• 0 Posts
  • 49 Comments
Joined 2Y ago
cake
Cake day: Jul 08, 2023

help-circle
rss

True, reading is faster. Narrating I find more pleasant, more engaging if done well. But that’s personal opinion. So having an option would be great. And yes to making dialogues or narration skippable. I think most games do that nowadays. To be honest, if I am really immersed and interested and the voice acting is top notch I may not skip at all. But that should be left to the player to decide.


I see. Happens to me too that I lose focus while listening to an audio recording. But not to the extent you describe. Have always had difficulty separating voices from background noise though, like when a few people talk in parallel or when loud music is playing in the background. I don’t remember what that’s called, but I remember a long time ago reading that it’s a thing. Doesn’t affect my gaming much though if at all. Anyway I’m always interested in things having to do with auditory perception, thanks for sharing.


Huh, never heard of this before. Does it affect music perception too?


Yeah I get it, but I like having the option of having a voice actor narrate the text to me rather than having to read everything. Especially as I mostly game on a TV that was not meant for reading.



No save option during stealth sequences or generally in stealth-heavy games. Allow me the option to either improvise and enjoy messing up or plan and execute and test every section of a stealth route carefully without having to replay the mission a thousand times, especially when the slightest hiccup will have the whole mission going awry. If that leads to some people save-scumming their way through the entire mission, so be it. Let them play their way.


Quests that demand that the player finds X of an unimportant item in a world which has exactly X instances of said item. Thankfully most games nowadays will offer up more of said item than needed to complete the quest, so that one doesn’t end up scouring the map over and over again, in search of that elusive last bottle/scroll/pigeon, because nobody got time for that. And not even talking about optional collectathon quests for those who want that sort of thing, some games would have this sort of quest in the main storyline.


Excessive reliance on audio recordings and written text for storytelling / world building. Oh look another game where I’m alone in this world and I have to listen to a ton of audio recordings or collect snippets of text throughout the entire game to learn anything about this world and what happened to it!

If anything, let it be audio, not text, I’m tired of reading through often very subpar writing, I just glaze over it. Better yet, have actual (skippable) voice actors read any text out loud. Ideally, weave all that info into the game’s main storyline or side quests, and have it communicated to the player via interesting NPCs. Also, use environmental storytelling more than info-dumps. Show, don’t tell.

Text/in-world notes/memos/books and found audio recordings have a place but don’t let that be the main way of learning about the world or my place in it.

I understand it’s also a budget issue, so I’ll cut indie games some slack.



“Here is a very urgent thing. We can’t stress enough how urgent this is. Also would you like to do a load of pointless shit for these random people that have no bearing on anything?”

Lol every RPG ever. Though some pull it off better than others by somehow connecting more pieces back to the main quest.

I think CDPR have has this issue since the Witcher 3 tbh. They know how to make amazing story based games, with nice enough writing and characters, and some lovely grey area decisions where there’s no real right and wrong, and then mar it with boring open world design.

Yes absolutely, although I don’t recall this being quite so egregious in the Witcher. But that was a long time ago, I may not remember it well.


Yeah early on at least it seems like one is encouraged to do side missions to get eddies. That seems to be the main motivation to me at the stage I’m in.


Also surprised it’s still buggy after all this time. Nothing too serious, but still. Treating it as a flawed but pretty action adventure game with neon lights is the only way.

Maybe CDPR underestimated the effort to create a convincing modern metropolis open world. It’s a whole different ball game to the small villages and towns of the Witcher. Maybe they’ll get it right in the sequel, if they make one.


CP2077. Love the looks. Gameplay is fine. City is mostly backdrop yes, most of the focus seems to have been at crafting a bombastic main quest line. So far so good, just wish there were more depth to the city and its systems.


First souls game I played was demons souls and nothing came close to that since. You never forget your first etc. Maybe bloodborne. I know most people loved the dark souls series but to me it always felt like a rehash of much of the same that was truly novel and captivating in demons souls. Of course happy that many more people got to experience souls games with the move away from the Sony IP. Yet still for me the best souls games are those that were made exclusively for PlayStation, for better or worse.


I struggle to connect with any of those characters. I did like Niko Bellic, he was a “character”. Maybe it was his accent, his immigrant’s take on things, don’t remember, it was a while ago.


Review scores for this are shockingly high for a new RPG entry from a small team. Seems very Persona/FF-like, which isn’t exactly my kind of game (I tend to find most JRPGs a little stale in the game design department), but I think I will give this one a try. I’d rather support a new effort in any case than play yet another Bethesda remaster. I know they’re different games, but I hope CO will get the attention it seemingly deserves.


I wish they made a sequel already. Also so rare to have motorbike riding specifically as a mechanic woven into the protagonist’s story and not just an alternative to driving a car.





Oh wow veilguard got so much flak that it’s refreshing to hear someone so positive on it.


So I checked and could not find any review bombing. If there was one, it was tiny and not worth talking about.



I wasn’t aware, but basically this confirms my suspicion above regarding how this is playing out in the Chinese psyche so to speak.


While he comes off as a jerk, and possibly is one, I can understand the sentiment, having spent a few years of my life among ethnically Chinese people in Asia. There is this drive and aspiration to be recognized by leading brands in the West as equals, perhaps even betters. Due to a history of subservience and shame and a strong nationalistic current seeking to undo that.

This game is one of the most ambitious and accomplished to come out of China and they’re hungering for that kind of recognition. So it is likely that fans of the game feel it was ‘stolen’ from them and he seems to be responding to that sentiment. To us it looks petty, but to some of the game’s most ardent Chinese fans this may have been an appropriate response. Not sure how this was received in China though, just speculating.


Ah and for a moment there I thought it would have been so cool if a developer were to publicly admit they fell asleep during gameplay…


That is odd that nobody could tell this wouldn’t be for you @[email protected]


Dude! How on earth… maybe pick up writing, the last sentence was fire.



I’d say Baldur’s Gate 3.

With Demons’ Souls a close second. For those of us who got to play that game before Dark Souls became a thing, when we knew next to nothing about what to expect, it was an almost revelatory experience.



Hey thanks, both AW1 and Control are games I might pick up again. Didn’t hate them, they just didn’t really hook me.


I found the pacing of the first few chapters in the first Alan Wake sublime, in terms of storytelling. The gameplay frustrated me on the other hand, became quickly monotonous and tedious for me. So I only played like a third of the game, much as I liked the story and was curious to see where it went. Then Control I was left completely unmoved by. So I’ve been hesitating to take up the second Alan Wake, basically because I didn’t much like the first iteration, or Control, which I’ve heard is somehow connected. Maybe I’m missing out. Or maybe these games appeal only to a certain audience.


Never used this. Never cared for it 🤷🏻‍♂️


Much of this looks good. But some of it looks painfully mid/generic. Might still be fun.


Well with an average in the 80s on metacritic one would assume it’s a very decent game. But user reviews tend to be a lot harsher indeed.


Thanks for the review. Disappointing to be sure. I was hoping to play it at some point and that it wouldn’t suck as much as people say it does. Or that they would turn it around in time.


Sometimes I wonder whether Starfield truly deserves all the bad publicity or whether people are also still upset because it became an Xbox exclusive and that is clouding their judgement. I know it does affect me for one. I got a ps5 for gaming and I’m automatically much less interested in anything that isn’t on the platform. And I was of course very disappointed when Microsoft outright bought all these huge IPs and made them exclusive to Xbox.


I’m waiting for the ultimate edition that will include everything here


This thread is like a lesson in the importance of x and y axes range in time series plots