Random Gaming Thoughts II ~News Items Beware~

I'm awful at buying games that my backlog even on PS4 & Switch is rather large, I don't really count my Dreamcast or Cube as even though they're a huge part of my gaming collection they're more for collecting that I look at the current gen systems as my backlog, not to say that their isn't games I want to play on retro systems.

I've listened to Kinda Funny as you know gJones and Colin when he was on it, sort of said a simliar thing but not himself having a ban as for his job he had to play the latest games.

He suggested no company released any games for 2 years in a episode as a topic and how it would give people to catch up on games, devs would have more time to develop their games and be more creative etc

Myself like to be part of the conversation take Monster Hunter World that could still be a good game to play in 2020 but people playing it and talking about it will be in 2018 when it comes out and I try to do YouTube and Gintendo stuff as well.

My suggestion is maybe a ban but still buy games if part of a series you enjoy, as you mention Uncharted 2 and I think you've got the collection on PS4 and if you enjoy that you might buy Uncharted 4 & Lost Legacy but you wouldn't buy a New IP or a game part of series you don' know if you like or not.

The other thing is a guy at work who hasn't got much money buys games only really sales and normally long games but I know for a while he was only playing stuff on PlayStation Plus, this might be a useful as you would still get new games with crackers like Until Dawn this month without buying anything new and it cost you the same for a year of Plus as a AAA game on day one.

masofdas wrote:

I've listened to Kinda Funny as you know gJones and Colin when he was on it, sort of said a simliar thing but not himself having a ban as for his job he had to play the latest games.

He suggested no company released any games for 2 years in a episode as a topic and how it would give people to catch up on games, devs would have more time to develop their games and be more creative etc  

I'm sure it's an off-hand idea, given it's obviously a hypothetical lets just sling some crap at the wall and 'see' if it sticks. But the notion that we'd see a load of creativity, rather than PUMP UP DEM GRAPHICS TO 11 BOIS, from a  2 year videogames hiatus is fucking laughable for someone who presumably gets paid to write about a creative industry. Creativity is often fostered by limitations: the strings of a guitar, how a camera focuses, the power of a console. But it is also a process constantly and inescapably informed by what others are doing. This is why we had a punk movement, a grunge movement, an MMOs everywhere movement etc. A 2 year ban is more likely to make games which aren't developed by tiny crews to be much more safe rather than experimental, because you aren't limiting their resources, you're expanding them [albeit some games take more than 2 years to develop]. Why the fuck would you work in the dark on crazy stuff for 2 years when the monetary risk of modern games is already stupid?

You wouldn't.

I'd wager we'd end up with a lot of open worlders - given that open world games are today's jazz, should the cut-off occur today - but they'd result in games that reside more in their - oh look, collectables everywhere, go over here because you've got 0/X thingys at the moment and oh boy don't we have so much content in our game - as opposed to residing in a game that encourages a player driven exploration in worlds that want you to have an adventure and discover the thingys naturally, and which doesn't constantly remind you how many thingys you have left [I'm looking at you Ass Cred   ]

Like you said it was hypothetical and you being up Assassins Creed that has a had a year off and will that series benefit from it, I think if the 2 years off was applied to series or studios that would make more sense as I look at Telltale and I do think what they could do if they took some time off and develop a new engine etc.

I've occasionally managed a month ban - and am currently looking at trying two months in a row - but never much longer. I crave the novelty a bit too much, I reckon. Good luck to you on a 24-month ban, Mr. Jones!

As for no new games in two years... how will companies earn enough to pay people if they've not got new products to sell?!

I'm not really sure Ass Cred has/will have benefited. It'll probably sell better but I watched about 10-15 minutes of it's long gameplay session post conference. What you have is the typical Ubi open worlder, where they absolutely nail the setting from a surface level. It looks fantastic.

But the moment you dive in, you're in this world where everyone important has a number over their head. It's not HP, it's a warning level - only go here if your number is high enough, if your number - level - isn't high enough, you'll do fuck all damage and die in 1-2 hits. It gamifies, in the ugliest, simplest, way possible, where you can should go. There's no varied enemy design, it's just. No he has the big number on his head so he will do a big hit. There are better ways to encourage players to go a certain route than, oh yeah this is the big number base.

For all the cool views birdo is going to give you, it won't change that this glorious setting is so, so shallow. The demo revelled in showing off just how vast the world was, but it also wanted to show 'difficulty' so they went for one of the big number bases and lost very quickly. In something like Dark Souls or Zelda BOTW, it's up to the player to go on adventures that'll eventually enable them to overcome such areas. In Assville, the game thinks you're dumb so it mandates that you piss off. But would there even have been any reward for clearing the hard area? I doubt it, because the treasure of Ass games is pointless. You'll eventually turn into a one-hit juggernaut so who cares if you get a new spear.

The moment you stop to smell the roses, Ass games eats themselves away, starved of any real substance - and nothing I saw in the presentation made that seem any different. Like in Syndicate, where you can watch some NPCs play cricket but after one ball they just get stuck (that's just not cricket). Sure, in GTA, the 'realism' of the world is constantly broken. Even if you try to drive properly, crazy stuff will happen. But it wears that with pride, it allows you, encourages you, to get jiggy with it, and while it blocks you from islands in dumb ways, at least those dumb means are in keeping with how dumb the games purposefully are at times. ASS doesn't want you to do that, it wants you to look and go - oh boy, this is cool and real - but when you look closely it's a charade. In a lot of games, you can overlook that. But ASS so heavily sells itself on looks that when it all falls apart all the obvious moohlah they've pumped into its looks start to feel a bit tacky.

The reason why bugs in some of the older Ass games were so hilarious (besides the game breaking ones), wasn't just because it's funny seeing an NPC in a cutscene - but that in ASS' case this highlighted just how seriously the game thought of itself, despite it obviously being this shallow thing. Its maps are constantly telling you, Oi, get over there, but no, don't go there because look at that big number! But hey, if you go here you can get a thing. OH MATE, YOu CAN ALSO CRAFT A THING. I know you already one shot almost everyone but you can get a cool sword now. Oh, I know you can one shot everyone here in this bit of the map but please do a stealth here because the plot says so. Yes I know it's an open world game with endless possibilities but please mate, the plot. Think of the plot mate. RIGHT. NO MATE, START AGAIN THIS IS A STEALTH BIT BECAUSE PLOT MATE YOU ****

As a tech demo it looked great, but I think the only changes they're really making are: A) The Setting, B) It won't launch with as many bugs

It's games like Shadows of Mordor, where they're going to town on a specific concept - the nemesis system - that are the sorts of games that are really making use of their timeout, and how despite how cool that system was how many big boy games have bothered to do anything that isn't vanilla?

Apart from Ghost Recon Wildlands I've not bought anything new on my ps4 this year but that is partly due to a backlog of 7 games & the fact I've just been way more interested in what the Switch has been bringing out.

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@ Muss That Assassins creed "leveling system" does sound awful, with Ghost Recon Wildlands, another open world Ubi game does something similar on the surface as every region in the world has a difficulty rating out of 5 BUT no matter the weapons or skills you have upgraded you could complete the hardest region & get some decent reward out of it. I noticed early on that the game was really just upping the difficulty not by making enemies stronger but either adding more of them in bases or making said base even more secure with alarms that could call for back up or locked gates etc. so these enemies still run on the same rule that level 1's do they can be 1 shot in the head/ 2 shot in the body you just have to be 100 percent sure that when you pull the trigger that no other enemy will see or hear it.

Real shame the mission structure becomes boring because of the open world setting because the main meat of the game is fun.

Muss wrote:

It's games like Shadows of Mordor, where they're going to town on a specific concept - the nemesis system - that are the sorts of games that are really making use of their timeout, and how despite how cool that system was how many big boy games have bothered to do anything that isn't vanilla?

It's interesting that you bring up Shadow of Mordor in relation to the Assassin's Creed series because I genuinely felt that Mordor was the best Creed game I'd played in years. It seemed to genuinely innovate in certain ways on the same formula Creed had relied on for years. I was so optimistic about Creed's hiatus and I was hoping to see some real change from the formula and how the game played compared to previous installments, but watching the gameplay demo I felt really deflated. It's just Creed again, but now in Egypt. There's a couple of new toys to play with, but that's the Creed formula. Kill men in London with a GRAPPLING HOOK! Kill men in Paris with YOUR FRIENDS! Kill men in the Caribbean with PIRA- well, that one gets a pass as it was pretty damn fine. But you get the gist. As Muss said, time away from a game doesn't guarantee creativity.

Yeah Black Flag's piracy stuff was good fun; biggest problem I had with it was the Assassin bollocks getting in the way. Hated it every time the Matrix-like outlines would appear on stuff - just constantly reminding you that this isn't really a pirate game. Happy to see Ubi are releasing some sort of pirate game though, it's such a weirdly untapped genre in computer games. I don't hate the Assassins Creed franchise, they're alright games but they sort of represent everything stale about big boy development.

@Jas That's a shame. I always prefer it when settlements/areas update based on your play style. So if you're a head shot extraordinaire the soldiers might be equipped with helmets now. That sort of thing. Or if the baddies gain some new kit to flush you out, rather than just more of the same but in a higher concentration. It's a tricky thing for the modern shooter types, but I always prefer it when an open world game has distinctive areas with distinctive enemies that require the player to try out different things. If programming the AI to react more smartly (can't imagine how hard that is) is out of the question, at least give the player different things to do.

Soon we'll have Spla2n... but before that, there was Splatoone.

Splat one squid, you splat the kid entire.

Bloody terrible patois theft, that.

I've... I've failed.

Best gaming character of the last twenty years:

Spoiler:

Spoiler:

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhh when Midway were a thing. *sighs*

Come to a halt of sorts with gaming. Again. I'm finding it hard to choose between Ever Oasis and DQVIII on the 3DS, and Blaster Master Zero is doing too good a job of reminding me that I don't particularly enjoy run'n'gun games. There are three choices.

a), power through;

2), get hold of a bright, breezy and cheap 2D platformer to reenergise myself; or

d), beat the fourteenth level of Tank Troopers and carry on with that.

Aww, what aren't you enjoying about BMZ?

And indeed Ever Oasis?

@Jay: I've just never clicked with run'n'guns (by which I mostly mean 'Mega Man', to be fair; X is a fun game, though). It feels like I lack the controls to do what I want to do, which is stay stationary and have the tank function as a turret for a bit, or I need to read the manual and find out how to do that. The top-down bits lack character at the moment, too.

@Balla: if Ever Oasis is going to get me to enjoy its village-building aspect, then I'd quite like some time to get to know each new villager for a while when they appear. As it is, you do their fetch quest (utterly failing to delegate effectively, too, for a Mayor), put their shop in place (sometimes not even that), and in the meantime another villager or two has/have appeared. Gameplay in the desert is much more fun at the minute but it is shaping up to be fairly formulaic in the future. I'm only motivated to play it in short bursts at the moment and I feel like I haven't clicked with it yet. Is all.

Ah. That's not something that goes away, I'm afraid, although you do get tools that help you delegate as you go through. (A 'supply in bulk' option, for example, and a 'go out and collect stuff for me' option.) The part of me that likes it is the same part that found building Norende in BDWtFF top fun. But you never really get to know the villagers. There aren't many real characters in the game full stop, now that I think about it. Although I have just met a cute bunny warrior.

I dunno, maybe these games just aren't for you, and a break would help?

This makes me very sad, Zero. I have very little imagination, and don't recognise enjoyment myself, so I don't think I've been in that situation in a long time.

Maybe a gaming break, but please only a little one - we need you!

Alternatively - another experimental cure:

@Balla: thanks for that. Now I know I'm waiting for something that isn't going to happen, I can get on with playing the game. Exploring the desert is much more appealing than messing around in the oasis, and that's something I didn't think I was going to definitively be able to say.

@Jimbob: I'm not going anywhere, sir. These kinds of situations are exactly why we have Off Topic. Also, sadly, my phone can't display whatever is in your spoiler tags.

Ah, it was an animation of the Triforce infinitely zooming in to show more Triforce...

Like a Mandelbrot set?! That would have been right up my street.

Or this

So I'm playing Deus Ex: Human Revolution on the old Wii U at the moment. I am utterly terrible at it, even on Easy: I want to stealth it up with speedy and silent takedowns, à la Batman, but I am so bad at just controlling Adam Jensen (the rather hoarse-voiced protagonist) that he dies more often than Kenny from South Park. The last time I was this bad at being in charge of a character it was whichever Giana sister it was in Twisted Dreams. I hesitate to ask gaming wizards such as yourselves but when was the last time y'all were bad at controlling your character in a game?