Game mechanic patents are such an unbelievable joke it’s hard to understand how any court could take them seriously. “Yes your honor. As you can see, we own the exclusive rights to the idea of throwing a ball at a creature in a video game.”
It’ll be one of those photos from a ride at a theme park where everyone is screaming in terror.
I played through the game long after it had been patched up. I enjoyed it enough. When Phantom Liberty released I went back to start a new save to play it and after playing through the different character background introductory bit I realized it just wasn’t going to be that different of an experience the second time around. So I just loaded up my endgame save for the DLC. I had fun with that, but going around with a maxed out character blowing everything up with a shotgun definitely trivialized things.
Not a niche game, but: day (???) of waiting for Sony to put Bloodborne on PC.
Also, this is a bit of a tangent, but I really wish Nintendo would start putting some of their games on PC. Not even so that I can play them, I do have a switch, but because there are quite a few of them that just don’t do well on console, either performance-wise or in terms of UX. For example, I’ve been playing the new Zelda game. The game’s core mechanic involves scrolling through a MASSIVE list of objects to find what you’re looking for and the best solution the game has for this is a handful of sorting options that only get you so far when there are just this many things. Without changing any of the gameplay, you could make the experience soooo much better by:
Some games just deserve better treatment than what they got from the limitations of their original platforms.
Yeah I think you’re right to some extent. It’s definitely harder to get invested in the ones with no or less VA. However, I think there’s also something to be said for the tutorials/starts of these games. The Larian games I’ve played had relatively punchy tutorials that lead into a nice amount of structured freedom very early into the experience. Disco Elsyium also gets you into the the thick of things without much explicit tutorializing because it’s so mechanic light your “tutorial” ends up just being gradual introduction to your main characters, the setting, and the case, which is what you’re here for anyway.
The other CRPGs have hit me with the double whammy of tutorials that lead me by the nose for way too long while also just dumping paragraphs of exposition on me that have almost nothing to do with the immediate characters or plot.
EDIT: Thinking about it a bit more: While you don’t need all the voice acting and cinematic to make good, dramatic, character focused story bits, I think the converse is true: It would have been a waste to get all these great VAs only to have them stand around and dryly deliver exposition. So it kind of had to be very character focused if it was going to work and be worth the effort.
Imagine how much worse the start of BG3 would be if you run into Laezel and you just stop for like 5 minutes while you exhaust all her dialgogue options so she can explain the entire history of the Gith and the Ilithid. Even fully voice acted that would have killed the pacing.
The funny thing for me with CRPGs: DOS2 was the first one I played and I really liked it. Followed up again with BG 3 when that came out. Since then I’ve tried a bunch of other CRPGs and… I don’t think I actually like CRPGs. I just like Larian. The one exception is Disco Elysium, but that’s so far removed from most others of the genre because it has no combat.
Elden Ring doesn’t even feel like a game for everyone who liked Dark Souls. They completely lost the plot on what a fun challenge is.
That is how I used to play all the other games. I just stopped having fun with it in Elden Ring.
Fair enough. But most of the time when I finally beat the bosses it just felt like I found the right spell/weapon and got a bit lucky. I’ve yet to get that sense of relief and achievement that the earlier games gave me.
I mean, to some extent yes. The hostile, uncaring world complemented by challenging gameplay that doesn’t hold your hand is an important part of the design. I just think they went too far in Elden Ring to the point where it stops being a challenge I can feel good about overcoming. But that’s not really what I meant as far as the flaws with the games.
Setting aside difficulty, their games are filled with flaws, both minor and major. Some they’ve learned from over the years, some they haven’t, and some which they’ve gone backwards. I could get into a whole discussion about them, but it’s a testament to the rest of the design that I can acknowledge all of these and look past them to enjoy what was done right. Just a few off the top of my head:
The stats are obtuse and frequently either broken or useless. Resistance from DS 1, Poise from DS 3, armor in basically any game, etc. This makes engaging with the RPG elements feel kind of pointless and why in a lot of the games I played basically naked.
The stat requirements and the need for upgrade materials makes it so that most items you find will be useless to you. They alone don’t really contribute to the desire to explore. I do end up exploring around in these games, but it’s in spite of the rewards rather than because of them.
Demon Souls made you go back to a hub through a load screen to level. Dark Souls 1 fixed this. Then every game after that until Sekiro has gone back to forcing you to go through a load screen to level.
The games are really inconsistent with their use of bonfires and shortcuts. I think to this day Dark Souls 1 has the best level design of the series. The lack of fast travel for the first half really makes you engage with the levels and makes you appreciate the shortcuts you find and eventually the fast travel once you have it. Since then all of the games have gone bananas with the bonfires/sites/etc with fast travel right from the start. There were some absolutely absurd places in DS3 where there was another bonfire within sight of the first. Then you have areas with absolutely no bonfires and shortcuts all the way through, or none at all. In Elden Ring sometimes you get sites of grace or stakes of Marika right outside the boss door and sometimes there just isn’t one anywhere close.
Consumables feel pretty useless since they’re non-renewable. If you use them and still can’t kill the boss before they run out, you’re now just gonna have to beat the boss without them, so you might as well not have bothered. Elden Ring kind of helped this with crafting, but honestly I haven’t used it much because I just am trained not to think about consumables in these games at this point.
Some weapons/spells end up being completely useless. Some feel like they were designed for a different game. I don’t know how they imagined people would make use of them. And iirc bows and spells have been a joke until like DS3, and even then from what I’ve heard people say bows are still pretty crap.
I think what’s interesting about these games is that they’re unpolished. That’s not to say I wouldn’t want these problems fixed with better design, but I think I prefer what we have to the usual AAA design where everything rough gets sanded down until the whole game is bland and appeals to nobody equally.
Yeah that’s basically how I felt. It was binary. The game was unfairly and frustratingly hard when I was trying to play fair and take the game on its terms. And then when I went to cheese everything it was so trivial that it felt empty. Sometimes I think about going back to the game to try to get the “real” experience, but then I remember the frustration and just can’t bring myself to do it.
Although part of my reluctance to replay the game has less to do with boss difficulty and more to do with the repetitiveness of the open world. Without the sense of exploration and discovery you get on the first playthrough, the world becomes a checklist of places you need to go to grab stuff for your build with little desire to go replay the other content because so much of it is copy pasted filler. Even going through the DLC now, with it being smaller in scope than the full game, but still pretty huge, I’m already seeing a lot of repeat content.
As much as I appreciate the attempt at putting a twist on the formula, I think the open world was a net negative for the game. The flaws in the reward systems of the previous games were exacerbated by the structure which led you to explore all the boring repetitive stuff on a first play-through because you don’t know if the thing you need might be in catacomb #20 and then on subsequent playthroughs you just skip vast parts of the game which aren’t relevant to you.
It also just doesn’t seem like they have the content output necessary to fill an open world with content that is of a comparable level of novelty and quality to what we’d come to expect from their level design. There’s a good dark souls game in Elden Ring, it’s just that it’s spaced out and everything in between is padding.
The funny thing is, despite all of that, Elden Ring is still one of the top 3 open world games alongside the 2 Zelda titles. But I think that says as much about the state of the industry and genre as much as it does about the skill of FROM’s and Nintendo’s designers.
I’m working my way through it now. They’re not really much different from the main game. The problem is the bosses in the main game were also pretty frustrating. A lot of absurdly long attack chains where it’s hard to read when you have an opening. Delayed attacks you have to memorize the timing for. Attacks where the enemy either dashes or stretches their model an absurd distance to hit you so it’s hard to get away from them or gauge distances. Damage values that will kill you in a few hits even with high health and armor. Attacks that start and execute so fast that anything with a cast time gets punished.
Outside bosses we have the enemies behind half the corners, we have platforming sections in a game that doesn’t really support that, etc.
I’ve always like their games in spite of a lot of the flaws. The level design, world building, atmosphere, weird writing, etc all are still great and what draws me to the games. In what in what other games can you see: bald scam man, onion man, sunny d man, “dip head in wax”, rolling lightning goats, doot doot boat ghost, etc?
But it feels like in terms of gameplay design it’s kind of stagnated. A lot of the same design patterns for difficulty plus the pressure to keep making the game feel hard to people who have played all their games before has led to them stretching their design about as much as they can. In my first play through of Elden Ring for the first time I gave up trying to play my usual Ooga booga strength build in favor of that stupid comet azure magic combo to just anihate the bosses rather than deal with their bullshit. And in previous games I happily smashed my face against things like Nameless King or Madam Butterfly and Dancer well before I was supposed to fight then.
I think at this point I just want to see FROM do some different things. Sekiro was a nice mix-up on the basic formula and while it wasn’t really my cup of tea, Armored Core 6 felt like a breath of fresh air. The mainline souls style games feel like they’re trying to keep linking the fire over and over.
I’ve been torn on the game as well. The platforming has been enraging/draining and you need to do so much of it in the process of backtracking around the map for metroidvania stuff. I’ve been kept going by the intrigue of the secrets, but I’m not sure how long that can carry me past this much frustration, especially as new discoveries get fewer and further between.
It seems I’m near the end of the basic ending, but honestly if I don’t end up going beyond that I’d consider the game a failure. The core gameplay isn’t fun enough if I don’t get some solid payoff on the secret hunting.
It’s a shame. I really like these kinds of games that reward exploration and discovery. Tunic is up there as one of my favorite games of all time. But the key there is that while there was some skill based combat I had to struggle through, once I did it, I usually didn’t have to do it again to get around the map. I constantly need to deal with the same platforming bits and puzzles to get back through certain parts of the map in this game.
I tried a 2nd time and just got the same automated message about the 2hr limit.
Agreed. This is one of the frustrating casualties of live service microtransaction games. Can’t let people run servers or mod it because otherwise how can you sell them stuff?
Maybe I missed it, but do they say that anywhere in the course of the gameplay or required interactions for getting into the gameplay? If it’s missable, it’s going to be missed. That’s fine for some stuff, but if your messaging relies on people with the most incurious ideology actively seeking it, you’re going to be disappointed.
We’re talking about it because it is something people misunderstood. You can’t wholly blame the audience without acknowledging the flaws of the media. Not that they bear no responsibility for their reading of it, but it’s not without value to critique the way the message was delivered.
There are some others, although I don’t know that they always need to do a “this is bad btw” message. Like Paday or GTA are crime fantasies. The player gets to have fun pretending to act outside the bounds of law and/or morality and get away with it in a safe environment. In the same way you root for the thieves in a heist movie. Although in a movies usually they do more to give you reasons to like the heroes like giving them some sad backstory.
These aren’t really trying to be a political commentary on crime. They might have a component of criticizing the society that forces people into crime, but I don’t know they have anything to say about the act or the people who do it in specific. And they don’t really need to. Not just because they don’t need to send a political message, but also because the game depends on the general understanding that crime is bad and. If it didn’t have that cultural context as a backdrop, the element of the game that makes the player feel like they’re getting away with something they shouldn’t be wouldn’t be effective.
Or to make a more direct thematic comparison: Call of Duty. They’re military fantasy games. The games are pretty much unironic imperialist propaganda. They, like a lot of big budget action movies that include military hardware, get direct support from, and in exchange cede editorial control to, the US military. In these games you are cast as a heroic soldier for either the US or an ally fighting against a bunch of evil, scary foreigners who want to destroy our way of life. When the bad guy turns out to be part of the military, it’s one rogue guy/faction. The one setting that doesn’t twist real life imperialist invasions as being good is WWII. But in the broader context, by placing the fight against the Nazis next to conflicts which have largely been about resource extraction and access to markets, they project the roles of WWII, where America is the good guy and the ones they’re fighting are evil, onto those invasions.
While CoD has to do some work to characterize the enemies to avoid humanizing them, they are heavily leaning on the pre-existing cultural assumption that America is good and brings freedom and democracy to the world. So while I’d criticize CoD for being what it is, I can’t really critique its effectiveness in conveying its message. It might not win over someone who already knows what’s up, and it probably doesn’t make any difference to the complete fascist nutjobs, for most people who don’t like violence and war, but might be convinced it’s necessary for some greater good, it helps reinforce the message that the wars we’re fighting are necessary and are for the greater good.
So yeah. My criticism of Helldivers 2 isn’t just that it doesn’t say it to your face that the things it depicts and represents are bad. It’s just that if it is a satire (and I don’t really have any reason to doubt that given a lot of context), I don’t know that it’s that effective at conveying its message. Sort of responding to some of the other comments: I don’t think you can reasonably expect that the majority of players playing a mission based co-op live service action game are going to stop to read lore or chat with NPCs that aren’t mechanically relevant. So if you want anything to get across, it has to happen in the course of gameplay, maybe even integrated into the mechanics. Granted, that game might not turn out to be fun to play, but that might just be a case for video games in general not being a very effective vehicle for anti-violence messaging.
Going back to those 3 groups:
For anti-imperialists, it doesn’t matter. We know already.
For straight up fascists, it doesn’t really do anything to make them re-evaluate their worldview. Maybe they might get something out of the way the lives of the soldiers is so valueless, but I kind of doubt it. But it certainly wouldn’t change their minds about their enemies being non-human and dangerous/worthy of being killed.
For the average person… they might get the overly patriotic propaganda part of it, but there are so many times when these kinds of people recognize that, but then are like “it’s just like some communist dictatorship! Good thing we’re not like that.” There’s zero self awareness. For the part of it about the nature of the enemy and the necessity of military conflict, the killer bugs and bots that we see in game really only reinforce the idea that this is a necessary conflict.
Idk. It’s fine if the game wants to just be a fun goofy shooting game, and I don’t begrudge it for trying to be something more than that even if it fails, but it’s kind of hard to give it much credit either when it basically just copied someone else’s homework poorly.
So, I think there’s something weird about the nature of the satire in Helldivers 2 that might lead to some problems.
I don’t feel like it’s that controversial to say that the game is pretty obviously ripping off Starship Troopers. Like to a point that goes way beyond mere homage. Now I don’t view this as an inherent problem, because I don’t believe IP should be a thing, but this fact, combined with the way they’ve adapted it into a game leads to some issues.
The game basically has all the aesthetic elements of the satire of Starship Troopers: The over the top patriotism, nationalism, militarism, the devaluing of the individual and life, etc. On it’s own, this is enough for people who have already become disillusioned with the US war machine to get what it’s saying. However, to someone who’s deep in the propaganda that America is a force for good in the world that is simply fighting evil enemies who hate freedom and democracy, there is no cognitive dissonance there. Of course we’re gonna be all patriotic about fighting against some big bad enemy that’s threatening us.
Not that people didn’t also misunderstand Starship Troopers, but a key difference it has in driving it’s point home is that moment at the end of the movie when they capture one of the bugs and learn it feels fear and then they all cheer. We see that no, the bugs aren’t some unthinking monsters bent on destroying us, they’re intelligent creatures and we’re the invaders, but the people are so indoctrinated at this point that this fact doesn’t even phase them.
Helldivers 2 doesn’t really have that anywhere within the main “text” of the game. Sure, you can read some lore and get a bit of that from some conversations with NPCs on the ship, but that’s not really how people interact with games, or at least a game like this. Most people are going to load into a lobby, pick a mission, maybe mess around with their loadout, then go jump into a game where the bugs ARE horrible unthinking monsters who represent an existential threat to humanity. In the ways the game lets you interact with it, there’s no option where you make peace with the bugs or come to understand the horror of what you’re doing. The bugs are just enemies and you have an assortment of guns and bombs to interact with them.
So since the mechanics of the game itself don’t really mesh well with the message of the satire, what it relies on is either a) You already having seen Starship Troopers or b) You already understanding imperialism, fascism, and recognizing those traits in America’s military culture.
It’s kind of a weird place for a piece of media to be when it’s message only makes sense in the context of another similar piece of media or when the player/reader/viewer already agrees with it’s message.
It’s not terribly surprising that it hasn’t had any success breaking through to the people who need their minds changed.
Elden Ring. Although that’s only because I didn’t want to start a whole new character for the DLC. Does Nier Automata count? All the extra playthroughs are kind of just part of the complete experience of the story. Then there’s harder difficulties of roguelikes like StS.
Beyond that, I tend to not end up being that interested in a NG+ unless there’s something substantially different about it like new story beats or I can play a cool build.