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Mofaz

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Mofaz

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@fisk0 said:
@bisonhero said:

@hatking said:

@bisonhero said:

@hatking said:

Excitedly, "it's the same!"

"Yep, it's fantastic."

Man, video games are fucked.

Remember the 70s-90s, when people made original games randomly sometimes? And it wasn't all just leaning on established genres and retreading nostalgia? Good times.

Yeah, and I hate being "get off my lawn" guy, but there's something kind of depressing about a couple of game critics(?) waxing on about how good a game is that just knowingly capitalizes on nostalgia and brings pretty much nothing of its own to the table.

This is also a complaint I generally level at Nintendo. I like their moxie and everything, but for every 1 Pikmin or Splatoon they come up with, they make about 25 games that are falling back on a good idea some dude had back in the 80s/early 90s. I digress.

So, I don't want all RTS games to be C&C clones from now on, but I got incredibly tired of the Blizzard model that got prevalent from around 1999 and onwards, and which seemingly also created an insurmountable fence around the genre, pretty much only making it an e-sports thing which few who weren't into super-competitive stuff could get into, which in the end also pretty much killed the genre for close to a decade.

All I want is that at least a few developers go back to when the genre was enjoyable to a large chunk of the (PC) audience and find a new direction to go from there, and I think Petroglyph could potentially do that.

The Blizzard model worked because it advanced the genre and created (for practically the first time) balanced gameplay in a genre that was noted for being heinously unbalanced for the majority of the time.

What you're suggesting is actually literally what killed the genre, stagnation, C&C clones, RTS games that had no real interesting deviation when it came to resource models or unit control, or base building or management.

In fact, the only real RTS games that deviated from the incredibly stagnant model of the 90's are titles like Company of Heroes which encouraged more fine micromanagement and focus on logistics and made resource control a significantly more central and interesting proposition.

Games like Grey Goo, 8 Bit Armies, Act of Aggression, the new Homeworld, all miss the point, we absolutely DO NOT need RTS games like they used to be, RTS games being too much like what they used to be is the biggest fucking issue, almost all of them are some incredibly shallow knock-offs of either Starcraft, Age of Empires, or C&C, those are the repeating models you CONSTANTLY see in new RTS games, with the rare ones emulating Total Annihilation.

And what does the genre have to show for it? Boring games that play exactly like games from twenty years ago with better production values and improved ease of use.

There's no innovation, we need wildly different RTS games that actually take the genre in new directions instead of constantly dwelling on the past.

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Mofaz

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Edited By Mofaz

@ferenz said:

Informative and well written review but I'm surprised at the score, as well as what seems like a general bias against giving AAA games 5 stars these days. The line I keep hearing consistently is that "we don't have any bias towards giving indie games higher scores because they were made by smaller development teams," but I'm not sure the statistics are bearing that out. Taking a look at the first page in "Reviews" currently I see the following five star reviews:

  • Stardew Valley
  • The Witness
  • Undertale
  • MGS V
  • Super Mario Maker
  • Axiom Verge

The top 10 list from 2015 also included Invisible Inc, Grow Home, and Kerbal Space program (as well as Undertale) while Bloodborne is absent as well as several other titles that everybody on the team gushed about for weeks at release. To me, it seems like it's becoming difficult to argue that there's not a growing bias towards favoring lower budget, smaller studio games.

Why is it so hard to understand that? Smaller, tighter titles designed with constraints in mind typically run better, have more polished mechanics, and simpler, but more refined gameplay without the deluge of problems that plague more complex engines and design.

Their very nature dictates that it's easier to make a good game when you're not shooting for something with top of the line production values with a massive team working crunchtime for years on end while trying to put together a product that's supposed to be competitive with every other AAA release.

The bigger a game gets, the bigger its technical issues, the bigger the scope of its ideas and the difficulty of executing them, the bigger creative dissonance becomes when trying to create a cohesive vision, and on and on.

It's not an "indie bias," it's just the fact that those games end up being less broken on release and realize their potential much more easily than something that takes a ludicrous amount of money and manpower.

Also those indie games also try something new and are unusual in some way, which is going to increase the impact they have on a player personally, it's more easy to feel profoundly affected by a more intimate game with stranger ideas than a AAA release that feels more clinically made.
That's just an important part of game criticism, you can critically assess a game mechanically and objectively, but part of it is also subjective, and if you come away from a game feeling like it spoke to you in some way, then you're going to have a better opinion of it.
Reviews of games aren't supposed to be dry assessments of game in some sort of robotic, apathetic sense, what you take away from a game is incredibly important, and it has to be, if games want to be considered the same way books, film, and music are, it's important that you assess them similarly.

Axiom Verge is a powerful ode to nostalgia that is just near perfectly made, The Witness is evocative of mystery and ambiance in a way that games haven't done in a long time, both those games also have very simple systems that have a reasonable amount of depth to them that just work.

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Mofaz

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It's fun and feels fluid and responsive in a way that Smite can only dream of (that's not saying much though, Smite is one of the worst fucking games I've had the displeasure of playing in my life) and the production values and visual feedback is fantastic, but there's absolutely no reason the games need to be as long as they are.

The minions are way too beefy, take forever to kill, and move at a glacial pace, it's ludicrously hard to push down lanes with the downtime after killing a bunch of members on the enemy team.

I stopped playing after about two weeks because of that, the games are artificially long, games that should be 30 minutes can easily extend to 50 just because of the way the game is paced in ways that have nothing to do with your team's performance or the capabilities of the heroes.

They need to speed it up, if you're going to have a MOBA try to play like an action game, it needs to have the pace of an action game, Smite already felt like nothing but a brutal slog because of this, and the only thing saving Paragon so far is that it's actually enjoyable to play moment-to-moment.

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Mofaz

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Centering the console around the pad was a terrible idea, zero third party support as per usual and literally no reason to get the Wii U beyond a smattering of exclusives.

Nintendo needs to get its shit together. The Wii U was an even worse investment than the XBOX One.

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Mofaz

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Is there an automated way to pick your crops? Because if you have to manually pluck everything like Harvest Moon then there is no way a game that forces you to do something so fucking tedious over and over deserves 5 stars.

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Edited By Mofaz

The more procedural generation the game has, the more nondescript it becomes, it's very obvious that something is just a dull collection of parts spat out by a machine when your entire game hinges on procedural generation as the point of the gameplay instead of a compliment to it.

For example, the goals in Minecraft are similar each time you start the game, same with Terraria, or with 4X games, it provides you a unique surface to use the game mechanics.

In No Man's Sky, it's exceedingly obvious that the procedural generation is the ENTIRE point of the game, the surface elements that should exist to compliment goal based gameplay is the actual gameplay.

It's going to be interesting for all of a few hours before you're realize it's pointless and recognize the repeating formula of heightmaps and randomized creatures, the more you see certain parts recycled (which you will) the more the illusion will fall apart and you're realize that for having a billion worlds, not any of them are truly unique or as interesting as something handcrafted.

In fact, it's funny you guys talk about Factorio because that game brilliantly uses procedural map generation, each layout forces you to figure out how to set up your production, your transportation lines, your defenses, the randomized maps are incredibly important to the gameplay of the game.

Factorio is one of the most brilliant games I have played in over a decade, a true puzzle game that requires forethought and experimentation, like SpaceChem, it's almost a visual programming game, and I really think it's a true example of innovative, revolutionary gameplay over something like No Man's Sky which is just going to be a small, interesting amusement.

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Mofaz

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I can guarantee you this game is going to be incredibly shallow with no real goals to it and essentially just a pretty time waster with little reason to play it.

Oh, and the very thing that makes it interesting (procedural generation) is going to be what makes it dull, it doesn't take very long for the brain to realize that everything is just a bunch of randomized heightmaps with certain randomized features, and a smorgashboard of Jabberwocky creatures amalgamated from a table of parts.
That means while everything will essentially be unique, none of it will actually be interesting as it's obviously just a smattering of randomness.

This game is obviously trying to hinge on its ambition and it will likely work, sell a bunch of copies, but I'm fairly certain it's a hollow premise that just has echoes of Lionhead Studios poking about.

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It has almost the longest intro-tutorial segment of any Zelda game, the wolf parts suck ass and throw off the pacing of the game, the dungeons are mostly forgettable and the story tries much too hard to be as evocative or as powerful as Majora's Mask was.

It was just obvious start from finish that they wanted to capitalize on the "dark" Zelda everyone clamored for after Wind Waker and it was just a miserably uninteresting game, especially after such a brilliant game as Wind Waker.

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It's good, but you're missing the pricepoint, it is absolutely not worth 25$ dollars.

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Edited By Mofaz

The potential for VR was strong and promising back when Oculus still touted that their tech would be affordable.

Except it isn't, and neither are any of the alternatives.
It's not going to catch on until these things are less than 400$, I can guarantee you that, it's just unfeasible and too expensive for anyone other than committed PC gamers with a larger income, because of that less and less games will use it as there's just not going to be a signifigant enough portion of the market able to take advantage of it.

It's going to die a quick and pointless death, just like 3D TVs did with their absurd pricepoints.

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