I'm a Switch, I'm a Lover, Talk About It With Each Other

Dusty Knackers wrote:

Rum wrote:

Have any of you lot sent joycons in to Nintendo to repair? Do they still do it for free?

Got my day one Joycons repaired last year, they charged me £35.

That's rank. I'm sure I read something about a class action lawsuit going against Nintendo somewhere in the world for the Joycon debacle.

I think various ones might still be going!

Joy-cons? More like Sorrow-con.
Putting the con in Joy-con.
Joy-controversies abound.
HD Rumble? More like R&D fumbled?
Joy-con grip? I'd rather grip an angry baboon's todger.

I sent my joy-cons in to Nintendo a couple of days ago, and I think I should hear back from them about whether they'll fix it for free or whether they want to charge me for it being due to "improper use". If it's the latter I'm not sure what I'll do, considering it would be absolutely fucking bullshit.

In other news I bought a Hori split pad pro and it's good! It's not as satisfyingly weighty as joy cons are, and it's comically unattractive to use, but its size makes handheld play more comfortable. And they don't drift! Yet.

Buskalilly wrote:

Joy-cons? More like Sorrow-con.
Putting the con in Joy-con.
Joy-controversies abound.
HD Rumble? More like R&D fumbled?
Joy-con grip? I'd rather grip an angry baboon's todger.

Thank you.

Quick unrelated question: what have been people's favourite worlds to explore on Switch so far?  I ask because when looking over my list of top games on Switch, I realised that while it's probably as good as/better than any machine I've owned in games quality, I'm missing some exploration on it.  I haven't had a really satisfying world to get my teeth into since... well, certainly nothing released last year.  Maybe Untitled Goose Game's village, but that's a bit smaller than what I'm thinking of.

Surely BotW and that's even coming from me, as it was a nice place to wonder about and even now playing a bit of Immortals Fenyx Rising which basically copies BotW in terms of look is nice to be in.

Why the sequel I'll happily be in that world, just everything else is meh.

Can't think of much else as even my favourite Switch games such as Fire Emblem Three Houses, you're just in the school pretty much or a GRIS it's a nice world but no one you really explore.

I was thinking of both those two. BotW was three+ years ago (as was the other stand-out I thought of, Xenoblade 2); and if it wasn't for the whole Ubi 'thing' I'd very much be up for playing Immortals just for a weaker hit of the same sort of drug.

BotW is the obvious choice, but what also came to mind - and I know it's not technically a Switch game but it's where I played it and all - was Xenoblade Chronicles. Pottering about the Bionis was a real treat and I thoroughly enjoyed my time in that world.

I would also say Breath of the Wild as a big-o-world is the best one. I am desperate to clear my giant backlog so I can explore it again.

Dragon Quest Builders' worlds were quite interesting but that's once you accept that it's a grid of specifically hidden easter eggs (as in the traditional easter egg hunt, not the Easter Egg as in secret game thing). Likewise, I have no idea how much I've seen of Dragon's Dogma's world; it looks like it should be an exciting world, but there's a lot of valleys to get channelled down - it's not really open.

JayMoyles wrote:

BotW is the obvious choice, but what also came to mind - and I know it's not technically a Switch game but it's where I played it and all - was Xenoblade Chronicles. Pottering about the Bionis was a real treat and I thoroughly enjoyed my time in that world.

Good picks!  You'll note that I mentioned XC2 above, which is more of the same.  The Xenoblade games have all had quality worlds.

Jimbob wrote:

I would also say Breath of the Wild as a big-o-world is the best one. I am desperate to clear my giant backlog so I can explore it again.

The year was 2041...

Jimbob wrote:

Likewise, I have no idea how much I've seen of Dragon's Dogma's world; it looks like it should be an exciting world, but there's a lot of valleys to get channelled down - it's not really open.

Dragon's Dogma! There's one I've been meaning to play!  Now you've gone and mentioned it and I've put it onto my wishlist.  Cracking suggestion.  (Also the way you describe its world makes me think of Twilight Princess, which is always going to work for me.) Do you know if the retail copy's a proper cart or a download-code-in-a-box?

Dragon's Dogma is brilliant, get on it.

I'm pretty sure there wasn't a UK physical release, only US/JPN

Balla should get on it as I'd be super curious to read his thoughts as it doesn't seem like a Balla game

Yeah, you'd have to get an import or digital.

Rats. Ah well, it's on my online wishlist: it'll need a couple of games to fall by the wayside before it comes into play, but that doesn't seem too unlikely at the moment. Hopefully it delivers on that world I'm searching for.

Hades had a great world to explore full of charatcers and myths and that.

I liked Galar shut up Balla, we ain't talking about it.

Cloudpunk and Paradise Killer are two more Indies with amazing worlds to just be in.

And then, yeah, Lordran, Hyrule, Rapture, Skyrim and Gransys can all be visited on Switch.

There's a lot of worlds on that diddy little machine!

My go to world to revisit on Switch is actually Go Vacation and I'm not even joking

I can see that!

Buskalilly wrote:

Hades had a great world to explore full of charatcers and myths and that.

I liked Galar shut up Balla, we ain't talking about it.

I thought someone might bring up Galar. I was actually considering aspects of it myself. Ultimately it's the Wild Area that's most 'world-like' for me, and... well we know my views on that.

As for Hades, I personally wasn't thinking about the culture, the world-building as it were: I'm sure that's grand, given that it has thousands of years of history and tradition to draw from! I'm talking about the world itself, the geography, the places to explore. Part of that, at least for me, is getting to know the layout of at least aspects of a place, what's safe and what's dangerous, what's known and what's unknown and scary. As such roguelikes don't qualify almost by default.

Balla wrote:

As such roguelikes don't qualify almost by default.

Going to have to disagree on that because there's certain ones (not all) where adventure and exploration are key elements, recent stuff like Spelunky, Noita & Sunless Sea spring to mind - plus if we are talking the proper definition and not the hundreds of offshoots we now have then it's only further backed up by the fact these games were influenced by dungeon crawlers and table top role-playing games like D&D.
Sure, you won't get to truly know the layout as if it were a real place but you can still recognise certain patterns (what's safe or dangerous) that aid you in your exploration which can arguably make it more real than anything that's purposely designed.

Now, I'm not trying to spark this genre debate again because it really is boring but you can still have exploration in a game that is randomly generated, I mean just look at Minecraft.

I think what Balla is looking for is a place to persist within and get to know, so yeah you can explore in roguelites and you can learn them and their patterns but that's not really the same.

With Go Vacation it's ostensibly a mini-game collection but it has four "resorts" that are free roam hubs from which the mini-games can be accessed. The snow resort you can ski or snowboard around, the mountain resort you can drive or ride a horse, and they all have secrets to find like hidden areas or taking photos of all the different animals that appear in different places. I just find that a very reassuring and familiar place to return to and to have explored, and while I doubt most people would get the same out of it I think that's the kind of "world to explore" Balla means?

I don't even think every open world game feels like that. Weirdly I think it might be games that have an open world but aren't really "open world" that make more of a lasting impression on me?

I totally get what Balla's after I was just pointing out that he's way off on roguelikes not qualifying as a game you can explore in.

Depending on how quickly a death comes and a run resets, roguelike procedurally generated games are in many respects the only way to get that experience again and again. Something like Super Mario Sunshine or Breath of the Wild has a world that's fun to explore once, but I know those locations now and they're boring. For a sense of adventure, Hades is the only world that deserves to be on this list at all. There are safe spaces which never change, and begin to feel like a home, but in the dangerous spots where the exploration and excitement happen, I'm forever being surprised. Nintendo achieved a lot with BotW, but there's only so far you can go with human design. Just as Kasparov was eventually superseded by the computers, so Nintendo's world crafting has been made redundant by Supergiant's algorithmic genius.

Ignoring the obvious troll: Minecraft definitely counts. As for roguelikes, I guess I'm guilty for trying to impose what I mean by 'world' on everyone else. The things I'm thinking of that make a good world are:
- Going from the known into the unknown and the palpable change;
- Familiarising myself with the familiar so that the unfamiliar is more exciting;
- The thrill of exploration;
- Good things to discover (new items, great views etc.)
and I suppose only the second one can't be done by a roguelike. (I didn't say that roguelikes can't do exploration!) For me it's still key that I can learn the geography of substantial parts, that it stays stationary while the parts of it you know change; but that's very much a 'me' thing.

In fact I'm slightly surprised that nobody's brought up Dark Souls (read: that Jas hasn't ), apart from a passing mention from Buska, as it surely epitomises all of the above.

As someone that has played all the Souls games but never got far, the worlds of them have always been something that has appealed to me, I just didn't think of it in regard to Switch.

Guess also got things like Okami and other ports like the Final Fantasy games.

Okami has an excellent world. That's a good argument for picking up my replay again, and just racing through Shinshu Field. Whaddagame.

The procgen in Hades has nothing to do with exploration, it just mixes up the rooms! Everything in the game world to explore is painstakingly hand-crafted and most of it is character driven through writing.

Procgen creating worlds to explore is much more Minecraft or No Man's Sky

Balladeer wrote:

Ignoring the obvious troll: Minecraft definitely counts.  As for roguelikes, I guess I'm guilty for trying to impose what I mean by 'world' on everyone else. The things I'm thinking of that make a good world are:
- Going from the known into the unknown and the palpable change;
- Familiarising myself with the familiar so that the unfamiliar is more exciting;
- The thrill of exploration;
- Good things to discover (new items, great views etc.)
and I suppose only the second one can't be done by a roguelike.  (I didn't say that roguelikes can't do exploration!) For me it's still key that I can learn the geography of substantial parts, that it stays stationary while the parts of it you know change; but that's very much a 'me' thing.

In fact I'm slightly surprised that nobody's brought up Dark Souls (read: that Jas hasn't ), apart from a passing mention from Buska, as it surely epitomises all of the above.

Ahh it definitely seemed like you were saying that they couldn't do exploration so cheers for clearing that up. I was actually going to bring up Dark souls and more specifically metroidvanias as world's like that in games are actually my preference but as much as I love those it's hard to beat the true sense of adventure that rogue like can give you.