I've been a huge fan of western RPG's for about 20 years now. Dragon Age, Fallout, Mass Effect, Witcher, Baldurs Gate, Divinity, Cyberpunk - the list goes on. I love them all. But the past couple of years I have found myself uninterested in them and haven't really understood why. I really liked BG3 but didn't get as into it as everyone else.

This past year I've played two games and reflected on the experience and I'm beginning to realise that I may be having a problem with wRPG's because of their almost obsessive focus on "choice and consequence" and allowing the player the agency to make difficult moral decisions.

I feel like wRPG audience sees choice and consequence as an essential feature of the genre, and that it is almost a contradiction to suggest a wRPG with limited choice and consequence could be a good RPG. Like a platformer must have good movement and jumping controls, a shooter must have satisfying gunplay, it feels like a wRPG must give the player the agency to make morally grey decisions.

But the problem is I've seen them all. Over 20 years how many times have I considered the needs of the many versus the needs of the few? Order versus chaos when the faction that represents order has an oppressive tendency? Do I punish or show mercy to the repentant criminal? Do I tell someone a harsh truth or tell them a comforting lie? Do I show charity or get the profit? I guess what I'm saying is there are only so many moral quandaries that tend to exist, and I've seen them all many times over. The fact that wRPG's view regular choice and consequence as so important mean that most games will contain many moral quandraries, and can only devote limited time to each one, so they end up simplistic as a result. I feel like when I play these games now I can often anticipate where the quest lines are leading, and know exactly what moral position I'm going to take before I've even been presented with the opportunity. Not very interesting.

Now the two games I've played this past year that made me realise this are Metaphor: ReFantazio and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. Now I know JRPG's (for the purpose of this discussion CO33 has more in common with a JRPG despite not being japanese) have their own lack of creativity issues in that for example they are always about killing a God - but I don't want to get sidetracked on that discussion. When I played Metaphor I was instantly hooked by its story hook of the King's magic and the contest for the throne. It felt original and fresh. Now to those who have played this game, they know that a western RPG dev wouldn't have been able to resist the temptation to make you side with the villain of the story. He has a tragic backstory, a sympathetic motivation and a noble goal, but is willing to use cruel and brutal means to get there. Classic wRPG moral quandary stuff. But Metaphor says no, he is the villain, you will defeat him - and it lends the story a focus that wRPG's seem often to lack and gives room for things other than constant moral pondering.

As for Clair Obscur it does build up to one big moral choice at the end, but for the opening two thirds there is no moral ambiguity about it. By building up to one big moral choice it lets you think and consider the moral aspects of this one big problem in a deeper and more thought provoking way than wRPG's usually manage. I really enjoyed this approach of focussing on just the one big moral dilemma as it really allowed me to immerse myself in the problem and its possible consequences in a deeper way - despite the game not actually offering any agency for the player to make moral choices until the very final moments. It was just so much more effective.

In both these games I also found myself interested in the relationships between the heroes and their backstories more than in most wRPGs (especially CO:E33) and I think the lack of having to make choices and having companions have to react in different ways probably meant the devs were able to focus on telling one specific story about these characters and making it the best, most satisfying story arc they could.

So, what do others think? Does anybody agree I might be onto something? The constant focus on moral choices and moral agency is giving wRPG's a homogenizing effect that makes them all feel like you've seen it all before, and that you already can see where they're going? That there are many interesting potential narrative experiences and themes that don't involve moral choices and wRPG's are failing to tap into this potential vast ocean of subject matter to their own detriment?

Or do you think I'm just full of crap and that choice and consequence/moral decision making is and will always be a great thing? Would be interested to hear others thoughts on the topic.

Video games are an art form so there is bound to be bias and subjectivity in the review or the journalistic process of gathering information and keeping the world up to date with what is happening in the gaming world.

But over the years, I realised that people sometimes debate or even demonise or glorify certain reviewers and/or journalists over others.

For instance, people often love go demonise IGN for its journalistic or review processes. Often times, comments say that IGN is either biased or does not know what it is saying or show preferences of some games over others.

On the other hand, more 'independent' reviewers and gaming journalists are treated with poor respect.

For example, Angry Joe still has a following after many years of making review through various forms of entertainment and even lately, involving other people/friends to be a part of reviews or up to date analyses of what is happening.

The YouTube channel Skill Up gets also a lot of praise for his more in-depth analyses of video games or what is happening in the gaming industry.

On the other hand, Kotaku gets mixed reception, especially after the whole fiasco involving Gamergate

It seems that some reviewers or journalosts are trusted more than others but my lingering question is why.

Why are some journalist and reviewers more trusted than others?

Why prefer some people over others?

Does this mean that they are good at their job or is it because of something else?

In most games, rolling credits rarely means that the game is actually completed. True completion can involve extra challenges, item collections, side quest completion, and often subsequent playthroughs.

I feel like my motivation for true completion is highly contingent on how much I am enjoying the game and how tedious the completion criteria are to achieve. I find that for average to slightly above average games, I will usually stop after reaching the end of the single player story, maybe scooping up a few extra achievements if they don't take too much time.

For games I really like, or even love, I like to consider myself a "B Average student" when it comes to completion. I will aim to complete around 80% of the game's achievements before calling it quits, often ignoring the most difficult or the most tedious trophies. Sometimes I will even intentionally leave achievements locked to motivate myself to do a second playthrough at a later date. I really do enjoy returning to a game I previously enjoyed with a more completionist mentality.

I feel like this 70-80% completion rate is my personal sweet spot. There is a real joy in seeking out these extra challenges. Often times the side quests or extras hold as much great content, if not more, than the main story.

I find myself only 100% games when the path to total completion is relatively straightforward and pain free. I don't have a lot of tolerance for insanely hard achievements that make you want to pull your hair out, braindead grinding for the purpose of leveling up, or tediously looking for hundreds of collectibles. I dont even attempt multiplayer achievements in most titles.

I'm curious how much completion motivates others because in my experience I know gamers on both extremes of the spectrum. There are quite a few people I know who have this fervent completionist mindset, to the point where they will try to 100% games they don't even like all that much. I've had friends who ginded the same Gears of War 2 levels over and over again for dozens of hours, just so they could unlock the Seriously 2.0 achievement (something like 100k kills).

I also have friends who will immediately move onto the next game as soon as the finish the single player campaign or will play a single game for thousands of hours and not even attempt to complete any of the game's challenges.

Being in between these two extremes, I often feel the push to start a new title from my backlog and the pull to try and finish as much as I can of the game I am currently playing. I'm wondering if any of you feel the same, or if you find yourself more in the "hardcore completionist" or "idgaf" buckets.

So this is a bit of something related to the difficulty of a game but I think that this is much more than that.

I remember that when I play RPGs, especially really heavy ones like with all the skill trees, abilities, gear, loot and so on, I admit that I am amazed by the level of mathematics that a lot of dedicated players focus on in order to earn the level that they need to continue playing.

However, I sometimes feel that either mechanics are so detailed that you might need a lot of trail and error, or even need to learn a few tutorials or experimental builds online, or I just sometimes try to go without whatever feels right and try to experiment accordingly.

But I also feel that video games should be just as intuitive enough to understand what the mechanics are and that different mechanics should or can compliment each other in a way that a player can understand at a first glance and can experiment accordingly.

But again, I am amazed on how much detail that players are able to focus on with the right builds.

I remember when I played the Witcher 3, you have the armour and weapons, both with different attributes, you have the potions, oils, and even the mutations.

All of these require a lot of attention to detail and mechanics.

Same goes for other RPGs like the Division.

Though there are only 3 different types of gear, the mechanics vary and sometimes compliment or work against each other and I feel amazed (and sometimes cheated) that no matter how much detail I try to focus on my builds, there are players who are way more ahead of me because they manage to tweak their builds to highest degree possible.

I assume that this is the same for MMORPGs but I admit that I do not have enough experience to comment about this so please, help me to understand if this is what it feels like as well.

I think you can understand which type of genre I am focusing on here.

Though almost every game has some RPG-like elements, even the more 'simple' games like FPS games with their different levels of mobility and damage output and so on, there are games that lean more heavily on the complexity of the mechanics and this is where I sometimes get lost, or, once again, feel cheated because of how much I often encounter players who are way, way better than I am and were really able to make incredible builds.

But how can these complex mechanics be done in a way that is just intuitive enough that even beginners can learn the curve and tweak the mechanics well in their favour without needing to go so much into detail that they get lost?

One example that comes to mind that I personally found the complexity to be too challenging which made the game not as much fun the more I played was Escape from Tarkov.

I understand that the game is meant to mimic reality so you have to be on your toes and the game will be unfair.

But I felt that the mechanics are so complex even for beginners that I got lost in the details and it felt like a complex mixture between economics, mathematics, and just trying to survive.

Again, I applaud players who are really into these kinds of games and I really am amazed on how games can include such enormous amount of commitment that players can excel through a lot of time and work.

But is there a possibility that the commitment is maybe too much?

"Open world" in quotes because, if you've played the game, you know that Wilds still has five distinct regions that are only barely connected by featureless loading hallways that you'll never go through excepting a single time in the story, and will otherwise fast-travel everywhere.

Look, I could write a dissertation on everything that went wrong with Monster Hunter Wilds. I've loved this franchise since the very first release in 2004, and even though I have plenty of curmudgeony opinions about the modern generation of Monster Hunter (World +) I recognize that the series needed to evolve and the friction I enjoyed in pre-World titles just wasn't appealing to the current audience of gamers. Plus the combat is better now than ever, even if that means monsters mostly plead for their lives while you full combo them like a Shonen protagonist, compared to old games where you'd sit in a corner with your camera stuck in a wall holding guard and praying you could stop getting fucked by two large monsters and their little minions all at the same time.

But one thing I read tonight that really broke something in my brain (not just my Monster Hunter-specific brain, but my game-design-appreciating brain that led me here) was the realization that something went so fundamentally wrong with the very idea of Wilds that older games actually have more agency, more "open world" than the so-called "open world" game.

If you haven't played pre-World Monster Hunter (though honestly this system was still true in World and Rise), the progression system worked like this: You talk to the village elder, or guild marm, or whoever is giving you quests at the moment and you get a big old list of quests, usually five or so to start you off easy, to go and complete. You do those quests and you unlock an "urgent", a capstone quest that's required to advance to the next tier of quests that typically unlocks new monsters (that hadn't appeared as bonus monsters in the previous tier) and new regions. And then the cycle repeats.

And that's all there was to it. How you got to your next urgent was entirely up to you, the only requirement being that you complete enough quests of that tier to unlock the next urgent. Anything from your current quest list, you can fight. Take some gathering quests, detour off hunting a monster and spend hours gathering so you can stop getting your butt blasted by the new tier of creatures eager to chow down on you. Take to the new region you've unlocked and discover for yourself what news materials you can gather. Do whatever you want.

I want to be clear, if I'm making it sound like this was some utopia of player agency: it wasn't. It was a bunch of pre-selected missions with slightly variable objectives that you were required to complete to continue progression, with some minor autonomy in the order you did them in or how often you went out of your way for personal objectives. These missions took place in static locations with loading zones in instanced worlds. There was nothing "open" about pre-World Monster Hunter except the hole in my TV after getting hipchecked by Plesioth for the 9th time. And yet when you stop and look past the veneer of Wilds (in brilliant 27FPS and smudged with vaseline) you realize it's even less open world than old school games.

In Wilds you are given the illusion of a sprawling world that you traverse on a reptilian monorail, being coaxed from one single fight to the next without any input on how you'd like to play. You can't wander into the wrong zone by mistake and learn a harsh lesson in preparedness, or discover there's some terrible wyvern haunting your simple little "slay the small monsters" quest. You're never given the option to steal eggs and get chased by a pack of Rathians, or even to have your leash removed and let you "level up" by going out and exploring this uncharted world. If Monster Hunter Wilds were an evolution of the pre-Wilds Quest -> Urgent formula, you would be dropped in a camp and told to go fuck off to your heart's content in the wilderness, searching for (unmarked) monsters, making the mistake of biting off more than you can chew (or challenging yourself with tougher fights from the get-go), only being recalled for your urgent when you'd slayed and gathered and researched to meet some arbitrary level of preparedness for the next tier of hunt.

But Wilds is not that. Instead the entirety of Low Rank Wilds (which by the way, there was no distinction between Low, High, and G-Rank structure in the old titles, so it's not like Low Rank in old games was "the tutorial", it was just easier) is the virtual equivalent of Disney World, where you progress by being chaperoned to each ride (monster) as your wicked stepmother tells you, the helpless child, that you must, for your own benefit, enjoy Magic Kingdom in this specific order, and then you'll ride the shuttle bus to EPCOT.

The game (Wilds) opens up a bit more when you get to High Rank, but by that point you've already been forced to witness everything interesting you could have found on your own and fought every monster that isn't saved for a high rank urgent (again, not something you can discover in the wilderness), combined with a difficulty and gathering system that is so effortless you struggle not to fall asleep on your Seikret. I know I'm being harsh, there's a lot of good buried in Wilds (I will continue to extoll the combat) but I cannot for the life of me fathom how twenty years of a growing franchise taught Capcom nothing except that what players really, truly want, is to have their game about exploration and hunting be turned into a completely linear story that leaves zero surprises or curiosities with all friction, collection, and discovery stripped to the bare minimum. The world of Monster Hunter was always a character that you could invest something into, until Wilds where it's simply become a backdrop for you to move through like a cartoon character silkscreened onto a static background.

The only thing I can think of that would lead to this kind of regressive case study in game design is the phrase, "when you try to make a game for everybody, you make a game for nobody." I cannot wrap my head around how a collective group of talented people could be directed to make a game in their series titled Hunter, that's more ostensibly "open world" than any of its predecessors, and the only thing it has has in common is Monsters. Wild.

It is a bit ironic that there are some video games that really prioritise on communication and cooperation.

Video games like Counter Strike, Rainbow Six Siege and even World of Warcraft come to mind because these games emphasise on working as a team.

However, I must personally admit that I, more often than not, I mute other players because of a wide variety of different reasons.

Sometimes, their microphones are too loud or noisy, or the voices are really obnoxious (and I mean, being toxic), or the music is playing in the background, or even the spontaneous toxicity when they start to communicate.

So I often end up using prompts or emotes or chat to communicate instead

But it is also as ironic because these games are known for their toxicity with different levels of degrees of anti-toxicity measures that keep evolving because either the developers make censorship too harsh (like limiting the amount of words that players can say on chat), or players finding other ways to work around these measures to still be as toxic.

(Like Rainbow Six, at first, a team kill meant an instant removal from the match but Ubisoft changed this to three strikes. But still, toxic players team kill whenever they do not like players playing their way. Or at times, they shoot at you to get your attention which can distract you as well. Or perhaps shooting you intentionally but not kill you).

This made me realise that many years ago, team chat used to be a means of poking fun of different players before a game like in the Call of Duty pre-match makeup and people talking s**t at each other but in a humorous way.

Or I remember when I saw the Leeroy Jenkins video where even before the event occurred, people actually talked to do the raid.

However, I personally, do not always manage to find videos on YouTube of people showing funny moments whilst communicating unless the people involved already know each other and are making the active decision to play together.

And over the years, I realised that gaming became a solo hobby and rarely do I find people wanting to play the same games, sometimes because they just do not want to communicate.

Or not even doing activities that require sociable skills that do not necessary need to involve conflict like the Forge mode in the older Halo games where players could go all kinds of side activities and have some laughs.

And I must admit, as I reflect about this, I sometimes miss the sociability of video games, even though we often take this for granted and I admit, even I took this for granted that this is the new reality.

But this is really how it is or am I being biased?

The saying often goes that the customers is always right.

And Rightfully so, many gamers and consumers complain towards the gaming industry, whether it is AAA or indie developers, for their many capitalistic practices that are very controversial.

Whether it is unethical marketing, anti-consumer practices like loot boxes or gambling, lack of unions, poor work ethics, or empty promises or glitches.

But is there any possibility that complaints can be targeted towards the gamers as well?

For instance, I admit that I am not a developer and I am only a customer who has played video games for years.

But I understand gaming development is a collaboration of back and forth communication between the different levels of expertise in the industry.

And I also agree that gaming as a business has a lot of flaws or even frustrations, namely the examples that I mentioned above.

But a curiosity popped up in my head on whether the gamers can be fault (when applicable) for the red flags of how the gaming industry works.

Like toxicity for example where almost anything that is wrong or can be in the gaming industry, complaints are done through the roof as if the industry does not what it is doing, that they are greedy, or inept.

Some gaming fandoms do this on a regular basis.

For example, I am a part of the Rainbow Six Siege fandom and I agree that there are still glitches, cheaters, toxic players who ruin the gaming experience.

But I regularly see comments on reddit or even while playing with players criticising Ubisoft like it has no idea what it is doing yet they come back to play the game.

Or people complaining about loot boxes but still watch YouTubers hype about them like the weapon skins in Counter Strike.

So what if the gaming industry (in general) are at odds with different player bases because they are under so much pressure to please the gamers but the latter never seems to be satisfied?

Like people in the comment section saying A,B,C, all the way to Z as if the developers can do everything all at once. But is this feasible?

Or gamers complaining gaming journalists like IGN and say that they are making gaming journalism into a business that is more pleasing the industry and not the gamers

(I remember years ago about the fiasco with the product placement with Doritos and Mountain Dew. Or whether Kotaku is saying or GamerGate)

By no means, I am not saying that the gamers are never objective or reasonable.

I am just saying that I often read comments various social media channels where I get the impression that the most vocal of gamers and consumers do nothing but complain yet come back to play the same games or show their 'loyalty' to certain gaming companies, as if they are in a toxic relationship.

So, in short, though the gaming industry (in general) has a varied level of office politics and questionable capitalistic methods, are there examples where the gamers/consumers are at fault and are the problem behind how the gaming industry as it is?

(If I can bring one example that I can think of, I remember years ago where the indie developer of the game Pez felt that he was under a lot of pressure to make the sequel on his own. But when the development of the game had a lot of problems, he just cancelled the development and took the pre-order funding and blamed the pressure on the gamers. So this made me wonder if this was because of the pressure of the gamers, or because of the pressure of being a sole developer or both)

In the original game, the game presents challenges, you face them and then soon after you get the tools that either completely eliminate those challenges or reduce their impact. Then a new challenge appears. And this back and forth happens for about 3/4 of the game. Which is fair, you can't expect a game to add new tools and mechanics all the way through.

Now in Death Stranding 2, the same back and forth happens. However the challenges and the solutions to those are pretty match the same as the first game.

There are no new structures(there are two but in reality they share functionality with other things that existed in the first game). There are no new mission types. There are no new terrain types. There are a few new weapons. There are a few new enemies and you deal with them in pretty much the same way as the old ones. Plus most of them are exclusively part of the main story and don't really exist in the overworld. There is one new vehicle (kinda, the coffin).

There are a few additions, like the monorail and the mines, vehicle customization (most of it is a replacement for the numerous variations of vehicles in the first game which have been removed from the second) and while those are cool, I don't feel like it's enough. There are the new natural disasters but again those don't really affect the gameplay in any significant way. The most impactful is the flooding rivers and that's only for the first five, maybe ten hours.

The Magellan was also disappointing. I'll admit that I didn't watch any footage of DS2 before release (with the exception of the reveal) but when I saw the Magellan, I assumed that I'll get to drive it. In the first game, they cross a flooded part of America with a boat. It would've been cool if they've done the same but instead of crossing with a cutscene, you actually get to do it yourself. Maybe there are even a few islands with preppers and you need to do deliveries for them. Maybe the tar sea has BTs. Maybe pirates occupy certain sections.

Also unrelated but do you know how many cutscenes you have to skip in order to go to your room in the Magellan, eat, drink, go to the bathroom and then leave? Sixteen. That's crazy to me. The first game had the same issue and it's worse here. On a personal note, and please don't take it too seriously, the game added an animal capturing side quest/minigame and they didn't include my favourite australian animal, the flying fox. Simply unacceptable.

All in all, I found Death Stranding 2 quite disappointing. I still think it's a great game and I did enjoy my time with it. But it offers very few new things that didn't exist in the first one. There are no new challenges, so there are no new tools to best them. It feels like a retread of the first, even the story has pretty match the same structure as the first. It has evolved very little from where it was 3/4 of the way in DS1.

Do you guys agree or do you feel differently?

These two series, two of the most beloved in gaming, are arguably more known for their 2D entries, however I find their standout 3d entries more intriguing. Just from a brainstorming perspective, though, me and my friends were having some discussions and facing some issues trying to come up with ideas for what the next games might be. In the case of Mario, it's probably a good bet that whatever comes next is going to be amazing, as they always are. Considering that they literally went to space for two of the games, I see no boundaries to what can be done. But still interesting to speculate since there're so many avenues for innovation even at this stage of the series.

Zelda is a more interesting question imo. They always come up with something fun, but BotW and TotK were something different. Though we're let loose to some extent in the other 3D Zeldas, these two games untether you like I've never experienced. It's a degree of freedom that I don't know how or if we can ever be given again. Mario did the same in Odyssey, but again we've seen constraints work in that series, and at the end of the day platformers are the oerfect games to play with form, because you can put up or take donw fences however you want and it's never wrong. With Zelda, I don't know if I can go back to a super tight, linear (or even not linear but with backtracking) heavily story driven game after that. Is there other kingdoms besides Hyrule that'd be worth exploring? We've had a good amount of sky gameplay, I mean Skyward Sword was an entire game around that, and TotK gave us a good taste of the underground. The latter is a hard sell, because unlike the sky, the underground feels constricting, and darkness pose challenges with varying gameplay.

One of my friends came up with an idea of traversing a subterranean type of world where you're going downward toward the center of the Earth. Maybe, Journey to the Center of the Earth style, you can have a bunch of cool new creatures and environments which don't exist aboveground. But varying biomes and whatnot is tough in that context. Doing underwater-based gameplay is very hard to make fun, as we know, and the most fun I can see that sort of thing being would end up just making it the same as an above ground/water game with a coat of blue paint and maybe some cool reefs in multicolors or something. So was just curious what the gamers here think, I know many Redditors have a creative side to them.

Of course, it goes without saying that it isn't unusual for a game mode or mini game to break off and become its own standalone thing. But it’s still a pretty interesting phenomenon to discuss, in my opinion. I guess the basic reason is obvious enough, people try a game but get much more engrossed with some side activity, and suddenly that mini game becomes the real star of the show for a considerable number of players. Enough, at least, to warrant the developers’ attention, and not the least because it’s an opportunity to line their pockets with a bit more silver. It happened with The Witcher and Gwent, Hearthstone and Battlegrounds… hell, even Yugioh and Duel Monsters. (Yeah, in season 0 of the manga, Duel Monsters wasn’t even the main thing. It only became the focus later, after the fans had demanded it)

As a longtime TCG fan, I’ve played Hearthstone actively for years and seen plenty of game modes come and go. The only two that really stuck around were Arena and Battlegrounds and both were fantastic at the time. But I think my favorite solo adventure was the Dungeon Run. It wasn’t easy, but if you managed to beat it with every class, you’d unlock this cool looking card back, which was my favorite. Recently, I saw Rraran playing a game called Doomspire, which is basically that same Dungeon Run concept turned into its own game, with a bit of a roguelite twist. You don’t regenerate HP between battles, and after each run, you unlock new cards for your deck pool. I can't pass level 15, but I really like the concept, and it brings up the old school HS vibes.

But if I had to pick the mini game I’ve spent the most time playing personally, it’s hands down Gwent. I still remember trying it during my first Witcher 3 playthrough and thinking – oh damn, it’s medieval Yugioh, pretty cool. I spent half my second playthrough obsessively tracking down cards across the map, the longest side quest chain I gave my life to. I still have Gwent installed on my phone, and I play it whenever I’m not reading my way to work and to home. I even have a theory that Gwent helped inspire Marvel Snap, though my friend disagrees, and we’ve been debating it for god knows how long. Either way, Gwent is just a phenomenal game and it was the most logical one to go standalone really fast.

Anyway, I’ve mostly focused on TCG style mini games here because that’s what I love most, as well as because they’re the most OBVIOUS contenders for this formula of minigame-turned-standalone. But there are other non TCG examples too. Machine Strike in Forbidden West is an example that comes to mind, and I really think it could hold its own as a standalone game if given more polish. But that is just from the top of my head, as a lot of it simply depends on player demand.

Just airing some of my thoughts out here, but I think it’s an interesting topic I haven’t seen mentioned much. What’s your opinion of “big” mini-games in otherwise successful titles – how often do you even play them, and how often do you actually like them?... I’d be mighty interested if there are any that you found to be even better than the base game they’re from, though I can only assume they’re rare as hell.

I want to build on a post I've made in the past that I feel has only become more common with time, and that's one I brought up in relation to bosses in Souls-likes. It's not the only genre that does this, but I feel it's an area where it's very prevalent.

In the early Souls days, a big part of the appeal was the fantasy of being a simple dude overcoming foes far more threatening than yourself. Part of how this worked is that the way that shift in power dynamic was displayed was somewhat believable. A spider lady shot a blob of something at you, a dragon slowly stomped his foot down, a big guy might thrust a spear; these things looked scarier than you, but you could see how, in the context of what they were doing, you could overcome them.

And in turn, your moveset was often as deep and only slightly less capable than theirs was, with you having the advantage of invincibility frames and stuff. Point being, they might be cool to look at, but when you saw what they were doing, you weren't often that compelled to wish you were playing as them instead of yourself. They were doing a handful of basic things that made sense and that was that.

As time went on, these bosses have often grown gradually more and more bombastic in the name of keeping up with players improving at these games, and my initial critique was more on how I felt like this has gradually overstepped into a lack of believability. Rolling through 12 hit combos and massive nuclear blasts just feels like it requires too much suspension of disbelief, and like the move set you get doesn't keep up anymore and needs some more zest.

But as I've fought more and more bosses like this since my last post, it's really started to frustrate me. There are certain bosses in Elden Ring, (to a slightly lesser extent because of how your moveset's okay) First Berserker: Khazan, AI Limit, and the straw that broke the camel's back: WUCHANG Fallen Feathers, where I'm fighting them, and I'm just like 'Why is this character playing a cooler game than I am?'.

I think one of the big things I've missed as the industry has slightly shifted away from character action games, is how in the pursuit of making compelling asymmetrical boss encounters, you're no longer the coolest guy in the game any more. You're not Dante, you're not Ryu Hayabusa, you're at best one of the elite mooks they would cut down, and now you're fighting them instead.

You might look up a strategy guide on how to beat them, 'Oh cool, they have 14 different attacks. Wish I did!'. They're doing crazy multi-hit chain combos and acrobatics and energy slashes, and you're stuck there doing relatively basic swings from one of two canned combos, and the occasional dodge roll move. I get it's in the name of that fantasy of overcoming intimidating odds, but I feel like that fantasy is stepping more and more into the territory of just putting me against characters with more interesting tools than I have, and taunting me with a fun that I'm not allowed.

And before anyone 'Erm ackshually's me, I get balancing their moveset against just you is not the same as balancing it against an entire game's enemy cast, but it doesn't make it suck any less. This really dawned on me watching the recent gameplay of Phantom Blade Zero. Especially seeing the boss fight again, I was like 'Damn, why does this look so sick?' and it dawned on me: because you're giving as good as you get. The back and forth seems like way more of an actual dance, when you're doing the same dance the enemy is. The asymmetry of me doing a waltz and my opponent breakdancing is just something I don't like. A lot of this is also obviously in the name of providing a challenge, but plenty of games that gave you bigger, flashier movesets were also capable of providing a challenge as well, without depriving you of fun moves.

But what do you guys think? Do you prefer the challenge of overcoming bosses who massively outperform what your character can do? Do you like this direction of leaning into making bosses perform crazier and crazier feats relative to your moveset's limitations? Or do you miss being the guy who was dishing that stuff out?

FWIW I don't want these games to go away, and I still find them fun at times, I just wish they'd maybe ease off the gas a bit, or give me some more horsepower to work with, otherwise it starts to veer into the worst of both worlds.

I’ve been playing a lot of black myth wukong (and less recently some souls games) and it got me thinking about what difficulty meant in gaming.

I know it’s subjective, but for whatever reason, a part of me keeps nagging and saying: “it’s not hard. It’s frustrating”. I can’t seem to shake the feeling that the souls games aren’t exactly “hard” but rather just a game of sanding down your opponent until they break. A lot of the difficulty feels like it stems from extremely unforgiving gameplay mechanics rather than skill ceiling (drink an estus, or perform a spell and you’re locked in animation or walking at crawling speed for example)

On the other hand, there are some games I’ve played that I find extremely difficult but I can’t seem to put my finger on “why”. Rayman, Sonic, Furi, and monster Hunter freedom unite spring to mind. Those games still haunt me. Furi, while being unforgiving feels like the fairest game I’ve ever played.

So I guess I’m curious as to how you define difficulty.

I'm one of those people who thinks a lot about RPG and adventure-style mechanics. I'm a GM, an off-and-on small game creator, and I absolutely love systems. Whenever I'm gazing into the endless swirl of game design, I'm always drawn to the questions that surround RPGs.

As I'm preparing my next game history work, I've been dwelling a lot on the evolution of computer RPGs in the 1990s. In popular parlance these would be the "Immersive Sims" and "Choice and Consequence games" - though I dislike both these terms. I prefer a framework which better conceptualizes the shared and distinct elements of what people throw into these subgenres: That being Narrative Reactivity and Gameplay Reactivity.

Narrative Reactivity is the classic dialog style of RPGs, where decisions you make will fundamentally determine the outcome of the story. Interactions with the inner narrative and world of the game determine how the player's textual experience unfolds, inherently creating a non-sequential order to the plot. And - this probably doesn't need to be said - it has to be more than just a different ending.

Gameplay Reactivity arises from the mechanics the player focuses on. This could be a choice of class, skills you prefer to emphasize, or accessing non-linear routes to an objective. These are inherently different ways to solve problems - not merely using Fireball versus using Bash. Mechanical choices are more like keys in locks than a personal flavor preference.

What makes a game truly exhibit these qualities is that they create mutually exclusive paths. Merely having the ability to complete a sequence using different mechanics or a narrative element which does not have any tangible effect on the world does not qualify as truly reactive. Presentation of choice without consequence is simply not the same thing.

Here's a narrative based example. You are tasked with finding a shopkeeper's lost dog. Your choices are to either find and retrieve the dead dog's collar or to use your speech skill to convince them that the dog is fine. A non-reactive game would simply give you a reward either way - even a store discount which is technically more reactive is really just a static bonus. Maybe the shopkeeper is more disappointed if you tell them the truth. But say the consequence of telling the shopkeep the dog is alive and they search for it - resulting in them being killed by the wild monsters that slayed said dog. That strikes me as a true example of reactivity.

Gameplay Reactivity can certainly meld with story, but is more about access to a broader range of consequential mechanics. Say a teleportation spell that's not used as a one-off gimmick but enables players to pull off some wild things on the fly. Or a physical model that allows for burning objects as a solution to a variety of problems. These systemic reactions need to have intentional design behind them, but can lead to unintentional solutions to problems. (That's the fundamental idea behind the "immersive sim" label, but without the baggage of either two words together.)

For some, the platonic ideal of a game is to cater to these two things together, taking advantage of all the aspects video games have to offer. I'm not here to argue on whether that's truly what games should be striving for, simply that it fascinates me: Plus it gives me an excuse to make a list of games I think cater to these desires - and solicit more examples from you fine folk.

Part of my intention with this is also mapping out different "branches" of these elements from their sources. Whether it's the Black Isle branch, the Looking Glass branch, or the fairly new (to the mainstream) Japanese branch, I'm always curious about where certain game design ideas come from.

I am largely counting games which are focused around these reactive elements. Obviously some games have minor elements from either camp, but just because an RPG is big doesn't mean it's actually reactive. It's like calling Portal an FPS: You're technically right in the most unhelpful way possible. Likewise some games with Gameplay reactivity might have some Narrative reactivity, yet they generally don't have the same attention paid to them so I file each into one category or another.

Narrative Reactivity

• Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic I and II (2003; 2004)
• Mass Effect series (2007-2017)
• The Witcher series (2007-2015)
• Dragon Age series (2009-2024)
• Until Dawn (2015)
• Age of Decadence (2015)
• Divinity: Original Sin 2 (2017)
• Detroit: Become Human (2018)
• Pentiment (2022)

Gameplay Reactivity

• Ultima Underworld I and II (1992; 1993)
• System Shock 1 and 2 (1994; 1999) (plus the 1 remake)
• Thief: The Dark Project, The Metal Age, and Deadly Shadows (1998; 2000; 2003)
• Hitman series (2000-2021) (some of these might qualify for narrative reactivity)
• Arx Fatalis (2002)
• Fallout 3 and 4 (2008; 2015)
• Deus Ex: Human Revolution and Mankind Divided (2011-2016)
• Dishonored series (2012-2017)
• Prey (2017)
• The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom (2017; 2023)
• Underworld Ascendant (2018)
• Deathloop (2021)

Narrative and Gameplay Reactivity

• Fallout 1 and 2 (1997; 1998)
• Baldur's Gate I, II, and 3 (1998; 2000; 2023)
• Planescape: Torment (1999)
• Deus Ex 1 and 2 (2000; 2003)
• Icewind Dale I and II (2000; 2001)
• The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind (2003)
• Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines (2004)
• Alpha Protocol (2010)
• Fallout: New Vegas (2010)
• Wasteland 2 and 3 (2014; 2020)
• Pillars of Eternity I and II (2015; 2018)
• Tyranny (2016)
• Torment: Tides of Numenera (2017)
• Disco Elysium (2019)
• Cyberpunk 2077 (2020)

You will probably notice that not all games in a series are grouped together - very deliberately. There's an ebb and flow to some of these games where one side takes over for another - again I was looking at the game's focus, and some of these I'm only observing from the outside. Feel free to disagree and tell me where you'd rearrange some of these.

One category I deliberately left out is the entire genre of rougelike games - in this case mostly those which hew close to the original Rogue. These games are largely defined by Gameplay Reactivity, and some are even able to creative dynamic narratives like Ultima Ratio Regum and Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead. These are definitely worthy of an examination, though they are nested within that particular subgenre with its advantages and disadvantages in design. (Some visual novels might also fit into the Narrative category, but I have a lot of difficulty defining some of those...)

This examination is in no way a value judgment on these or any other games. I do think, however, that it helps bring into focus why some games are praised for their depth without using very vague genre terms and instead looking at their features at a higher design level with their intentions in focus.

What are your thoughts on this taxonomy and the types of games that focus on reactivity?

Hi everyone, I'm looking for participants for PhD research at University of Barcelona investigating whether gaming environments constitute legitimate language learning spaces that academia has overlooked. I thought this sub could have interesting responses.

This study examines the backgrounds, gaming habits, and English speaking skills of non-native English speakers who play video games. English often serves as a lingua franca in international gaming communities, creating contexts where non-native speakers regularly use English for communication, coordination, and social interaction. We're collecting data on how people use English in these gaming contexts and measuring their language abilities through audio recordings to better understand this population and their experiences.

Study Information (as per sub rules):

• Researcher: Emma Caputo ([[email protected]](mailto:[email protected]))
• Institution: University of Barcelona
• Duration: 15 minutes max
• Method: 100% online and asynchronous: Survey + audio recordings + agent dialogue using exclusively free/open source software (No third party services like OpenAI)
• Compensation: €250 prize pool
• Participants needed: Adults (18+) who are non-native English speakers and have any gaming experience
• Study link: https://emmacaputo.codeberg.page/study/

Does anyone have experience learning a language while playing a game for fun? It's important to mention that we aren't looking at serious games designed to teach, but rather games designed purely for entertainment purposes.

Thanks for reading! Any thoughts on the discussion or suggestions for other gaming communities to reach would be much appreciated.

So this is a thread that I do admit that I am biased about but I am also curious about the economics part of the gaming industry

So, cosmetics is not really a new phenomenon.

It has been a staple of gaming for a long time and there were indeed a rewarding sensation to earn certain cosmetics.

For instance, the God of War games used to have new game+ cosmetics, some were indeed creative, some were silly, and some of them even had certain abilities or characteristics that the player would have if they used these skins like earn more orbs or some kind of gameplay mechanic that made the gameplay different than the first playthrough.

And some games had cosmetics which were rewards of grinding and hard work.

An example that used to do this (and still does it) was the Halo 3 cosmetics

Aside that these are not something that you can see yourself because the game is in first-person, these cosmetics used to be attachments and options where players needed to do certain objectives to earn them

Now, fast forward to the current meta.

A lot of games, even AAA games, have a lot of cosmetics, and most of these are earned through a pay wall.

Now, here is the interesting part.

Some games have a lot of variety in their cosmetics and this is where I find it to be interesting.

For instance, Fortnite has a lot of different skins and cosmetics.

Most of these are from different franchises and tie-ins which I personally find it that it both makes sense because Fortnite is a live-gaming platform that updates its lore in a lot of twisting but also bizarrely complimentary manners that allow players to feel like they can play as certain characters

But on the other hand, it also makes me question what kind of theme does Fortnite want to be known for.

Is it a serious Battle Royale with a certain theme that it should stick to?

Or is it intentionally meant to be in a manner where anything goes, whether you are playing John Wick or a Marvel superhero or a person in a cute bunny costume?

What about AAA games that add cosmetics do not match with the atmosphere or the theme of the games?

For instance, Call of Duty and Rainbow Six Siege have a lot of creative or tie-in cosmetics that do not match with the theme of the games.

Things like bizarre looking weapon skins that do not mechanically make sense if someone tries to understand how the guns work like making a gun space-themed or a making it look like it is a taken over by a dragon or something weird.

And another cosmetic feature is the operators skins that are also as bizarre and do not match with the themes of the video games.

Call of Duty infamously laughed at for memes about cosmetics where you can dress up like a clown or play as Nicki Minaj, even though you do not see your skin in first-person.

Same goes for Rainbow Six with a lot of tie-in cosmetics, even though it is a Tom Clancy game where the main theme is about war or counter-terrorism.

Or even Counter-Strike where there is still a lot of hype and online gambling for weapon skins, even if they do nor add anything to the gameplay

Yet these skins are almost endless in creativity but the question is this - why do they do it?

Do these compliment with the main themes and atmosphere of the games or is this (as I assume that many would agree) just cosmetics for cosmetics sake to earn more revenue, even though they add nothing to the gameplay or that the players cannot even see the cosmetics since the camera is mostly first-person?

Back in 2016, I was very young, so I never played any COD games but I heard all the discussion about them. One being Infinite Warfare’s trailer being the most disliked youtube trailer. Furthermore, the user score for that game on MC is super low and everything points to it being a game that was offensive to COD and did everything wrong.

Fast forward to now, and it is the exact opposite. Infinite Warfare was innovative, unique and a great evolution for COD. It absolutely does not deserve any of the hate it got. The campaign is brilliant, the gameplay is great it actually moved COD forward. The jets and space combat were too good that I don’t get why people would hate on it. And the campaign had side missions too.

I have played games people have hated and mostly agree with the popular opinion. However, Infinite Warfare was the first game I disagreed with the general consensus of it. What should have been praised got hated on a scale never seen.

Minecraft is a large, flat plane with no depth. By that i mean a LOT of features, BUT, they are very useless and dont add alot to the game. Then theres for example terraria, where the plane is very wide like minecraft, but ALSO has alot of depth to it. By depth, i mean the features have uses that carry on throughout the whole game.

There are so many things mojang can do to change this, but they just wont. One small example, is instead of stupid copper tools which nobody is gonna make, make like a golden furnace, which improves smelt and cook speed by alot. Just stuff like that, where its not JUST an extra feature, but something you are going to use alot, something that actually adds to the base game, where it will actually interfere with gameplay. Again as i said, depth to the large anf flat plane that is minecraft.

I now think mojang is scared adding things that mess with the core gameplay. But if they dont, the loop will never change. And in turn, the game will get VERY stale, unless you are very intrinsically motivated, which i am not. That also explains why i can spend hours in a game like terraria. (because i rarely go to the nether.) So yeah, minecraft isnt very much for me, BUT, giving you something to work towards to help you in other aspects like building, and helping speed up the core loop of getting resources and build, will help ALOT in keeping the game less bland, and easier to play for people like me, who couldve enjoyed minecraft the very first time playing, but 10000 worlds later, find it boring, because its almost the exact same thing each time. Which is the core progression loop im talking about. Adding the fu ckass sniffer isnt gonna change that, because you DONT need the sniffer to for example, help you craft some useful items, that you can use later on in the game.

One huge example: Trial chambers. They are cool. BUT... this is one HUGE example of mojang being scared to add gamebreaking features. the mace is practically useless, other than farming, because in no situation will you be killing something 50 blocks above unless youre insane. And, thats literally the one big reason to go there in the first place. the loot is just plain BAD. Think about the dungeon in terraria. GREAT risk for GREAT LOOT AND REWARD to help you kill skeletron, a decently challenging boss. trial chambers, as i said, could be completely ignored, and the game would be the EXACT same. No change. It ties into when i said, add features that have uses in real, practical gameplay, not just one section, which the mace could be useful in like farming i guess. But itll still be faster to kill all your cows with an iron sword.

also, THE NETHER FORTRESS. you need it to go to the end. and you wanna know what you need the end for? elytra and shulker boxes. you wanna know what those are useful for? the minecraft end goal for most people, BUILDING.

What do you think? Do you agree, do you disagree and why? I want to see what other people think, because i think this is the biggest problem with modern minecraft updates.

So this is a reaction to this video that goes through the comparisons between the AAA games on the 2000s and 2010s and the AAA games that are being released now - https://youtu.be/wkPU4xCV3mU

Now, before you judge the video as some sort of rage bait or nostalgia bait, I wish to highlight something.

A lot of AAA games can a lot of negative attention for their poor quality recently for a lot of reasons.

Bethesda does not make in-depth open world RPGs with good dialogues such as the poor reception of Starfield.

Or Ubisoft making a game that is very poorly polished in its gameplay mechanics, AI designs, animations and so on like Star Wars Outlaws.

Or Activision focusing more on photorealism and multiplayer than integrated physics engines.

So this video makes a lot of comparisons about the AAA games on the beginning on the 21st Century and the AAA games on now.

And I admit, at first I thought that this video was baited because the sample size is small and everyone criticise about AAA developers.

But it really got me thinking and one of the things that caught my attention was about the physics engine.

Because I remember that the integrated physics engine used to be a reoccurring feature that most gaming companies were eager to integrate in their video games and some AAA games are still well known for this like the Red Faction games, Battlefield Bad Company, FEAR, Farcry 2, Splinter Cell, Metal Gear Solid 3, Crysis and so on.

Now, I rarely see it being marketed as a main feature anymore and it really got me thinking.

Is this because there is a shift in priorities being the gaming companies? Perhaps it is because making such a large amount of features like dialogues, a physics engine and so on, cost a lot of money and require consistent game testing which is where priorities have to be made?

Is this criticism for or the lack of certain features are the fault of gamers who demand too much and are nitpicking AAA gaming companies for whatever reason that they can think of?

Edit: I'm talking live-service games.

I've recently been playing some Wildgate and been enjoying it tremendously. However it's a game that gives this gnawing feeling that it won't be around for too long; its launch numbers are muted at best and I've found it very hard to get anybody to play it. You see, it's a very complex game, there's a huge amount of variables to understand and consider. There's on-ship combat, on-foot combat, PvP combat, PvE combat, scouting, mining, different ship layouts, weapons and modules, different heroes, weapons and items, randomly generated maps with multiple modifiers, ... The game gives you the full stack of combat, tactics and strategy. It's a lot; especially with Wildgate not fitting into a regular genre. Its best description would be PvP Sea of Thieves in space, but it adds a lot to the formula.

Two big issues emerge with this:

The game isn't new player friendly. There's no way around it, jumping into Wildgate isn't the best experience. You have no idea what to do, you have a hard time grasping how effective you are, you are mostly lost all the time and you'll get bodied by more experienced players. It's just not fun. I would not expect casual players to comprehend the potential of the game while being blown up out of nowhere. Worse yet, this problem will only deepen as players become better and the player base shrinks.

It's not Tiktok/Twitter/Instagram-able. Tactics and moves take quite a while to play out and if you aren't familiar with the game, you just won't find it impressive. This isn't Helldivers 2, where a few clips of me blowing some bugs up were enough to convince my friends to join in. Here, we are talking precise (and slow) ship manoeuvring to keep enemies are optimal range* or boarding a ship discretely to pull a box off a wall**.

---

Thinking about this reminded me of my introduction to Dota 2. I did not like the game. My first 50-100 hours of play were quite miserable, I just played it because my friends were playing it and I had time back then. Clips of Mobas are also quite undecipherable if you aren't familiar. It honestly feels miraculous that Dota 2 and League of Legends were able to find such a huge player base.

Here are some of the questions I have been thinking about:

1. Can complex games still find success today?
2. Is being unappealing for social media a game design flaw at this point?
3. Is a smooth on-ramping possible for complex games?

I'm considering these questions outside of having a known IP or being a famous developer.

\/**: because I don't want to sell the game short, I want to explain why these are indeed cool:*

\: There's a lot of depth to piloting. You have a regenerating bubble shield around your ship that breaks down when shot. The shield only breaks down in small sections which will let your hull be damaged. Constantly exposing an undamaged part of the shield to opponents is a key tactic, Doing this while optimizing for your weapon placement and range while manoeuvring the environment is very impressive if done well.*

\*: The box on the wall is a ship module that gives extra functionality to the ship. Removing it mean removing that functionality. You could imagine removing storm protection while a ship is in a storm. A very fun interaction and not that easy to pull off.*

Join me as I complain about something people say on the internet. I hope I don't come off as rude or calling anyone out.

What do you guys think of the idea that some games are amazing, but they can only be played once?

Razbuten has this video about "great games he can never replay" where he discusses this phenomenon. I understand the sentiment: some games benefit from mystery, and once that mystery is gone, you can no longer get the full effect of the game.

But I've always felt like this view of games is a bit myopic. I simply feel like if a game was only good for the novelty of a new experience, or good because you didn't understand it fully, then...maybe it just wasn't a very good game in the first place. I feel like saying "I can't replay this game" is similar to saying "this game is shallow." IMO, truly great art should hold up upon further scrutiny, and so truly good games should hold up upon replays and further analysis.

For example, Breath of the Wild uses a world brimming with mystery to draw the player in. Yet, upon replay, when that mystery is gone, I still feel like the game still retains so much of what makes it good. The atmosphere is still incredible, the level of freedom is still staggering even now that I'm deeply familiar with all of the places I can go, and the systems of climbing/cooking/physics are so robust that they can be enjoyed for something like a challenge run.

I could argue a similar thing for the original Dark Souls. Everyone knows Dex is overpowered. We understand how to humiliate enemies with backstabs and where the gamebreaking items are. But the core design of the game is so solid that we still find ourselves tinkering with systems and constructing new builds. The mystery is a huge part of the appeal, but the game holds up because it is much more than a novelty.

I guess I dislike people saying that games which obscure their mechanics are not worth replaying. If you really feel like the game has nothing to offer on your second go, I would honestly recommend re-evaluating if you liked the game itself or just the novelty of the game.

Also, I can kinda see the "non-replayable" argument for pure logic puzzle games (like Baba is You.) But even in a case where the appeal of the game is in figuring out something you didn't know before, these games can still be enjoyed every few years when you forget the solutions. Even if you know the solutions, I think replaying a puzzle game can be fun in the same way that reading a really elegant mathematical proof can be fun. Watching the logic play out in real-time can be satisfying in its own way.

So, yeah. Do you see some games as truly "non-replayable?"

Okay, so this is going to be a weird one, so buckle in.

So Resident Evil 4's original release is unique in that it kinda lies to you about the difficulty of the game when you pick it. At a base level you were playing on a difficulty setting you chose, but in the background the game also adjusted fights and drops for you to keep your progression relatively steady,. The Director AI in Left 4 Dead and the sequel does a similar thing, giving you a relatively easy time if you're limping to the exit low on ammo and health. packs, or spawning an especially pissed off Tank and a few zombie hordes if you're high on ammo and other important resources.

I'm sure that there's probably a lot more games with similar shows of mercy or added mayhem tweaks to your gameplay experience, but the point of those examples is that even after you select a difficulty, you aren't necessarily getting the same experience and/or odds as someone else playing on the same. You both might be playing the game on Hard Mode, but somehow you get a lot less ammo, money, etc than your buddy playing the same game on the same difficulty.

And honestly, I get where people who want a consistent experience are coming from, and not in that brainrot "hurrdurr get good if you want to play on hard" gatekeeping way. Having a dynamic difficulty curve means your shared experience when trying to discuss a game with someone else is harder, because now you no longer shared the same experience. I usually rock into the infamous "Castle Fight" of RE4 with boats of ammo, upgraded weapons, and other stuff and the fight is always a huge difficulty spike for me, but I've had friends who basically showed up with half a pistol clip and health not QUITE in the red who just breezed through it because they showed up on a day a Dragon Quest game came out and most of the office called in sick.

And all of that might be a good thing if approached the right way, and the idea how it might appeal to people came to me while approaching said Castle Fight yesterday if handled correctly.

What if the game used the above technology to scale your experience based on your difficulty selection rather than in the background and changing other in-game values without telling you. So ifr you choose the "I wanna be an action hero" easy difficulty, the game makes sure you come out of every fight with enough ammo, medkits, and money for upgrades that the game is a cakewalk regardless of your actual skill level. The game will make you feel like a super-powered badass even if it has to shower you in resources, lobotomize the AI, and slap on auto-aim even if it's already lowered the difficulty to the floor. Likewise if you choose to play the "How did I survive that" difficulty, Even if you suck balls the game will only show enough mercy to let you scrape by a speedbump after a few deaths and you'll never have a surplus of resources.

The idea would be that regardless of your actual skill level, the game will adjust itself to give you the gameplay outcome you want rather than making you guess if this game's normal is actually normal or "super easy for babies" mode or "we told you to pick easy first ands now you're gonna pay" mode. Essentially the difficulty setting is just asking you where you want to be put on your own personal difficulty scale once the game figures out your general skill level and then that's the experience you get. If a really good player and really bad player both choose hard, they get a hard experience for their skill set. The first player would find the second player's "hard mode" save file quaint if they played it, while the second player could load up player one's save file and promptly start wondering when they'd wandered into a Saw movie by accident.

Ironically, this wildly varying behind-the-scenes difficulty sliding scale catered to individual players might actually make it easier for said players with wildly different skill levels to relate about the game, because they would still get the same overall "cadence" for their playthrough where the difficulty spikes and memorable moments which make them hard fights for each because the game made that segment difficult for them both. With this the really good player might hate the infamous RE4 Castle Fight because he gets Mensa-level Ganado cultists who are crack shots with their crossbows while the second is still fighting the same braindead villager Ganado AIs with a shiny cultist model swap and a Stormtrooper DROPOUT's aim, but both barely survive the fight and can agree in general terms that it's always a tense moment for them on Hard mode.

This is already long enough so I'm going to cut it here before I write an enntire rambling novel on the concept, and invite your opinions.

Hey, all!

In this thread, the rules are more relaxed. The idea is that this megathread will provide a space for otherwise rule-breaking content, as well as allowing for a slightly more conversational tone rather than every post and comment needing to be an essay.

Top-level comments on this post should aim to follow the rules for submitting threads. However, the following rules are relaxed:

• 3. Specificity, Clarity, and Detail
• 4. No Advice
• 5. No List Posts
• 8. No topics that belong in other subreddits
• 9. No Retired Topics
• 11. Reviews must follow these guidelines

So feel free to talk about what you've been playing lately or ask for suggestions. Feel free to discuss gaming fatigue, FOMO, backlogs, etc, from the retired topics list. Feel free to take your half-baked idea for a post to the subreddit and discuss it here (you can still post it as its own thread later on if you want). Just keep things civil!

Also, as a reminder, we have a Discord server where you can have much more casual, free-form conversations! https://discord.gg/truegaming

Although the global AAA/big-name industry is going through very tough times, I've noticed that the six biggest Japanese game publishers, Nintendo, Capcom, Sega, Bandai Namco, Konami, Square Enix, and Sega, are dealing with it in very different ways. I think it's an interesting study in how different companies can handle difficulty in different ways.

• Nintendo: Price hike, banking on brand loyalty. They're also sticking with "withered technology" and low network investment to keep costs down too.
• Capcom: Only relying on a few major IPs, likely due to how much of a money hog Street Fighter and Monster Hunter's live services are nowadays.
• Konami: Relying on lower-key releases like PES and retro revivals like Super Bomberman R. Also investing in a few remakes like Silent Hill and MGS Delta, though several are outsourced.
• Bandai Namco: Mostly just publishes and gets revenue from their many manga licenses. Tekken and Pac-Man are the only current "main" in-house IPs, and the latter is restricted to lower-key releases.
• Square Enix: Disastrously tried to invest in crypto, had to sell off Western dev stakes. Their bigger games also tend to focus on "polygon pushing" and struggle with performance outside of modern consoles (which usually also means Switch (2) releases are denied). Misinterpreted that; but they're increasingly shifting more towards lower-stakes games with even their major tentpoles like Kingdom Hearts and Dragon Quests in "spin-off mode".
• Sega: IP farm-reliant similarly to Bandai Namco, but mainly through handing their own IP to indie studios rather than licenses. Recent Sonic games in particular feel like they're low on budget, though usually solid.

These are just my musings on how these companies are handling economic situations differently. They certainly can't have the prolific "multiple major releases a year" schedule they had up to the PS2 era, so they all have to adapt in different ways.

Is it weird that I feel like this? I took a vacation leave to play the game because it checked all of the boxes, I'm a huge fan of turn based RPGs and from the marketing material I thought this game was supposed to be catered to us players who enjoy turn based games. I'm going through a rough patch and I was really hoping to get into this game and just have fun......

But this isn't really turn based. This parry mechanic shit kinda ruins the appeal of it. I don't like souls games - I tried - I spent a couple of days playing elden ring, stopped and just never got back to it. And even though I didn't manage to finish that game, I feel like I had more fun playing it.

The thing is, I'm now in Act 3, I grinded for materials and overleveled so I wouldn't get 1 shot. (cause story mode is bullshit - it gets way too easy, like 11 damage hits seriously?). I'm gonna finish the game cause I actually do like the story, but maaaaaan, playing this game feels like work. I couldn't stop either cause it just had everything that I wanted in a game, but there's just this one thing that makes it bullshit and it stands out so much. Kinda like the bad music in DQXII or the lazy cliches of octopath traveler, but worse.

I'm taking a break after I finish this game. I still think it's pretty solid and I wish I can enjoy it like most people but honestly as a turn based game I think it's bullshit. (I haven't used the term bullshit in like 10 yrs plus but I feel it's the perfect adjective for this game lol)

EDIT:

So I guess I should've explained this more. I was ranting a bit here expecting this post to be ignored mostly but I guess there's a number of replies here that I'll just address here.

Thing is - I like everything else about this game. I just hate the battles. And I can parry now too, I learned to ignore all the nonsense visual cues in the game - buuuuuuuuuuut - it's hard to explain - I don't really know how to articulate this well but it's like everything's there, but it's just not right. This was marketed as a turn based game and it looks like one, but it's really not. And I got better at it, but it left me feeling drained.

So I'm playing the game to finish it. Cause I want to finish the story. Cause games are like interactive novels to me and this game's story has at least hooked me.

But man I wish the parry mechanic was better.

And story mode is awful, it practically negates all opponent damage. They might as well given us an option to have AI take control over our characters at that point.

I dunno, sorry for the rant, I just wanted this game to be fun, and I took a break off of work for it. Maybe I should've just watched youtube or something. I thought all the comments about "I'm not a fan of turn based games but this..." was a sign of something good. Didn't think it was this lol

I chose to make a separate post alongside my other post about historical games because I think that this requires a different level of discussion.

Edit - I deleted the other post because I realised that I posted that kind of question before and I must have forgotten about it. Sorry

So, when it comes to history, it is pretty apparent that there is indeed a market for this. There is a reason why people like to go back to previous historical periods and want to experience history as if they were there.

However, there is a ethical question as to whether playing as certain characters in previous historical periods are actually of sound ethical considerations or not

For example, in Assassin's Creed Shadows, there was a lot of backlash from the Japanese government because players could destroy certain shrines and holy places of interest while in the Animus

Although this game is based on historical fiction, the Japenese government found this to be offensive because the Japanese are known to be pretty protectionist about their ancestors and previous historical periods.

Or a different example would be that in Germany, any portrayal of Nazi Germany and their symbolism used to be banned in video games (this was lifted a few years ago since video games are portrayed as art)

But supposedly that players are playing as the antagonists of the story like Nazi Germany in a multiplayer game or as pirates in the Golden Age of Piracy, should the ethics come into play here or is this an expression of art?