, bringing our people together'
Like, yeah, I'm glad the big, mechanics heavy origins are there. It's cool to be able to start as a Clone Army, or having a Gateway in orbit, or whatever. But it deeply annoys me there's no difference between 'our planetary government evolved out of an equivalent to the UN' and 'we united our people in a massive war' or 'A new religion swept aside all prior forms of government, bringing our people together'
Synthesis
Special Mobile Suit Troops, U.E.S.A.
- Location
- Luxembourg City
This actually gets to an interesting failing (or "weakness") of Cyberpunk 2077 as a released product (which isn't really changed in any meaningful way by with Phantom Liberty), that I noted as someone who actually came to CP2077 from a "more than favorable" standpoint (because I waited more than a year after the games' release to only play it on Xbox Series X, which at the time had the advantage of the best console experience until at least the correction of Playstation's "ghost city" bug): namely, for a game that can be a technological triumph*, its handling of interior spaces--as opposed to the grand deserted vistas outside Night City, or the relatively convincing if uninteractive urban sprawl of the city itself--is generally mediocre at best and incredibly sammy and poor at worse. Beyond a few generally okay looking iconic locations--the lobby of the Arasaka Corporation, one or two specific clubs and fixer hangouts, certain homes--the game makes massive reuse of templates with minimal alterations, with mediocre interior object populating and little, or no, variation between locations. You will raid the same three-room slum tenement that you and Jackie rescued the kidnapped Medtech customer over, and over, and over, across the city. Some of them will even have the same hole in the wall. And you will go spelunking in the same underground industrial sewer access. And this would probably be more forgivable if the same repeated tenement, hotel bungalow, warehouse, black market clinic, etc., were actually populated with actual physical objects with any degree of interaction. Instead of what they are populated with, which is (sometimes) destructible nicknacks (that mostly go up in a "poof" of confetti) and object containers, 99% of which have no physics modeling of their own (since 99% of in-world objects that aren't weapons, corpses, or some vehicles have no physics modeling to begin with), and exist solely for the purpose of being "opened" to reveal a placeholder ingredient or vendor trash. Open a donut-shaped box to receive a donut, a hat box to receive a hat, a coffee box to receive a coffee, a money box to receive money, and so forth.
How much does this hurt the game? That's hard to say. It's pretty certain that at least part of this was owed to a very real need to compromise on performance, particularly for the earlier Playstation 4 and Xbox One releases (or people who don't have high-end Windows PCs, for that matter), and that the minimalistic environmental physics calculations the game has are already pretty taxing. It's just plainly obvious that, as a first person role-playing game that sold itself on an immersive, interactive first-person action game, parts of the underlying systems in CP2077 are literally years behind the technology we've seen in Control, Gears of War, or Call of Duty...or for that matter, what Bethesda's jury-rigged Gamebryo/Creation Engine RPGs were doing more than a decade earlier, where you can actually be a criminal and steal things that weren't written into a bespoke mission document. Even if you did overlook the fact that CP2077's interior spaces look like the same, obviously repeating mediocrely-lit template spaces, it wouldn't change the fact that they're almost completely devoid of interactivity beyond combat, "computer use", and opening containers to get obtain 2D sprites that populate your inventory. "Wow! You can open a door to bypass an enemy encounter! This is some nextgen shit and totally not what videogames have been doing since, at latest, Duke Nukem 3D in 1996!" There are aircraft in Flight Simulator that have interior cabins as interactive as interior spaces in Cyberpunk 2077. And unfortunately, because of the framework behind the game, neither of these, though especially the second, are problems that the modding community can address (as evidenced by the fact that 95% of CP2077 mods are clothing, vehicles, or character body mods).
I don't know, maybe Phantom Liberty does it better. Probably not, but I haven't played it yet. I mean, I bought the game twice, once the physical console release and later on a Steam sale, so they have my money (though I'm kicking myself for having stopped playing the Xbox release right before "Nocturn", before the mandatory update completely overhauled the skill mechanics and basically required you start from scratch). I've played enough of the game to find myself thinking about the mechanics just underneath the surface, and how they compare to other games.
Especially when a corpse or the like disappears, and leaves a low-res "doggie bag" floating half a meter above the floor, unperturbed, beginning you "Open me! I probably have some eaddies or a taco or a vinyl record you can vend!"
*Because, in so many respects, the game is a technological triumph...even in the context of a game that was repeatedly delayed in release until 2020 and still launched in such a state it was actually pulled from the Playstation store (admittedly probably the worse console release initially, until CDPR corrected the "ghost city" bug). The scripted character animations that form much of the storytelling are still, five years later, often second to none (when they don't break, which is still one of the most common bugs to encounter and why the game autosaves every five minutes anyway), the exterior environs are so much better than the interiors that they genuinely feel like they belong to a different game, or even at least very presentable (like the open-air malls in Pacifica, etc.), the combat is good considering the game's issues with latency and were probably improved overall with the streamlining of later patches? Probably? As is the flexibility of the adjacent hacking combat mechanic. There just parts of it that are Oblivion's lazy cousin, probably because CDPR's extensive experience didn't really offer any insight to do them differently.
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I... think the '-like' nomenclature is used for mechanical similarities because, like, you can absolutely make a soulslike or roguelike with that kind of story and it won't make sense to call it a Yakuza-like...
But also we already have a genre where sidequests from quirky interesting side characters is a mainstay and it's just... RPG. Not every RPG has them but it's a common enough element that it doesn't make sense to subcategorise RPGs by quirky sidequests because that's just a baseline assumption of the broad genre.
Comrade Future
Man from Zeerust
- Location
- USSR
- Pronouns
- He/His/Him
Dear colleagues - let me ask you a question.
There is a game that uses "motion capture", official actors play roles, and in general it is "interactive cinema". Why make a film based on a game that is already a "soap movie"?
There is a game that uses "motion capture", official actors play roles, and in general it is "interactive cinema". Why make a film based on a game that is already a "soap movie"?
- Location
- Russia
Because Hollywood has an overinflated sense of self-importance and have been cultivating the idea that "it's not real until it's a movie" for decades. Consider how even books aren't considered successful until they've got a movie made out of them.
Comrade Future
Man from Zeerust
- Location
- USSR
- Pronouns
- He/His/Him
For the first decades they somehow got along just fine without adaptations. Besides, Warcraft or some Tomb Raider are one thing. But Until Dawn?! It already looks like a bad movie - as if we don't have enough bad movies!
- Location
- Russia
That's because for the first decades they didn't see video games as valid stories period.
- Location
- The Great Beyond
- Pronouns
- He/She/They
Yes, in the first decades games were largely dismissed as not real art- you're confusing cause and effect. They didn't get movies because even big name games got no respect from broader society, stuff like Warcraft getting a movie at all was a big 'look, people care enough to get The Big Deal' moment.
There was a long period in the early 2000s or so where game devs were desperately trying to get people to admit games could be art at all, even.
Comrade Future
Man from Zeerust
- Location
- USSR
- Pronouns
- He/His/Him
Okay - that's all clear. But Until Dawn is almost a movie anyway - which recently got an updated version anyway. Another one in such a short time is too much.
- Location
- Russia
Think of it this way.
Why the hell did we need a "Live Action" Lion King movie even though it's legitimately 100% CGI? Because Hollywood thinks that unless it's live-action it's not real art. Even if it's not actually live-action.
Mandemon
Gentlemen, I love brawl.
- Location
- Cookie Jar
So, having finally played No Man's Sky, I can finally confidently say, that I prefer exploration in Starfield. All the touted features, such as "land anywhere" and "seamless transition" don't add anything to the experience. All planets are single biome planets, so you can't even exprience different biomes on one planet and quite frankly, I rather have 5 second loading screen than spend 2-3 minutes flying from point A to point B every time quest marker says. Ability to land anywhere isn't even truly landing, it's just button press and ship handles the landing itself, up to and including landing inside a rock of it happens to be in bad place.
- Location
- The Great Beyond
- Pronouns
- He/She/They
Is/ought problem. The point is game companies do seek Hollywood's positive opinion/to be seen like Hollywood.
While certainly foolish overall, it's what is happening and especially has been for a long time.
I haven't played Starfield and it sounds bad to me, but I will say if NMS transitions are "seamless" I don't really understand the value of the term - there are quite clear and visible divisions between ground, flight, and space flight. They're all in the same world, and that's useful (use space to cut between surface POIs fast, land carefully in places that would otherwise be tricky to traverse, even strafe ground threats with your ship). But seamless?
NMS also grappled hard with the usual exploration game problem of "why, though?" and I don't really think they solved it. Not sure anyone else has either without hand-built maps.
- Location
- Russia
Elite Dangerous mostly solved it via "it's about the fastest and easiest way to make money" but I'm not sure if most people would qualify its exploration as proper exploration.
Mandemon
Gentlemen, I love brawl.
- Location
- Cookie Jar
To explain difference, in Starfield you select a landing site from the planetary screen. If it is the first time you land on the planet, you get an extra animation that is skipped on all following landings. But main thing is that you click a planet and the landing site, and you instantly go there, rather than be able to "fly down". You can even directly select and "fast travel" to landing site from another star system, skipping all the manual need to jump to star system, select planet, fly to planet, select landing site and watching the animation. You just... go where you need to be.
When people say "seamless", they mean there is no visible loading screen.
- Location
- Georgia, US
- Pronouns
- He/Him
People have asked for this but I struggle to imagine how this would work. Stellaris operates at a scale where stellar gameplay is very marginal, the moment you start the game you're directly mandated to send out science ships and explore the nearby solar systems. Even planets (which have oscillated in importance but have always been at least moderately significant) aren't given enough granularity to be singularly sustain gameplay.
In practice a pre-FTL start would be sitting in one system until you research the necessary tech or go down an event tree. Which frankly doesn't sound fun to me. For that to work you'd need a game that was designed from the ground up to make it viable. Stellaris has revamped core systems before but always to serve a broad design vision, "let's make this one specific Origin work" doesn't really cut it. If this were to happen it would probably need Stellaris 2. And even that I suspect it probably wouldn't happen, it's just not conducive to the kind of game they're making.
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- Pronouns
- Any
I tried no man sky, didn't get passed the turoiral, it a fine game I think but it just not my kind of thing.
- Location
- Russia
Gnome Ann's Sky is one of those games that is explicitly designed for you to zone out and not really think about what you're doing. It's the equivalent of booting up a Minecraft world and just buzzing off in a random direction without actually building anything, but with actual stuff to do along the way.
- Location
- Ireland
- Pronouns
- He/Him
I'm sorry but at what point in the Starfield gameplay loop are you actually exploring space, then? You've described how you can just fast travel via menu, and then fast travel via menu from different starting points. I know you explore on the ground, but like...
Your complaint is that the manual flying and landing without loading screens don't add anything, but they do. They add to the fantasy of flying around space freely. That's what NMS is going for, it's core to the whole appeal. Starfield is only better in this regard if you don't care about the "flying in space" aspect.
- Location
- Sweden
Tankdrop wasn't talking about an Origin where you start pre-FTL, but more Origins based around what the pre-FTL society was, that aren't based on some large thing that makes them extremely different from other empires.