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The problem with modern games


delatroy

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I enjoyed watching this video. It reinforced my reasoning for continually playing older games or good remakes of older games.

 

I got into Minecraft for ages, but now I can't play it without adding various mods that add temperature and thirst, making mining stone really slow, force you to keep your diet varied, remove the punching of trees and introduce flint shovels, picks and axes, make items fall flat to the floor instead of floating pickups so they get lost in the long grass, making torches burn out so you have to relight them, and various other things that add so many more challenging aspects to the game.

 

I don't quite know why, but I prefer having to work with next to nothing to try and survive or get anywhere in a game. Like Project Zomboid where you will start the game with a fork or a spoon, and you'd be lucky to have a rolling pin nearby! Thief games have this to a degree because you really have to save your limited supply of arrows until you really need them, and The Dark Mod really brings this back, which is probably why I play it almost every day.

 

I was playing the mission "Thomas Porter 2: Beleaguered Fence" earlier and almost threw my computer out of the window. I've put the mission on pause for now, but I will return to it... and I will complete it... and then and only then will I feel rewarded!

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My Autoexec.cfg contains seta g_fov "65" and seta r_gamma "0.9" for a more immersive Dark Mod experience...



Always expert difficulty every time... all hail the Dark Mod mission authors!



"Hmm, 'tis too quiet... I should summon the minstrel."

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That's a good video, I think I've seen it before.

 

Heh, crowbar, wait till you play Lich Queen's Demise. I think that was the most difficult mission I ever made.

 

I've gotten softer on my older years, and my later production is more humane in difficulty.

Clipper

-The mapper's best friend.

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I don't quite know why, but I prefer having to work with next to nothing to try and survive or get anywhere in a game. Like Project Zomboid where you will start the game with a fork or a spoon, and you'd be lucky to have a rolling pin nearby!

 

If you like the type of "Survive with nothing to start" you might want to have a look at "The Long Dark". Unfortunately, it is still in early access, but it is a game where due to a sun storm all electronics gets fried and you are a pilot who crashes into some Canadian woods in winter and have to survive. You have four factors you need to satisfy (Food, Drink, Heat and Exhaustion) in order to survive, first by scavenging, later on by hunting etc. Currently, it is only a sandbox survival, but there will also be a story mode (hopefully soon). As I said, you can just look for it on Steam...

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its that you've found 75% of the loot in this map that's worrying, how would you even know how much loot is in a map, or you've found 45% of the secrets, really, again how would you know that there are any secrets, and when you find a secret, its out in the open and anyone could have found it so its not really a secret. thief 4 has stupid loot as well, like scissors and ink bottles.

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I enjoyed watching this video. It reinforced my reasoning for continually playing older games or good remakes of older games.

 

I got into Minecraft for ages, but now I can't play it without adding various mods that add temperature and thirst, making mining stone really slow, force you to keep your diet varied, remove the punching of trees and introduce flint shovels, picks and axes, make items fall flat to the floor instead of floating pickups so they get lost in the long grass, making torches burn out so you have to relight them, and various other things that add so many more challenging aspects to the game.

 

I don't quite know why, but I prefer having to work with next to nothing to try and survive or get anywhere in a game. Like Project Zomboid where you will start the game with a fork or a spoon, and you'd be lucky to have a rolling pin nearby! Thief games have this to a degree because you really have to save your limited supply of arrows until you really need them, and The Dark Mod really brings this back, which is probably why I play it almost every day.

 

I was playing the mission "Thomas Porter 2: Beleaguered Fence" earlier and almost threw my computer out of the window. I've put the mission on pause for now, but I will return to it... and I will complete it... and then and only then will I feel rewarded!

This weekend I played through Kingpin: Life of Crime. They give the player nothing but a short pipe at the beginning of the game, and the player starts in an area with lots of heavily armed hostile NPCs blocking either path. You must sneak past them and search the areas thoroughly to get some decent equipment to progress through the game.

 

But later on, it gets quite easy, because ammo is handed out like candy. The first level is actually the hardest part of the game. :) Something like this would never fly today in the games industry. There is a slight bit of stealth in the game, but enemies seem to have godlike reaction times. This means that if you sneak up on an enemy NPC and attack while their back is turned, they turn around and retaliate immediately, which is kind of unfair. They also rarely miss.

 

But by far, the coolest aspect of this game is the friendly NPCs. They will follow the player *anywhere*, such as up/down ladders, jumping across gaps, up and down elevators, and so fourth. The friendly AI in this game even puts Half-Life to shame.

Edited by kano
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99,9% of modern games suck i'm afraid. They play like a movie, and not in a good way. They just simply get rid of the players responsibility too much. Back in the days, you had to learn games, and that might have taken hours. Nowadays, you will be thrown into total action in the first level, learn the game via tutorial at the same time, and in 10 minutes, you're done (Deus Ex Mankind Divided *cough cough*). Plus they overwhelm you with visual bogus, you have to play, or have to deal with characters you can't identify with, and you get action non-stop, because it is too boring for the kids otherwise. The action-ification of series like Splinter Cell, or Tomb Raider really says it all. I stick with old games, newer games are just not my case anymore. Dishonored 2 perhaps, but apart from that, nope. I want depth, atmosphere and GAMEPLAY instead of cool graphics, character, and all that nonsense.

 

TDM is sort of the antithesis to that btw. Just like the old Thief games.

Edited by chakkman
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Just wanted to chime in that there are pretty good modern indie games, which play and challenge you like the good 'old games.

 

I've been playing Rimworld a lot recently. Pretty nice game, but gets a bit easy once you learn the ropes. But it is still in development and constantly evolving, can't wait for some AI improvements...

 

The Long Dark I like too. Spent a lot of time struggling to survive on medium difficulty. Shot a bear to the face and now I have a fridge full of meat. Made me want to start over at the highest difficulty.

 

Recently,I bought X3 Terran Conflict and Albion Prelude, because I haven't had anything to play with my sidewinder joystick for a while. Nice game, too if you like space economy shooter simulator. ;)

 

Just stay away from the triple-A's, there are plenty of modern good old games. They are made by the smaller, more unknown studios. ;)

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Clipper

-The mapper's best friend.

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The only example of a good modern AAA-game which comes to mind is GTA 5. That's nothing short of amazing. I wonder if any of those kids playing the game can even value how great that game really is. Rockstar Games do have it a bit more easy though, they know they have a quality product, and they got to know what the people like about their games, and deliver. What does the Thief reboot deliver for example. It only shares the name with the Thief franchise, apart from that, it plays like a totally different game.

Edited by chakkman
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Agree with everything said in this video. So much is just painful. I stopped playing Fallout 4 for just this reason!

 

The biggest problem is that gaming is big business now, and there's a lot of money riding on it, and publishers just don't want to take a risk, so they keep playing safe doing what the AAA games do, as if that will work. What works, is innovation. It's so frustrating for a gamer, because we all know developers know the way to success is to innovate but they just won't take the risk. It's a lot of money, but if you take the risk and let the community know about it and truly show that you are taking a risk, they will support you. Star Citizen has shown this over and over. Over $110 million has been given to Chris Roberts because he promised to innovate and give them what they want. Developers just don't want to listen, as it's the scary route.

I have an eclectic YouTube channel making videos on a variety of games. Come and have look here:

https://www.youtube.com/c/NeonsStyleHD

 

Dark Mod Missions: Briarwood Manor - available here or in game

http://forums.thedarkmod.com/topic/18980-fan-mission-briarwood-manor-by-neonsstyle-first-mission-6082017-update-16/

 

 

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This weekend I played through Kingpin: Life of Crime. They give the player nothing but a short pipe at the beginning of the game, and the player starts in an area with lots of heavily armed hostile NPCs blocking either path. You must sneak past them and search the areas thoroughly to get some decent equipment to progress through the game.

 

But later on, it gets quite easy, because ammo is handed out like candy. The first level is actually the hardest part of the game. :) Something like this would never fly today in the games industry. There is a slight bit of stealth in the game, but enemies seem to have godlike reaction times. This means that if you sneak up on an enemy NPC and attack while their back is turned, they turn around and retaliate immediately, which is kind of unfair. They also rarely miss.

 

But by far, the coolest aspect of this game is the friendly NPCs. They will follow the player *anywhere*, such as up/down ladders, jumping across gaps, up and down elevators, and so fourth. The friendly AI in this game even puts Half-Life to shame.

 

That was a fun game, I really loved playing it. :)

I have an eclectic YouTube channel making videos on a variety of games. Come and have look here:

https://www.youtube.com/c/NeonsStyleHD

 

Dark Mod Missions: Briarwood Manor - available here or in game

http://forums.thedarkmod.com/topic/18980-fan-mission-briarwood-manor-by-neonsstyle-first-mission-6082017-update-16/

 

 

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Agree with everything said in this video. So much is just painful. I stopped playing Fallout 4 for just this reason!

 

The biggest problem is that gaming is big business now, and there's a lot of money riding on it, and publishers just don't want to take a risk, so they keep playing safe doing what the AAA games do, as if that will work. What works, is innovation. It's so frustrating for a gamer, because we all know developers know the way to success is to innovate but they just won't take the risk. It's a lot of money, but if you take the risk and let the community know about it and truly show that you are taking a risk, they will support you. Star Citizen has shown this over and over. Over $110 million has been given to Chris Roberts because he promised to innovate and give them what they want. Developers just don't want to listen, as it's the scary route.

 

This statement is often raised when blaming AAA games which alludes to the gaming market being not that mature in my view. It's similar to how TV is becoming the medium for art form instead of cinema as it once was. Movies today have receded to a handful of repetitive franchises, remakes and special effects. Producers are recognising that there's real money in genuinely highly quality content and are instead moving to TV. Stranger Things is a perfect example which is a highly positive development for art and culture overall.

 

The gaming market on the other hand feels more immature and stuck in the mind numbing hum drum much like movies. Off to a good start, was heading in the right direction but temporarily side tracked by the allure of ever increasingly fancy graphics, tick boxing and immediate gratification. I suspect a similar thing may happen at some stage with games where genuine gameplay under a budget indie developer ignites the imagination of the AAA mass market. Minecraft maybe the best example of this but I feel like we need a few more of these cataclysmic explosions (and more threads like these) to heighten the mass market's ability to recognise what a good game looks like and what doesn't. I live in hope!

Edited by delatroy
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Its known that the console makers like microsoft and sony interfear with a games progress, both of them have been known to take over games companies and drive them out of business by the way that they both add input or input a lack of creative input hence when it comes to review how a game is progressing they will often cancel a game if its not going in the direction they want, this is the direction the console makers want not the game makers want, usually this includes the games company folding as well. So the main reason that all games seem to have gone crap is due to people who don't actually play the games thinking that games must play their way and its more than probable that those games that have been cancelled were playing the way that game players want, but the console makers can't see that as they are thick and stupid.

 

Minecraft is now owned by microsoft, who added payed subscriptions, and boxes with goodies that you also have to pay for to make the game easier for stupid people who want to cheat.

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I've always thought the sign of a great game is one that I enjoy losing almost as much as winning, and can hats-off to the AI when they see me mangled in a puddle of my own blood.

 

With some smart decisions in the early design phase, I think it doesn't need to take a whole bunch of extra effort to please both crowds, on an easy setting that holds the player's hand, to a difficult ("realistic") difficulty that pleases the more hardcore audience by not assuming anything about their intelligence. It's always going to be extra development work, but can be severely minimised. Sometimes I think it might be a case of - instead of using the terms "easy" or "hard", using some other words that aren't such an affront to their sensibilities, whatever those words may be. Don't put a pacifier in their mouth because they choose easy, like in Wolf3D, folks these days don't have a sense of humour about themselves like we used to. The idea of 'adaptive difficulty' is interesting but I don't think it's a solution that's ever been very well implemented.

Perhaps the issue is that most gamers like to jump into a game on the hardest setting and expect the game to not be ridiculous, they still want to take thousands of bullets to the face without a hiccup, while every enemy collapses in agony from being grazed on the pinky, and such. They will sooner rage-quit than try again on a lower difficulty. It's a matter of pride, both for the person and their hardware. The same people probably max-out all graphics quality settings and if they get low framerates they will just uninstall the piece of crap rather than try again with more modest settings which likely wouldn't be a very noticeable visual degradation anyway. Again, I think this could be solved by not using words like "low" and "high", and giving some clear warnings (red popups) about what maximum settings are going to be more of a framerate penalty. It would kind of put more perceived emphasis on the developer being at fault if poor performance is the outcome, rather than the 'customer'.

I think in many ways developers dig their own graves when they give the impression that the hardest difficulty gives some implications about the girth of the player's testicles, likewise implications about how if you can't sustain 60FPS with all settings maxxed-out, it means the player's computer is a worthless paper-weight. Folks these days are very sensitive about these things and will react negatively, but I think it can be avoided.

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They will sooner rage-quit than try again on a lower difficulty. It's a matter of pride, both for the person and their hardware.

 

Sadly, I just thought of an instance, where I did exactly that. And this was in Deus Ex: Human Revolution. I played on a rather high difficulty (not sure, which one exactly) and as a sneaky character (who would have thought ;) ). However, when it came to boss-fights, there was no way that you could take a stealthy approach. So, with one boss (I think it was also rather late in the game) I also was too stubborn to reduce the difficulty and was simply not able to defeat the boss, until I lost the motivation to try again after the tenth try or so and finally uninstalled the game half a year later.

Graphics, on the other hand, are one of the least important things for me, as long as the gameplay is fun. But I also grew up with the original Mario Bros on NES and other games of that graphical quality, so I don't mind my games being pixelated. Also, I never had too much money and so I never had current top-end computers, which forced me to play the latest games on low settings.

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