Shivoa

How can we be even 10% as cool as you?

(but for real question:) VR is here. VR is wild. Is there anything that's shocked you about VR/developing for VR that you really didn't see coming before you started working on this? Something outside of the bullet points Oculus etc have put into their official documentation about development maybe that caused a light-bulb to go off when you realised it?

@theht: Sorry, I think I slightly misread your post the first time through and got the wrong end of the stick (and so went off on a tangent).

Ye, I totally agree with you. Making a game that's got a core loot loop but is also about other things (hybrid) and uses those mechanics as leverage in the narrative (including as commentary) sounds really good. Games can definitely be about more than just a core mechanic without stopping being a game with that core mechanic (or doing harm to that mechanic). Hell, you can play a Bioware game (or an Obsidian game, Pillars of Eternity patched in Storey Difficulty recently) as a mechanical test of your RPG skills or as a narrative experience about dialogue choices. The ability to pick a focus or do both doesn't weaken the game (it just offers more options and different ways to engage with the mix of systems). Or I can think back the the first reboot of Tomb Raider and the difficulty sliders separately for combat and exploration. Pick your mechanical complexity, your focus. Games are very capable of being many things to many people without detracting from the whole.

I'd love to see a game like the Division that really pushed the story component much further (in fact that's one of the things I hope for in a sequel - use this as an Assassin's Creed 1 to 2 path to remove some of the copy-paste design, develop out the narrative, and iterate on the mechanics already there to find new complexity and smooth over some rough edges to other bits that aren't quite polished just yet - something the year of DLC will hopefully also be working on).

@theht: I am reminded of Cow Clicker. (Does GB not have a wiki page for that? I couldn't find it - how does that not already exist?)

I think that a AAA deconstruction of a genre is going to be exceedingly rare due to the relatively small gaming audience size (Hollywood deconstructions of Hollywood movies can play to a wider audience who are familiar with what is being satirised - billions have seen Hollywood movies) and lack of a well-understood genre of comedy/satire to draw from outside of the thing being satirised (to situate it beyond the "this just replicates the issue with the genre and that makes it a bad thing to engage with rather than being a deconstruction of that badness" problems that games can fall into when attempting to satirise genre conventions*). When you're going big (AAA) then you do have to worry about failing to find an audience and certain aspects of games are simply very expensive (so you can't make a AAA-like without spending AAA money). Not to say it's not something every indie game has a go at but I don't think there's the same market for it in AAA as you get in the equivalent forms in some other media.

* When making a game commenting on the issues of loot-driven games that might uncharitably be compared to Skinner boxes then building a Skinner box and putting a wink on it seems like a particularly weak play. The GB crew have commented on this before as a failure of games trying to comment on genre conventions by replicating them - it's just bad game design at some point.

@hestilllives19: See, I got to DZ lvl 30 before main lvl 30. There is a wealth of DZ content for players to enjoy (from purple rewards to really give you a boost or fill a rng drop hole in your gear all the way to how the bracketing of the different zones mean the southern area is a decent place for solo players as they level to really test their skills and prep for group combat against elites, especially at the *4/*9 main level boundaries - a pit-stop from the main levelling progression in the solo/co-op game to increase your DZ lvl and get some good extracted loot that'll help push your gear/competence). It's not all about the destination but the journey and I had no interest in rushing to find an end-game with no content by shortening the levelling curve of the main game. I comfortably got to 40-50 hours in before the end-game started and then have been enjoying my time pottering about and getting to that ilvl31 yellow loot in my own time. It's not as if there's something to do after that.

Because of this, I never understood the complaints of people who rushed through the world (this NY is big and there's a lot to do, even if quite a lot of the side stuff is very copy/paste). I was always geared pretty well (partially because of DZ stops on the way up the level curve) and so I never felt like normal enemies were too spongey. "How is this not a shooter?" I wondered as I always had a DMR to hand that would 1-shot any normal mob if I got them in the head (and playing stuff solo there is a lot of normal mobs). Some specials and elites took patience and lots of ammo but I took that as part of the RPG (I've brought down meteors on enemies in fantasy RPGs for them to barely be scratched). But enemies of my level who weren't the elite packs in the DZ? They definitely seemed like shooter enemies not bullet sponges. Like, definitely easier to down than the general enemies in an Uncharted game. Possibly because I was taking my time and so was always somewhat over-geared.

As noted by @thatdudeguy, this is an MMO solo progression through and through (I'm weird, I read the quest text in WoW - I like a stupidly large world and fiction to enjoy; even if half the text is basic instructions for a generic quest and only half is flavour; I'll enjoy the flavour in the games that do a good job adding that). You get directed to a hub, you collect a load of local quests, once you've don't the quests you return to the hub and get given a quest to go to the next hub (here it was to go to the locker in the next hub, which was pretty weird and I assume a pretty late addition to the design as it was very light on flavour text). As each borough has its own flavour from the terrible side-quest radio chatter and its own visual style, I found going through linearly quite the progression. And every time you're about ready for a break then there was a new main mission with unique assets, lots of VO, and an xp reward that basically got you most of the way to the next level. You can do them all co-op but I knew I was going to come back for hard mode and even challenging mode for the few that had it in the end-game (they even flag it with an achievement for doing every mission at lvl30 on Hard) so I decided that unless I had friends wanting to join up I'd solo them. First time through then they're pretty great as solo. It gives you the layout so when you're back doing it with randos or a group of friends you can rush through and not worry about missing out on any story-telling or details of the spaces they took time to carefully craft.

Soloing MMOs isn't for everyone but if WoW taught the world anything, it's that offering that in an MMO is core to moving out of a niche audience (by both attracting players who do like that as the primary activity, at least before being tempted by group content, and giving a solo diversion to players who are there for grouping but need something to do in gaps when groups aren't available).

4K is higher settings. Even with a 1080p TV/monitor. Due to a lack of decent anti-aliasing, pushing the internally rendered resolution as high as is reasonable provides a significant improvement in visual quality (especially temporally where aliasing issues will cause strobing and flickering artefacts due to the nature* of real-time rendering). Trying to recover fine (and edge) detail via post-processing (looking for shapes that are associated with aliasing and smoothing them) is fraught at best in most games (FXAA/MLAA/SMAA) even if we're starting to see more complex approaches with temporal sampling (see the Division for recovering significantly more than a simple 1080p resolve from this process but also see Project Cars and the ghosting issue it shipped with for how this is also really hard to do well).

4K downsampled to 1080p (via DSR or similar branded names for that process) isn't quite as detailed as 4K native (for really making the most of those really high res textures) but it's sure a lot better than 1080p native without anti-aliasing in terms of visual quality of the final scene. Higher res, beyond that of your output screen, is a higher quality setting in itself as it tries to emulate the spacial integration of a sensor cell via multiple samples.

* When you point a video camera at something, the sensor element is exposed to 1/48th of a second of light (for a 24Hz cinematic presentation using a standard 180 degree shutter - even if emulated by a permanently open digital sensor) integrating over both axes of the cell (ie the total area that it maps out to in the scene it captures is where that light comes from and is summed by the sensor). When you engage in modern real-time rendering then you're taking a single instant in time and looking at the colour of the centre of the pixel and what is behind that (MSAA looks at several samples in the pixel but most modern games don't use MSAA as it's hard to do with deferred rendering).

I think First Light is impressive for making Neon powers feels fresh again with a few tweaks (I played the games in order and quick succession). Being a smaller scope game definitely helped FL feel tight (although Second Son isn't exactly massive to start with and that copy-paste open world design certainly feels refreshing for being 8-15 hours long [in SS, with FL being about half that] rather than 30+ hours in the Ubisoft template).

I didn't think Second Son treated Fetch that well in the main story so was glad that the campaign for her was better. Both games feel somewhat mixed to me, sometimes gleeful in the comic book inspiration but at other times feeling trapped in that immature source template (something the earlier games also had issues with) - if you know what you're getting then I found it reasonable easy to ignore it and generally embrace it but one day Sucker Punch might be able to step beyond that (surely we see their next game at this E3).

I think several people just saw it as another sequel to the inFamous games and so basically dismissed it as a nice looking but pointless addition to boost the early PS4 catalogue. I've always had a soft spot for the series (and how they deal with traversal and slowly handing out a shooter's weapons as unlocks) and thought this was actually a radical departure from the earlier games. Traversal is not only completely different to the PS3 games, but also having Second Son be about switching them up was pretty bold (as each set needs to be tweaked to feel good and worked with compatible structures in the game world to facilitate them). The element defining your weapon/ability set (on top of good/evil choices) instantly changes Second Son to be very different to the PS3 titles when engaging in the shooter aspect.

You want an SSD. A reasonable consumer model (nothing fancy and blinding fast over PCI-Express, just a standard budget-friendly model) start at $120 for 480GB, $60 for 240GB, or go all the way because games are now 50GB downloads and really push it out with $200 for 960GB (this is overkill IMO but it's your money and right now my rig has 750GB of SSD space so who knows). I like Samsung 850 EVO drives as an ok balance of performance and cost but those are quite a bit more expensive to pay for that mainstream performance over a more budget friendly drive priced above.

Also, don't just buy a random drive, lots of them are ok but there are still duds (especially some older budget drives that have been on the market for a while or the new ultra-budget tier which are slower than the last generation of drives) out there which are only about an order of magnitude better than a platter drive rather and you can do better without spending much more. Also the larger drives generally have better performance (more memory chips means more parallelism which is one of the reasons SSDs are really fast) but this mainly applies to not buying 120GB drives - 480GB drives are better than 240GB ones but not as much as 240GB ones are a different class to the tiny 120GB SSDs - but for gaming and the OS you need to be thinking 240GB minimum anyway.

I'd hold off on a GPU upgrade as the next cards are coming within months (we may hear more in days but that's not for certain going to give us the full picture about the range of cards coming this Summer) and for the first time in years, these ones are on a new die process (this basically means the thermal limitations that have been fixed for 5 years are being pushed back). AMD have the Polaris designs, nVidia have the Pascal designs. They both sound like the fastest cards could be almost double the performance of the current high end and so the entire product stack will move up accordingly. It probably means buying the same performance will be significantly cheaper in 2 months than today, it certainly means less noise/heat for the same performance. Considering $500 minus an SSD, you could be buying a seriously fast model (there could be a $400 card that's faster than the fastest GPU out today and also using HBM2 RAM which means it'll have more bandwidth than anything you can buy today as well as a better GPU - not sure anyone is sure how premium HBM2 will be but it's coming at some point this year to graphics cards).

@thatdudeguy: With WoW the guilds did (at least in the olden days, not played for a few expansions and I think in-game voice chat for guilds that people actually occasionally used was possibly just getting added around when I left the game) provide a critical text-chat channel [I play the Division on PC so console equivalent would probably be voice channels]. Most of the time that I was playing WoW that was the main chat I was logged into (the Division have public chat channels for social areas, even if they're barely used - they seem just as worthless as Barrens chat) as I played. I also was part of guilds quite often where logging into Vent/TS/Mumble server was the standard way to start an evening and just chat with friends (so replicating the friendslist/party chat stuff on consoles but with a looser list than just friends). So even solo activities weren't really solo, they were the stuff you were doing while chatting about your day etc.

The thing I find central to in-game guilds (or even games with static servers so you log in to play with a specific group) is they generate a community like your local pub. It's larger than a friends list, it's a friends and friends of friends list (effectively). Most everyone is either someone you know or knowns someone you know (and so has chosen to group up), baring a few randos who (the supposition is) wish to get to know people. Being larger then a friends list, it means you can log in basically whenever and there's likely be someone else there to chat to. But it's small enough to be a community.

Right now I use the uPlay friends list to track people playing (via stuff like the forum thread here to find people to add as friends) but it's not the same without a social channel that's default-on where a cohesive group is chatting. Yes, it's easier to group up with people on my friends list but if people were just chatting away then it would be far more likely (in my experience) for someone to casually mention maybe doing a Heroic (ie Challenging mission, soon to be Incursion) and a group to organically form from people saying they'd be up for doing that. I really feel the lack of such a social channel (even if text-only) when doing solo stuff in the Division but not actively seeking out an isolated experience (which I'd get by logging out of chat if I wanted to - because sometimes it's good to be isolated in this game to fit the theme).

@corvak: I mean, don't count out the large publishers.

EA pushed out Mirror's Edge: a game that's still a form of power fantasy (lots of disabling foes and living in a world built around your story) and even included some shooting (certainly not the actual part of that game that was the best) but far from making you the Punisher, here to mow down thousands of foes without so much as a scratch. That was far more about traversal than combat (far more than, say, Assassin's Creed did for enhancing traversal and downplaying combat - at least initially when the combat mechanics were less well developed than the sequels).

Far Cry 2 plays with this somewhat, again keeping it a power fantasy but tainting it with the elements of that game that lots of people bounced off of. Again, AAA and this time a Ubisoft funded project.

I'd also go back to the original Thief games. That's very much the story of a disempowered, lowly minion of a man who is a pawn of those around him. Yes, you're generally taking on foes but hardly with the upper-hand (ok, primitive AI of the time) and there was a push for pure stealth as the true way to play.

As you say, Bioware have more RPG in their games but they're still very much about a power fantasy. I'd say these titles (off the top of my head, I'm betting I've missed a few more really obvious candidates) are far closer to looking at some middle-ground between the super-powered hero who has one tool and that tool is genocide to save the universe and the branching path story-only game with some QTEs of Telltale (or even the slightly more action-oriented stories of Quantic Dream: offering a somewhat different type of power fantasy than just man-shoots or man-spells).

Art imitates life.

The French seem pretty good at selling that glistening message about the US military, the only global super-power. Able to go anywhere in the world and break any law because who is going to stop them from being the violent kid breaking crap in a blind rage.

Considering the extent of US cultural imperialism (and the script input the US military get in exchange for allowing shooting of their hardware for use in film and TV), it's not surprising that it's commercially advisable to replicate the dominant narrative about US exceptionalism and military might being justified. Most people who are aware of politics know that's all a fabrication, but "our troops" (if you're not a USian, that's a foreign army which comes not far off spending as much as every other nation on the planet combined) are the ones revered in popular culture.

At least some of this stuff can be read as the feverish enthusiasm of the blindly positive protagonist (possibly as an unreliable narrator but alternatively as just the actual facts of being totally wrapped up in the shield of patriotism and the belief that this is unquestionably the right course of action - I don't think most adults playing games need the heavy-handedness of something like Haze to grasp potential subversive messages inside such an arc); a protagonist who knows they're on the right side of every fight (despite being the one who clearly fails to consider rules of engagement or so on - see the Division chatter* for this being plainly clear to anyone playing the game, even if some seem to suggest they want a big on-screen prompt "you are possibly also the bad guys" before they will read the game/text as self-aware of this; really this is an area verging on Poe's law).

* [spoilers for the Division, although the other threads make it clear few care about the plot so...] They made the big bad in that game the exact same troops (US military, Division Agents, first wave) as you play as, only the first batch got there much earlier than you and so had time to watch it all go to Hell and become a brutal regime (with lots of vignettes showing that descent for people engaging with the [environmental] storytelling offered) rather than liberators. Combine with the way the game constantly throws messages questioning the military force's right to be there and nature of some of the enemy forces (except for messages directly at the protagonist: the protag always gets told they're doing the right thing and are saving America - but the scenes (echo etc) you stumble onto, the radio broadcasts, the game putting looters in places where you're going to loot shops so it's impossible to not kill people for doing an action you're about to engage in... I think it's just as likely to be read as about how US might is ultimately destructive rather than the ludonarrative dissonance that approximately 100% of articles about it seem to be saying about the violence (only that terminology is out of fashion so I don't think many are using it in 2016).