Unfortunately it's not only modern video games that treat their clientele like idiots. It's a massive problem across entertainment as a whole, and it's creating a generation of awful content.
Yeah I know this shit'll be classic one day just like the new *music*. Shutter What will the kids think in 20 years? After all 20 years makes a classic.
There has always been brainless entertainment. Back in the day when high school was considered higher education, movies were just people singing and dancing. Today people are more educated than ever before and there are more sophisticated entertainment options than ever before. However there are still a fair share of drooling idiots, and for them we still have Fast and the Furious and Call of Duty. But there's also really good shit available today too that was never available before if you look beyond what the largest multinational corporations are offering.
Any fallout player will tell you half the fun is just wandering about aimlessly discovering things. The actual main story tends to be pretty short, I've gone weeks actively avoiding the main story
I’ve never been an open world player, but I honestly fell in love with Prototype. I can’t tell you why, but I just do. I also fell in love with Hitman:Blood Money; especially because it wasn’t/isn’t linear. You were given your objective how you got there was up to you. It was also fun, to find another way to achieve Silent Assassin.
TFW you’re so old that you recognize that Bethesda games have no shortage of handholding themselves and Bethesda’s success is partly responsible for the dumbing down of video games..
This is one of the reasons I love Kingdom Come Deliverance. A historically accurate RPG passion project from a lower budget studio and the detail is fantastic. A few issues as far as bugs are concerned but it's definitely old school in the way there is minimal hand holding. You're going to suffer initially and be frustrated at times but when you start kicking ass it feels so rewarding.
The character progression in that game is so well done. If the player puts in the work, they are rewarded. It makes going from a total scrub to a badass warrior believable and it feels earned.
The best illustration of this was Drinker's video on old Tomb Raider games versus new ones. The old ones were technically simplistic by comparison but have actual subtlety, atmosphere, no quest markers etc. and they force you to learn the maps, explore them and use your brain. Whereas the modern games are literally just "follow arrow and win".
@@cattysplat I did that in Tomb Raider 2013 and got scewered in the throat by a pipe. Even if it was handholdy it definitely didn't allow you letting your guard down =D Damn I was horrified after that
This is why Elden Ring is such a loved game already. It doesn’t tell you where to go, how to build, how to fight. It throws you in says, “figure it out” and when you win it’s all the more gratifying.
@@farhad4174 I mean yeah. I’ve played them all but this and bloodborne are the magnum opuses. Gimme BB2 with FromSoft on design and Bluepoint on graphics. That’s my dream.
I've started playing Elden Ring yesterday and I love the fact that it treats you like an adult, I love the challenges, the exploration as well and when you defeat a boss it's so satisfying. I've never played a souls game before so as a newcomer it's brilliant.
There's context here. I was once part of a project that was basically an updated version of Space Invaders. We put voice acting in it, and one of the actors suggested a camera-free cut scene experience, similar to Half Life. You know, let the player control the action consistently. ...Bro it's Space Invaders. There is no camera for the player to control.
Hmm yes that's a great anecdote thanks, when thinking of what the thing IS, as its own separate creative outlet. Sounds simple, but if the idea is simple to you, perhaps think for second longer is all we ask
But it’s also that strict logical thinking that get a lot of games to downsize cut many contents out before releases and just generally don’t explore new ideas. And it is not just space invaders. Don’t come with any pre-conceived notions. You think when we would have the GTAs we have now if someone told the boys at take two or rockstar. Dude it’s just cops and robbers chase You can’t give that character a mansion?..maybe you were attempting to make something someone already played and paid for a millions times before and someone had a fresher idea. Just a thought.
I really don't like when cuts scenes make me control the character. Take Guild Wars 2; the basic game had cut scenes with the player and NPCs talking to each other in almost a fighting game perspective and I could admire the NPC and see special animations. Any of the expansions after that though were free action cameras with a few cinematic. It really undermines serious interactions when all the characters are using stock reaction animations, the player gets fixated with some event in the back ground, enemies start attacking (not auto-attack easy ones at that), the player has to navigate an area, or the player gets bored and starts dancing (few of the GW2 NPCs are interesting/compelling).
Is it surprising that CoD Vanguard basically disregards real history to change the sex, skin color, or nationality of the main character so it fits better with “the message.”
Half-Life was the best at just throwing you into a situation and letting you figure it out. Also one of the best methods of story telling, by just dropping you into a crazy situation and let the player and the character your playing find out what's going on in real time, no cutscenes, no out of body camera, just all from your perspective, and it was brilliant.
Agreed! I remember the first time playing HL. literally had to solve everything yourself and interact with the world. No quest markers, no waypoints. Maybe a security guard or scientist telling you a message, but you had to find your way and approach each challenge yourself
I've done DS1 to 3 and honnestly I've most of the time saw the area as just something to go through, sure it looks nice but it was not my primary goal. Only DS1 made me want to know more. I have not played BloodBorne, Sekiro nor Elden Ring yet. But I see these game first as a fun and challenging game, then if interested check out the lore but it is rare.
I feel a lot of video game developers take the mindset of, "This could be someone's very first video game ever, so we can't assume they'll know what to do in any given situation." They design the game to practically hold the player's hand because they expect the player to have never played a game before. I think the lack of a tutorial isn't the barrier it once was; look at the success of Minecraft! No tutorial, everyone's played it, and if they don't know how to do something, they can look it up online. One of my favorite games was Myst, which was all about exploration and following environmental and context clues to figure things out. There was a (antiquated by today's standards) text dump in the manual about how to play, then just the game.
You know, I don't know why in the age of the internet "this could be someone's very first video game ever" is suddenly a "problem" that the devs have to "fix" when in the days before you could look up how to do stuff on the internet, video games were like 100x harder. I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm just befuddled that you're probably right. WHY???? Don't make a hand-holdy video game! If someone can't figure it out, they'll just look it up on the internet! lol
@@randomperson8571 I mean, you're not wrong, haha! I've just heard that particular line come up relatively often from game devs and game-focused channels. I do think it has something to do with the notion that players are spoiled for choice, but I don't think the people who truly appreciate the game would be off put by having to figure something out.
I find learning the mechanics by trial and error to be the primary source of fun for me, and usually as soon as I feel I understand the mechanics, I start losing interest. That's why I ALWAYS skip/ignore tutorials in strategy and 4x games, or stuff like Stellaris. I love learning them just by poking around the interface, However, there's some games with tutorials which give you a choice: "I'm new to gaming tutorial", "I'm new to this genre tutorial" and "I know this genre tutorial". I would say that's a nice compromise between trusting people to have a brain, and trying to include every last plank of wood in the "potential target audience".
If the games aren't written to handhold, with "Easy Mode" and "invisible while crawling", then ultra woke "journalists" from Kotaku, etc, could not get through them. They're not the brightest bulbs.
I remember when the graphics, gameplay AND story all sucked. Oh, and the "music" was recycled R2-D2 sound effects. Coming back after 3 decades, something like Red Dead 2 seems almost supernatural to me.
@@rac1equalsbestgame853 FF8 came out on the PS1. If you are looking at PS2 graphics and feeling undwhelmed, you haven't even dipped your toe in the "graphics left a lot to the imagination" pool
@@XXXVerve Ummm, I am not underwhelmed at all by PS2 graphics. Actually, I adore the weirdly fuzzy I can count the poligons output of the PS2. And PS1 graphics? I never played one as a child and for some reason feel nostalgic for it's graphics. And IMO games like MGS still look really good to this day.
@@rac1equalsbestgame853 I get it. I was referencing it more as a point that by the time the PS2 came to be, games had already moved to be mass marketed with flashy graphics (a bar that moves with technology, of course). The games that existed on the Nintendo, Sega Genesis, SNES, and even the PS1 were a different breed.
I love how obsessed with diversity game developers and some social media gamers are for the developer staff, completely ignoring that games considered the best of all time, like FF7, had almost no diversity amongst its staff. Makes no sense.
@@cradiculous bruh y’all are dumb as hell. It was made in 97 they didn’t give a damn about diversity, they wanted to create a good story that happened to just have women in it
What do you mean? FFVII had a black guy, a half-human, a sentient dog, a shapeshifting sort-of vampire, and a Scottish puppet in the party. How much more diverse can you get? Ohhh, you meant diversity for people who complain about that stuff.
There's a way to balance the handholding and total crypticness. A good quest log is always welcome. Especially one like in older RPGs, written from the perspective of the player. Just so you have something to check if you get lost. Not like a giant arrow, or flashing "GO THERE" sign, but something to give more context and a realistic note the hero would write to himself to remember. Like in Baldur's Gate, or Gothic.
@@bladeofphoenix Morrowind is a fine example of how a game needs improving. It does a lot right but so does a lot wrong. The combat sucks and finding your way is remarkably tedious.
You are forgetting that modern video games are made with so-called educated people in mind, like English literature majors whose vocabulary is so restricted that they cannot understand books written before the 1980s.
@@stevenlornie1261 the combat was fine the problem was that damn free dagger that doesn't hit as most builds did not have the short blade skill to use it properly thus didn't hit with it. in Morrowwind your skill determined your ability to hit and the damage you did when you hit making a master able to kill enemies in a couple of attacks whereas a novice will almost never hit with a weapon. that was what the skill trainers where for getting skills up to useable levels. It was a much better system than the damage sponge enemies implemented from Oblivion on
The Secret World has a specific category of missions where you have to research the topic you're working on with an actual browser. The Investigation missions were my favorite to do because they made me think by looking around for clues and piecing things together. The Black Watchmen also did this extensively because it's a game based on actual investigation and clue-finding (it dealt with the supernatural while the sister game, NITE Team 4, dealt with cybercrimes based on real cases).
@@CynicalAnomaly205 Bethesda is actually really good at "environmental storytelling" , it's their writing and world building that is completely incompetent.
@@imjustsomeguy5048 true, when I first played the elder scrolls Oblivion and fallout 3 after I think GTA games I'm like where is the mini map. But yeah the writing is kindof stupid.
That's the "accessibility" generation for you. Game companies are more concerned with having as many people as possible play their games than they are in creating memorable and challenging experiences. It's no surprise this happened as games became more interconnected and online.
Well, given *how many people* work on a game, for *how long* and *how much* it costs to make a big game nowadays, you need a broad appeal to make that money back. The size of a "studio making a bestselling game" has been doubling by every console generation ever since SNES / Genesis era - look it up (it helps if you go to replacementdocs to get a coly of a game manual to see the credits list), that is *excluding voice actors*. Less than 10 people worked on DOOM, 20 worked on Quake II, 50 people made Quake IV, more than a hundred worked on DOOM 2016.
@@psychodrummer1567 I don't agree with that. Right now the best-selling game is Elden Ring and the developer refused to change their way of making games to broaden the appeal. The argument is akin to many movie studios who think they need to make blockbusters in order to make money. There are plenty of developers who make good, appealing games and make money without sacrificing quality and attempting to be accessible.
@@cmbjive However, Elden Ring could afford to do this because of the continous success of the studio previous games which gathered both money and good will.
@@psychodrummer1567 True, From Software has goodwill and that is grim not compromising on their core beliefs and delivering good games. From Software has always made difficult games and they were relatively unknown until Demon Souls came out.
Not just an issue of trying to get as many people playing as possible, but the very definition of what "playing" means. Back in the day, you didn't need to actually be able to beat a game to have fun playing it. Some of these games it was actually bragworthy to be able to have beaten it. Now I swear some games are made worried that the family dog might not be able to beat the game.
80's sci-fi was amazing at suggesting an unseen world; the one just out of view. Perhaps that's why I rewatched Aliens so often? Modern films throw everything at you, too much to take in at once, and leave you exhausted rather than intrigued.
They sure throw a lot of flashy, stylistically boring, and empty eye candy at the audience. The problem is there is nothing even remotely challenging or thoughts provoking associated to all that fluff.
The scifi from 1977 to 1981 (the Carter years) were produced during a time of major shortages, long gas lines and a weak US president. The current generation will experience the same very soon. Perhaps media will get a creative kick in the A during a time less, struggle and need. But seeing that suicide rates shot up during the lockdowns I'm not sure.
I've noticed its effect with players as well. More and more, we start to see players who just can't handle even a little bit of inconvenience. They can't handle being lost, or dying, or not knowing an enemy weakness, or just generally not knowing what to do. Learning things and overcoming challenges makes videogames the unique entertainment medium that it is, and these gamers can't even appreciate that. They want games to play like movies, which completely loses the point of it being a game in the first place. It gets really annoying whenever someone leaves a negative review, just because they got stuck somewhere. Figure it out, just like the rest of us, or don't play videogames at all.
@@undefined1509 and when they do there are gamers like you complaining how much you hate getting a bit of help when it is popular and mainstream. You guys keep crying when you see waypoints in a bloody map. Video games as a medium is not sustainable when it only caters to the die hards.
I beg to differ it's a trope that's there since FFVII if not since the begining of Cutscenes in video games, the media always wanted to be close to the cinema art, mainly because it's this form of art that inspired a lot the developpers. Like the MGS series (except V) wich are B movies that happen to be video games. And they're freaking great. The main difference with today games is that they try to be cinematic and close to movies because they saw some critics say that it was cool. Why it works with MGS and not many modern games is because Kojima (like his games or not)is a huge cinephile and put a lot of passion in each of his games. That's why many people like Vaas character in Far Cry 3. The actor put a lot of passion in his role while his successors are less memorable
@@Geekezf the difference is, FFVII is an RPG, so that's just the genre it's apart of. As for MGS, yes I agree, I enjoy those games. But while that game was unique back in it's day, due to it being the only one like it, now almost every AAA game from PlayStation is essentially that, but without the uniqueness.
I just played through The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time for the first time since I was a kid. You can easily figure what to do and where to go next by exploring the area and asking NPCs for clues. It feels so much better than just an arrow with a distance marker in meters guiding me to the next thing.
I did the exact same thing. I loved that there were no waypoints or glowing markers, you just were given a clue as to which area you might need to go next, and then you figured out what to do when you got there. I haven't played more recent Zelda games so I don't know what they're like, but I think the criticism that OoT discourages exploration through linear gameplay is unfair. Sometimes games are so huge and open world that the devs give up and just highlight everything, while OoT has a more focused world that you can genuinely explore on your own.
@@wolliveryoutube Twilight Princess has a very rocky start with the human tutorial, but you become a wolf, the game gives only a few pointers for learning how to use the wolf function, and after that, there are very few forced-feeling tutorials. Skyward Sword's initial tutorial is better, but it never seems to truly let go of your hand; there are way too many times where it tells you way to much. Breath of the wild does pretty much no hand holding for its tutorial; it's pretty much "Here's a few locations you need to get to finish this tutorial. Have fun!", and a very similar mindset is given to the rest of the game. It gives you a location to get to if you want to progress the main story, but it's all up to you to actually get there. The only drawn out tutorial is one shrine where you get taught how to do special attacks. That's pretty much it.
That's not necessarily bad if done well. Valve games are very linear, but they're really good at selling the illusion that you're making choices. If the illusion is good enough, I'll call it fair. But so many of them are bad at even selling the illusion.
I would say some things that point you in directions are ok, some are not. An Example for a RPG or MMO: You get a Quest, and from the Info, there is an Area that is known ( like that Nation, this Area of woods ) and your Character would know where that is, because your character lives in that world. Then it would be completely ok to show the player the Area to go to, but, you dont get shown the exact location. Because your character cant know exactly where it is. Or you have to go to a certain house in the City, but, your character isnt from that city. you get only shown the City as the place to go to. Then you ask where that house is and someone points you to a district in that city and you get the info "that direction to that district" untill ypou find someone in that district that tells you the street where that house is and so on. Make the info aviable that your IN-Game char knows. If you, your real self has to remember EVERYTHING then, maybe you cant play for a week, load a save and "where am i and why am i here again?" Along the lines of, what would the Character you play know, see, hear and so on and then show that and only that, it makes sense. Its sad that, in a way to aim at "the wider audience" EVERYTHING is explained.
Something important about how quests are handled in modern RPG's that are not throwbacks. Most guide you with an arrow and put set pieces in the middle. This is a quest in Fallout 1. A trade caravan went missing. People rumors there is foul play, but in fact caravans are dissapearing no matter wich faction is. So it's more random. You are recommended to speak with other people to ask about their missing caravans. One of the rumors is that it could be a deathclaw, a very dangerous animal from the wastelands. So you go around town asking for deathclaws, everyone thinks they are a myth (despite one town just 2 days walking ahead being full of them) But there is one who claims to have seen one. And he's not right in the head. So you go to him and he tells you he saw one, and it's up to you to believe his incoherent ramblings or follow him. Then you find the death claw and inside the cave a dead mutant, By this point that dead mutant is probably the first you see in the entire game. This is very important because it sets up the entire second half of it. There is no quest markers, you are just told to speak with others, sometimes they know where the dude you are looking for , sometimes they don't but if you ask someone else they probably seen him. In the way you find more leads for your main quest learn where the most important NPC's are and what they could be useful for in the biggest town in the game. If this was a modern rpg game you would have a big arrow telling you where to go next the problem with this system is that it skips speaking with people and getting to understand where you are standing. That's a very important element on RPGs. Not mentioning you become a god easily in a RPG if you focus your skills in one or 2 elements, In an old one you HAD to play a role. that was the point.
This is a major issue with games like Elden Ring. Asking where the fuck someone is going is a completely reasonable thing for thr player character to do.
The implementation is key. A smart developer will give you an objective and leave you to your own devices to try and figure it out, and then if it's taking too long and likely beginning to frustrate the player you then offer them hints and clues that will lead them to the solution. That way it works for everybody, without forcing everyone to get treated like an idiot from the outset.
@@st0nedpenguin Leaving you to your own devices as a default is really dumb in an open world. Anyone saying "Go kill the dragon" would result in any player character immediately asking what dragon and where. The idea that the player is an idiot for wanting to know where they're going is absurd. Do you just drive aimlessly around hoping to run into your job interview by complete chance or do you ask when and where it is? Directions used to be the norm. The reason they got taken out is that voice lines were expensive to do and thus they were dropped in favour of arrows and objective markers. Objective markers make complete sense if you have a map and someone asks you to go somewhere. The idea that using the map makes you a casual is so unbelievably stupid.
Something I really liked about Dragon's Dogma the first time I played is if you summoned a pawn (a npc party member created by other players) that has completed the quest you were on, when you get close to the area, the pawn will say something like "I've done this before, follow me" and will show you were to go.
Speaking of depth, Kubrik had the "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy" in The Shining typed out in all the major languages the film would be distributed in (though the phrasing could be somewhat different in some cases). So if you were German you would experience the same level of horrifying discovery that Shelly Duvall has at that moment.
The Ravenholm level in Half-Life 2 is a prime example of what Maulers talking about for hidden tutorials in games. You get thegravity gun and are immediately set loose in an absolute playground to discover it’s capabilities.
Took a long while for me to work up the nerve to even step out of the mine and into the map. I had surround sound and thought for sure I'd get attacked from all sides.
@Chris Miles, yeah, HL2 is still the gold standard for a lot of things in my opinion, but especially the kind of “show, don’t tell” visual storytelling they’re talking about. Soooo immersive.
@@skylx0812 Reminds me of that Antlion scene in Episode 2. *alarms blaring* "We got incoming!" "No, we got a _buttload_ of incoming!" Am I glad I didn't have surround sound headphones at the time. That part would've been ten times as horrifying.
yeah no as much as people praise ravenholm for that so many people forget the very lengthy tutorial that you have to go through with the gravity gun in the previous mission
It's money - it's all about money. Like with movies, the budgets for games, especially AAA games, has been slowly creeping upwards. On the most practical level this means that there is substantially more risk involved with putting out these products, and a greater demand for larger returns. Naturally this leads to one place - safe, easily digestible, trend-chasing development strategies. The most important, and often overlooked, thing is that this kind of development isn't meant to target me or you - you as in people who think about what they consume beyond the surface level. This kind of development is meant for average or casual consumers. It's so successful because your average consumer doesn't care about being challenged or provoked into consideration, they just want something that will kill sometime inbetween their responsibilities or actual interests. The sad reality is that the largest segment of the market isn't held by more involved hobbyist, it's held by these casual consumers. Worse still, with regards to the video game industry, many hobbyist have simply gone along with the trends set by uninformed causal consumers. Remember when people laughed at horse armour? Well paid cosmetic content is now standard practice - same with FOMO updates, Skinner box progression systems, always online DRM, and the overall games as service model.
I remember the days when PC games came in MASSIVE boxes and if you didn't read the instructions you were in trouble. Now it's like kindergarten level gaming.
Came here to post this. A fun game too. They lampoon a lot of tropes in that game. "employees, be careful of today's shipment of explosive red barrels"
Part of the reason both movies and games have gone this way is because consumers are increasingly spoiled for choice. There are so many sources of entertainment that game developers aren't incentivized to challenge players, and there's a lot of handholding and waypointing instead of having the player figure things out conventionally. Also true of many films. Obviously it's not a universal trend, but big studios know that if they don't take things down to the least common denominator, the majority of consumers will just get frustrated and turn their attention to something else, and there are a million things to choose from.
I agree. This only means that AAA games and blockbusters must be dumbed down, anyone brave enough can pull off a AA game or an indie film that is challenging.
A lot of games have gotten easier for a tons of different. Reason a lot haven't gotten easier people have just gotten better at videogames. Plus devs have started removing content that thought was abusive and dumb. Should we go back to the arcade set up where you have to pay for another live every time you die? Games have gotten far better in ever measurable metric. People have just gotten more entitled and bitchy than ever.
Personally, I have a feeling Western movies and games have been dumbed down for the purpose of dumbing down the audience. Think about it, especially in regards to games. Eventually, you get so used to games only letting you interact with the world in very specific ways that you never think to yourself, “Hmm, can I do this? Is this possible?” They stop letting you use your brain, and eventually, due to never expecting anything different, you just willingly stop using your brain. And in regards to movies, I see people say a lot that people’s attention spans are shorter and they need explosions every so often to stay engaged. I can’t help but wonder who put that lie out there, because the success of Dune proved otherwise. People in the upper echelons of society don’t want you to think; Satan doesn’t want you to think
An embarrassment of riches. Story of our lives. Just wish some more people would wake up to it...instead of harping for MORE. LOL "More" might be what's killing us.
I miss the days when games didn’t hold your hand because the devs had some respect for the player. You were given tutorials on how things work and it was on you to pay attention. If you screwed up you were punished immediately and had to learn what you did wrong and get better if you wanted to get anywhere. I also miss how games had genres; they would do a few things well not everything terribly. Game design by committee was a mistake. Kids playing nothing but Fortnite or Roblox would lose their minds if they had to play games like Ghouls ‘N Ghosts, Deus Ex, Thief, Indiana Jones and The Fate of Atlantis
because these days they are written for `journalist` and `reviews`. The Players weren`t happy with a game? they simply try to cut us out off the equation.
The indie game scene is where it’s at right now. A lot of my favorite games from the past decade have been Indie games that have interesting art styles, a cool core gameplay loop, and add stuff that doesn’t detract from the experience.
I contest a little to the waypoint aspect, in early games, they where either more linear or stuck in "alleys" for progression. Waypoints in large sandbox environments help due to the massive areas that modern games have to explore. As long as you are not locked into having to go to the waypoint, I do not see a problem.
Because it's often a crutch for shitty game design. Between games that have little content beyond "Go to these hundred map markers" and 'exploration' titles that do everything they can to avoid having any actual exploration.
@@boobah5643 do you have any examples of games with no waypoint system that are good in your opinion, or some games that are bad and it is reflected by the waypoint system?
@@blakemccartney1068 of the top of my head Morrowind is a good game with no waypoint system. All of the Elder Scrolls and Fallout games after lost something good by using the grab the player by the nose waypoint system Morrowind is also at times bad because it doesn't have a waypoint system, such as when you are in a rush to get some progress in only to realize that you've spent hours in the wrong cave Because when you were supposed to go to Yasamsi you went to Yesamsi by mistake. The latest Far Cry and Ass Creed games are bad and it's reflected by their waypoint system, large open spaces with very few things placed in uninspired points that do require waypoints to find.
@@Palora01 I agree with the idea of large spaces with nothing there, that is a problem with some sandbox games, but having a tracker to let you know where to go in a large system is not inherently bad is all u am saying. For example, red dead 2 has a quest waypoint system, but similar to fallout/grand theft/ elder scrolls, there are so many other things to do, I like knowing almost where not to go so I do not progress too far before I want to.
@@blakemccartney1068 oh no, I agree there is nothing inherently bad about quest waypoint systems, like with a lot of things it's the implementation of the system that is usually done in a bad way.
I still consider Morrowind one of my favourite RPG's of all time. No compass with map markers, no fast travel (except for town services like a boatman) and absolutely no hand holding. This makes the game feel so much more wondrous and mysterious because you're actually exploring instead of beelining towards a marker on a compass. Because there is very little voiced dialogue the dialogue can be expansive and isn't limited by the budget for the actors. Because you have to be smart with your character you feel like you are genuinely improving as your skills improve. And finally, every character is mortal. None of this "essential character" stuff where they fall unconscious if you clobber them on the head, nope, they die. You can absolutely lose the game this way.
I tend to have issues with focusing, so while I don't need constant tutorial messages in my face. A waypoint usually helps. I can get really lost in the weeds especially when I am exploring. So a blip on the map is perfect since chances are i'm not going to immediately go the way of progression I can do whatever, get lost and let my ADHD brain be happy but then when I'm satisfied with whatever bullshit I was doing I know where the hell to go. But that's just me, I recognize that a lot of people don't like getting their hand held and despite my issues and need for waypoints I agree with the handholding stuff. I'd rather just figure gameplay out for myself for the most part. I do miss when games just organically taught you things and I think it's a very lost art. No one likes to lose but losing helps us win. Dark Souls doesn't need an easy mode. lol.
A quote from the director of the Highlander when asked about the deleted scenes. He said that they were removed cause the film editors just didn’t think Americans would get it. He said that was a trend in movie making when it comes to making films for the American audience. Just take a look at how different Legend by Ridley Scott is. The American version is nothing like the international version.
It's not just games. It's all of life. And people expect/ want it. They get freaked out by any sort of open ended exploration. Everything must be planned, controlled, predictable, and above all, SAFE. We've lost our collective ability to think freely, and are afraid of people who do, and of environments that require it.
Yeah, it is rather disturbing, even downright frightening at times, that nowadays divergent thoughts and lateral thinking are equated with “conspiracy theories” and fake news, and thus those expressing them are to be either mocked or violently silenced.
The whole history of human social development is one of ever-increasing centralization, uniformity, and efficiency. It's basically a continuation of the same evolutionary process that led to cells grouping together to exist as interchangeable components of a giant machine (that machine being a fish, a dog, or you). The future is Borg.
@@stevenscott2136 I hate that you appear to be right. I wonder if when we form that super organism, are we aware of it? I think cities begin to cross that line. There is an emergent intelligence in some of our large structures. I imagine at some undefinable point we will exist to serve the overmind, and not the other way around. I also don't think we'll ever really be disposed of, since we're like hyper adaptable white blood cells equipped with terrabyte level computers. We'll be repairing and expanding the physical hardware of the emerging super organism... Even if it is a hyper intelligent smart AI.
Video games definitely have an insane advantage when it comes to delivering lore an exposition, because characters can just do that while you're playing the game. Take God of War for example, you've got Kratos, Atreus and Mimir chatting away with each other for the whole damn game, about really interesting stuff, but it almost never interrupts the gameplay. Pretty much every quest in that game would be just fine without that dialogue, since the gameplay is really solid, but having it layered on top just makes everything so much better. I hate having to run off and do some busywork to get the NPCs to realise they're sentient again and give me more information on the story and world. And I hate when the game stops to make you listen to an audiobook before letting you actually play it again. But some studios really know how to do this well. Arenanet, the devs of Guild Wars 2, really learned their lesson here. Early game story always stops you when NPCs deliver dialogue. Now with newer content they give you full movement and combat with most NPC dialogue, unless a pause in gameplay makes sense.
After the release of Ragnarok, this comment aged kind of poorly since Ragnarok forces you into dozens of cutscenes so that the characters can tell you exactly what's going on rather than treating the player like a functioning adult who can put things together with their own brain. I loved 2018 to death and agree with what you said about it, but Ragnarok took it way too far with the dialogue.
^Yeah, I don't remember 2018 GoW, but Ragnarok had a lot of "I see something" or "maybe try this to get this debris off the wall" kind of comment by the companions. While I appreciated at the time, now I think about it, that was a lot of handholding.
My god I watched my younger brother play an early 2000s game that didn't tell him exactly what to do and it amazed me how stuck he was unable to beat the simplest of puzzles
It’s funny, I’ve been gaming for a very long time, since the days of pong on the Atari when I was a kid. My first real game that I got into and loved was Space Quest. That’s a game you can complete in about half an hour or less if you know what to do, but it took me weeks and I even had to order a hint book from Sierra to get myself unstuck and couldn’t play until it arrived. I didn’t give up, but it was a bit annoying that you could miss something unless you really looked (by typing “look at xxxx”) at everything in the scene because nothing was highlighted. If you didn’t pick up a piece of glass from your crashed spaceship at one point you would be screwed and have to reload an old game because there was no way to ever go back and get it. Again, that didn’t make me give up and stop playing, but if I had not been able to order a hint book I certainly would have. Also back in those days you had to write down information you got on a notepad. The game would not conveniently store it somewhere for you to reference when you needed it. That was kind of cool. Years later I got Elder Scrolls Morrowind and I spent a few hours wandering around but never figured out where to go or what to even do first. I was probably an idiot and missed something obvious, but I did actually just give up on that one and never tried it again. I love big open world games and I like it when it’s up to you to explore and find things, but I am glad that your objectives are shown on a map so you can figure out where to go. Depending on the game you still usually just get your main objective shown and you have to explore to find side quests, but when you do they are then shown on the map. Maybe it’s just me, but I would get bored and stop playing if I had to figure out where to go on a huge, open world map. But perhaps that’s just me because I’m ADHD. On the other hand, with games like doom eternal I think you could be left to figure things out. Maybe have an option to disable tutorials so you can skip all that if you prefer. There would definitely be a certain. Satisfaction in figuring out for yourself that you have to hit the gun mounted on top of the brain crabs first to get the better of them, and figure out for yourself which weapons are most effective against different enemies. For open world, a bit of hand holding is helpful, but for a lot of other games I agree that it could be more fun to have to figure more things out. But maybe let the user decide how much hand holding they want?
It was slightly better during EA, your PDA had edgy quotes once in a while. I truly miss the line ’congratulations on not dying’ , but sadly enough the devs are soft skinned and thought this was offensive, thus it was removed.
Just don't play the Subnautica game, Below Zero. Subnautica is still one of my more played games. Below Zero... I'll take a hard pass. More hand holding and of course "The Message".
@@frostreaper1607 I think a non-snarky PDA is more in keeping with the Alterra corporate culture. Megacorps have no sense of humor. Just like I've been told there are no guns because the devs are lefties, but if there WERE proper weapons in the game, it would be too easy. It's hard to maintain an atmosphere of suspense when YOU are the scariest thing in the game.
Ori and the Blind Forest is one of my favourite games ever and I think it builds up your skills in the game very organically. Like, you learn a new skill called 'bash' where you fling yourself from an enemy to another enemy, sort of using them as a temporary platform, and in the next dungeon your skills with the ability are put to a test, and at the end of the dungeon there's an epic escape sequence where you're likely to die a dozen times before you memorise what to anticipate and how to utilise the new skill. I wish games were more like that nowadays.
Did you play Ori and the Will of the Wisp? I haven't even finished it yet, but due to a crapton of new mechanics it introduces, it's simultaneously easier and also harder xD definitely one of my favorites and the art and music are as on point as ever.
@@randomperson8571 I played it, but didn't complete. I have it on PC, but the controls feel off on keyboard and I couldn't get used to a controller. Plus there were some really annoying bugs, and I didn't like the fetchy sidequests they added. The original is superior in every way, imo.
Try Hollow Knight if you haven't already. Tremendous amount of exploring and secrets with a moveset that gradually comes together to expand the world. You will get lost several times, but there's always a path you haven't searched, and that is often the answer. The controls are also silky smooth.
I really enjoyed it, as I enjoyed ROTR also. And while playing both I noticed what either of the devs were trying to do. The graphics and ability to draw you into the game world has developed tremendously. And Ori "cuts" you off with clever world and character setup- you are just a energetic entity and you really don´t die but just loose your ability to coherently exist in the given "universe". It was a lot of fun to die 3-5x and then discover devs intention and be like " aha, that way it goes". And then there are games like ROTR which have still the best graphics and physics and also the best character animation and voice acting. All that drew me so into the world that even if I liked some more challenge I was feeling devastated when I saw her falling down and crushing her skull. That´s too bad that everybody just name todays games "bad" and don´t even try to understand how the tech has evolved and can influence the gamers mind set. And does anybody of those " hardcore gamers" never use Google Maps\Here Maps to get from A to B? Using only stars and sextant to navigate streets ature? Imho games should be relaxing and fun, you want real challenge- take out compass and hard printed map and go hiking. PS there´s always possibility to not use the technical aids- turn off jump points and not press Z on the Medallion.(I tried to not to, though the world is bigger and bigger these days and the object\grass density grows by hour, that for grinding herbs I sometimes used medallion). If you look Digital Foundries game comparison between PC and PS4 you can see that PS has 10% of grass density- so ofc "in the old good days" you had on PS1 one bush and that´s the one you could collect herbs from. Todays game worlds are more detailed- but no1 seems to take it into account.
The reason Sekiro grabbed my attention is because it had that element of difficulty and figure it the fuck out, brought me back to when things didnt hold your hand. Everyone's a pussy now
Btw drinker, I'm loving all these clips taken from your live shows. Gives me bite-size ways to hear these conversations from streams I may have missed.
Devs need to step it up and just make games the way they used to. I showed my moms neighbors Super Mario 64 and it didn't take long for those kids to be completely sold, exploring the castle, playing through the levels, having blast. And it doesn't matter, quality is quality. And today we can still do the same thing.
Which is exactly why Shadow of the Colossus is such a beloved game. No directions, no explanations - just a map, a beam of light that points north, south, East or west(is it through mountains or underground - impossible to know) and one vague hint per Colossus that MIGHT clue you in to a weakness, but is more often just a physical description
It's what I loved about Silent Hill 2. The scenery said so much about the protagonists as well as the other main characters. Not only this but the endings were decided not by binary decisions but instead by how you played (how many times you looked at certain items in your inventory, how long you took to walk through a hallway, how close you stuck to an NPC, and so on)
@@firstnamelastname4331 but I'm still confused about the whole marry & maria thing like was she really my wife or a lookalike or it was all in my brain.
@@cholebhature5765 so bear with me, I'm bad at explaining things so apologies in advance. Maria is a manifestation of James' subconscious created as a way to torture himself for the guilt he feels. He forces himself to see her get hurt over and over again by pyramid head, who represents that guilt and his repressed sexual urges (which is why pyramid head uses a spear to penetrate/kill maria. ) Also in water is my favorite ending (and technically canonical since it's referenced in SH4 but that's hardly important)
I think this really depends on the kind of game you're playing. A game with complicated mechanics requires hand holdy tutorials just so the player really understands how to play. A game with simpler mechanics requires little to no tutorial. Really just depends on if the game is designed to be intuitive or not.
Naughty Dog games tend to use the environment to guide the player. They normally use lighting to guide you towards the next checkpoint or make you go the wrong way in order do some exploration but they do it subtlety. The game will offer to give you a hint if you take too long but you just ignore that cue and carry on.
Lmfao, I feel personally attacked. That's exactly what happened to me playing kingdom hearts part 1 where you can across the sleeping door shortly after you meet goofy and daffy duck (Edit: I meant Donald Duck). Although it may have just been that I wasn't too invested into the game enough to continue (probably not my type of game personally, I guess)...this just proves that if a game is interesting/good enough, you'll be interested/invested enough to figuring out everything yourself. Or at least wanting to learn more.
Most everyone thought that great story creation (in all its incarnations) would get better and better as time goes on.... but the exact opposite seems to be happening... technically everything LOOKS better because of FX innovation, but they don't FEEL better... for the most part, all content resembles a state-of-the-art robot - perfection on the outside, soulless on the inside.... instead of raising humanity to new heights, the inability to tell a great story is keeping us tethered to the ground.
@@Zeburaman2005 Really discouraging. Great, ground breaking art used to be an aspiration... now it seems the only goal is the bare minimum... I hope I'm wrong, but all I see is dark creative days ahead...
@@Zeburaman2005 I think you might be overthinking it, to use a version of Hanlon's razor. I think it's more probable to think that they're trying to earn as much money as possible, and to do that they're aiming at the lowest common denominator and taking as few risks as possible. I also think it has to do with the fact that they have too large teams that don't necessarily talk to each other.
@@RannonSi Oh, they are definitely in it for the money, no doubt about it. But since I am a rather pessimistic person, I can’t help but suspect their greed is being taken advantage of by third parties. Kind of how “THE MESSAGE” is officially about promoting positive values like inclusivity and diversity, yet the actual aim is to subvert and destabilise society to the point of ushering into an utopia that paradoxically reads like a hard Sci-fi dystopian novel.
@@johnbishop2536 late reply but yeah, In terms of feeling like a fun and engaging combat experience you’re right. To be fair Cory Barlog has said that he really wanted there to be more but they didn’t have the budget. I believe he also said they’re making sure god of war ragnarok has way more cool fights in it
Unfortunately, it's because they are, and are conditioned in winning. Deduction and reasoning have been removed from games. In other words, the Challenge is gone.
Kingdom Come Deliverance is a great example of environmental storytelling and treating the audience/player like they're intelligent. One example among many, you're sent out to look for a missing merchant who has an item you need, and given a general road he was supposed to be coming from. So you ride around, not even sure you're on the right road, and spot a bloodstain on the ground. You might ride past it not realizing its significance, then eventually go back and follow it out of curiosity, find a wagon with dead people, see how they died, follow a trail leading off from there (no Batman detective vision either, it'll be the occasional bloodstain or a dropped item), which leads to a bandit camp, which has a chest with the item you need and the dead merchant beside it. Most of the game is like that, there's very little hand holding
One of the greatest moments in gaming was getting plunked into MYST and not knowing where you were or how the game was to be played. We've been de-evolving from that ever since.
Horizon forbidden west was literally the biggest example of a game treating the player like a baby, even spawning a weaker version of an enemy if you die an apex machine once. Aloy never shuts up about anything, constantly getting on your nerves as she tells you how, where, and what to do at every point in an OPEN WORLD GAME. There is never any sense of mystery or problem solving for the player, as the game points out how to do everything and then has Aloy literally tell you, even carrying over to fighting enemies when she audibly tells the player what the machine is weak to or strong against. This ALSO carries over to the writing, with every bit of optional dialogue reiterating information already stated in the previous main conversation because the game assumes you're too stupid to for instance "understand which direction is north".
@@SilvrSavior yup, which made it all the more annoying when Aloy says, “I sHoULd bE UsInG FirE aRrOwS”. Like just let the player do what they want and figure it out on their own.
I will say that the game telling you which ammunition to use doesnt make the fights any easier. The machine fights are surprisingly difficult for a AAA game unless you play on easy or sth. Also, for this statement 'even spawning a weaker version of an enemy if you die to it once', source or dont make shit up.
@@Jerry-dx3cb It’s demonstrably false. If I get killed by a fireclaw, that fireclaw is going to be there waiting to kick my ass with the same gusto as the first go.
@@Jerry-dx3cb I'm not "making shit up"...(who crapped on your waffles?). If you die to an apex machine the game will spawn a regular variant of the machine/machines you just died to in the general area, I have over 130 hours in HFW at this point btw so I've died quite a few times to them only to get pissed when the apex heart I was looking for can no longer be obtained because I died once. I enjoy the combat a lot actually, that and the beauty of the world/enemies is what's kept me playing. But I don't need to be reminded of what ammo type to use every single time I engage in a fight or scan a machine, I never said it made the game physically easier, it's just incredibly annoying. In fact I never even said the fight's weren't difficult to begin with, that literally has nothing to do with my complaint. My complaint is that nearly everything else in the game from the main story to dialogue to quest design is bloated with Aloy's monotone reiterations of information you tend to already know, or she tells you how to solve a puzzle within ten seconds of entering an new area. It's hand-holding to the max and if it doesn't bother you that's fine, but I like games that don't treat me like an inebriate.
Ico was such a fun game. I spent holiday break 2011 in a cottage in Portland, OR with my best friend drinking craft beer and playing Ico and Xenogears. That was an awesome week.
Nintendo actually perfected the art of showing you how to do things/use new items without holding your hand through the entire game a long time ago. All everyone else had to do is copy them (like Capcom did with games like RE4).
There's a reason games like Super Metroid are still analyzed to this day, they perfected the use of the invisible guiding hand of the developer to teach players new skills and to show them the way forward.
3:12 I do wonder how much of this is them thinking the gamers are idiots and how much of this is because it's faster and easier to just pluck down a waypoint, compared to actually writing down how to get somewhere (either outright or just the descriptions necessary for someone to figure it out). I think part of the problem is that they're doing things for the lowest common denominator, because otherwise someone else will get the funding to do the thing (game/film/whatever), and there you'll be with the ideas of a masterpiece but no funding while someone else gets all the funding to do some generic version of whatever genre's popular this decade.
This is one of the major reasons why I love Breath of the Wild. The handholding there is damn near minimum. You take someone experienced in video games, and they'll do some weird shit to get to the objective. Then you get someone who doesn't play games, and they'll accidently stumble into a totally new an unexpected way to get there. Maybe better, maybe worse, but they can get there too.
You're my new favorite person, bringing up Breath of the Wild in a post-Elden Ring world xD both BOTW and Elden Ring deserve credit for trusting the player. The love behind those two games' designs is obvious. Those games were made solely with players in mind and that's why they're both delightful. (And also why, I think, people are trying so hard to compare them when they can't really be compared. Please stop, lol. The only true similarity between them is that they were made with love.)
That's why BotW is my favorite open world game ever. Best tutorial zone, so many ways to get to places, etc! I'm still playing that game to this day, this time with mods and stuff.
I prefer Breath of the Wild to Elden Ring. BotW is beautiful and a style I love with great designs. Elden Ring feels more generic with often ugly designs and the ”music” is awful… sometimes it’s so dark I can’t even see. Gets a bit repetitive too after a while. I do appreciate the challange though and it’s rewarding when you beat a hard boss.
This is why I feel western developers are salty about Elden Ring doing so well. They were sold this lie that they had to dumb down their games to find an audience and sanitize it to death. Make your game a grab bag of random ideas to appeal to the widest possible audience to be profitable. Then Elden Ring blew that narrative straight out of the water. From Soft has been able to carve out a very specific niche but in doing so they have acquired a very loyal fanbase. And a fanbase that continues to grow. I know several people where Elden Ring is their first Souls game and they are loving it. It's so refreshing to have an open world game that doesn't cover the screen with so many icons on where to go. I have just been exploring trying to find every boss and dungeon and I still am nowhere near done with the game.
I'm one of them. I'm not even a form soft fan but elden ring has my attention and I can't wait to get the game. A dark fantasy that I can do whatever I want and I can play a magic swordsman sign me up
and they can`t put the reviews straight to k0tak0 because they have to actually play it, and the most important reason they hate it?: no messaging for them to push, that`s the saltiest reason.
It's worse than that; the western entertainment industry is effectively an echo-chamber cabal at this point. Nearly everything from the West has become hyper-monetized and creatively sterile, because no one in the West will allow anyone except maybe a specific few to stand out. And those they allow don't do so because they're actually works of talent, but because they're approved by a new aristocracy that is more interested in jerking each other off. They keep creating new ways to celebrate mediocrity, but if someone is genuinely exceptional appears, it can only be blasphemy.
I feel like that dominance of their niche has let them stagnate somewhat in terms of design. I've seen plenty of seemingly valid complaints about Elden Ring be dismissed out of hand because "it's supposed to be hard, git gud", and I can't help but wonder if a game not specifically associated with FromSoft/the souls "genre" would be given the same leeway and excuses, or if it needs that legacy and reputation to temper expectations.
@@justinambru8529 I think previous generations of gaming had a lot more digging through piles to find the diamonds than people remember. I think the biggest difference between now and then is that in the past, the big studios experimented more, throwing stuff against the wall and seeing what stuck. Now, they know what sells huge numbers to the mainstream audience so you see all the publishers pushing similar games, and beating them to death with annualized releases.
@@ressljs True. The big studios were once little studios who managed to have a big hit with the right thing at the right time. The 80's didn't really have 'Big' studios as we do now. Then they got bigger. Then they got shareholders and Directors. There was a lot of dross back in the day but we tend to remember the few good ones because we kept playing them. There are still some greats coming out of the indy side. Rimworld and Subnautica for example. Had to buy 2 extra of Rimworld so my wife and kids could also play lol. Only game we have ever done that with in 20+ years together I tend to not buy anything until I see user reviews now. Seems to work pretty well for me though it does mean not many new games. If anything, that just means we have more ways to make the right choice for us than we used to. We can be much more discerning.
@@ressljs Yeah. I think that the problems with people talking about how good games were (except the rose-tinted glasses) is that they're excluding things like the Video Game Crash and the reason there was a crash.
i'm glad that ICO was brought up as Shadow of the Colossus has one of my favourite stories and settings and it's so great because of the fact that it's a video game, it wouldn't work in any other medium in my opinion
Generally speaking I don't mind waypoints in my games as long as it is done in a way that fits thematically with the game. Turning on street view navigation for a driving game makes a lot more sense than having some sort of an HUD display while trying to chase down dragons and griffins. I totally agree with the observation that games designers and movie writers either don't trust the audience to be intelligent enough to follow or don't trust their own skills in storytelling to be able to convey the desired emotions into their own characters. This is what happens when you spend the last decade making movies by checking demographic boxes instead of simply learning how to craft a good story this is what you are left with.
My guiltiest pleasure is Lord of the Rings Online. I was not a huge Tolkien fan - it took me several tries to get through the book LOTR despite enjoying The Hobbit in junior high school. And I was completely unimpressed by the book, which I finally finished in university. When the Peter Jackson films came out, I was able to better get into the world, but getting into LOTRO was what changed my mind about the books and helped me build an appreciation for the lore and world building Tolkien had done. In a funny way, then, the video game actually increased my appreciation of literature. The game itself has changed in the 10+ years it's been available, and much has been "dumbed down", with for the most part quests now designed to be as straightforward as possible, a big arrow on the interface showing you exactly where to find the next objective, and many routines simplified or removed. Loot from defeated enemies is automatically accumulated, for example, etc. There isn't a lot of thinking or strategizing to do, but honestly, while I like the *idea* of more challenging games, at the end of a long work week when I just want to wander around the breathtaking scenery of Middle Earth and boost my self-esteem with some easily accomplished tasks, I'm quite fine with how LOTRO evolved. And I have to believe the producers have made these changes because it is netting them the most money from players who have been sucked in by the free-to-play model. It's easy to criticize game developers but I am sure they aren't acting alone or out of malice. They make money by giving the public what it wants.
The FarCry Blood Dragon tutorial used to be satire, however it seems to only become more of a true representation of modern tutorials with each passing year. "Running is like walking, only faster. To jump, jump."
My first playthrough of Morrowind was just last year at the urging of a friend of mine. The first time I came across the Scroll of Icarian Flight I used it and died immediately. I set it aside because it was, literally, too powerful for me to use. Eventually I started learning more magic and thought "hey, I have a Slow Descent spell..." After figuring that out and flying around for awhile I thought "Man... That's just Fortify Acrobatics... There are like 12 other attributes I can do that to..." I then went down a rabbithole of breaking the game that lasted months. That's the perfect example I can think of after listening to this discussion. Morrowind was a game that threw possibilities at you right out the gate, but it was up to you to make it surviveable. You can see how much it has changed. Without mods, Skyrim was just a Walking Simulator that turned into a Fast Travel Simulator. I like to imagine that Fallout 74 never happened.
Indie and AA are where it's at, and if you don't have a PC or a Nintendo Switch (the best platforms for those markets) know that you have my sympathies.
I basically stopped playing AAA titles a few years ago. Indie games are so much better and cheaper. Small teams of people with passion is what makes good games. Hell, that’s what makes good art, is passion!
Paying $20 (usually much less) and finding a great game you could put 100 hrs into is very satisying. AAA start and stay at 60, and only work till the next AAA comes out and its forgotten by its target audience.
Ico is a masterpiece! I remember playing it as a child, desperately trying to save the girl. The most fun and frustration I had in a video game in my entirely life!
to buttress the argument that games can convey complex levels of story; more than one article has been written on Majoras Mask hiding a story in Ikana Valley, how the people used to worship the deity Majora and rejected the three goddesses and the Triforce and was punished for it. Link redeems the people of Termina. They're incredibly in-depth.
A great "recent" example for me was the earlier Prince of Persia reboot/sequels. There were so many times where you just got dropped into a puzzle room with zero indicator of what you're supposed to do and you...played the damn game to figure it out. The BEST example of all time for me though as an indicator of how things changed, is comparing any modern MMO to Star Wars Galaxies. Modern MMOs have massive cinematic intros and tutorials that hold your hand through the first few hours with quests and objectives. Star Wars Galaxies you made a character, picked a starting planet, then were dumped into a random spot on that planet and left to your own devices. It was great. It really hammered home the whole immersion part of being a small cog in a huge machine.
Drinker, I think you've limited yourself to AAA titles. Even just AA ones - like Nioh, Pathfinder games(?), Vermintide 2 - don't shy away from pushing the player. The indie scene is polarized by the 'casual vs. hardcore' divide: casual ones are intended to be relaxing and easy or just be pure power fantasies while hardcore ones try to push their difficulties as much as they can. Big names definitely become more and more dumbed-down with each new entry, though.
As extremely rough around the edges as it was, Outward was another good example. Uncompromisingly difficult starting out, but with hidden elements along the way that could make you extremely capable if you bothered to invest in figuring them out, and earning the power fantasy of the fully developed character later on. FromSoftware certainly did its own thing and had other games to use as inspiration, but games like Outward were like proto-level ER, just oftentimes harder to look at and significantly less polished. Indie games are where it's at.
@@thant0s I loved the idea of multiplayer in that game. With spells just being so long to set up, that needing a second player was just essential for doing half of it. Funnily though it can also count as an example of why dumbing down games can be good. I was really annoyed, when certain events blocked you form doing certain things (like when the home town gets burned down, and entire levels becoming meaningless, as the story just does not progress in that direction anymore) Also it was super hard to find a second player because of the difficulty.
@@0ntimetaiment921 Our experiences were quite a bit different it seems, and I don't mean that in a rude way, I just sink a BUNCH of hours into digital entertainment and saw a lot of patterns very early on that I think made the experience much easier. But yes, I can certainly agree that there were numerous quest flags and triggers that were a bit *too* obscure if one is *only* looking at the information available natively in the game. A more elegant way to handle the destruction of the town would have been to drip feed more info over a longer period of time, and have the perceived threat ramp up, but when it came to that portion of game development, the like, single person dev team had some weaknesses next to what otherwise is a wonderful experience.
@@thant0s Oh, I definitely liked the game. I just wanted to point out, that things like "quest pointers" ect are sometimes useful, especially when you don't have a lot of time. (I sometimes start playing a game I have not played for months, and then it's super nice to have logbooks ect to remind you what happened. for example) And as you said: Outward was a little rough on the edges, but I agree that that's excusable in the big picture.
The Forest was an amazing game in not telling you what to do or where to go. They give you an opening cutscene that provides your end goal, then set you loose. It's up to you to figure out how to achieve that. The Forest is one of my top favorite games.
That intro little back and forth kinda tells me you two haven't thought too hard on that question. Reason is is because games and movies have the same ability to do environmental, and sub textual storytelling. There are different practices that each has to cater to in order to pull it off well, but they both can do it equally. It's funny you brought this up, about the Assembly Line Design of games. You lot are primarily movie critics, but I'm sure you've noticed that Gaming has gone through this same rot that movies are going through now. Difference is, that rot started in gaming years before we all started noticing it in movies. AAA Gaming companies don't make interactable worlds. They make amusement park rides. Any time a "secret" is put into a game, or a puzzle, or an intrigue, there will be an arrow pointing you right to the solution and 5 npcs or documents telling you the solution. Anytime there's a quest in a game, they can't just trust the player to understand simple directions like "Go to X town and find X person in X building." There has to be an arrow, on screen text, and an npc on the road who just happens to know that person. And it's the same thing in movies. We can't just intuit a person's attitude or feelings. We have to be told, and they have to pose and flaunt and be a caricature. We can't just understand the setting and it's general feel. We have to be told this place is dangerous, quirky, or safe. We can't empathize a character's relationship with someone. We have to have them fighting, or kissing, or fucking to shove what these people are down the audience's throats. It's all the same problems. The makers of these products don't treat their audience as Human. They treat them like cattle. Too dumb to understand, but will still line up at the feeding trough when the bell rings. And they've bred a LOT of gamers to do exactly that brilliantly. Well. The floor is falling out of that fanbase lately, I feel. All the drama and scandal has put a black mark on these companies, so people should be less inclined to support them. At least, that's my hope. That people will act like thinking Humans and treat these situations accordingly, but the sheep mentality of a lot of those fans runs deeeep. It's also why I follow people like you guys. Because when everyone around you is braying that the new bland, broken railroad of noise and lights is the best thing ever, you can start feeling like you're insane just because you feel like the only one holding these games to standards. Standards as high as "Let me play the game, not the game play the game" sometimes.
The first time I played Fallout 3 I had no idea what I was doing. After going through the opening narrative of being raised in and escaping the vault, then going scrambling around wasting ammo and avoiding enemies, I really felt like a naive kid in a hostile world who had no idea what she was doing and was lucky to not get killed right away. It really made for an immersive experience I'll never forget.😊
I had that with Fallout 4, which was my first game in 30 years. Just wandering around with my dog, killing everything that looked at me wrong and worrying about my supply of ammo and stimpacks.
@@drdeadbeat1604 thats why one of most popular mods for fallout 3 is an alternate start mod. the vault is a boring, overly lenghty tutorial filled with utter nonsense and illusions of choice.
Game: "Hold L2 to strafe" Also game: Does not trust player to know to hold L2 to strafe so it adds an autrostrafe to firing even withouth pressing L2 🤦♀️
Is anyone here old enough to have played the Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy text adventure? That game treated you like you were WAY more intelligent (and, frankly, insane) than most people actually are. I don't think most people even figured out how to get the Babel fish, without which you die very, very quickly.
Half-Life (the first one) really taught me to appreciate older video games that didn't have to teach you everything. Heck, that managed to tell a story without cutscenes.
I remember the game Myst from rhe 90s, where you started knowing nothing about what to do, where it was placed, and you had to Wander around and figure out every inch of what was going on. It was a great time of adventure when the creators trusted you could do it.
Speaking of treating the audience like idiots... Something I noticed the other day with what I call 'Wine Aunt Entertainment", it's those TV dramas (like Call the Midwife) that amp emotive music loudly over a scene like they expect their target audience are complete NPCs that can't tell what to feel without it blatantly pointed out to them. It's basically the drama equivalent of a laugh track.
I like that some games are starting to offer toggle on/off for things like maps, waypoints etc. While I can take the points being made here, I do actually like knowing where I've to go and all that, as I'm in my mid-30s now. I can't expend 000s of hours on a game any more to figure it all out between work, family and everything else. Mechanics that help cut the time spent down I find really helpful. Most important thing is, choice is starting to re-emerge to fit the needs of different people better, and more choice on how to play is ultimately a good thing IMO.
I love the fact that Miyazaki doesn't give a shit if you find everything in his game. In fact, he goes out of his way to make things obscured and elusive.
Perhaps it's a "sign of the times" we are in when a game like Elden Ring receives negative reviews based upon the fact that it provides the player TOO much freedom.
@@HelghastStalker dark souls isnt even that hard. its just learning mechanics Honestly I would say dark souls's difficulty is closer to raiding in an MMO Where the goal is to fight a boss to learn the mechanics of that boss until you finally clear it, which may take many attempts which is in direct opposition to a lot of games where you are kinda expected to be able to beat bosses on the first attempt The big thing is the bosses in dark souls are their main appeal, while raid bosses in most MMOs are kind of a side thing Also chromehounds is the greatest game of all time, and really just needs a remaster on PC
@@HelghastStalker funny is that souls game was never been asibine difficulty you have tools and other path that can make tbe game as difficult as you want. Like an actual rpg.
I’m reminded of the old Sierra games and Lucasfilm games where some of the puzzles or how you used items were really off the wall. We had a heckuva time trying to get into the Governor’s Mansion in Secret of Monkey Island. We knew that you could give meat to the guard dogs and had an idea we could get past them that way and there was also a random flower that you could pick in the forest. Playing around in the bar kitchen one day, found out that you could stew the meat in a pot on the stove. “Hey, let’s see what else I can add to the pot. Wow, I can add the flower for some reason. Oh, look the meat is now poisoned with the flower that makes you drowsy.” My brother got us past another stuck spot, basically just getting frustrated and trying every item at a certain spot We did have to break down and get a cheat guide for King’s Quest 3 because we had a bootleg copy and couldn’t do the spells without it, but by and large, we got through a lot of games without having guides. And there were lots of amusing deaths along the way
I don't mind a bit more hand-holding if its in the interest of not wasting the players time, I am not a fan of running around for 2 hours trying to figure out what the hell the developer was thinking when they designed a quest based on vague wording. I usually just look up a walkthrough at that point, but holy crap has it gone way too far to the point where so many games are practically on rails, the reason games like dark souls and (from what I've heard) Elden Ring work is because you usually have enough of an idea of where you need to go, its just a matter of figuring out exactly how to get there without getting killed or you need to figure out a strategy to kill that particular boss and the game is NOT going to give you any hints about it.
Aloy in Horizon Zero Dawn : ...umm...survive. Look at the map. Go somewhere you haven't been yet. Maybe don't go anywhere near that T-rex with chainsaws for a face till we've leveled up a bit...or a lot. Learn what's going on as you explore. Meet interesting side characters with minor plot arcs, and add depth to the overall narrative. Game breaking items available for late/end game fun as a reward for exploration and completion. Aloy in Horizon Forbidden West : Go here. Kill the thing. Collect crafting stuff. Prattle on about everything you haven't looked at yet. Use this weapon to kill that bigger, more heavily armed yet somehow less dangerous apex loot crate with feet. Progress story to reveal more story. Meet many many NPC people that give you quests to get more crafting materials and then piss off to the next village. Game breaking items found in first loot cave. Wouldn't want you to hurt yourself.
Also, the character you’re playing as now gives buckets of exposition when you’re stuck for more than a minute. Things like “gee, that rock up there on the wall looks different than the rest. Maybe I should interact with it” all because you were thinking and exploring your way through a room. Maybe even just gathering collectibles
That has been kind of a thing even since Ocarina of Time, hence the "Hey! Listen!" -meme. However, while very annoying at times the tips also weren't usually that useful for solving any immediate problems, usually they were quite vague or just simple reminders of where the story is going next in case you forgot
I think Elden Ring is a good example of developers trusting their audience to figure things out for themselves. The tutorial is literally off to the side, and I've seen a few people complain because the shiny white dude pointing down into a hole in the ground apparently wasn't enough for them to think there might be something important there. Once you get out you're faced with a _really_ tough enemy, that you can either fight or literally go around and continue, and there are areas where the difficulty suddenly skyrockets, telling you this might not be the place for you just yet. Other than that you're pretty much free to wander around, explore this absolutely massive world and fuck about as you please. In the meantime the game will for the most part give ... suggestions as to what the intended path is, with very little handholding or locking the player into a specific path. And you can at any time choose to ignore the suggestions, and instead wander off and do something completely different. Not to mention all the spells and weapon skills you can find, that can be mixed and matched in a million different ways to find something that suits your playstyle.
I remember when games were very experimental, wacky, fun, didn't hold your hands so much beyond the tutorial. Once the posers started showing up and infiltrating by pretending they always played games, that was when things started to slowly change. The reason why I enjoyed the Japanese-made games is not because of the art styles but rather how free they were with it all. Go back to making movies, Sony. That's all you're ever good for!
A lot of what happened to games is greatly improved analytics and a huge increase in the amount of sciencing that went into how people actually play the game. As the goal focused in on broadening out the player base as much as possible and as developers could identify any kind of snag people got stuck on any kind of rough edges got polished off these AAA games, which took a lot of the flavor out IMO.
When playing a game the emphasis should be on the gameplay, the story should be there to facilitate it. You can do it well but gameplay should always come first.
Older games were a lot more limited than modern ones. Thats why games needed a good story or a new style of gameplay. Nowadays most don't bother with either. It's nothing but graphics. Story is either a rework or a butchering of a good one {SEQUELS!} and the same for the controls.
The next evolution of the waypoint will be player driven note taking. If you give the player a notebook or editable map that will engage them more because they will get to mark things that make sense to them. I can't tell you how many times I have played a game and thought "would it kill the devs to give me a notebook so I can write some things down?". Satisfactory actually has a really great UI for this. You can track your next build goal but the higher you advance the more complicated the things are so you end up making your own checklist of how many screws you need and how much iron plate, etc. This also has to do with building your factory. You plan out how much stuff you will need to build a certain section of floor with a certain amount of power poles and a certain amount of machines. The main point im getting at is that the player likes information that is relevant to them but ONLY when they ask for it.
The Mass Effect trilogy really displayed this change in video games transitioning from something you were active in to being a story that you’re guided through.
In all fairness, I loved the ME trilogy because it told a decent story, it was also a pretty decent dating sim game too lol - RPG's have traditionally told a story (Final Fantasy?????) until they started becoming all about the "open world"...
I remember playing the 1st resident evil on the 1st play station and thinking "Man, before the zombies got loose it would be impossible for one of the mad scientists to get to the kitchen to make a sandwich."
I think that game developers have to sometimes add in a tutorial into the game, bc let's face it there are no game manuals nowadays, so that is understandable to a degree. However, games outside the Souls series have been getting to easy or forgiving and allowing too many checkpoints and save points. Back in the NES days the best you would have is a password in most cases and if you wanted to beat the game a lot of times you had to it in one sitting.
During NES days a lot of that was more due to limitations of the hardware than purposeful game design. Also Games back then were more difficult because, 1. They were still coming from arcade design philosophy and it was that way to eat quarters (the original micro transactions) and 2. games were made purposely more difficult to pad out the length. Most of those games if you could play straight through without deaths are maybe an hour long...And there is no “end game”, youd just have to play whole thing again
Lol I remember the NES game Battle of Olympus, in which the "passwords" were long base 64 strings (I think 24 or 32 characters) that you just had to write down. I was too young to understand at the time that I was basically contracting out the "storage" of my saved games to pencil and paper
Why on earth would I want to go back to having to write out absurdly long passwords in order to save my spot? Also, most games nowadays are anywhere between 12 to over a 100 hours. No way am I going to want to play all of that in one sitting. Even games that deal with ironman mode where you only have one autosave allow you to leave the game and come back another day. Besides, even as far back as the ps1, they were allowing you save more and more at regular intervals. Tomb Raider 2 even allowed you to save the game whenever you darn well felt like although I will admit that had its own risks as I discovered to my misfortune when I once saved it at a bad spot I couldn't get out of and had to restart the whole game.
Unfortunately it's not only modern video games that treat their clientele like idiots.
It's a massive problem across entertainment as a whole, and it's creating a generation of awful content.
I totally agree.
Yeah I know this shit'll be classic one day just like the new *music*. Shutter What will the kids think in 20 years? After all 20 years makes a classic.
@91.5, the phoenix! Orwell commented on this in 1984. He foresaw plebeian music as generic and government provided
Check out Hello Neighbor if you want a challenge.
There has always been brainless entertainment. Back in the day when high school was considered higher education, movies were just people singing and dancing. Today people are more educated than ever before and there are more sophisticated entertainment options than ever before. However there are still a fair share of drooling idiots, and for them we still have Fast and the Furious and Call of Duty. But there's also really good shit available today too that was never available before if you look beyond what the largest multinational corporations are offering.
Any fallout player will tell you half the fun is just wandering about aimlessly discovering things. The actual main story tends to be pretty short, I've gone weeks actively avoiding the main story
Skyrim is kinda like that too. I mean, there's still people owning the game since 2011 that still didn't finish the main story.
Yep... I'm 40 hours deep in RDR2 yet only on Chapter 2... :P
I’ve never been an open world player, but I honestly fell in love with Prototype. I can’t tell you why, but I just do.
I also fell in love with Hitman:Blood Money; especially because it wasn’t/isn’t linear. You were given your objective how you got there was up to you. It was also fun, to find another way to achieve Silent Assassin.
TFW you’re so old that you recognize that Bethesda games have no shortage of handholding themselves and Bethesda’s success is partly responsible for the dumbing down of video games..
@@DrMcFly28 NEVER LEAVE chapter 2! heed my warning!
This is one of the reasons I love Kingdom Come Deliverance. A historically accurate RPG passion project from a lower budget studio and the detail is fantastic. A few issues as far as bugs are concerned but it's definitely old school in the way there is minimal hand holding. You're going to suffer initially and be frustrated at times but when you start kicking ass it feels so rewarding.
Getting gud at that was so memorable and satisfying...
Gaming does need to go back to this design. Real immersion. Infinitely more satisfying.
I spent hours just working on alchemy. It was my favourite thing to do in the game.
The character progression in that game is so well done. If the player puts in the work, they are rewarded. It makes going from a total scrub to a badass warrior believable and it feels earned.
After Kingdom *_come,_* comes *_deliverance._*
If you know what I mean. :^)
The best illustration of this was Drinker's video on old Tomb Raider games versus new ones.
The old ones were technically simplistic by comparison but have actual subtlety, atmosphere, no quest markers etc. and they force you to learn the maps, explore them and use your brain.
Whereas the modern games are literally just "follow arrow and win".
Put down the controller and watch cutscene is pretty much the modus operandi of the modern gaming industry.
@@cattysplat I did that in Tomb Raider 2013 and got scewered in the throat by a pipe. Even if it was handholdy it definitely didn't allow you letting your guard down =D Damn I was horrified after that
This is why Elden Ring is such a loved game already. It doesn’t tell you where to go, how to build, how to fight. It throws you in says, “figure it out” and when you win it’s all the more gratifying.
Yeh but is a reskin of every other souls born game😂
It's 'The Bible' of videogames now.
@@farhad4174 I mean yeah. I’ve played them all but this and bloodborne are the magnum opuses. Gimme BB2 with FromSoft on design and Bluepoint on graphics. That’s my dream.
@@farhad4174 ...and?
I've started playing Elden Ring yesterday and I love the fact that it treats you like an adult, I love the challenges, the exploration as well and when you defeat a boss it's so satisfying. I've never played a souls game before so as a newcomer it's brilliant.
There's context here. I was once part of a project that was basically an updated version of Space Invaders. We put voice acting in it, and one of the actors suggested a camera-free cut scene experience, similar to Half Life. You know, let the player control the action consistently. ...Bro it's Space Invaders. There is no camera for the player to control.
Hmm yes that's a great anecdote thanks, when thinking of what the thing IS, as its own separate creative outlet. Sounds simple, but if the idea is simple to you, perhaps think for second longer is all we ask
But it’s also that strict logical thinking that get a lot of games to downsize cut many contents out before releases and just generally don’t explore new ideas. And it is not just space invaders. Don’t come with any pre-conceived notions. You think when we would have the GTAs we have now if someone told the boys at take two or rockstar. Dude it’s just cops and robbers chase You can’t give that character a mansion?..maybe you were attempting to make something someone already played and paid for a millions times before and someone had a fresher idea. Just a thought.
I can’t even begin to imagine what the hell this guy was imagining. Like, what??
I really don't like when cuts scenes make me control the character. Take Guild Wars 2; the basic game had cut scenes with the player and NPCs talking to each other in almost a fighting game perspective and I could admire the NPC and see special animations. Any of the expansions after that though were free action cameras with a few cinematic. It really undermines serious interactions when all the characters are using stock reaction animations, the player gets fixated with some event in the back ground, enemies start attacking (not auto-attack easy ones at that), the player has to navigate an area, or the player gets bored and starts dancing (few of the GW2 NPCs are interesting/compelling).
Is it surprising that CoD Vanguard basically disregards real history to change the sex, skin color, or nationality of the main character so it fits better with “the message.”
Half-Life was the best at just throwing you into a situation and letting you figure it out. Also one of the best methods of story telling, by just dropping you into a crazy situation and let the player and the character your playing find out what's going on in real time, no cutscenes, no out of body camera, just all from your perspective, and it was brilliant.
Agreed! I remember the first time playing HL. literally had to solve everything yourself and interact with the world. No quest markers, no waypoints. Maybe a security guard or scientist telling you a message, but you had to find your way and approach each challenge yourself
The only problem is that they still haven't finished the story.
“Walking into Moria and wondering what happened here” = every Soulsborne video game.
Finished bloodborne and I'm still wondering what happened lol
@@josephatherley Alien gods happened.
I've done DS1 to 3 and honnestly I've most of the time saw the area as just something to go through, sure it looks nice but it was not my primary goal. Only DS1 made me want to know more.
I have not played BloodBorne, Sekiro nor Elden Ring yet. But I see these game first as a fun and challenging game, then if interested check out the lore but it is rare.
I feel a lot of video game developers take the mindset of, "This could be someone's very first video game ever, so we can't assume they'll know what to do in any given situation." They design the game to practically hold the player's hand because they expect the player to have never played a game before. I think the lack of a tutorial isn't the barrier it once was; look at the success of Minecraft! No tutorial, everyone's played it, and if they don't know how to do something, they can look it up online. One of my favorite games was Myst, which was all about exploration and following environmental and context clues to figure things out. There was a (antiquated by today's standards) text dump in the manual about how to play, then just the game.
You know, I don't know why in the age of the internet "this could be someone's very first video game ever" is suddenly a "problem" that the devs have to "fix" when in the days before you could look up how to do stuff on the internet, video games were like 100x harder. I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm just befuddled that you're probably right. WHY???? Don't make a hand-holdy video game! If someone can't figure it out, they'll just look it up on the internet! lol
Myst was great, would love to replay that and Riven sometime. Myst 3 was way too easy though
@@randomperson8571 I mean, you're not wrong, haha! I've just heard that particular line come up relatively often from game devs and game-focused channels. I do think it has something to do with the notion that players are spoiled for choice, but I don't think the people who truly appreciate the game would be off put by having to figure something out.
Thank the heavens for Monster Hunter. Never treating you like it is your first videogame ever since the very first game
I find learning the mechanics by trial and error to be the primary source of fun for me, and usually as soon as I feel I understand the mechanics, I start losing interest. That's why I ALWAYS skip/ignore tutorials in strategy and 4x games, or stuff like Stellaris. I love learning them just by poking around the interface,
However, there's some games with tutorials which give you a choice: "I'm new to gaming tutorial", "I'm new to this genre tutorial" and "I know this genre tutorial".
I would say that's a nice compromise between trusting people to have a brain, and trying to include every last plank of wood in the "potential target audience".
If the games aren't written to handhold, with "Easy Mode" and "invisible while crawling", then ultra woke "journalists" from Kotaku, etc, could not get through them. They're not the brightest bulbs.
You mean those folks that don't play video games who bs their way into having soft authority over how games are made?
I remember that one "journalist" trying to do a couple of jumps in doom eternal and getting stuck haha, forgot what site he was from though.
they want games to be written for them, and the factories, 00bisoft etc do it with reskins every year.
or thr infamous cuphead journo who couldnt finish the tutorial
Kotaku would have gone broke within months reviewing arcade games.
Remember when the graphics in games left a lot to the imagination but the gameplay kept you coming back for more? Good times, good times.
Same for me. Greatly miss PS2 graphics
I remember when the graphics, gameplay AND story all sucked. Oh, and the "music" was recycled R2-D2 sound effects. Coming back after 3 decades, something like Red Dead 2 seems almost supernatural to me.
@@rac1equalsbestgame853 FF8 came out on the PS1. If you are looking at PS2 graphics and feeling undwhelmed, you haven't even dipped your toe in the "graphics left a lot to the imagination" pool
@@XXXVerve Ummm, I am not underwhelmed at all by PS2 graphics. Actually, I adore the weirdly fuzzy I can count the poligons output of the PS2.
And PS1 graphics? I never played one as a child and for some reason feel nostalgic for it's graphics. And IMO games like MGS still look really good to this day.
@@rac1equalsbestgame853 I get it. I was referencing it more as a point that by the time the PS2 came to be, games had already moved to be mass marketed with flashy graphics (a bar that moves with technology, of course). The games that existed on the Nintendo, Sega Genesis, SNES, and even the PS1 were a different breed.
I love how obsessed with diversity game developers and some social media gamers are for the developer staff, completely ignoring that games considered the best of all time, like FF7, had almost no diversity amongst its staff. Makes no sense.
One might say FF7 had TOO much diversity. That's why I had to reduce the number of women in the party by one.
@@cradiculous bruh y’all are dumb as hell. It was made in 97 they didn’t give a damn about diversity, they wanted to create a good story that happened to just have women in it
No diversity? What about the carousel ride Cloud took with Barrett? Just friends?..................
What do you mean? FFVII had a black guy, a half-human, a sentient dog, a shapeshifting sort-of vampire, and a Scottish puppet in the party. How much more diverse can you get?
Ohhh, you meant diversity for people who complain about that stuff.
@@natedarnell8926 what? Ima look this up lol
There's a way to balance the handholding and total crypticness. A good quest log is always welcome. Especially one like in older RPGs, written from the perspective of the player. Just so you have something to check if you get lost. Not like a giant arrow, or flashing "GO THERE" sign, but something to give more context and a realistic note the hero would write to himself to remember. Like in Baldur's Gate, or Gothic.
As I was reading your comment it immediately brought to mind The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind.
@@bladeofphoenix Morrowind is a fine example of how a game needs improving. It does a lot right but so does a lot wrong. The combat sucks and finding your way is remarkably tedious.
You are forgetting that modern video games are made with so-called educated people in mind, like English literature majors whose vocabulary is so restricted that they cannot understand books written before the 1980s.
@@stevenlornie1261 the combat was fine the problem was that damn free dagger that doesn't hit as most builds did not have the short blade skill to use it properly thus didn't hit with it. in Morrowwind your skill determined your ability to hit and the damage you did when you hit making a master able to kill enemies in a couple of attacks whereas a novice will almost never hit with a weapon. that was what the skill trainers where for getting skills up to useable levels. It was a much better system than the damage sponge enemies implemented from Oblivion on
The Secret World has a specific category of missions where you have to research the topic you're working on with an actual browser. The Investigation missions were my favorite to do because they made me think by looking around for clues and piecing things together.
The Black Watchmen also did this extensively because it's a game based on actual investigation and clue-finding (it dealt with the supernatural while the sister game, NITE Team 4, dealt with cybercrimes based on real cases).
Fallout and Red Dead Redemption tell stories just with the sceneries. The deeper you dig, it gets grimmer!
The Interplay and Obsidian Fallout titles definitely did a great job, the newer Bugthesda titles? Not so much.
@@CynicalAnomaly205 especially fallout 1 & 2, basically tell you go find something and that's it, no help lol
@@CynicalAnomaly205 Bethesda is actually really good at "environmental storytelling" , it's their writing and world building that is completely incompetent.
The Dunwich areas if fallout 3 and 4 are great
@@imjustsomeguy5048 true, when I first played the elder scrolls Oblivion and fallout 3 after I think GTA games I'm like where is the mini map. But yeah the writing is kindof stupid.
That's the "accessibility" generation for you. Game companies are more concerned with having as many people as possible play their games than they are in creating memorable and challenging experiences. It's no surprise this happened as games became more interconnected and online.
Well, given *how many people* work on a game, for *how long* and *how much* it costs to make a big game nowadays, you need a broad appeal to make that money back.
The size of a "studio making a bestselling game" has been doubling by every console generation ever since SNES / Genesis era - look it up (it helps if you go to replacementdocs to get a coly of a game manual to see the credits list), that is *excluding voice actors*. Less than 10 people worked on DOOM, 20 worked on Quake II, 50 people made Quake IV, more than a hundred worked on DOOM 2016.
@@psychodrummer1567 I don't agree with that. Right now the best-selling game is Elden Ring and the developer refused to change their way of making games to broaden the appeal. The argument is akin to many movie studios who think they need to make blockbusters in order to make money. There are plenty of developers who make good, appealing games and make money without sacrificing quality and attempting to be accessible.
@@cmbjive However, Elden Ring could afford to do this because of the continous success of the studio previous games which gathered both money and good will.
@@psychodrummer1567 True, From Software has goodwill and that is grim not compromising on their core beliefs and delivering good games. From Software has always made difficult games and they were relatively unknown until Demon Souls came out.
Not just an issue of trying to get as many people playing as possible, but the very definition of what "playing" means.
Back in the day, you didn't need to actually be able to beat a game to have fun playing it. Some of these games it was actually bragworthy to be able to have beaten it.
Now I swear some games are made worried that the family dog might not be able to beat the game.
80's sci-fi was amazing at suggesting an unseen world; the one just out of view. Perhaps that's why I rewatched Aliens so often? Modern films throw everything at you, too much to take in at once, and leave you exhausted rather than intrigued.
They sure throw a lot of flashy, stylistically boring, and empty eye candy at the audience. The problem is there is nothing even remotely challenging or thoughts provoking associated to all that fluff.
60s-2000s had the best films, tv shows. 80s-2010s had the best videogames.
The scifi from 1977 to 1981 (the Carter years) were produced during a time of major shortages, long gas lines and a weak US president.
The current generation will experience the same very soon. Perhaps media will get a creative kick in the A during a time less, struggle and need. But seeing that suicide rates shot up during the lockdowns I'm not sure.
@@Zeburaman2005 Do you watch a lot of Amish documentaries, or are you simply dullened to today's cgi oversaturation?
I've noticed its effect with players as well. More and more, we start to see players who just can't handle even a little bit of inconvenience. They can't handle being lost, or dying, or not knowing an enemy weakness, or just generally not knowing what to do. Learning things and overcoming challenges makes videogames the unique entertainment medium that it is, and these gamers can't even appreciate that. They want games to play like movies, which completely loses the point of it being a game in the first place. It gets really annoying whenever someone leaves a negative review, just because they got stuck somewhere. Figure it out, just like the rest of us, or don't play videogames at all.
Or worse, they can't handle playing a game and instead watch countless Let's Plays.... i just can't understand that behaviour, it makes no sense
Or maybe people have better things to do that waste time figuring shit out and they just want to play…
@@nathanieljefferies5491Then find another game to play.
@@undefined1509 and when they do there are gamers like you complaining how much you hate getting a bit of help when it is popular and mainstream. You guys keep crying when you see waypoints in a bloody map. Video games as a medium is not sustainable when it only caters to the die hards.
skill issue@@nathanieljefferies5491
I've noticed this when PlayStation games started becoming playable movies. While back on the PS1 and PS2, they were a lot more like actual games.
That trend started on the PS3 when the first Uncharted came out...
I beg to differ it's a trope that's there since FFVII if not since the begining of Cutscenes in video games, the media always wanted to be close to the cinema art, mainly because it's this form of art that inspired a lot the developpers. Like the MGS series (except V) wich are B movies that happen to be video games. And they're freaking great. The main difference with today games is that they try to be cinematic and close to movies because they saw some critics say that it was cool. Why it works with MGS and not many modern games is because Kojima (like his games or not)is a huge cinephile and put a lot of passion in each of his games. That's why many people like Vaas character in Far Cry 3. The actor put a lot of passion in his role while his successors are less memorable
I feel that metal gear solid started it.
@@Geekezf the difference is, FFVII is an RPG, so that's just the genre it's apart of. As for MGS, yes I agree, I enjoy those games. But while that game was unique back in it's day, due to it being the only one like it, now almost every AAA game from PlayStation is essentially that, but without the uniqueness.
@@Multi-Tech Unfortunatly yes.
I just played through The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time for the first time since I was a kid. You can easily figure what to do and where to go next by exploring the area and asking NPCs for clues. It feels so much better than just an arrow with a distance marker in meters guiding me to the next thing.
I did the exact same thing. I loved that there were no waypoints or glowing markers, you just were given a clue as to which area you might need to go next, and then you figured out what to do when you got there. I haven't played more recent Zelda games so I don't know what they're like, but I think the criticism that OoT discourages exploration through linear gameplay is unfair. Sometimes games are so huge and open world that the devs give up and just highlight everything, while OoT has a more focused world that you can genuinely explore on your own.
@@wolliveryoutube Twilight Princess has a very rocky start with the human tutorial, but you become a wolf, the game gives only a few pointers for learning how to use the wolf function, and after that, there are very few forced-feeling tutorials. Skyward Sword's initial tutorial is better, but it never seems to truly let go of your hand; there are way too many times where it tells you way to much. Breath of the wild does pretty much no hand holding for its tutorial; it's pretty much "Here's a few locations you need to get to finish this tutorial. Have fun!", and a very similar mindset is given to the rest of the game. It gives you a location to get to if you want to progress the main story, but it's all up to you to actually get there. The only drawn out tutorial is one shrine where you get taught how to do special attacks. That's pretty much it.
Yea many modern games in all honesty feel just as on rails as the old arcade shooters but with an illusion to freedom.
Yeah, but at least something on the rails like "House of The Dead", is still more engaging than "walking to the next cutscene, the game".
@@Multi-Tech Time Cyisis was awesome!
That's not necessarily bad if done well. Valve games are very linear, but they're really good at selling the illusion that you're making choices. If the illusion is good enough, I'll call it fair. But so many of them are bad at even selling the illusion.
Except rail shooters are at least honest about it.
That's why Breath of the Wild is so loved. The game has minimal hand-holding, and you can literally go anywhere, any time, and do whatever you want
I would say some things that point you in directions are ok, some are not. An Example for a RPG or MMO:
You get a Quest, and from the Info, there is an Area that is known ( like that Nation, this Area of woods ) and your Character would know where that is, because your character lives in that world. Then it would be completely ok to show the player the Area to go to, but, you dont get shown the exact location. Because your character cant know exactly where it is. Or you have to go to a certain house in the City, but, your character isnt from that city. you get only shown the City as the place to go to. Then you ask where that house is and someone points you to a district in that city and you get the info "that direction to that district" untill ypou find someone in that district that tells you the street where that house is and so on.
Make the info aviable that your IN-Game char knows. If you, your real self has to remember EVERYTHING then, maybe you cant play for a week, load a save and "where am i and why am i here again?"
Along the lines of, what would the Character you play know, see, hear and so on and then show that and only that, it makes sense. Its sad that, in a way to aim at "the wider audience" EVERYTHING is explained.
Something important about how quests are handled in modern RPG's that are not throwbacks. Most guide you with an arrow and put set pieces in the middle.
This is a quest in Fallout 1.
A trade caravan went missing. People rumors there is foul play, but in fact caravans are dissapearing no matter wich faction is. So it's more random. You are recommended to speak with other people to ask about their missing caravans. One of the rumors is that it could be a deathclaw, a very dangerous animal from the wastelands. So you go around town asking for deathclaws, everyone thinks they are a myth (despite one town just 2 days walking ahead being full of them) But there is one who claims to have seen one. And he's not right in the head.
So you go to him and he tells you he saw one, and it's up to you to believe his incoherent ramblings or follow him. Then you find the death claw and inside the cave a dead mutant, By this point that dead mutant is probably the first you see in the entire game. This is very important because it sets up the entire second half of it.
There is no quest markers, you are just told to speak with others, sometimes they know where the dude you are looking for , sometimes they don't but if you ask someone else they probably seen him. In the way you find more leads for your main quest learn where the most important NPC's are and what they could be useful for in the biggest town in the game.
If this was a modern rpg game you would have a big arrow telling you where to go next the problem with this system is that it skips speaking with people and getting to understand where you are standing. That's a very important element on RPGs.
Not mentioning you become a god easily in a RPG if you focus your skills in one or 2 elements, In an old one you HAD to play a role. that was the point.
This is a major issue with games like Elden Ring. Asking where the fuck someone is going is a completely reasonable thing for thr player character to do.
The implementation is key. A smart developer will give you an objective and leave you to your own devices to try and figure it out, and then if it's taking too long and likely beginning to frustrate the player you then offer them hints and clues that will lead them to the solution.
That way it works for everybody, without forcing everyone to get treated like an idiot from the outset.
@@st0nedpenguin Leaving you to your own devices as a default is really dumb in an open world. Anyone saying "Go kill the dragon" would result in any player character immediately asking what dragon and where. The idea that the player is an idiot for wanting to know where they're going is absurd. Do you just drive aimlessly around hoping to run into your job interview by complete chance or do you ask when and where it is?
Directions used to be the norm. The reason they got taken out is that voice lines were expensive to do and thus they were dropped in favour of arrows and objective markers. Objective markers make complete sense if you have a map and someone asks you to go somewhere. The idea that using the map makes you a casual is so unbelievably stupid.
Something I really liked about Dragon's Dogma the first time I played is if you summoned a pawn (a npc party member created by other players) that has completed the quest you were on, when you get close to the area, the pawn will say something like "I've done this before, follow me" and will show you were to go.
Speaking of depth, Kubrik had the "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy" in The Shining typed out in all the major languages the film would be distributed in (though the phrasing could be somewhat different in some cases). So if you were German you would experience the same level of horrifying discovery that Shelly Duvall has at that moment.
Now that's a dope move!
"No por mucho madrugar amanece más temprano" in the Spanish version.
Wow, I did not know that. Very cool.
Interesting... did he get his secretary to type these out too or did he drive other people mad as well?
Nicholson himself learned all the languages and typed it all out, every time. Now that's a committed actor!
The Ravenholm level in Half-Life 2 is a prime example of what Maulers talking about for hidden tutorials in games. You get thegravity gun and are immediately set loose in an absolute playground to discover it’s capabilities.
Gold standard for this
Took a long while for me to work up the nerve to even step out of the mine and into the map. I had surround sound and thought for sure I'd get attacked from all sides.
@Chris Miles, yeah, HL2 is still the gold standard for a lot of things in my opinion, but especially the kind of “show, don’t tell” visual storytelling they’re talking about. Soooo immersive.
@@skylx0812 Reminds me of that Antlion scene in Episode 2.
*alarms blaring*
"We got incoming!"
"No, we got a _buttload_ of incoming!"
Am I glad I didn't have surround sound headphones at the time. That part would've been ten times as horrifying.
yeah no
as much as people praise ravenholm for that
so many people forget the very lengthy tutorial that you have to go through with the gravity gun in the previous mission
It's money - it's all about money.
Like with movies, the budgets for games, especially AAA games, has been slowly creeping upwards. On the most practical level this means that there is substantially more risk involved with putting out these products, and a greater demand for larger returns. Naturally this leads to one place - safe, easily digestible, trend-chasing development strategies.
The most important, and often overlooked, thing is that this kind of development isn't meant to target me or you - you as in people who think about what they consume beyond the surface level. This kind of development is meant for average or casual consumers. It's so successful because your average consumer doesn't care about being challenged or provoked into consideration, they just want something that will kill sometime inbetween their responsibilities or actual interests.
The sad reality is that the largest segment of the market isn't held by more involved hobbyist, it's held by these casual consumers. Worse still, with regards to the video game industry, many hobbyist have simply gone along with the trends set by uninformed causal consumers. Remember when people laughed at horse armour? Well paid cosmetic content is now standard practice - same with FOMO updates, Skinner box progression systems, always online DRM, and the overall games as service model.
FOMO is FUD
I remember the days when PC games came in MASSIVE boxes and if you didn't read the instructions you were in trouble. Now it's like kindergarten level gaming.
In the era of automation and mediocrity, even having fun is reduced to a conveyor belt.
I love how Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon totally lampoons/satirizes the opening tutorial most games have. "Just let me kill something dammit!!"
“Press the Jump button to jump.” “You got to be kidding me!😡”
Came here to post this. A fun game too. They lampoon a lot of tropes in that game. "employees, be careful of today's shipment of explosive red barrels"
Part of the reason both movies and games have gone this way is because consumers are increasingly spoiled for choice. There are so many sources of entertainment that game developers aren't incentivized to challenge players, and there's a lot of handholding and waypointing instead of having the player figure things out conventionally. Also true of many films. Obviously it's not a universal trend, but big studios know that if they don't take things down to the least common denominator, the majority of consumers will just get frustrated and turn their attention to something else, and there are a million things to choose from.
I agree. This only means that AAA games and blockbusters must be dumbed down, anyone brave enough can pull off a AA game or an indie film that is challenging.
A lot of games have gotten easier for a tons of different.
Reason a lot haven't gotten easier people have just gotten better at videogames.
Plus devs have started removing content that thought was abusive and dumb.
Should we go back to the arcade set up where you have to pay for another live every time you die?
Games have gotten far better in ever measurable metric. People have just gotten more entitled and bitchy than ever.
@@nathaniels9141 "Games have gotten far better in ever measurable metric." how about being completed upon release? is that not a measurable metric?
Personally, I have a feeling Western movies and games have been dumbed down for the purpose of dumbing down the audience.
Think about it, especially in regards to games. Eventually, you get so used to games only letting you interact with the world in very specific ways that you never think to yourself, “Hmm, can I do this? Is this possible?”
They stop letting you use your brain, and eventually, due to never expecting anything different, you just willingly stop using your brain.
And in regards to movies, I see people say a lot that people’s attention spans are shorter and they need explosions every so often to stay engaged. I can’t help but wonder who put that lie out there, because the success of Dune proved otherwise.
People in the upper echelons of society don’t want you to think; Satan doesn’t want you to think
An embarrassment of riches. Story of our lives. Just wish some more people would wake up to it...instead of harping for MORE.
LOL "More" might be what's killing us.
I miss the days when games didn’t hold your hand because the devs had some respect for the player. You were given tutorials on how things work and it was on you to pay attention. If you screwed up you were punished immediately and had to learn what you did wrong and get better if you wanted to get anywhere. I also miss how games had genres; they would do a few things well not everything terribly. Game design by committee was a mistake. Kids playing nothing but Fortnite or Roblox would lose their minds if they had to play games like Ghouls ‘N Ghosts, Deus Ex, Thief, Indiana Jones and The Fate of Atlantis
because these days they are written for `journalist` and `reviews`. The Players weren`t happy with a game? they simply try to cut us out off the equation.
I hate tutorials. Especially in FF games.
Monster Hunter games are still like that, the comunity memes how awful the tutorials are
Play Bloodborne. They do none of that
The indie game scene is where it’s at right now.
A lot of my favorite games from the past decade have been Indie games that have interesting art styles, a cool core gameplay loop, and add stuff that doesn’t detract from the experience.
I contest a little to the waypoint aspect, in early games, they where either more linear or stuck in "alleys" for progression. Waypoints in large sandbox environments help due to the massive areas that modern games have to explore. As long as you are not locked into having to go to the waypoint, I do not see a problem.
Because it's often a crutch for shitty game design. Between games that have little content beyond "Go to these hundred map markers" and 'exploration' titles that do everything they can to avoid having any actual exploration.
@@boobah5643 do you have any examples of games with no waypoint system that are good in your opinion, or some games that are bad and it is reflected by the waypoint system?
@@blakemccartney1068 of the top of my head Morrowind is a good game with no waypoint system.
All of the Elder Scrolls and Fallout games after lost something good by using the grab the player by the nose waypoint system
Morrowind is also at times bad because it doesn't have a waypoint system, such as when you are in a rush to get some progress in only to realize that you've spent hours in the wrong cave Because when you were supposed to go to Yasamsi you went to Yesamsi by mistake.
The latest Far Cry and Ass Creed games are bad and it's reflected by their waypoint system, large open spaces with very few things placed in uninspired points that do require waypoints to find.
@@Palora01 I agree with the idea of large spaces with nothing there, that is a problem with some sandbox games, but having a tracker to let you know where to go in a large system is not inherently bad is all u am saying. For example, red dead 2 has a quest waypoint system, but similar to fallout/grand theft/ elder scrolls, there are so many other things to do, I like knowing almost where not to go so I do not progress too far before I want to.
@@blakemccartney1068 oh no, I agree there is nothing inherently bad about quest waypoint systems, like with a lot of things it's the implementation of the system that is usually done in a bad way.
I still consider Morrowind one of my favourite RPG's of all time. No compass with map markers, no fast travel (except for town services like a boatman) and absolutely no hand holding. This makes the game feel so much more wondrous and mysterious because you're actually exploring instead of beelining towards a marker on a compass. Because there is very little voiced dialogue the dialogue can be expansive and isn't limited by the budget for the actors. Because you have to be smart with your character you feel like you are genuinely improving as your skills improve. And finally, every character is mortal. None of this "essential character" stuff where they fall unconscious if you clobber them on the head, nope, they die. You can absolutely lose the game this way.
Morrowind rules
Give Dragon's Dogma a try ;7
Aside from NPC death it pretty much covers all the points you listed in a better-looking package.
Absolutely. I remember it taking me like 2 hours to find the cave I needed to go to, but it was so rewarding when I finally found the right one.
Getting beaten to death by a mudcrab, good times.
"You N'wah!"
I tend to have issues with focusing, so while I don't need constant tutorial messages in my face. A waypoint usually helps. I can get really lost in the weeds especially when I am exploring. So a blip on the map is perfect since chances are i'm not going to immediately go the way of progression I can do whatever, get lost and let my ADHD brain be happy but then when I'm satisfied with whatever bullshit I was doing I know where the hell to go. But that's just me, I recognize that a lot of people don't like getting their hand held and despite my issues and need for waypoints I agree with the handholding stuff. I'd rather just figure gameplay out for myself for the most part. I do miss when games just organically taught you things and I think it's a very lost art. No one likes to lose but losing helps us win. Dark Souls doesn't need an easy mode. lol.
A quote from the director of the Highlander when asked about the deleted scenes. He said that they were removed cause the film editors just didn’t think Americans would get it. He said that was a trend in movie making when it comes to making films for the American audience. Just take a look at how different Legend by Ridley Scott is. The American version is nothing like the international version.
Meanwhile, Mystery Science Theater 3000 has been running off and on with the philosophy of "the right people will get it [a joke]" for 30 years.
It's not just games. It's all of life. And people expect/ want it. They get freaked out by any sort of open ended exploration. Everything must be planned, controlled, predictable, and above all, SAFE. We've lost our collective ability to think freely, and are afraid of people who do, and of environments that require it.
Yeah, it is rather disturbing, even downright frightening at times, that nowadays divergent thoughts and lateral thinking are equated with “conspiracy theories” and fake news, and thus those expressing them are to be either mocked or violently silenced.
The whole history of human social development is one of ever-increasing centralization, uniformity, and efficiency. It's basically a continuation of the same evolutionary process that led to cells grouping together to exist as interchangeable components of a giant machine (that machine being a fish, a dog, or you).
The future is Borg.
@@stevenscott2136 I hate that you appear to be right. I wonder if when we form that super organism, are we aware of it? I think cities begin to cross that line. There is an emergent intelligence in some of our large structures. I imagine at some undefinable point we will exist to serve the overmind, and not the other way around. I also don't think we'll ever really be disposed of, since we're like hyper adaptable white blood cells equipped with terrabyte level computers. We'll be repairing and expanding the physical hardware of the emerging super organism... Even if it is a hyper intelligent smart AI.
Video games definitely have an insane advantage when it comes to delivering lore an exposition, because characters can just do that while you're playing the game. Take God of War for example, you've got Kratos, Atreus and Mimir chatting away with each other for the whole damn game, about really interesting stuff, but it almost never interrupts the gameplay. Pretty much every quest in that game would be just fine without that dialogue, since the gameplay is really solid, but having it layered on top just makes everything so much better.
I hate having to run off and do some busywork to get the NPCs to realise they're sentient again and give me more information on the story and world. And I hate when the game stops to make you listen to an audiobook before letting you actually play it again. But some studios really know how to do this well.
Arenanet, the devs of Guild Wars 2, really learned their lesson here. Early game story always stops you when NPCs deliver dialogue. Now with newer content they give you full movement and combat with most NPC dialogue, unless a pause in gameplay makes sense.
After the release of Ragnarok, this comment aged kind of poorly since Ragnarok forces you into dozens of cutscenes so that the characters can tell you exactly what's going on rather than treating the player like a functioning adult who can put things together with their own brain.
I loved 2018 to death and agree with what you said about it, but Ragnarok took it way too far with the dialogue.
^Yeah, I don't remember 2018 GoW, but Ragnarok had a lot of "I see something" or "maybe try this to get this debris off the wall" kind of comment by the companions. While I appreciated at the time, now I think about it, that was a lot of handholding.
My god I watched my younger brother play an early 2000s game that didn't tell him exactly what to do and it amazed me how stuck he was unable to beat the simplest of puzzles
It’s funny, I’ve been gaming for a very long time, since the days of pong on the Atari when I was a kid. My first real game that I got into and loved was Space Quest. That’s a game you can complete in about half an hour or less if you know what to do, but it took me weeks and I even had to order a hint book from Sierra to get myself unstuck and couldn’t play until it arrived. I didn’t give up, but it was a bit annoying that you could miss something unless you really looked (by typing “look at xxxx”) at everything in the scene because nothing was highlighted. If you didn’t pick up a piece of glass from your crashed spaceship at one point you would be screwed and have to reload an old game because there was no way to ever go back and get it. Again, that didn’t make me give up and stop playing, but if I had not been able to order a hint book I certainly would have. Also back in those days you had to write down information you got on a notepad. The game would not conveniently store it somewhere for you to reference when you needed it. That was kind of cool. Years later I got Elder Scrolls Morrowind and I spent a few hours wandering around but never figured out where to go or what to even do first. I was probably an idiot and missed something obvious, but I did actually just give up on that one and never tried it again. I love big open world games and I like it when it’s up to you to explore and find things, but I am glad that your objectives are shown on a map so you can figure out where to go. Depending on the game you still usually just get your main objective shown and you have to explore to find side quests, but when you do they are then shown on the map. Maybe it’s just me, but I would get bored and stop playing if I had to figure out where to go on a huge, open world map. But perhaps that’s just me because I’m ADHD. On the other hand, with games like doom eternal I think you could be left to figure things out. Maybe have an option to disable tutorials so you can skip all that if you prefer. There would definitely be a certain. Satisfaction in figuring out for yourself that you have to hit the gun mounted on top of the brain crabs first to get the better of them, and figure out for yourself which weapons are most effective against different enemies. For open world, a bit of hand holding is helpful, but for a lot of other games I agree that it could be more fun to have to figure more things out. But maybe let the user decide how much hand holding they want?
Started Subnautica this week and definitely haven't been treated like I'm stupid. Thumbs up
It was slightly better during EA, your PDA had edgy quotes once in a while. I truly miss the line ’congratulations on not dying’ , but sadly enough the devs are soft skinned and thought this was offensive, thus it was removed.
Definitely the learning curve in the first 30 minutes is pretty steep but also very rewarding
Just don't play the Subnautica game, Below Zero. Subnautica is still one of my more played games. Below Zero... I'll take a hard pass. More hand holding and of course "The Message".
@@gregmchurch oh nooooo, that’s too bad. Probably going back to no man’s sky after this then
@@frostreaper1607 I think a non-snarky PDA is more in keeping with the Alterra corporate culture. Megacorps have no sense of humor. Just like I've been told there are no guns because the devs are lefties, but if there WERE proper weapons in the game, it would be too easy. It's hard to maintain an atmosphere of suspense when YOU are the scariest thing in the game.
Ori and the Blind Forest is one of my favourite games ever and I think it builds up your skills in the game very organically. Like, you learn a new skill called 'bash' where you fling yourself from an enemy to another enemy, sort of using them as a temporary platform, and in the next dungeon your skills with the ability are put to a test, and at the end of the dungeon there's an epic escape sequence where you're likely to die a dozen times before you memorise what to anticipate and how to utilise the new skill. I wish games were more like that nowadays.
Did you play Ori and the Will of the Wisp? I haven't even finished it yet, but due to a crapton of new mechanics it introduces, it's simultaneously easier and also harder xD definitely one of my favorites and the art and music are as on point as ever.
@@randomperson8571 I played it, but didn't complete. I have it on PC, but the controls feel off on keyboard and I couldn't get used to a controller. Plus there were some really annoying bugs, and I didn't like the fetchy sidequests they added. The original is superior in every way, imo.
Try Hollow Knight if you haven't already. Tremendous amount of exploring and secrets with a moveset that gradually comes together to expand the world. You will get lost several times, but there's always a path you haven't searched, and that is often the answer. The controls are also silky smooth.
I really enjoyed it, as I enjoyed ROTR also. And while playing both I noticed what either of the devs were trying to do. The graphics and ability to draw you into the game world has developed tremendously. And Ori "cuts" you off with clever world and character setup- you are just a energetic entity and you really don´t die but just loose your ability to coherently exist in the given "universe". It was a lot of fun to die 3-5x and then discover devs intention and be like " aha, that way it goes".
And then there are games like ROTR which have still the best graphics and physics and also the best character animation and voice acting. All that drew me so into the world that even if I liked some more challenge I was feeling devastated when I saw her falling down and crushing her skull.
That´s too bad that everybody just name todays games "bad" and don´t even try to understand how the tech has evolved and can influence the gamers mind set.
And does anybody of those " hardcore gamers" never use Google Maps\Here Maps to get from A to B? Using only stars and sextant to navigate streets
ature? Imho games should be relaxing and fun, you want real challenge- take out compass and hard printed map and go hiking.
PS there´s always possibility to not use the technical aids- turn off jump points and not press Z on the Medallion.(I tried to not to, though the world is bigger and bigger these days and the object\grass density grows by hour, that for grinding herbs I sometimes used medallion).
If you look Digital Foundries game comparison between PC and PS4 you can see that PS has 10% of grass density- so ofc "in the old good days" you had on PS1 one bush and that´s the one you could collect herbs from. Todays game worlds are more detailed- but no1 seems to take it into account.
The reason Sekiro grabbed my attention is because it had that element of difficulty and figure it the fuck out, brought me back to when things didnt hold your hand. Everyone's a pussy now
Btw drinker, I'm loving all these clips taken from your live shows. Gives me bite-size ways to hear these conversations from streams I may have missed.
Devs need to step it up and just make games the way they used to. I showed my moms neighbors Super Mario 64 and it didn't take long for those kids to be completely sold, exploring the castle, playing through the levels, having blast. And it doesn't matter, quality is quality. And today we can still do the same thing.
Which is exactly why Shadow of the Colossus is such a beloved game. No directions, no explanations - just a map, a beam of light that points north, south, East or west(is it through mountains or underground - impossible to know) and one vague hint per Colossus that MIGHT clue you in to a weakness, but is more often just a physical description
"I grew up surrounded by idiots." - Boba
It's what I loved about Silent Hill 2. The scenery said so much about the protagonists as well as the other main characters. Not only this but the endings were decided not by binary decisions but instead by how you played (how many times you looked at certain items in your inventory, how long you took to walk through a hallway, how close you stuck to an NPC, and so on)
I'm currently playing silent hill 2 I'll be back after completing it
@@cholebhature5765 I hope you enjoy! Lemme know what ending you got!
@@firstnamelastname4331 bro I fkin loved it and how amazing the whole experience was. I got the in water ending.
@@firstnamelastname4331 but I'm still confused about the whole marry & maria thing like was she really my wife or a lookalike or it was all in my brain.
@@cholebhature5765 so bear with me, I'm bad at explaining things so apologies in advance.
Maria is a manifestation of James' subconscious created as a way to torture himself for the guilt he feels. He forces himself to see her get hurt over and over again by pyramid head, who represents that guilt and his repressed sexual urges (which is why pyramid head uses a spear to penetrate/kill maria. )
Also in water is my favorite ending (and technically canonical since it's referenced in SH4 but that's hardly important)
I think this really depends on the kind of game you're playing. A game with complicated mechanics requires hand holdy tutorials just so the player really understands how to play. A game with simpler mechanics requires little to no tutorial. Really just depends on if the game is designed to be intuitive or not.
I was replaying through the Uncharted games and I realized how refreshing it was to play without a minimap telling me exactly where to go.
Naughty Dog games tend to use the environment to guide the player. They normally use lighting to guide you towards the next checkpoint or make you go the wrong way in order do some exploration but they do it subtlety. The game will offer to give you a hint if you take too long but you just ignore that cue and carry on.
I would say that mass effects logbook journal thing is the best exposition in a game I enjoyed reading those logs
It was basically excerpts from a sci-fi novel. I kept thinking about what author I'd get to flesh them out.
Lmfao, I feel personally attacked. That's exactly what happened to me playing kingdom hearts part 1 where you can across the sleeping door shortly after you meet goofy and daffy duck (Edit: I meant Donald Duck). Although it may have just been that I wasn't too invested into the game enough to continue (probably not my type of game personally, I guess)...this just proves that if a game is interesting/good enough, you'll be interested/invested enough to figuring out everything yourself. Or at least wanting to learn more.
Most everyone thought that great story creation (in all its incarnations) would get better and better as time goes on.... but the exact opposite seems to be happening... technically everything LOOKS better because of FX innovation, but they don't FEEL better... for the most part, all content resembles a state-of-the-art robot - perfection on the outside, soulless on the inside.... instead of raising humanity to new heights, the inability to tell a great story is keeping us tethered to the ground.
It almost feels like there is a deliberate interest behind feeding people dull stories in order to keep them docile, doesn’t it?
@@Zeburaman2005 Really discouraging. Great, ground breaking art used to be an aspiration... now it seems the only goal is the bare minimum... I hope I'm wrong, but all I see is dark creative days ahead...
@@Zeburaman2005 I think you might be overthinking it, to use a version of Hanlon's razor. I think it's more probable to think that they're trying to earn as much money as possible, and to do that they're aiming at the lowest common denominator and taking as few risks as possible.
I also think it has to do with the fact that they have too large teams that don't necessarily talk to each other.
@@RannonSi Oh, they are definitely in it for the money, no doubt about it. But since I am a rather pessimistic person, I can’t help but suspect their greed is being taken advantage of by third parties. Kind of how “THE MESSAGE” is officially about promoting positive values like inclusivity and diversity, yet the actual aim is to subvert and destabilise society to the point of ushering into an utopia that paradoxically reads like a hard Sci-fi dystopian novel.
Hacks are in leadership positions???
I sure felt like an idiot when it took me 5 hours to beat the Valkyrie queen in god of war, that game sure did make that easy
I like GOW but lets be honest the Valkyrie fights were the only good boss fights
@@johnbishop2536 late reply but yeah, In terms of feeling like a fun and engaging combat experience you’re right. To be fair Cory Barlog has said that he really wanted there to be more but they didn’t have the budget. I believe he also said they’re making sure god of war ragnarok has way more cool fights in it
Unfortunately, it's because they are, and are conditioned in winning. Deduction and reasoning have been removed from games. In other words, the Challenge is gone.
A result of the everyone gets a trophy generation? We are in trouble as a society because we are churning out weak little jellies.
Kingdom Come Deliverance is a great example of environmental storytelling and treating the audience/player like they're intelligent. One example among many, you're sent out to look for a missing merchant who has an item you need, and given a general road he was supposed to be coming from. So you ride around, not even sure you're on the right road, and spot a bloodstain on the ground. You might ride past it not realizing its significance, then eventually go back and follow it out of curiosity, find a wagon with dead people, see how they died, follow a trail leading off from there (no Batman detective vision either, it'll be the occasional bloodstain or a dropped item), which leads to a bandit camp, which has a chest with the item you need and the dead merchant beside it. Most of the game is like that, there's very little hand holding
yeah but i mean, that alchemy system...
Interesting, sounds like Westworld as a video game.
I think reading was interesting for it
did you learn to read? No. well guess all the words in the game are a mystery to you then
gameplay is bland and boring af tho. combat is clunky and awkward.
Summoning the Jellyfish's twin broke my goddamn heart.
But the little prissy spin gesture you get is hilarious to use after you kill someone in pvp, especially if you're a big armored strength build lol
One of the greatest moments in gaming was getting plunked into MYST and not knowing where you were or how the game was to be played. We've been de-evolving from that ever since.
I appreciate that Nerdortic was present for this lovely discussion
Considering he is still stuck in the first room of Witcher 3 game...Gary could use the help.
Horizon forbidden west was literally the biggest example of a game treating the player like a baby, even spawning a weaker version of an enemy if you die an apex machine once. Aloy never shuts up about anything, constantly getting on your nerves as she tells you how, where, and what to do at every point in an OPEN WORLD GAME. There is never any sense of mystery or problem solving for the player, as the game points out how to do everything and then has Aloy literally tell you, even carrying over to fighting enemies when she audibly tells the player what the machine is weak to or strong against. This ALSO carries over to the writing, with every bit of optional dialogue reiterating information already stated in the previous main conversation because the game assumes you're too stupid to for instance "understand which direction is north".
I know what most enemies are weak to: braced shot. It was my 'no' option for a lot of general fights.
@@SilvrSavior yup, which made it all the more annoying when Aloy says, “I sHoULd bE UsInG FirE aRrOwS”. Like just let the player do what they want and figure it out on their own.
I will say that the game telling you which ammunition to use doesnt make the fights any easier. The machine fights are surprisingly difficult for a AAA game unless you play on easy or sth. Also, for this statement 'even spawning a weaker version of an enemy if you die to it once', source or dont make shit up.
@@Jerry-dx3cb It’s demonstrably false. If I get killed by a fireclaw, that fireclaw is going to be there waiting to kick my ass with the same gusto as the first go.
@@Jerry-dx3cb I'm not "making shit up"...(who crapped on your waffles?). If you die to an apex machine the game will spawn a regular variant of the machine/machines you just died to in the general area, I have over 130 hours in HFW at this point btw so I've died quite a few times to them only to get pissed when the apex heart I was looking for can no longer be obtained because I died once. I enjoy the combat a lot actually, that and the beauty of the world/enemies is what's kept me playing. But I don't need to be reminded of what ammo type to use every single time I engage in a fight or scan a machine, I never said it made the game physically easier, it's just incredibly annoying. In fact I never even said the fight's weren't difficult to begin with, that literally has nothing to do with my complaint. My complaint is that nearly everything else in the game from the main story to dialogue to quest design is bloated with Aloy's monotone reiterations of information you tend to already know, or she tells you how to solve a puzzle within ten seconds of entering an new area. It's hand-holding to the max and if it doesn't bother you that's fine, but I like games that don't treat me like an inebriate.
Ico was such a fun game. I spent holiday break 2011 in a cottage in Portland, OR with my best friend drinking craft beer and playing Ico and Xenogears. That was an awesome week.
Nintendo actually perfected the art of showing you how to do things/use new items without holding your hand through the entire game a long time ago. All everyone else had to do is copy them (like Capcom did with games like RE4).
BS.
There's a reason games like Super Metroid are still analyzed to this day, they perfected the use of the invisible guiding hand of the developer to teach players new skills and to show them the way forward.
Zombies comin' up the hell right now. Grab the shotgun, you don't gotta load it, we did that shit for you. Shoot 'em in the head!
^damn Super Metroid. Still the greatest Metroid game in my opinion.
3:12 I do wonder how much of this is them thinking the gamers are idiots and how much of this is because it's faster and easier to just pluck down a waypoint, compared to actually writing down how to get somewhere (either outright or just the descriptions necessary for someone to figure it out).
I think part of the problem is that they're doing things for the lowest common denominator, because otherwise someone else will get the funding to do the thing (game/film/whatever), and there you'll be with the ideas of a masterpiece but no funding while someone else gets all the funding to do some generic version of whatever genre's popular this decade.
This is one of the major reasons why I love Breath of the Wild. The handholding there is damn near minimum. You take someone experienced in video games, and they'll do some weird shit to get to the objective. Then you get someone who doesn't play games, and they'll accidently stumble into a totally new an unexpected way to get there. Maybe better, maybe worse, but they can get there too.
You're my new favorite person, bringing up Breath of the Wild in a post-Elden Ring world xD both BOTW and Elden Ring deserve credit for trusting the player. The love behind those two games' designs is obvious. Those games were made solely with players in mind and that's why they're both delightful. (And also why, I think, people are trying so hard to compare them when they can't really be compared. Please stop, lol. The only true similarity between them is that they were made with love.)
That's why BotW is my favorite open world game ever. Best tutorial zone, so many ways to get to places, etc!
I'm still playing that game to this day, this time with mods and stuff.
I prefer Breath of the Wild to Elden Ring. BotW is beautiful and a style I love with great designs. Elden Ring feels more generic with often ugly designs and the ”music” is awful… sometimes it’s so dark I can’t even see. Gets a bit repetitive too after a while. I do appreciate the challange though and it’s rewarding when you beat a hard boss.
This is why I feel western developers are salty about Elden Ring doing so well. They were sold this lie that they had to dumb down their games to find an audience and sanitize it to death. Make your game a grab bag of random ideas to appeal to the widest possible audience to be profitable. Then Elden Ring blew that narrative straight out of the water. From Soft has been able to carve out a very specific niche but in doing so they have acquired a very loyal fanbase. And a fanbase that continues to grow. I know several people where Elden Ring is their first Souls game and they are loving it. It's so refreshing to have an open world game that doesn't cover the screen with so many icons on where to go. I have just been exploring trying to find every boss and dungeon and I still am nowhere near done with the game.
I'm one of them. I'm not even a form soft fan but elden ring has my attention and I can't wait to get the game. A dark fantasy that I can do whatever I want and I can play a magic swordsman sign me up
and they can`t put the reviews straight to k0tak0 because they have to actually play it, and the most important reason they hate it?: no messaging for them to push, that`s the saltiest reason.
It's worse than that; the western entertainment industry is effectively an echo-chamber cabal at this point. Nearly everything from the West has become hyper-monetized and creatively sterile, because no one in the West will allow anyone except maybe a specific few to stand out. And those they allow don't do so because they're actually works of talent, but because they're approved by a new aristocracy that is more interested in jerking each other off.
They keep creating new ways to celebrate mediocrity, but if someone is genuinely exceptional appears, it can only be blasphemy.
I feel like that dominance of their niche has let them stagnate somewhat in terms of design. I've seen plenty of seemingly valid complaints about Elden Ring be dismissed out of hand because "it's supposed to be hard, git gud", and I can't help but wonder if a game not specifically associated with FromSoft/the souls "genre" would be given the same leeway and excuses, or if it needs that legacy and reputation to temper expectations.
@@QuantumRangerPower you right. I've seen long time fans of them complain about some cheap ass bosses.
Whilst modern gaming does suck, you have to admit there are some good games being made today.
Noone denies that, but to find a good game, is like finding a diamond in pile of shit.
@@justinambru8529 I think previous generations of gaming had a lot more digging through piles to find the diamonds than people remember. I think the biggest difference between now and then is that in the past, the big studios experimented more, throwing stuff against the wall and seeing what stuck. Now, they know what sells huge numbers to the mainstream audience so you see all the publishers pushing similar games, and beating them to death with annualized releases.
@@ressljs True. The big studios were once little studios who managed to have a big hit with the right thing at the right time. The 80's didn't really have 'Big' studios as we do now. Then they got bigger. Then they got shareholders and Directors. There was a lot of dross back in the day but we tend to remember the few good ones because we kept playing them. There are still some greats coming out of the indy side. Rimworld and Subnautica for example. Had to buy 2 extra of Rimworld so my wife and kids could also play lol. Only game we have ever done that with in 20+ years together
I tend to not buy anything until I see user reviews now. Seems to work pretty well for me though it does mean not many new games. If anything, that just means we have more ways to make the right choice for us than we used to. We can be much more discerning.
@@ressljs Yeah. I think that the problems with people talking about how good games were (except the rose-tinted glasses) is that they're excluding things like the Video Game Crash and the reason there was a crash.
@@RannonSi I think that was caused by E.T. the game, which was one of the worst games ever released.
i'm glad that ICO was brought up as Shadow of the Colossus has one of my favourite stories and settings and it's so great because of the fact that it's a video game, it wouldn't work in any other medium in my opinion
You, mauler and Andre could have a daily hour show talking about anything and I would never miss it
Generally speaking I don't mind waypoints in my games as long as it is done in a way that fits thematically with the game. Turning on street view navigation for a driving game makes a lot more sense than having some sort of an HUD display while trying to chase down dragons and griffins.
I totally agree with the observation that games designers and movie writers either don't trust the audience to be intelligent enough to follow or don't trust their own skills in storytelling to be able to convey the desired emotions into their own characters.
This is what happens when you spend the last decade making movies by checking demographic boxes instead of simply learning how to craft a good story this is what you are left with.
My guiltiest pleasure is Lord of the Rings Online. I was not a huge Tolkien fan - it took me several tries to get through the book LOTR despite enjoying The Hobbit in junior high school. And I was completely unimpressed by the book, which I finally finished in university. When the Peter Jackson films came out, I was able to better get into the world, but getting into LOTRO was what changed my mind about the books and helped me build an appreciation for the lore and world building Tolkien had done. In a funny way, then, the video game actually increased my appreciation of literature. The game itself has changed in the 10+ years it's been available, and much has been "dumbed down", with for the most part quests now designed to be as straightforward as possible, a big arrow on the interface showing you exactly where to find the next objective, and many routines simplified or removed. Loot from defeated enemies is automatically accumulated, for example, etc. There isn't a lot of thinking or strategizing to do, but honestly, while I like the *idea* of more challenging games, at the end of a long work week when I just want to wander around the breathtaking scenery of Middle Earth and boost my self-esteem with some easily accomplished tasks, I'm quite fine with how LOTRO evolved. And I have to believe the producers have made these changes because it is netting them the most money from players who have been sucked in by the free-to-play model. It's easy to criticize game developers but I am sure they aren't acting alone or out of malice. They make money by giving the public what it wants.
The FarCry Blood Dragon tutorial used to be satire, however it seems to only become more of a true representation of modern tutorials with each passing year. "Running is like walking, only faster. To jump, jump."
My first playthrough of Morrowind was just last year at the urging of a friend of mine.
The first time I came across the Scroll of Icarian Flight I used it and died immediately. I set it aside because it was, literally, too powerful for me to use.
Eventually I started learning more magic and thought "hey, I have a Slow Descent spell..." After figuring that out and flying around for awhile I thought "Man... That's just Fortify Acrobatics... There are like 12 other attributes I can do that to..." I then went down a rabbithole of breaking the game that lasted months.
That's the perfect example I can think of after listening to this discussion. Morrowind was a game that threw possibilities at you right out the gate, but it was up to you to make it surviveable.
You can see how much it has changed. Without mods, Skyrim was just a Walking Simulator that turned into a Fast Travel Simulator. I like to imagine that Fallout 74 never happened.
Indie and AA are where it's at, and if you don't have a PC or a Nintendo Switch (the best platforms for those markets) know that you have my sympathies.
Yeah hotline miami is challenging as hell
I basically stopped playing AAA titles a few years ago. Indie games are so much better and cheaper. Small teams of people with passion is what makes good games. Hell, that’s what makes good art, is passion!
Paying $20 (usually much less) and finding a great game you could put 100 hrs into is very satisying. AAA start and stay at 60, and only work till the next AAA comes out and its forgotten by its target audience.
@@scottneil1187 modern games, not 10 yr old classics, thats what the video/discussion is about....lol
Yeah ditto man , I find their financial constraints leads to more creative thinking!
Ico is a masterpiece! I remember playing it as a child, desperately trying to save the girl. The most fun and frustration I had in a video game in my entirely life!
to buttress the argument that games can convey complex levels of story; more than one article has been written on Majoras Mask hiding a story in Ikana Valley, how the people used to worship the deity Majora and rejected the three goddesses and the Triforce and was punished for it. Link redeems the people of Termina. They're incredibly in-depth.
Doom Eternal really excels at this. It doesn't "tell" much story at all. Most of the story is up to the player to find and read.
That was Doom 2016...eternal turned it up a notch but agree Less so than other AAA games
yeah cuz, you know the Doom games are known for having a deep and consuming story right?
@@zoltanz288 There actually is a real story in 2016 and Eternal, you just have to read the codex
A great "recent" example for me was the earlier Prince of Persia reboot/sequels. There were so many times where you just got dropped into a puzzle room with zero indicator of what you're supposed to do and you...played the damn game to figure it out.
The BEST example of all time for me though as an indicator of how things changed, is comparing any modern MMO to Star Wars Galaxies. Modern MMOs have massive cinematic intros and tutorials that hold your hand through the first few hours with quests and objectives. Star Wars Galaxies you made a character, picked a starting planet, then were dumped into a random spot on that planet and left to your own devices. It was great. It really hammered home the whole immersion part of being a small cog in a huge machine.
Drinker, I think you've limited yourself to AAA titles. Even just AA ones - like Nioh, Pathfinder games(?), Vermintide 2 - don't shy away from pushing the player. The indie scene is polarized by the 'casual vs. hardcore' divide: casual ones are intended to be relaxing and easy or just be pure power fantasies while hardcore ones try to push their difficulties as much as they can. Big names definitely become more and more dumbed-down with each new entry, though.
As extremely rough around the edges as it was, Outward was another good example. Uncompromisingly difficult starting out, but with hidden elements along the way that could make you extremely capable if you bothered to invest in figuring them out, and earning the power fantasy of the fully developed character later on.
FromSoftware certainly did its own thing and had other games to use as inspiration, but games like Outward were like proto-level ER, just oftentimes harder to look at and significantly less polished. Indie games are where it's at.
@@thant0s I loved the idea of multiplayer in that game. With spells just being so long to set up, that needing a second player was just essential for doing half of it.
Funnily though it can also count as an example of why dumbing down games can be good. I was really annoyed, when certain events blocked you form doing certain things (like when the home town gets burned down, and entire levels becoming meaningless, as the story just does not progress in that direction anymore)
Also it was super hard to find a second player because of the difficulty.
@@0ntimetaiment921 Our experiences were quite a bit different it seems, and I don't mean that in a rude way, I just sink a BUNCH of hours into digital entertainment and saw a lot of patterns very early on that I think made the experience much easier.
But yes, I can certainly agree that there were numerous quest flags and triggers that were a bit *too* obscure if one is *only* looking at the information available natively in the game. A more elegant way to handle the destruction of the town would have been to drip feed more info over a longer period of time, and have the perceived threat ramp up, but when it came to that portion of game development, the like, single person dev team had some weaknesses next to what otherwise is a wonderful experience.
@@thant0s Oh, I definitely liked the game. I just wanted to point out, that things like "quest pointers" ect are sometimes useful, especially when you don't have a lot of time. (I sometimes start playing a game I have not played for months, and then it's super nice to have logbooks ect to remind you what happened. for example)
And as you said: Outward was a little rough on the edges, but I agree that that's excusable in the big picture.
The Forest was an amazing game in not telling you what to do or where to go. They give you an opening cutscene that provides your end goal, then set you loose. It's up to you to figure out how to achieve that. The Forest is one of my top favorite games.
That intro little back and forth kinda tells me you two haven't thought too hard on that question. Reason is is because games and movies have the same ability to do environmental, and sub textual storytelling. There are different practices that each has to cater to in order to pull it off well, but they both can do it equally.
It's funny you brought this up, about the Assembly Line Design of games. You lot are primarily movie critics, but I'm sure you've noticed that Gaming has gone through this same rot that movies are going through now. Difference is, that rot started in gaming years before we all started noticing it in movies. AAA Gaming companies don't make interactable worlds. They make amusement park rides. Any time a "secret" is put into a game, or a puzzle, or an intrigue, there will be an arrow pointing you right to the solution and 5 npcs or documents telling you the solution. Anytime there's a quest in a game, they can't just trust the player to understand simple directions like "Go to X town and find X person in X building." There has to be an arrow, on screen text, and an npc on the road who just happens to know that person.
And it's the same thing in movies. We can't just intuit a person's attitude or feelings. We have to be told, and they have to pose and flaunt and be a caricature. We can't just understand the setting and it's general feel. We have to be told this place is dangerous, quirky, or safe. We can't empathize a character's relationship with someone. We have to have them fighting, or kissing, or fucking to shove what these people are down the audience's throats.
It's all the same problems. The makers of these products don't treat their audience as Human. They treat them like cattle. Too dumb to understand, but will still line up at the feeding trough when the bell rings. And they've bred a LOT of gamers to do exactly that brilliantly. Well. The floor is falling out of that fanbase lately, I feel. All the drama and scandal has put a black mark on these companies, so people should be less inclined to support them. At least, that's my hope. That people will act like thinking Humans and treat these situations accordingly, but the sheep mentality of a lot of those fans runs deeeep.
It's also why I follow people like you guys. Because when everyone around you is braying that the new bland, broken railroad of noise and lights is the best thing ever, you can start feeling like you're insane just because you feel like the only one holding these games to standards. Standards as high as "Let me play the game, not the game play the game" sometimes.
Well put
The first time I played Fallout 3 I had no idea what I was doing. After going through the opening narrative of being raised in and escaping the vault, then going scrambling around wasting ammo and avoiding enemies, I really felt like a naive kid in a hostile world who had no idea what she was doing and was lucky to not get killed right away. It really made for an immersive experience I'll never forget.😊
I had that with Fallout 4, which was my first game in 30 years. Just wandering around with my dog, killing everything that looked at me wrong and worrying about my supply of ammo and stimpacks.
The intro to fallout 3 in the vault is such a great way to ease the player in while building the world and story very naturally
@@drdeadbeat1604 thats why one of most popular mods for fallout 3 is an alternate start mod. the vault is a boring, overly lenghty tutorial filled with utter nonsense and illusions of choice.
@@zoltanz288 each to their own, but I thought it was ingenious and it really got me immersed and adjusted to the gameplay very quickly
" To move, press the analog stick" Really? I thought I was supposed to eat the damn thing to move.
That's even wrong. You TILT the stick. Pressing it will probably make you crouch or sprint or something.
You’re supposed to rub it back and forth sensually
Game: "Hold L2 to strafe"
Also game: Does not trust player to know to hold L2 to strafe so it adds an autrostrafe to firing even withouth pressing L2 🤦♀️
Is anyone here old enough to have played the Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy text adventure? That game treated you like you were WAY more intelligent (and, frankly, insane) than most people actually are. I don't think most people even figured out how to get the Babel fish, without which you die very, very quickly.
Half-Life (the first one) really taught me to appreciate older video games that didn't have to teach you everything. Heck, that managed to tell a story without cutscenes.
I remember the game Myst from rhe 90s, where you started knowing nothing about what to do, where it was placed, and you had to Wander around and figure out every inch of what was going on. It was a great time of adventure when the creators trusted you could do it.
I see it as the same kind of problem that modern cinema has with treating the audience like infants that need to be spoon fed everything
Speaking of treating the audience like idiots...
Something I noticed the other day with what I call 'Wine Aunt Entertainment", it's those TV dramas (like Call the Midwife) that amp emotive music loudly over a scene like they expect their target audience are complete NPCs that can't tell what to feel without it blatantly pointed out to them.
It's basically the drama equivalent of a laugh track.
I like that some games are starting to offer toggle on/off for things like maps, waypoints etc. While I can take the points being made here, I do actually like knowing where I've to go and all that, as I'm in my mid-30s now. I can't expend 000s of hours on a game any more to figure it all out between work, family and everything else. Mechanics that help cut the time spent down I find really helpful. Most important thing is, choice is starting to re-emerge to fit the needs of different people better, and more choice on how to play is ultimately a good thing IMO.
I love the fact that Miyazaki doesn't give a shit if you find everything in his game. In fact, he goes out of his way to make things obscured and elusive.
Perhaps it's a "sign of the times" we are in when a game like Elden Ring receives negative reviews based upon the fact that it provides the player TOO much freedom.
yea but those are the minortiy...elden ring is proof that a fuckload of people want games that challange them.
@@1whitedan Absolutely agree.
@@HelghastStalker sounds like you need to git gud.
@@HelghastStalker dark souls isnt even that hard.
its just learning mechanics
Honestly I would say dark souls's difficulty is closer to raiding in an MMO
Where the goal is to fight a boss to learn the mechanics of that boss until you finally clear it, which may take many attempts
which is in direct opposition to a lot of games where you are kinda expected to be able to beat bosses on the first attempt
The big thing is the bosses in dark souls are their main appeal, while raid bosses in most MMOs are kind of a side thing
Also chromehounds is the greatest game of all time, and really just needs a remaster on PC
@@HelghastStalker funny is that souls game was never been asibine difficulty you have tools and other path that can make tbe game as difficult as you want. Like an actual rpg.
I’m reminded of the old Sierra games and Lucasfilm games where some of the puzzles or how you used items were really off the wall. We had a heckuva time trying to get into the Governor’s Mansion in Secret of Monkey Island. We knew that you could give meat to the guard dogs and had an idea we could get past them that way and there was also a random flower that you could pick in the forest. Playing around in the bar kitchen one day, found out that you could stew the meat in a pot on the stove. “Hey, let’s see what else I can add to the pot. Wow, I can add the flower for some reason. Oh, look the meat is now poisoned with the flower that makes you drowsy.” My brother got us past another stuck spot, basically just getting frustrated and trying every item at a certain spot
We did have to break down and get a cheat guide for King’s Quest 3 because we had a bootleg copy and couldn’t do the spells without it, but by and large, we got through a lot of games without having guides. And there were lots of amusing deaths along the way
I don't mind a bit more hand-holding if its in the interest of not wasting the players time, I am not a fan of running around for 2 hours trying to figure out what the hell the developer was thinking when they designed a quest based on vague wording. I usually just look up a walkthrough at that point, but holy crap has it gone way too far to the point where so many games are practically on rails, the reason games like dark souls and (from what I've heard) Elden Ring work is because you usually have enough of an idea of where you need to go, its just a matter of figuring out exactly how to get there without getting killed or you need to figure out a strategy to kill that particular boss and the game is NOT going to give you any hints about it.
Aloy in Horizon Zero Dawn : ...umm...survive. Look at the map. Go somewhere you haven't been yet. Maybe don't go anywhere near that T-rex with chainsaws for a face till we've leveled up a bit...or a lot. Learn what's going on as you explore. Meet interesting side characters with minor plot arcs, and add depth to the overall narrative. Game breaking items available for late/end game fun as a reward for exploration and completion.
Aloy in Horizon Forbidden West : Go here. Kill the thing. Collect crafting stuff. Prattle on about everything you haven't looked at yet. Use this weapon to kill that bigger, more heavily armed yet somehow less dangerous apex loot crate with feet. Progress story to reveal more story. Meet many many NPC people that give you quests to get more crafting materials and then piss off to the next village. Game breaking items found in first loot cave. Wouldn't want you to hurt yourself.
Also, the character you’re playing as now gives buckets of exposition when you’re stuck for more than a minute. Things like “gee, that rock up there on the wall looks different than the rest. Maybe I should interact with it” all because you were thinking and exploring your way through a room. Maybe even just gathering collectibles
That has been kind of a thing even since Ocarina of Time, hence the "Hey! Listen!" -meme. However, while very annoying at times the tips also weren't usually that useful for solving any immediate problems, usually they were quite vague or just simple reminders of where the story is going next in case you forgot
GoW: Ragnarok comes in mind.
I think Elden Ring is a good example of developers trusting their audience to figure things out for themselves. The tutorial is literally off to the side, and I've seen a few people complain because the shiny white dude pointing down into a hole in the ground apparently wasn't enough for them to think there might be something important there. Once you get out you're faced with a _really_ tough enemy, that you can either fight or literally go around and continue, and there are areas where the difficulty suddenly skyrockets, telling you this might not be the place for you just yet. Other than that you're pretty much free to wander around, explore this absolutely massive world and fuck about as you please. In the meantime the game will for the most part give ... suggestions as to what the intended path is, with very little handholding or locking the player into a specific path. And you can at any time choose to ignore the suggestions, and instead wander off and do something completely different. Not to mention all the spells and weapon skills you can find, that can be mixed and matched in a million different ways to find something that suits your playstyle.
I remember when games were very experimental, wacky, fun, didn't hold your hands so much beyond the tutorial. Once the posers started showing up and infiltrating by pretending they always played games, that was when things started to slowly change. The reason why I enjoyed the Japanese-made games is not because of the art styles but rather how free they were with it all.
Go back to making movies, Sony. That's all you're ever good for!
Daybreak (formerly Sony Online Entertainment) still maintains two popular MMOs: Lord of the Rings and DC Universe
@@AdderTude Daybreak killed off Just Survive after release to push H1Z1 so they can sell loot boxes, stopped buying anything from them after that.
This is why gatekeeping is a good thing.
A lot of what happened to games is greatly improved analytics and a huge increase in the amount of sciencing that went into how people actually play the game. As the goal focused in on broadening out the player base as much as possible and as developers could identify any kind of snag people got stuck on any kind of rough edges got polished off these AAA games, which took a lot of the flavor out IMO.
in other words, the talent was gone and only corporate BS was left.
When playing a game the emphasis should be on the gameplay, the story should be there to facilitate it. You can do it well but gameplay should always come first.
Older games were a lot more limited than modern ones. Thats why games needed a good story or a new style of gameplay. Nowadays most don't bother with either. It's nothing but graphics. Story is either a rework or a butchering of a good one {SEQUELS!} and the same for the controls.
The next evolution of the waypoint will be player driven note taking. If you give the player a notebook or editable map that will engage them more because they will get to mark things that make sense to them. I can't tell you how many times I have played a game and thought "would it kill the devs to give me a notebook so I can write some things down?". Satisfactory actually has a really great UI for this. You can track your next build goal but the higher you advance the more complicated the things are so you end up making your own checklist of how many screws you need and how much iron plate, etc. This also has to do with building your factory. You plan out how much stuff you will need to build a certain section of floor with a certain amount of power poles and a certain amount of machines. The main point im getting at is that the player likes information that is relevant to them but ONLY when they ask for it.
The Mass Effect trilogy really displayed this change in video games transitioning from something you were active in to being a story that you’re guided through.
In all fairness, I loved the ME trilogy because it told a decent story, it was also a pretty decent dating sim game too lol - RPG's have traditionally told a story (Final Fantasy?????) until they started becoming all about the "open world"...
I remember playing the 1st resident evil on the 1st play station and thinking "Man, before the zombies got loose it would be impossible for one of the mad scientists to get to the kitchen to make a sandwich."
I think that game developers have to sometimes add in a tutorial into the game, bc let's face it there are no game manuals nowadays, so that is understandable to a degree. However, games outside the Souls series have been getting to easy or forgiving and allowing too many checkpoints and save points. Back in the NES days the best you would have is a password in most cases and if you wanted to beat the game a lot of times you had to it in one sitting.
I miss game manuals.
During NES days a lot of that was more due to limitations of the hardware than purposeful game design. Also Games back then were more difficult because, 1. They were still coming from arcade design philosophy and it was that way to eat quarters (the original micro transactions) and 2. games were made purposely more difficult to pad out the length. Most of those games if you could play straight through without deaths are maybe an hour long...And there is no “end game”, youd just have to play whole thing again
Lol I remember the NES game Battle of Olympus, in which the "passwords" were long base 64 strings (I think 24 or 32 characters) that you just had to write down. I was too young to understand at the time that I was basically contracting out the "storage" of my saved games to pencil and paper
@@kenelliott6897 truly a lost art form. I can't recall the names but I remember a few having gorgeous art.
Why on earth would I want to go back to having to write out absurdly long passwords in order to save my spot? Also, most games nowadays are anywhere between 12 to over a 100 hours. No way am I going to want to play all of that in one sitting. Even games that deal with ironman mode where you only have one autosave allow you to leave the game and come back another day. Besides, even as far back as the ps1, they were allowing you save more and more at regular intervals. Tomb Raider 2 even allowed you to save the game whenever you darn well felt like although I will admit that had its own risks as I discovered to my misfortune when I once saved it at a bad spot I couldn't get out of and had to restart the whole game.