@redhotchilimist: In the case of AC for me it was more just laying the groundwork of roleplaying in a videogame by letting the world actually be alive instead of just a series of obstacles between me and my goal more than it was actually roleplaying. It's clear just looking at the AC series that they put an inordinate amount of work into tiny details that are totally inconsequential to the actual gameplay, stuff like people sweeping the streets, having little conversations, junk falling off into the canals and floating away. In games like The Elder Scrolls series those small details are the framework that they build their entire quest systems on, the schedules people keep and the shenanigans they get into, and that attention to detail is there in AC as well, and it's the first place I noticed and appreciated the life it brings to a game world. I see all over the place the criticism that "Skyrim is wide as an ocean but shallow as a pond" and I think this comes from people playing it the same way Assassin's Creed seems to want you to play it. In Skyrim's case I think it's the fault of the player, but in Assassin's Creed it really seems like the game is trying to get you to ignore what a lush world it's set in.
Thanks for elaborating! I don't necessarily think people were talking about the world and environment when they were saying Skyrim was shallow. I belong to the tons of people who started playing Elder Scrolls when Skyrim came out, so I guess I wouldn't know, but the article series I'm reading about the franchise talks much more about how the stats, quest, class and dialogue systems have changed, mostly simplified. I never noticed those nice little details in AC(I kinda want to go back to Venice now, look for stuff floating in the canals and follow it), but I certainly wandered around immersed and involved in Skyrim for a hundred hours, which hasn't happened to me with any other open world game. Rather than laying the groundwork for roleplaying, I think getting lost in a world for a while is a seperate thing from roleplaying that Skyrim is really great at.
@themaintank: Could you write a little about roleplaying in AC2? I went into that game thinking I would sneak around all over the place, murdering nobody except my target. But in reality, I ended up killing hundreds of guards and every assassination was a big public mess, because that's the game. What does roleplaying as Ezio actually entail? Gathering all of the family-related collectibles because he would care?
I also got the most enjoyment out of Asura's Wrath by bringing to my college campus and playing it with a FULL CROWD watching the entire spectacle. Applause and everything!
I love imagining this. Audience Reacts To Asura's Wrath.
@tennmuerti That's a great Batman story! It's cool when increasing the difficulty makes you more involved in the proceedings. I started playing games on Hard more this last year, but a lot of the time it just results in more HP and attack power for the enemies. Games where they remove crutches or enemies gain new attack patterns are much more entertaining.
I have shifted my goals, or focus, when the game was better at something different than I expected. I can think of two examples.
1) Romance in Dragon Age Origins. I don't really roleplay, I'm always just me, although the player character doesn't have to look a thing like me. I like women. So when I played a female dwarf in Origins, I figured I'd go for the lesbian option, who's Leliana. But I couldn't stand Leliana, she was annoying and dull. On the other hand, I found myself torn between insecure sarcastic gentleman prince Alistair/pathetic rogue assassin badboy Zevran, who were both interesting and funny characters.
2) Skullgirls changing what kind of character I play in fighting games. They put out a demo with two characters a while before the game was out, so me and my flatmate played one of them each. The one I chose was a grappler character, Cerebella. And while I always like those in concept because they are huge, she's the first grappler character that I actually had fun playing. She had armored attacks that would move her quickly across the screen. The simpler than usual directional inputs and the way Skullgirls register the controller motions meant I could pull off all of her command grabs reliably. I don't just like playing her, I gained an appreciation for characters I was bad at playing before, like Zangief and R. Mika. And that would not have happened if I wasn't stuck playing her for weeks or if they had made playing her as difficult as I used to find grapplers.
It was a nice idea to have user questions in this column. Even though I have nothing to say about Consulting Detective, Her Story or Hate Story on account of not having played any of them, I can leave a comment reflecting on my own experiences.
"Help" is not a cool word in Norwegian. It's "hjelp", pronounced like "yelp". Norwegian translators were probably just bad. Or not paid a lot. I don't know about a lot of hilariously translated recent titles, so maybe they just stopped translating them.
No thanks! Still don't want innovation in controller inputs. I feel pretty good about what we have got. If the portable part of the NX is a touchscreen controller, then whatever. There were a few games on the DS that are played almost entirely with a touch screen, but I don't feel like Phantom Hourglass would have been much worse even if you couldn't directly draw the path of the boomerang or the rails for your own boat.
A Good Gardener reminds me of MGSV. I wonder if anyone bothered to not kidnap soldiers or build a bigger platform to slow the growth of their global spanning PMC out of bad conscience. It's one of the game's successes that they made the player want to do so because it's fun and gives you more abilites and options. The kind of indie games that seem to not want you to play them is fine by me, because I don't want to play them either. But I think it's nice when a game makes you want to do something that's ultimately a bad idea because it would be engaging to do so. It doesn't feel like preaching anymore, because I'm having a good time.
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My first thought about the question is that "gameplay loop" is mostly used by Brad to describe the sort of loot games that make me sleepy just to think about. My second is that Henry Hatsworth had the most unique one I could think of! Not a ton of games where you do hard platforming one second and puzzle games the next, and they influence each other in more ways than opening a door to the next room.
I want to try a VR headset. Listening to them talking about it is frustrating when I haven't, because the descriptions of the games are so... I don't know, there's no way to connect to it without having tried it. It's just listening to people being really excited about rail shooters and first person walking games, and not anything tangible in the games themselves, but the physical experience of playing them. At this moment, I'm not interested in VR because the games don't sound like anything I'm into. There's no way to know if I'd be as excited as them if I tried it or not without actually putting on a headset at some convention.
This is kinda cool, but more than anything, I feel like I'm really not ready to live in a world where "Ressentiment" is a documentary. Jeff is looking great!
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