r/Games • u/AutoModerator • Sep 20 '24
Discussion Daily /r/Games Discussion - Free Talk Friday - September 20, 2024
It's F-F-Friday, the best day of the week where you can finally get home and play video games all weekend and also, talk about anything not-games in this thread.
Just keep our rules in mind, especially Rule 2. This post is set to sort comments by 'new' on default.
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Scheduled Discussion Posts
WEEKLY: What Have You Been Playing?
MONDAY: Thematic Monday
WEDNESDAY: Suggest Me A Game
FRIDAY: Free Talk Friday
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u/Rayuzx Sep 20 '24
One thing that been on my for the past week is Skies of Arcadia honesty should've been a bigger game than it was.
The game came out to near universal praise, so it wasn't like it was okayish at best for the time. While the Dreamcast was a doomed console it got a GameCube port, and it's just weird how that version never caught on. Sonic Adventure 2 Battle has defined a whole generation of Sonic fans, so it wasn't like GC owners weren't weary of Sega games. The Tales series has it's Western popularity bolstered on the fact that Symphonia was one of the few JRPGs on the console, so it wasn't like people were avoiding any of those that didn't have Mario on the cover.
Several other Sega games that came around the same time would get more prominent fanbases, like Crazy Taxi, Phantasy Star's transition to Online/Universe, and Super Monkey Ball. Vyse has also appeared in several other projects throughout the years, so it's not like Sega forgot about it. It's just so weird to me that the game seemed to have all of the things it needed to at least get a vocal cult fanbase, like Jet Set Radio, but it was like the stars perfectly misaligned on SoA.
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u/KawaiiSocks Sep 20 '24
For some reason every single great cRPG developer has a very weird quirk that involves doing more work, while simultaneously making the game ever so slightly worse, at least in my opinion.
For OwlCat it is encounters. Both Pathfinders and to a lesser extent Rogue Trader are great games, but they really suffer from having so many trashy and uninspired encounters. I just fought a bunch of goblins, can I not do it for another five times in the next half-hour, please? Take a look at Larian and how they approach their fights, with almost every single one being unique and memorable.
Certainly don't take a look into how freaking obsessed Larian is with CONTAINERS. I mean, what's up with that? I can semi-get it in DOS games, where there is a Lucky Find skill and it can give you some resources. But it gets tiring so fast, but as a completionist min-maxer I just can't stop myself from clicking every single one of them. I do wish they just made them movable objects that you can throw, climb on, instead of CONTAINERS, because this Jamrock Shuffle just isn't it. At least their dialogue is concise, to the point and fun.
Unlike long-winded monologues of Pillars of Eternity series. Brilliant game, best cRPG gameplay system, good encounter and CONTAINER design, but holy shit does it get verbose, and not in a good Disco Elysium-way. It comes off unnatural and takes a while to get used to all the names of the gods, and then in game two they just introduce a whole new culture that has different names for all the gods you've just spent 100+ hours learning and memorizing in game one; and also went ahead and made sure that every god has multiple aspects with different names.
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u/abbzug Sep 20 '24
Why not just lower the difficulty and cruise through the encounters? Improbable as it may seem some people play cRPGs because they like the gameplay of cRPGs.
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u/KawaiiSocks Sep 20 '24
Oh, I do absolutely love the gameplay of cRPGs, have 3+ playthroughs in most offerings in the last several years, including more obscure titles like ATOM, Solasta and Encased. The problem still stands: most PF encounters are designed around solutions rather than stat-checks and it is a better approach for encounters in general to keep it fresh, in my opinion.
In Kingmaker/WotR, though, once you find a solution it is a lesson in repetition, rather than creativity a lot of the time, which I find jarring. It feels like a resource tax at best, and padding, grinding at its worst.
In the absence of mechanical skill check (aiming, reaction etc.), knowledge and tactics checks should be the go-to checks in good cRPGs, but that's just my opinion
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u/desantoos Sep 21 '24
I've been enjoying Second Wind on YouTube but I guess I missed the dramatic walk-out of Cold Take guy Frost. He has now two videos where he goes into detail all the things he doesn't like about his former boss. He thinks the Second Wind top brass was shady about finances and pushed him into doing pieces about stuff he didn't want to do.
I'm used to this sort of call-out being over stuff like sex abuse and physical assaults and stuff like that. Frost alleges a lot of smaller things and thinks if he has enough of them that it equals something worthy of doing a loud shouting condemnation. But do I, a bystander to all of this, really have to care about whether the Second Wind top guy published spreadsheets detailing financials in a timely manner to his peers at the company? At worst, he alleges that the guy may have been bribed to tell people to praise a game, but his evidence is a lot of dot connecting that, if I'm assuming good faith, I don't see.
In the second video he responds to a post by the team at Second Wind who more or less stand by their guy, though often in vague shoulder-shrugging "I guess I'll work for this guy" statement. He goes, name by name, on a tirade against each one.
Frost's Cold Take often felt like a corner of reason. Often reason that was kinda superficial, but reason nonetheless. I suppose that's why it's so head-scratching that he'd go on this solo crusade. Now he wants to investigate and take down games journalists. I mean, go ahead dude, but gaming journalism is basically a dead thing already and is an atom in the universe of money the gaming industry is splashing around with. I'm surprised that such a person would make this sharp turn.
But he has made the whole Second Wind thing seem sour. Maybe there's a better alternative out there?
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u/Bebobopbe Sep 21 '24
Between Yahtzee and Marty I'll never leave second wind. Frost has made himself look like a lunatic. I lost all respect for him. But I do enjoy all the other content the channel produces. I rather support them.
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u/calwil93 Sep 21 '24
Just pre-ordered Dragon Ball: Sparking Zero. Hoping it’s as good as Budokai Tenkaichi 3…
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u/llamaguy21 Sep 20 '24
I'm probably gonna grab em at some point anyway, but anyone have experience with the Sunless series (Sunless Sea, Sunless Sky)? The aesthetic and world look super interesting, and they've been out for a while.
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u/Izzy248 Sep 20 '24
When it comes to sequels, one thought I often find myself asking in a lot of recent games is why does it seem like so many games walk backwards. When it comes to variables like being developed by different teams or something, I can somewhat get it. But there seems to be a lot of times recently where a sequel will be made by the same team but its missing modes, missing features/mechanics, has more bugs than the last one, or overall the quality just isnt there. And its really baffling because in my mind, youve already made the building blocks. But then it feels like it took a step back...
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u/llamaguy21 Sep 21 '24
I'd hazard a guess that it has to do with not trying to retread too much old ground. I was thinking about Marvel's Spider-Man 2 as an example, but from what I've heard Darkest Dungeon 2 sounds more in line with what you're talking about.
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u/Izzy248 Sep 21 '24
We've seen a lot of stupid and frivolous lawsuits in the gaming industry in years, like Monster Energy trying to stop anyone from using the word "Monster", Bethesda suing because people use the word "Scrolls" or "Prey", lawsuits over the words "King" and "Sugar", but with the recent lawsuit against Palworld by Nintendo...it just gets an extra level of petty and stupid. The Nintenlawyers are infamous for pursuing lawsuits, but the sheer fact they filed patents after the release just so they could have a case to sue over is wild. Like, they couldnt dredge up anything else so they made up some so they could build a case.
And there are many other creature collection games that resemble Pokemon much more than Palworld does. Whether its the creatures looking more like Pokemon, the mechanics, the gameplay style, even the naming of the IP like Nexomon and Coromon. The only reason I can imagine Nintendo pursuing this is because Palworld blew up far more than those other contenders, and the fact that Sony inked a deal with Pocketpair, and they dont want Playstation to potentially have their own version of a creature collection game.
This even makes me wonder...ignoring the patents Nintendo filed after the fact, how and where can people look for patents that are locked down by someone. Because it seems like when you are making a game, it could be very easy to stumble upon doing someone elses patent, since a lot of them are pretty vague and broad in the scope of their description, so you may end up infringing without even realizing you are infringing until its too late. How can someone possibly know, or prevent themselves from ending up in those situations. Because Im sure when a lot of newcomers and indie devs make a game, they arent looking up a registry for a bunch of patents to see what is or isnt allowed.
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u/OverHaze Sep 21 '24
I just re-watched the PS5 Pro announcement and it got me thinking how much Concord content do you think had to be cut at the last minute? It would help explain lack of new (or even recent) games featured running on the thing. I'm betting 120fps Concord was meant to be the centrepiece of the presentation.
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u/Effective-Priority62 Sep 21 '24
Is there any chance Microsoft might improve and make a monumental comeback in the next gen to end Sony's monopoly? Or has the massive debt of the Activision deal ruined them forever?
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u/RareCheetah3162 Sep 22 '24
It's always possible. The games industry is kind of unique in that there are these clear sudden transitions to entirely new platforms every 6-8 years that always provide opportunities for the console manufacturers to totally reverse their fortunes. Look at Nintendo, who went from a massive hit platform with >100 million sales in the Wii, then an absolute failure with the Wii U selling only a tenth of that, to an even bigger hit with the Switch selling 140 million. Look at Sony going from the best-selling platform of all time in the PS2 to a platform that just barely matched a competitor from Microsoft, who had only been in the industry 4 years when they launched it, only for Microsoft to drop the ball themselves the next gen and get into their current state. In the exact same year a company can launch the most profitable franchise of all time and a platform that underwhelms and fails (1996 brought Nintendo both Pokemon and the N64). This medium is an unpredictable rollercoaster.
Microsoft have a lot of valuable studios under their belt now. It's possible that they could launch their next-gen platform at a good price a year before Sony's and have those studios populate the first-year lineup with strong exclusives. It worked to make the Xbox 360 a success, coming off a generation where the PS2 was utterly dominant. It's also possible they could become successful doing something more unexpected, like making their next platform Windows-compatible for games and releasing a Steam Deck + dock style device to compete with the Switch 2.
The trouble is that game development cycles are a *ot longer now than they were in the PS2/360 days. That makes it harder to turn things around by funding a bunch of big exclusives for a new platform. If it takes 4-5 years to make a game, your next platform's launch titles have to begin development while your last platform is still new.
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u/Effective-Priority62 Sep 24 '24
Sorry for the incoming paragraphs of the long rant that I wrote, I just needed to get it out. You make a great point, though. I'm just not very confident in Microsoft finally learning after nearly two generations since the Xbox One disaster. But I'm hoping they're actually cooking an incredible comeback with the next Xbox and lineup.
What irks me about Microsoft currently, is that they don't seem to be course correcting anytime soon. I think they're actually pretty comfortable not being on top and just selling subscription/cloud services and sponsoring a few games. Phil Spencer and Sarah Bond still in charge and not willing to steer the ship into a new direction. I think MS will not even bother with the next Xbox being the world's most powerful machine at launch, and will probably take advantage from all the outrage directed at Sony to quietly make the next console being much more focused on digital services and streaming, and having an optional disc drive (just to not piss off their install base who still own discs).
If they were actually still interested in the console race, we'd start hearing all those mid-gen industry rumors by now, about how the next Xbox's specs will blow PS6 out of the water in overall power and performance, and maybe hopefully, that they're actually making games for the next Xbox's lineup. If MS did this and expanded dev mode support in the next gen so Xbox can finally smoothly run even PS3 emulation, the free marketing from the media would be insane.
Of course, they still need to also get third party devs back on their side, as so many have skipped Xbox now when it's more profitable to develop a game optimized for either the PS5 or Switch and then port it to PC. The biggest problem with Xbox is the one they themselves caused. PS5 still has exclusives in both third and first party, even if they all eventually come to PC over the years. No one, not even casual gamers are interested in Xbox when most of it's exclusives are relatively obscure and also always day one on PC, while all their friends and more famous games are on the PS5 and Switch.
My only hope for the Sony monopoly to end is for Xbox to turn this around, but I see no signs of them doing this yet, it seems like they still haven't hit rock bottom. The future seems bleak, and while I can play great games on the PS5, it's sad to look back on the last 3 previous Playstation consoles and how soulless the PS5 looks like in comparison. The PS3 specially, was a behemoth of a media center, its first models could even run linux, along with the PS2.
The PS5 is ass-backwards in all those regards, the video player sucks, can't play local music or store photos, no native web browser app, can't use all the Dualshock 4s you own except on backcompat mode PS4 games, can't even manage local save files other than either deleting them or uploading to the cloud, and their first party games is a barren landscape of just one or two big releases per year, not to mention the absurd PS Plus prices. Or the Classic PS1 and PS2 titles you can buy or acquire via PS Plus, run like they're in a dogshit laptop and not the most powerful console in the world, which should have an emulator on par with PCSX2 or better. Or their zero effort in investing in PS3 emulation, when they can sell remasters, remakes and streaming them via PS Now.
It's basically one huge money-milking subscription machine, I'm savvy (or poor) enough not to throw much of my money into it and share games with friends, but it's sad knowing how powerful this console is, how magical the playstation brand used to be, and what could have been. And more disheartening still, that my only hope lies on the people at Xbox eventually pulling their head out of their asses, hopefully within the next 10 years so I can feel the effects in 20. And no, I don't really like dealing with PC other than work, study and easily playing some old games on my laptop, maybe getting the next Steam Deck eventually.
I've always been a console player that casually goes back and forth in this hobby, but seeing the state of the industry now sometimes makes me wanna just stop. Thankfully there are a lot of games and franchises I still like to keep up with, but it will be a long time before I bother getting a PS6 because I'm suspicious both PS and Xbox are still a long way from any course correcting. Hoping I'm wrong about Xbox.
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u/Bebobopbe Sep 26 '24
Anyone know a better site for gaming news? i just want to read about games and not have to look at reddit constant negativity on everything. This site is such a shit show that no one even enjoys the hobby on here.
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u/khanys Sep 20 '24
so that god of war thread that just got locked was full of bots, right? surely there aren't that many sony defenders on here.
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u/Cautious-Intern9612 Sep 21 '24
I get that it sucks but if it gets Sony pumped to put all their games on steam it’s fine to me, I’m just worried these hate campaigns will lead to us having games never coming to PC
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u/Zordman Sep 20 '24
I'm pro giving billion dollar corporations as much shit as possible, but this honestly is one of the biggest non-issues I've seen people flip their shit over.
They tell you in a clearly visible sign that this is required, it is not pulling the rug out from under you.
From what I'm seeing, people can cancel out of the PSN login and play offline. So it actually is not required? I can't confirm this myself because I do not own it on steam.
Just about every company has done something in the past with almost 0 pushback. Why the sudden outcry now that Sony is doing it?
The process to make an account takes less than 2 minutes. Less than it takes to write an angry comment about the game.
Most importantly, there are much bigger problems in the industry than this, such as the mass layoffs. Putting attention on this with such outcry delegitimatizes and devalues outcry for something more worthwhile
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u/AbyssalSolitude Sep 20 '24
Requiring an additional account is objectively bad. It's not an opinion whether forcing people to waste time making accounts they don't need a good thing for them or not. The company is making you waste your time in hopes you'd get dragged inside it ecosystem. If it was optional, then players themselves could decided whether they want it or not.
Like, you can say "but it's not that bad" or "but other companies also do this" or "but smth-smth layoffs" and neither would cancel out the fact that it's objectively bad, that's why defending it is so weird. It's like defending telemarketing calls because "it's not a big deal, just hang up, it takes 2 seconds, why are you complaining about something so trivial while African kids are starving"
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u/Zordman Sep 20 '24
As I said, Im pro giving billion dollar corporations as much shit as possible.
What's weird is that Sony is suddenly the focus of this, as if this was a new innovation from them that they are imposing on consumer and trying to make this the new standard for the industry. But this is already been the standard for PC games for almost a decade. Where was this energy before for Microsoft, Ubisoft, etc.?
It is also weird to buy a game full price at launch just to review it negatively for something that is clearly stated.
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u/AbyssalSolitude Sep 21 '24
It's plain disingenuous to claim there were no complaints when other companies forced people to make useless accounts. Do you even remember EGS exclusivity drama? People hate being forced to make new accounts.
You are saying you are "pro giving billion dollar corporations as much shit as possible", but at the same time you are giving it a free pass because "but other billion dollar corporations are doing the same thing, this makes it okay" which makes no sense. No, it's bad in all cases.
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u/Zordman Sep 21 '24
You aren't comprehending the point I'm making. It's disingenuous to put words in my mouth with a fake quote.
I never at any point said "but other billion dollar corporations are doing the same thing, this makes it okay". Why are you quoting me when I said no such thing?
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u/AbyssalSolitude Sep 21 '24
That's called paraphrasing.
You said (and these are direct quotes) "Just about every company has done something in the past with almost 0 pushback. Why the sudden outcry now that Sony is doing it?" and "But this is already been the standard for PC games for almost a decade. Where was this energy before for Microsoft, Ubisoft, etc.?"
You did not said any variation of "this practice is not okay", so I assumed you think this practice is okay.
And so I paraphrased: "but other billion dollar corporations are doing the same thing, this makes it okay"
If it's not your point, then do clarify what you mean.
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u/Zordman Sep 21 '24 edited Sep 21 '24
Paraphrasing does not use quotation marks. When you use quotation marks you are directly quoting something. People have been sued for putting words in people's mouths like that (note: I am not suggesting I have any intent on suing you. Maybe you don't speak English fluently, which is why I'm making the distinction.)
If you want further reading on this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotation_marks_in_English
"Quotation marks are not used for indirect speech. This is because indirect speech can be a paraphrase; it is not a direct quote, and in the course of any composition, it is important to document when one is using a quotation versus when one is just giving content, which may be paraphrased, and which could be open to interpretation."
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u/subredditsummarybot Sep 20 '24
Your Weekly /r/games Recap
Friday, September 13 - Thursday, September 19, 2024
Top 10 Posts
Top 7 Discussions
| score | comments | title & link |
|---|---|---|
| 66 | 13 comments | [Trailer] Brawlhalla x Mega Man Crossover Reveal Trailer |
| 32 | 6 comments | [Update] Brutal Orchestra 1.4 "Human Canvas" |
| 63 | 4 comments | [Preview] Forza Horizon 2 - XWine1 (Xbox One) Progress Update 1 |
| 0 | 1 comments | Pristontale EU: Fusionists Season 10 Official Trailer |
| 15 | 1 comments | [Retrospective] Vib-Ribbon Retrospective: "Vibri Deserves Better" |
| 56 | 0 comments | "Utopia Must Fall" Is A Stylish Vector-Based Shooter Inspired By Missile Command | Time Extension |
If you would like this roundup sent to your reddit inbox every week send me a message with the subject 'games'. Or if you want a daily roundup, use the subject 'games daily' (<--Click one of the links. The bot can't read chats, you must send a message).
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u/M8753 Sep 20 '24
Just occurred to me that criticisms of Dragon Age Veilguard are a lot like criticisms that Baldur's Gate 3 received when it was revealed (but before early access). Too bright and cheery, graphics too cartoony, combat too different compared to the previous games. I know it doesn't mean that Veilguard will be GOTY or anythiing :D more like... I just really want to play it for myself and see.