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Airship Ballet

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  1. Recommendation: What 1st person game to buy

    in Off-Topic

    Posted

    I expected better from a game released in 2011 - even a middling game like Crysis 2 was better

    If you can bring yourself to call Crysis 2 "middling" I think it's clear that you expect too much in general. My point is that it's not pushed as a deep, compelling tale of love and loss, but rather a silly excuse to blast banditos away with ridiculous guns. Bulletstorm had an awful story, so did Painkiller, so did Unreal Tournament, so does Gears of War: these aren't the games that you can fairly say "had a less-than-compelling story, not worth my £4.50." Rage definitely isn't sub-par on the whole, and as you can tell I'm far from complacent when something isn't done justice. The average quality of video games has been consistent for a good decade, with some below average and even more above. It's nowhere near time to start the vox populi "rise up against consumer abuse through mediocre titles" spiel yet, especially in this context.

  2. Recommendation: What 1st person game to buy

    in Off-Topic

    Posted · Edited by Airship Ballet

    Could it perhaps be your expectations that are leaving you disappointed? It's a game by id and you're complaining about linear gameplay and a sacrificing of story and freedom of movement in favor of top-notch gunplay? Picking up an id game and expecting anything other than satisfying gunplay and non-existent story/freedom is like picking up a Thief game and expecting to be given a shotgun. If you looked at screenshots and watched trailers/gameplay footage and came away expecting better textures than what you saw and a compelling story somewhere amidst the Mad Max buggy fights, I'm afraid that the fault lies with you.

     

    need to stop reading this thread, it's getting me down

  4. Recommendation: What 1st person game to buy

    in Off-Topic

    Posted

    Okay, well since you've played the majority of big releases, don't want to play any smaller (and often better) releases, can't buy anything recently released because you want them to cost as much as they will in a couple of years' time and think that 2010 has fallen into antiquity, I've got a little list that I think should match your criteria.

     

    Dwarf Fortress - a game full of stunning vistas about Frodo taking the ring to Isengard from the perspective of the dwarves. Looks stunning in 4k.

    XCOM UFO Defense - Another stunning game, optimised well enough to show the entire globe on-screen at once. You play as Will Smith and his sassy sidekick Jeff Goldblum in an action-packed adventure that takes you all around the world in an effort to fight back the alien menace.

    TES Daggersmall - Fan project working to completely remake Bethesda's Skyblivionwind and bring it up to date to run on modern tech. Even Titans are struggling to run it, it's nuts. Weird thing is, it's about the size of a student's bedroom: it's just that graphically advanced.

    Meinkraft - A noirish re-telling of Adolf Hitler's life from his teen years to the fall of the Third Reich in '45. Hard-hitting and gritty, boasting extreme fidelity and definitely not for the faint of heart or hardware.

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    Lootable paintings

    in The Dark Mod

    Posted

    I honestly just like checking everything. I've always maintained that stealth is, ironically enough, a secondary gameplay direction in the Thief series, and TDM by extension. I think the primary direction is exploration, in that you walk into a place blind and have to go around checking everything while remaining undetected. The largest part of the game for me is making a mental map in my head and figuring out where I haven't been, what I haven't checked, and so on. The stealth is obviously still pivotal, but the exploration is just a constant thing, and all the trepidation I ever feel when trying to remain undetected is that it'd make it a pain to move further into the mission if I set off an alert. If I can look into a room and see everything immediately, that's spoiled for me. I wanna go rubbing my face along all the paintings and ham-fisting the contents of cabinets to see what's in them, all the while nervously glancing at the door. The exploration itself is the core of the game for me, and it's the stealth that backs it up, so as far as I'm concerned, the easier it is to tell loot apart from junk, the less fun I have.

    • Like 9

  13. Thief 4

    in Off-Topic

    Posted

    You can't really take what a person selling a product says and assume it's what they actually believe. They'll say anything to appeal to their audience, even as you see the sparkle in their eyes die mid-sentence. Conference shows and the consequent interviews are only useful for finding out what the game is through gameplay footage. Disregard everything that isn't raw gameplay footage (and even then try to figure out how much of it is representative of the rest of the game) at those shows, because they talk a load of shit during interviews. If it's a stage demo, ignore the dude talking and go off what you see because, again, everything they say is paper-thin buzzword spam. The more buzzwords you hear in an interview or stage demo, the more they're being paid to spout nonsense. The more effort they have to go to in addition to gameplay screenings, the worse the game probably is.

     

    I mean it's common sense. Little Jimmy wanted to be a level designer, so he learned and it became his passion, then he grew up and men in suits wrote a script for him to present it on-stage. Little Jimmy doesn't agree with the script and thinks it sounds stilted and out of touch, but it's in his contract. That's if they even hire Little Jimmy. They might take his work and have Paul Marketing completely misrepresent it before his very eyes. Nobody wakes up in the morning and genuinely thinks "I know, I'll go put hours and hours of my time into a shitty game that'll garner me a bad reputation, then go lie at a few conventions so that my bosses can take a bigger cut of the shadily earned sales than me." The people who build the thing are generally talented, passionate people in my experience, and I've made a good few friends out of them. It's like Robert Patterson hating his role in Twilight with a passion. Dude loves acting but hates what he was made to do on that one job. The people behind AAA productions typically loathe the end result when they see it from a distance but talk about the great time they had making it. They're skilled people who enjoy their jobs, but the direction they're made to throw their work is decided by out of touch people who know more about economics than they do about the entertainment industry.

     

    From what I've seen, it's not the devs' intention to create a crappy, buggy, lukewarm game, and it's not their decisions that screw it up, but the people driving them.

    • Like 1

  14. Thief 4

    in Off-Topic

    Posted

    I think that when everyone you know who worked on it bows their head like a berated puppy when you bring the game up, they know what they did. The actual developers aren't even remotely blinded by the money: that's the attitude that caused the talented people to push out a crappy game, but it isn't theirs to begin with. If the suits were feckless enough to try for another, it's going to be with new people for sure.

  19. TDM 2.03 Logo Request

    in The Dark Mod

    Posted

    I always like LPs in which the player comments on the current situation (in a gameplay mattered way, so no "shitty jokes" and ruining gameplay feel like Airship said) and as a bonus, it is really nice if the player gives some background information on the map / the game which is playing. All remained with some silent pauses of course :)

    Keepin' it short to avoid stealing thunder, a friend of mine has been streaming some Dark Mod missions and has turned them into videos with little reviews edited onto the end. They're pretty much what you described, I'll link 'em somewhere when they go up.

  21. TDM 2.03 Logo Request

    in The Dark Mod

    Posted · Edited by Airship Ballet

    AFAIK the definition of an LP is gameplay with commentary, though I could be wrong. I used to stream with voice, and it was popular, but your gameplay does invariably suffer if you're concentrating on talking. I never tried to be funny, rather talked about stuff in a lighthearted way, which was a formula people seemed to like. Nowadays LPs are all about shouting and giggling and making shitty jokes to incredibly young audiences, but back when I streamed (not very long after JTV started up, before popularity for streams really exploded) it was just like playing a game with a few hundred friends over. Uh, bit of a tangent. What I'm getting at is that people who do commentary for their videos will typically play the game poorly due to trying to be funny or interesting, so you have to be pretty talented to remain interesting and avoid frustrating video. It's not for everyone, certainly, and I'm perfectly happy to just watch entertaining gameplay, if it is entertaining.

     

    That gameplay was entertaining, but a bit too slow. I think that if you want a better video, you need to skim-read readables and be a bit less cautious, otherwise it's a whole lot of standing still, waiting for guards to move or laboring over a note. It might not be how you play normally, and I certainly rush around more on video than I would if I was playing alone, but again there's that balance. Be entertaining and quick about it, but not dumb and reckless. Don't mess up all the time, but also don't try to ghost it in silence.

     

    Last time I checked, most people don't like LPs with voice overs.

    Most people don't like babble, I think is the general consensus.Some people just don't know when to shush. They'll try to fill all the silence with noise, even if it's completely meaningless nonsense. It's like 75% funny and 25% holy-shit-stop-to-breathe-dude commentary, but the 25% overrides the rest of it after a while and it all becomes annoying. It's hard to be interesting and funny but not boring and obnoxious, so it does take skill to provide successful commentary.

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