Computer Games

[NapLajoieonSteroids]

Nuclear Reactor Simulator

from the Dalton Nuclear Institute, University of Manchester

That is fun.

[noddy]

took ages to load, but I eventually got there.

nice way to gamify the learning.

[NapLajoieonSteroids]

[noddy]

the original doom was built for

Processor. 80386.
RAM. 4 MB.
Video Mode. VGA
Disk: 3mb

nearly every cpu on the planet is more powerful than the old 386 now, most of the porting effort is the memory requirements, making the textures/maps/sounds smalller.

[NapLajoieonSteroids]

[noddy]

fallout 3 , I managed to mainline the story, avoid the sidequests and finish.

skyrim and fallout 4 , got em in bargain bins, didnt find them interesting enough to leave the starter areas.

I hear starfield is even worse - for all its initial criticism cyperpunk 2077 has raised the bar well beyond whatever it is bethesda does.

[NapLajoieonSteroids]

Have only played Skyrim; and my experience was a lot more positive.

But Skyrim to me was a game where my character survived the dragon attack, made his way through the tutorial dungeon/escape; came upon that first house with the exposition dump about choosing factions in the land and saying "no" to that and running away.

Instead, I wandered until I found the magic college, went there and became a warrior-mage then did random quests until I had enough to buy a house and settle down forever.

If I happened to do anything from the main story, it was inadvertent and I still don't have a clue what was happening in the main plot of the game.

It was a nice breezy 20+ hours where no one was saved and nothing was learned (except the value of hoarding money for an abode).

[Juno]

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[noddy]

[NapLajoieonSteroids]

[NapLajoieonSteroids]

Finally gonna set up the steam deck. I'm just going to enable SSH and move files that way; spending more money right now on a flash drive/external hard drive is out and I don't wanna spend an afternoon going through the junk I have just to find something-- that's a project for down the road.

This has been a week of setting up everyone else's gizmos. The most annoying, as expected, has been transferring someone from one switch to another. Nintendo does not really make it so easy with devices holding multiple accounts for kids at various stages of online access.

[NapLajoieonSteroids]

The valve machine arrived, opened the box to check if it was all there then sealed it up again and will be putting it under the Christmas tree.

nice way to avoid the aumtumn and black friday sales

Avoiding the sales is a specialty.

We've been watching the discount lists and, sure, there are games we'd like to play but like I said to the missus; we have a number of games we're in the middle of right now that I rather not start a backlog of games for down the road.

The short of it is that most of these companies put the same games on sale every sales holiday, so there isn't a rush.

---------------------------------

For me, I'm truly rpg'd out. I can go a good year or two without having to read text about magic crystals and troll-apocalypses. Baldur's Gate 3 may be the best thing ever but I look at it and see hours of waste.

[NapLajoieonSteroids]

We are still grinding through Tears of the Kingdom. It's way too much. We have taken several breaks from it and as I argued, I'm at the point where if we put it down again, I'm out- I don't want to string it along for years just to get some fake sense of completion.

I checked out reddit to see what percentages fanatics are finishing the game the first time (from starting area to beating the final boss) to show the missus, and a lot of them were in the 40 to 50% range; with most of the thread spoke about the rest of the material as "post-game" content.

While we both agree this sort of "post-game" nonsense is lame; we're diverging on what it means to complete this and how much of it is just built in redundancy to cover a broad range of players. I also think our division of labor gameplay has worked against us in dragging things out.

-----------------------------

As for the game itself, I think we've wrung everything out of it and have done enough to form a solid opinion.

As I said last year, it is neither quite expansion nor remix nor new game; it is a 2nd quest to the 1st one, much like the original 8-bit Zelda. Like that original 2nd quest, the game doesn't really encourage exploration and immersion but more manipulation. The player doesn't act in the world but on it with the new abilities reflecting that. The game somewhat caters to players who thoroughly memorized the first game. The reuse of the same map (in addition to the sky, cave and underground layers) with an expectation that players are going to know their way around and zip around the surface. [for what it's worth, knowing the surface also helps with the underground depths as the map is inverted with important landmarks on one mirrored on the other- so knowing one map gives one a good idea of both]

The fourth wall breaking goes both ways for player and developer. It's clear a lot of the "oohs and aahs" were intended for tik tok purposes. There's a real conscious effort to recreate the "viral" market of Breath of the Wild. It's like they watched all the stuff players did online with the first game and decided they were going to try to top it so as to produce more viral videos. Has it worked? It certainly did early on, but the hype has died down and hasn't been as ground-up organic as it seemed from the original.

Why is that? I think it self-evident. One was about "cool stuff" one could do in the game aimed at being used for the game; the other are these things that are sort of superimposed on top of the game aimed at being used for making short-form videos. The difference comes through. Requiring a building mechanic immediately turns off a large segment of players and the people most interested in using it are not applying their love of fake engineering to an objective in the game but to impress other people on line. It's a sideshow to the game.

I think I fall in the "I like building" camp and if I were a young kid (who Nintendo very much wants to appeal to) I'd love it even more. But I'm old, and not looking to impress anyone with my perpetual motion lego block builder. After x amount of hours, building a car with a slab; four misaligned wheels and a steering stick to amble about just well enough to get from point A to point B is more than good enough. By the time one's character can afford to make a drone system and gizmos galore, one is sick of building things.

It's not all negative. Besides building running out of steam, the other new powers- phasing through ceilings and especially weapon creation- are amazing. There are a good handful of genuinely clever puzzles, hints and quests that are impressive for the type of game it is. The base mechanics are more or less improved. I'd say the same goes for the layout of enemies and certain collectables. It's still fun for what it is. The narrative and story elements have taken a step back from serviceable but that's a whole other issue.

[noddy]

some games do slip into comfort food status, the kind of thing you can fire up for 20 minutes and play for a bit long after its "finished"

sounds like that game is aimed at that outcome.

[NapLajoieonSteroids]

Yes, and I underestimate the number of players who approach games like that, finishing the narrative start to finish and then returning to reach 100% completion status. The Zelda series famously doesn't save anything past the end boss since the SNES days, so obviously a number of players have always played it that way; I just didn't think it was a lot of them in that maximizer camp.

They must have internal metrics about x amount of time and y amount of stuff players reach; engagement numbers and length and turning that into a guaranteed customer for the next one and all of that.

My impression from Part 1 to Part 2 is a conscience effort to maximize engagement.

[noddy]

Yeh not sure its all about the maximalist/completionists - the comfort food endgame people arent aiming for that, but they are looking todo another round of gameplay loop, so it does give them a token reward.

For the older games with this endgame feature, you had to invent your own reward like doing it faster, or restricting your own options or somesuch.

It does add to the percieved value of the game

[NapLajoieonSteroids]

I 100% Tears of the Kingdom and It Destroyed Me

This is the type of player I have in mind.

The value-fan is a different sort of thing in my head. But it is an important aspect too because x amount of content is expected for high price point games.

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Nowadays the guy in the video above is a streamer of some kind (I don't know much about him) and so its a job expectation that he do "everything" with extra motivation.

It loses me once the checklists and guides start coming out and glitches employed to cut down on farming resources. He says without the glitches, he'd easily add another 200 hours to his time. Without the use of guides for Korok Seeds for example, that's another 200 hours.

Fast forwarding through the video, seems he first ran through the adventure at a leisurely pace, doing a good amount before the final boss.

His time for that was 78 hours and a 50% completion rate.

Then with outside help/glitches/etc. It took him another 110 (IIRC) hours to complete the next 50%.

[NapLajoieonSteroids]

Even as a kid any 100+ hour tradeoff just to cross something off a checklist would've been preposterous. 10 hours would've been too much.

The time commitment and resource-gating suggest to me that there is no expectation for a normal person to, say, "upgrade every bit of armor," and it is a matter of choice and prioritization with lots of redundancy involved so the developers can ensure the majority of players get far enough to make some sort of upgrade choice.

[noddy]

back when I was younger and smoked, quake 1 was my comfort food game, Id hate to think how many hundreds of hours ive put into that.

download a new level, have a bit of fun, nothing to learn, just indulge primal brain for a period.

nowdays, its all about the balance between level gating and grind - you upgrade and side mission enough to make it to the next part of the game.

how the game balances those 2 things is a big part of how boring it gets.

I recently got mad max on a steam freebie, its the perfect example of the open world, copy and paste game play loop, clear our the icons on the map.

I think i got to about 1/3 before being bored of it all, and not wanting to do the grind to get to the next level.

[NapLajoieonSteroids]

Mad Max is low-key supposed to be one of the better examples of sandboxes too.

--------------

Breath of the Wild was a tutorial area then it was all intrinsic motivation. That game is still here but there is now this other layer of a linear, gated narrative stretched across the sandbox. We stumbled on a secret temple and then fortuitously flew into the trigger to start a mission to complete it; but there is another trigger to learn about it that is actual cordoned off unless one x,y,z. The game has a character who yells at the player if they try sneaking in early.

A few years ago the producer, Eiji Aonuma, said in an interview that the Zelda team was carefully studying how 'Red Dead Redemption 2' operated and it shows.

There are these little narrative branches that one can do at his or her own pace but slowly open up other story beats or changes in the land. A way for the developer to maintain control and keeping players on determined paths with player choices factored in.

The thing is though: whatever one thinks of Rockstar games they don't skimp out on actors and scripts. Red Dead Redemption II was a fully realized cowboy/outlaw game with 900 thousand lines of dialogue and fleshed out characters. A lot of it memorable because the characters were varied and memorable. And those paths are stretched out over chapters where everything on the gameboard is reset anyway.

None of that is going on here.

[noddy]

mad max's main problem is the game play loop is one of my least favourites - third person melee button masher.

that is extremely popular generally and translates well to console controller antics on the couch - however its very clunk on mouse/keyboard PC gaming.

its secondary "hook" is driving from place to place in the hotted up car to do the button mashing task.

driving is another thing which I find generally tedious in games - even the best of them Ill only play sporadically , and dig around in my cupboard to find the controller to do it.

Id suspect the reviews are mostly positive from younger people who arent burnt out on sandboxes and play with controllers.

then on top of that, some of the task types are downright boring - only the vehicle combat was vaguely interesting , yet for some tedious reason it took nearly that 1/3 of the game to build up your car strong enough to do it easily, then.. it was too easy and no longer much of challenge.

rant about games that trickle feed the things that make the game fun, then take them away goes ere.

[NapLajoieonSteroids]

Get the impression that brainstorming what a Mad Max game is started with: "he drives around in cool cars...and....we are making this for Sony/Xbox so...."

A quote from the game's wiki:

Avalanche Studios found developing a vehicular-combat video game a challenge because of their inexperience with creating that type of game. Announced at E3 2013, the game was re-tooled during development and the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 versions were canceled.

8 years on from that release, there are probably some really interesting things one could do with more dynamic and "intelligent" npcs.

And it'd be the kinda game where roving bands changing the board environment wouldn't need too much forethought to go wild with.

[noddy]

well, they re-skinned it as rage 2 for Id software a bit later and as an action game, that was far superior, being movement based FPS with Id software levels of care on the particulars.

the vehicles and story however, where as crap as ever.

Mad Max universe isnt that interesting as an action game anyway, its all desert and limited resources.

it probably far better suited a red dead style RPG, where story and NPC characters could shine a bit more.

[NapLajoieonSteroids]

Yes. The irony that the brand is its biggest attention getter and hindrance. Probably would be in much better shape just to borrow bits of it, like bands of mad men in a post-apocalyptic world and run with that.

[noddy]

then they would have fallout

actually, this has just reminded me - someone IS going to set a story based rpg in post apocalypse australia



--

you mentioned previously you are done with time soak rpgs, im pretty been that way for a while now, so im unlikely to bother with this.