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Threat Interactive a channel which has launched out of no-where in last six months, made an excellent first video: Fake "Optimization in Modern Graphics" He discusses in depth the issues with recent sloppy game development as it related to realistic graphics and how essentially a reliance on the user friendliness of UE4-5 (TAA, nanite, etc) has caused "realistic" graphics to look muddy, dull, blurry. Also, how it has affected game graphics and optimization much more broadly.

Postal 2 did it best. When you finish your last quest on Friday, a newspaper pops up reporting that the apocalypse has begun (along with a curiously specific denial from the military about its cause) and stray cats rain down from the sky as you head home, where your wife will nag you for forgetting her rocky road ice cream, followed by a delightfully ambiguous gunshot (which the DLC subsequently ruined by disambiguating).

"In some old games like Might and Magic or Darklands, they added aging, so there's a time limit, you can't play eternally. Your character would get older, lowering their stats and fighting capacity, and ultimately, they would die. There's the option to continue playing by recruiting new characters at level 1. but "inheriting" gold and gear from the previous generation

Thanks, now I want to play Kenshi again!

People who love ENDING games need to seek help.

That's why, nowadays, as I'm approaching my 30's, only games like RimWorld, CDDA, zomboid and dwarf fortress are the only games I actually have high emotions playing, because there are stakes, I can't hit replay infinitely and I don't have an eternity to make stuff

a good open world ending I can think of is Enderal, it's a "skyrim mod" technically but, it's basically it's own game. spoiler ahead (you should really try it tho): it works just like skyrim or most open world, with a main quest, but you can go around explore for yourself, do most dongeon (some have a quest requierement to progress further but that's normal) do secondary quest and everything BUT, unlike skyrim, the main quest does affect the world, there are series of event that make the world really change and unlike most open world, you "feel" the time passing by with it, some quest can be failed becaused the events of the main quest made the npc, or the location, or the reason for that quest unavailable anymore. and at some point you get a message telling you "you should save here, there is no coming back", that's the end, the end of the storyline quest, that lead to an actual end of the game. Once you finish the story, you aren't thrown back in that empty map with nothing more to do, your quest is over, and the game is too.

i think the premise of the question is incorrect. open world doesn't reference the narrative, therefore the "end" only goes as far as the narrative leads you. if you want a game with a true end of life experience you need to remove the guard rails of a narrative. something between a RPG and a Sandbox. where NPCs also participate in crafting the world, and are also afflicted by the sands of time.

I think subnautica (first one at least) ended well, after all the horrors and grind and base building and exploring you finally finish building your final goal of building a rocket to escape, and once you get in the rocket and fly back home its one of the most satisfying endings because you finally get that end "anxiety" where you like "do I finish the rocket? and leave now? or do i stay and see if i missed anything?" ultimately to end up finally leaving after a long and satisfying journey, I've beat the game 3 times back when I played it and every time I got on the rocket to leave I just felt content with my adventure like it was a satisfying and fulfilling journey and I was happy to finally end it.

new vegas did it right, it ends

Divine cybermancy did it correctly, I think. If you finish all the routes, you can basically seal yourself on a deserted floating island to escape the cycles of guilt (ie. the game). This gives you a finishing point. BUT, at the center of the island is a seal. At any point, you can break that seal and start a NG+.

I feel like a big part of the pitfall lies in the nature of these types of games & the freedom they give the player. They choose which parts of the world, which questlines, where to go & when. Having a satisfying ending is reliant on the specific journey. Games like Skyrim have both a major and minor set of payoffs for questlines. The main one is fighting Alduin where you do the part of the Dragonborn. Then smaller ones like the Thieves Guild questline have the payoff of meeting Nocturne and becoming a Nightingale, or assassinating the Emperor with the Dark Brotherhood. But if that's not enough, or if you get done everything, it goes into "leftovers" territory. The chef has prepared sequences of 5 course meals, and you ate them in your own order. But by a certain point, you have to go home and just eat the leftovers, away from the chef's control. All stories told from here on out are on your terms with the systems in place. As far as a solution, I find that endings are most satisfying in this genre when they address the challenges relevant to parts of the world. Making the landmarks of each unique region's questline come together for one massive payoff and emphasizing their contribution is really important. Maybe it's artifacts, characters, or the people of those lands. Once you're there, all that's left is to have the cutscene show the player character settling down, dying, or coming to some canonical end. Even if it is open-ended, as long as the vibes communicate a conclusion, it works. Pokémon has been good at that, because as a child you aren't going to simply stop growing or training Pokémon, but it acknowledges that you worked hard, became the champion, and you may even return home and bask in how far you came. But, it usually continues with a clear distinction that we are now in an "epilogue" state, hinting that from here on out the events aren't so strictly canon.

A lot of open world games have endings. Just because it's open world doesn't mean there's no ending. A lot of survival games you keep going when there's no final boss till you get bored or feel like you beat it.

I think RDR2 is a good middleground. You can keep playing as John now, but it's not the same.

despite playing through skyrim five or six times ive only completed the main story once or twice. ill pick a path i want the character to go down, which generally involves about 30 levels of exploration and adventure. after the mage finishes the mages guild the bard finished the college or the knight kills defeat the Stormcloaks, i have them get married, buy a house and adopt a child. after that i sit them down in front of the fireplace, save the game and never pick them up again. Im not condemning them to death in my mind, just deciding that the rest of their life doesnt need to be orchestrated by me. the interesting part is over, so ill leave them to be happy. more often than not i feel they deserve that

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What I like about roguelikes is that progress is made through skill rather than through levelling characters. When I made a grave mistake in Darkest Dungeon I lost my strongest party members, I knew I had to play countless hours to get to that point again, which I wouldnt feel like making real progress. While in roguelikes you can learn from your mistakes and immediately implement them AND feel like you are making progress. I also like the shorter length of roguelikes. In bad north, my strongest army died, so the multiple hour run is over. This was a bit too much for me. At one hand you want to make dying feel like it means smth, at the other hand if it means too much it can be really demoitvating. It is such a hard balance to find imo

Part of the reason why souls games (including Sekiro, Bloodborne, Elden Ring) feel so consistent is precisely because they incorporate all these narrative elements alongside the gameplay. Which is something only games can do. And I truly believe they push the videogame medium forward with each iteration on that. Take for instance, Dark Souls' endings. The ending itself is worked into the player experience when you realize it's a neverending cycle of strife and struggle to either link the fire or become dark lord. Both endings are supposed to be the end of a cycle and the beggining of a new one (as established at the end of Dark Souls 2 and further explored in Dark Souls 3). Another player's chosen undead might be next in line to do the exact same. Or you yourself on subsequent playthroughs. It mirrors the gameplay element of interconnected worlds and the cycle of death and rebirth interwoven at the core of the franchise. Take another example, Bloodborne and Sekiro's feel for their combat. Starting with Bloodborne you play as a blood thirsty hunter, who skids the line between a hunter that thrives off of that blood thirst, and a mindless beast. You NEED to be agressive, you NEED to SOAK YOURSELF IN THE BLOOD OF YOUR ENEMIES to be able to recover health using the rally mechanic. But you need TO REEL THE BEAST BACK IN and take account of what the boss is doing and of what you're doing in relation to it or you'll die horribly. Playing like a mindless beast will certainly get you killed. You also get an edge over enemies if you use the correct items/damage types, like any good hunter would, they use Serrated weapons for beasts, and Righteous weapons for Kin type enemies, using tools like cocktails and elemental damages can sometimes give you just the edge you need as you plunge deeper into the Night and deeper into the Dream. In Sekiro, all bets are off. You're a goddamn shinobi, you don't care about rightousness, you don't care about honor, you care about the shinobi code, and carrying on your mission, no matter the cost. So if a boss' second phase can be cheesed by standing on a tree, or by using fistfuls of ash, firecrackers and snap seeds, it's all part of the game. Combat is ruthless, but you have ALL the dirty cheap tricks up your sleeve. You're a shinobi after all. You can diminish enemy numbers or get an edge in a critical battle by using your sneaking skills. You can even lure enemies out of their paths to make it easier for you to take them out from the shadows. You can take advantage of your ninja mobility to skip some of the hardest encounters in the game entirely. And the game FORCES you to do this as well. Take for instance a lowly enemy, the wooden shield guy. Fighting them WITHOUT employing the Shinobi Axe is just more boring than annoying. One axe hit. That's all it takes for the game to give you the win. To teach you that using all your tools is going to be rewarded, a lot. You can even go after a Demon born out of the flames of hatred and bloodlust, which you can get and edge over by using a fireproof umbrella and a special finger whistle that sends it haywire (like a certain other boss who fell too far into beasthood in Bloodborne, seeing beasts in everyone, including his wife, and in you, the player). But Sekiro is also about the search for perfection (bushido) no matter how many tricks you learn... you still have to be skilled with a sword to be a great shinobi. And Sekiro's character arc throughout the game reflects that honing of your and his skill. That's why bosses like Genichiro, Isshin and Owl are so memorable and so well designed. They teach you to plow forward agains foes that can actually defend themselves against most of your bullshit. Isshin being the final exam if you will, where all your skills are tested in a dance againsta revenant legendary warrior. A showdown that benefits you for using your arsenal but benefits a lot more if used SKILLFULLY and INTERWOVEN with the swordplay. I could go along and make the same types of analysis for Elden Ring, it's grandeur and the scope of its fantasy, the fact that its world is permeated THROUGHOUT by OBFUSCATION and everything plays into that, making it so hard yet so wonderful and grandiose to divise a consistent narrative from the unreliable narrators and tidbits of lore tainted with perspective on one end and so hard to learn the animation tells of the boss' movesets without resorting to timing on the other end. The information is there, pretty much always. It's just that it was designed to be taken apart throughout multiple playthroughs, most likely WITH other people, finding out the cool details on it, sharing what new boss/dungeon you found under a rock, and the likes. There's some criterion to be found here. If you're gonna build a world, and a narrative within that world, you need to choose very carefully HOW IT PLAYS in relation to all that. There's no one method to it, I'm sure. You can always write around the gameplay mechanics you came up with that you found fun and cool. But I'm willing to guess that's a tad harder, if your focus is to build such an interesting, rich world to play through. In this case Death is always inexorably tied to the lore of the world, so that just goes to show the importance From Soft gives to it. It's not only a game mechanic... it's so much more. It's supposed to be such an intrinsic part of their games that without it taking some form, whether its the Undead Curse, the Dream, the Dragon's Heritage or the fact that the single most important event in the world of Elden Ring was the shattering where Marika removed the Rune of Death from the Law of the World... these games simply wouldn't be the same. The struggle your character (and you) go through wouldn't be as meaningful in the larger scheme of things if you could quick load at any time... That's why we don't care about dying that much... like you guys said.. it's expected when you're going into it.. But why, since Prepare to Die was only the slogan in DkS1? Because it's explained through us with more than just words on an intro or an item description... It's explained to us THROUGH GAMEPLAY too.. Reinforcing the rest of the piece as a whole... and it clicks so hard it's insane that there are so many envious western AAA devs crying about it...

7:10 and sometimes the orneriest character is your very favorite haha

Thats one of the things i don't like about Pokémon games, i don't feel like a trainer because i cant canically lose a Pokémon fight. I (as the player) learn from my mistakes but the character is supposed to be perfect, never loses and never makes mistakes.

Accepting that death will likely happen when you make a wrong move is one of the things I love most about the souls-like genre. It more or less adds a puzzle element to the game. You just have to follow the rules and do it right. It's a fair game. Any time it feels unfair (aside from glitches and often unbalanced pvp) its likely you haven't learned what is fair yet.

İs it copyrighted?

Good stuff! This helped me figure out better why I struggle with Dead Cells, but love Celeste.

27:07 Praise the sun!

Hey, I know this is a bit of a random comment but I think the title format works really well, I was interested by the discussion of "Generated Characters" and having the little separation with the slashes works really well...great video!

Love the topic of creativity in games.

I tried out the game, it was good👍

If thoes musics are not copyrighted this channel is pure gold

Interesting...

“I’m in the market for a green bean”

I like the idea of being immersed in a game. It sounds like it would be very exciting!

:) surface of a female?

:)

I kinda want to dance to that intro piece. Great job on your latest video, Aaron, Zac, and Nick.

Lovin the intro/outro tunes 👌

I enjoy these videos immensely!

I think chaos is fulfilling so long as there are boundaries to rub against. Like if a game is presented as serious, and down to earth, with solid, non-wacky mechanics, then the sudden surprise when the horse ends up in the roof breaks the norm, and makes it really funny. I think there has to be limits or contrast to make it satisfying. It’s about expectation. If you expect every punchline it just doesn’t land right. I think chaos is best when chaos is not the expectation

Makes me want to play skyrim and eat sweet rolls! Fun podcast.

I totally hear what Zach is saying at the beginning about Night in the Woods. It really nails the portrayal of a mundane day-to-day existence in a really cathartic way, which is probably relatable to a lot of us right now what with the way things are, being stuck inside day in and day out. Really dope to hear someone else say the same thing I was thinking but much more succinct.

Just listening to this again to contrast with our newer style. I have to say that even though we’re lacking a lot of the structure and polish of our more recent episodes, the discussion and back and forth is really good and I actually think the balance of conversation is better.

I was playing a way out with my brother and DUDE I felt like there were no real choices for anything. One of the characters already had a plan to get out of prison and that was it. No thinking required. We stopped playing after the characters made it out to the woods (it made us catch some fish), but hey maybe it gets better ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

5:27 - 8:45 Nick spends 3 minutes saying, "I don't want to be a spaceship"