What kind of single player games can still hook jaded gaming veterans?

I think you are less picky than I am. I couldn't stand the Witcher either.

In the case of the Witcher however, I thought many of the side stories were really cool but hte main story was pretty, blah. Only reason anybody cared at all about Ciri was because, let's be real, she had a great ass. Just the kind of sexism gamers are always ranting about, and yet a game that practically hinges on sexism to sell the narrative gets all the praise in the world. Nobody cared about Ciri. Obviously they know she isn't going to die. The game itself didn't care about Ciri. While she's fighting moment by moment for survival, we are picking mushrooms. Only reason anybody kept playing was 1. to see the sex scenes, and 2. to get the cool late game armors.

Had Ciri been just ordinary, or at least dressed ordinarily (not skin tight leather and plenty of walking around in thong scenes), and had a little more attention been put into making her seem like a human with a personality, it would have been a totally different story. Could have been a story that people played because they cared about the characters, rather than just wanting to see some fine ass and kinky, cringey sex scenes.

Again, we have game developers encouraging the most basic traits in gamers, rather than delivering something with more substance, or perhaps even challenging some of our basic nature. And I get it, humans are animals to be milked for cash. But this approach makes for games that offer the fully developed brain (i.e. older than 20) little to enjoy, and is kind of depressing to boot. It's taking advantage of people, rather than empowering people.

 

I don't think there's anything wrong with multiple levels of communication. For example I thought Quiet from MGS was one of the most carefully thought out and intriguing female characters I've ever seen. It's hard to appreciate a message that only engages half of my brain.

 

I'm not familiar with MGS. Was Quit sexy or something? And you are saying you wouldn't care about her or the story if there wasn't some sex appeal?

I'm not against sex. Or beautiful, sexy women. In fact, I like them a lot.

But if that's all the games got and then people are glorifying the game for great story telling, come on. Let's just be honest and say, "man that game had hot babes."

And of course, in 2018, we are now considering the fact that women are people too, and sometimes they get tired of only being portrayed as sex objects. So there's that too, and seeing as how women are like, half of the population, it's probably a good reason to cast women as actual human characters, and not just the old sex dolls we're used to.

This all feels pretty off topic, but its just one more reason in a myriad of reasons why most games this jaded gamer picks up immediately get refunded and poorly reviewed. I did finish the Witcher as I enjoyed the environment art and many of the side quest stories enough to get that far, but at the end I kind of felt embarrassed by it all. Like, "I'm too old for this teenager crap."

 

The reason I liked Quiet's character was that her character was 100% female, without being any less 'dangerous' (I'm not sure why I feel the need to point out the latter part of that sentence, but here we are in 2018). She did not try to be a man or to compete with the male characters at having a male personality. Every expression of hers, whether through the face or behavior (she didn't speak), was simultaneously menacing and expressed not just the pain of her past experiences but a pure female sexuality that had not been destroyed (quite the opposite). In that sense she succeeded at being a female hero, in my book.

In case someone thinks we're getting off topic, the reason why this is important is that when writers/developers take care to take some truth of the world and distill it into something clearer, something that immediately engages you with the feeling "there's something here to be seen, felt and understood" then the game and the button-mashing becomes somewhat meaningful. When the cast is a collection of manufactured teenage personalities and the story sounds like the latest destruction of a Marvel comic, then all the great game mechanics in the world won't interest me.

 

Sounds like it would annoy the hell out of me as well.

I recently realized that I seem to have different levels of tolerance for frustration - one for staying persistently trying to defeat enemies that keep killing me, and one that deals with more meta stuff like how well are the controls implemented, how well can I tolerate cutscenes that annoy me etc.. I find myself still able to beat a Dark Souls boss that takes me 3 gaming sessions of ~1 hour each of repeated trying and failing to defeat him. But I've ragequit games in anger because of too many cutscenes breaking up the flow of gameplay, or stupid design decisions, or poorly implemented gamepad controls that kept flickering between gamepad and keyboard button prompts when I was playing and made it impossible for me to use the gamepad like I wanted. In those areas I feel like my frustration tolerance is at an all-time low, and modern gaming tropes trigger me much more than they used to.

Thanks, I'll read it. First few paragraphs sounded promising and I loved Spec Ops The Line.

I agree, Dark Souls does this well I think. In DS2 I even walked past the tutorial area without intending to do so. Perhaps a poor choice to put them behind fog walls, or maybe the right choice, so that a veteran who doesn't feel like fighting a boss straight away won't pass through them?

I wass gonna ask you to elaborate, but now that you did, I still can't agree. Iirc I laughed out loud multiple times over the course of the game and said "you gotta be kidding me", and many times this was related to some scene with quiet. I loved the game for its complex and well thought out gamedesign with very nuanced states of success and failure and unusually complex and nuanced movement and stealth systems, but I think the writing is pretty terrible. But I finished act 1 and 2 and had 50+ mostly great hours with it, so I'm not complaining. I consider the cringey Kojima writing the price to pay for an excellent Kojima gamedesign. And Death Stranding is something I'm interested in simply because I was so impressed by MGS V's gamedesign, and the kind of weirdness his stories have I can ignore fairly well.

You're right, it is offtopic, so let's better end this here. But since you seem to not know the game, I googled a cutscene to give you an idea:

Spoiler

That cage is where she is held captive on your base, but she posesses the power to basically "teleport" out as she pleases.

Back to the patience and getting to the point thing that angrypenguin mentioned:
One of the many things that I disliked about Fallout 4, was how damn "convenient" it was, and how it broke with traditions in the franchise. In Fallout 3 I've spent roughly an hour in the tutorial section where you are still in the vault, then you get out, open the door, are blinded by the sunlight you're seeing for the first time in your life and I've seen a vast and freely traversable gaming landscape of a size that I had never seen before! I walked one way, and got mercilessly killed by a giant scorpion. I tried a few more times and always got killed, so I chose another path. I like when I can make a choice not to go somewhere because it's too hard right now, but theoretically if I was a really competent player I could progress even there. That feels organic and believable and I feel respected as a player.

In Fallout 1,2,3 you had to invest a lot of time till you got your first Power-Armor - the iconic thing seen on every box cover. And your dog companion in the game you'd also only find in one specific place and might as well miss him. Now in Fallout 4 someone must have decided "We've shown the dog and the armor in every piece of marketing, we better make 100% sure that every player gets them or we'll never hear the end of it". And about an hour or so into the game they literally hand you the power armor and the dog, like with a fourth wall breaking wink of "We know this is what you want you slut". No I F***ing don't, not like this! They've taken what was an iconic achievement in prior Fallout games and absolutely devalued it by just handing it to the player. That broke all immersion for me and made me feel not respected as a player. If I hadn't already paid full price for the game at that point and wasn't so strongly invested into both the Fallout franchise and that genre of game, I would have rage quit right then and there and never come back to the game. While I don't need games to be super hardcore to enjoy them, there is this one brand of casualness, that I absolutely can not stand.
I still like the core gameplay loop of shooting and looting and have ~250 hours in the game and recently purchased the season pass to play the DLC areas too at some point, because there's no other comparable game to scratch this particular itch, but I do have some fairly big complaints about the game as well.

 

Kojima's language is one that mixes mythological symbolism with portrayals of reality. In some ways it's jarring, but it opens up the ability to characterize things far more strongly that you otherwise could.

I'm interested to know what you considered terrible about the writing?

Spoiler: SPOILER

Incidentally, these was the scenes that convinced me that there was more to Quiet's character and the way she was presented than simply sex appeal.

 

This exactly for me as well. I want a challenging game that is quick to understand but hard to master. If I see UI that looks like a Jumbo Jet cockpit, I instantly bail. If the first hour of the game involves more than a few minutes of cutscenes with awful dialogue, I bail. If the controls are clunky and just flat out annoying to use, I bail. If the first ten minutes are introducing me to a million different systems I've seen before and don't care about -- crafting, side quest, discoverable doodads, blah blah blah -- I bail.

 

Maybe I'm not smart enough to "get" all the advanced symbolism, but I just don't see in the cutscenes what you seem to see in them.

Overall I find it contrived, tonally inconsistent, impossible to take serious, but fun. Delightfully trashy if you will. I might be influenced in my opinion by the camera work, which is about as unsubtle as I can imagine it to be. It's just not presented in a context where I'd even think to look for deeper meaning. It doesn't ruin the game for me, I got many chuckles out of it. But I can't with a straight face call this "good writing".

On the one side he tries to be super edgy and grim with torture, rape, child soldiers, genocide and if you never take a shower and kill a lot of people you're covered in blood and look like the devil himself, and then on the other side you tie ballons to sheep to put them in your zoo, and you adopt a cute puppy, and when he's all grown up and trained you can order him to kill an enemy, which he does by pulling out a knife, jumping on him, slitting his throat and sommersaulting away:

Spoiler

I laughed out loud when I saw that ingame for the first time and I very much salute the "fun above everything" approach that allows for silly and fun things, details that not many players will experience, and all kinds of creative freedom to justify fun gamedesign. But I could do with much less cameras zooming in on butts and boobs (it's done so often it's like an inside joke that I'm not getting), or endless dialogs/monologues. And the one jeep ride where after 5 minutes of monologue they pause talking for 2 minutes to play a song? There must be dozens of better ways for the bad guy to reveal his masterplan...

But it's one of the best stealth games I've played, and I think it offers enough depth and uniqueness to appeal even to the jaded veterans. I can't deny the writing is part of that "uniqueness" and while I just can't call it "good", I'm not so sure I'd prefer it to have the more generic and "inoffensive" AAA writing that your average shooter gets. It's part of the whole package I guess.

 

I didn't play those games because I played one of the MGS games years ago and, not knowing what it was and expecting just a basic military themeed stealth game, I was pretty shocked when flying mech vampires came down from the sky and then S*** got super weird. I just can't wrap my head around these mashups where you've got guns, swords, flying robots, dinosaurs, pirates -- all this anachronistic stuff jumbled into the same univerrsre.

That japanese stuff is just too weird for me. Same thing with this mech combat game from From. I don't remember the name. The gameplay was awesome, but it immediately thrust you into this story that made absolutely zero sense. It was just like a string of dramatic encounters and cringey one liners, and the whole time you are left wondering, "who am I? Where am I? What the hell is going on?"

 

I don't think it's a case of the symbolism being complex or not. It's like stylized art. The idea is to exaggerate the overall form of an idea and remove the unnecessary details, to remove things from realism enough to be able to evoke a stronger reaction from the audience. You don't ask 'why' something happened in a Kojima game, you think 'what does it mean'. That level of fantasy appeals to me, because it lets you consider an idea or a representation in a distilled, abstract form. It's a bit like the way that a dream works - one moment things make total sense, the next, something just happens that the only way you can understand it is to see it as a symbolism of something else.

I don't want to go into a lot of detail about MGS in particular. Probably a lot of the way I see specific things are particular to me. But what I think it generally does well, like most good fiction, is to use powerful forces in the environment and in the events that occur around the characters (in the case of MGS, it is mostly war) and contrast them with a level of vulnerability to draw out aspects of human nature that are very much at the root of what it means to be a human being, things that operate well below the level of social consciousness or identity.

It's a bit like a Quentin Tarantino film - the characters are powerfully human in their own right, regardless of anything they represent morally, or beyond their individual identity.

 

Speak for yourself. Both of those things come down to player choice. The game gives a variety of reasons that you/Geralt could care about Ciri, and if you want you can 100% focus on saving her and ignore any other distractions. Either way you'll end up "picking mushrooms", but that's a major part of a Witcher's power and Geralt couldn't reasonably expect save Ciri if he lost his head and stopped doing that stuff.

One thing that I as a gamer am certainly jaded of is "Role Playing Games" where "role" means "combat style". The Diablo franchise is pretty much a prime example of this - it's called an RPG, but as far as I'm aware 100% of the character development in the game is numeric, advancing stats on level up. I've nothing against that as a game mechanic, but I feel very much that RPGs on the whole focus too much on that and not enough on the role playing part.

My first playthrough of The Witcher 3 had me ignoring any distraction that wasn't going to help me find Ciri. But if the game never gave me the other stuff to ignore then I wouldn't have been role playing that version of Geralt, because I wouldn't have had the choice to ignore it.

Except that depending on how you play the game she can in fact die. I had to look that up. I assumed it was the case, but it didn't happen on either of my plays. You can get other characters killed, too.

That said, this still raises something that irks me as well, when a game threatens you with something that you don't believe it will mechanically follow through with. Interestingly, I'm sure this used to be really common, but I can't think of a single specific example. But stuff like being told "Hurry up and do X before Y happens!" when you know that Y is scripted to happen immediately after you do X, regardless of what you do beforehand.

I understand why games do it. It increases drama without increasing required player skill. But it only works until I have seen behind the curtain, after which it just makes me trust less in what the game is telling me. I'm all for smoke and mirrors if it makes the experience better but you've got to make sure I believe it in the moment, otherwise it kills suspension of disbelief.

Nor do I. I feel that it's "faux depth" - it seems like it's philosophical and deep and meaningful, but it's just fluff and everything is in the eye of the beholder. Which is fine, if it stimulates people then it doesn't really matter how or why. It just doesn't do a lot for me.

I enjoy the Metal Gear games that I've played, but there are parts which just don't fit with the rest. Metal Gear Solid could have done without the Psycho Mantis bit entirely, for instance, and that's probably the game where it's least pronounced.

What those games do usually achieve quite effectively is somehow mixing the "just for fun" stuff with the serious stuff without either spoiling my mood for the other. The Quiet stuff is the exception to that, because it screams "we just thought it'd be fun to have a bikini babe on the battlefield" but then we're told with a straight face that no, this is a serious part of the game's lore. What?

 

I know exactly what you mean. Especially in open world games where need to go to a place where you will advance the main story. You know unless there is a timer on screen, you have time to do as many side missions and other stuff for days till you get there.

Speaking of RPGs and timers, yay or nay for the game-over timer in Fallout 1, for when your vault runs out of water reserves? I thought it was a powerful device to keep the player focused on the main plot, but ultimately I don't think I liked it as a mechanic, because it added stress to a game where exploration and taking your time to search for hidden stuff are fun. It was conflicting with other fun parts of the game, even though it made much sense for the narrative.

I forgot to ask this when you brought it up: do you think there's anything in The Witcher 3 gameplay wise, that would make me stay, when I've stopped playing both Witcher 1 and 2 a few hours in, because I was super bored by the games and didn't get into them at all?

Im still sceptical about their upcoming Cyberpunk game because so far I liked none of their games, but FPS and Cyberpunk are a very attractive combination for me.


I've read the cracked.com article, it was interesting to see under what crazy conditions these stories get written. Marketing dictating things on their own, insane deadlines, tight budgets, bosses that fight you on ideas and try to maneuver you into corners where you have no time to react... just crazy. Next time I see some bad/cringy writing, I'll assume the writers did their best under incredibly adverse circumstances.

Thanks for the explanation! I used to like Tarantino films, but over the years I grew absolutely tired of them, to the point where I don't even know how many of them I've not seen. Maybe it's an indication I wouldn't be able to appreciate Kojima's writing either. I find both write way too long dialogs.

I kinda wanna know which one you mean. Didn't even know From Software made so many mecha games before I looked at their wiki page just now. I only knew about the soulsborne games.






edit: P.S.: Stumbled over this No Man's Sky review on steam that I found interesting:

"After racking up 25hrs on this title in the last week, I know that NMS is a very pretty game which I can get sucked into and play for frightening amounts of time. (The weekend was a blur). Which is the problem, as I do not feel like my time is adequately rewarded or memorable.

The game is 5% 'Oh wow special gaming moment', 10% 'I feel alive exploring the universe' and 85% mindless resource gathering and crafting / managing meters. Like any addiction, you live for the high of jumping to a new system, then deal with the much longer low of resupply.

I have not dealt with this kind compulsive play since EVE over a decade ago. My instinct is to delete it forever, as the 15% is not worth the loss of time irrationally invested. Gaming should be memorable, not a mindless loop, no matter how pretty it looks."


On one hand I appreciate a high degree of agency and freedom in a game, but I don't like resource grind at all...

 

I remember the first couple of times I played Baldurs Gate I didn't realise that Dynaheir was a recruitable character. I assumed that Minsc's story just included that she was dead. But no, if you follow up on Minsc's quest in a reasonable timeframe you find her alive.

I just didn't expect that to be the case because despite the game telling me there was a time limit in dialog, there wasn't a clock or an explcit deadline so I thought it was just flavour text.

Well... as much as I wanted to love The Witcher 1, and despite starting it 3 times, I never finished the first part of the game. I purchased The Witcher 2, but never installed it as I intended to play the original first. I got The Witcher 3 after hearing others rave over it for months, installed it to check out the tech, and ended up playing ~200 hours of it.

Really it depends what you didn't like about the earlier ones. In The Witcher 3 alchemy is still a huve part of the game, but one of the things they streamlined is that you only need to gather ingredients for new recipes the first time you make them. After that, as long as you have the base ingredient (alcohol) you can keep re-stocking stuff. So preparing a new potion is basically a quest, rather than preparing any potion potentially being a chore. They still managed to keep alchemy an interesting and significant part of the game by giving each brew a couple of upgrade versions, which you really want towards the end of the game.

It got my thumbs up because it added to the sense of danger and unforgivingness of the world, and it forced the player to make choices rather than do everything to begin with.

Also on Fallout, the lack of a feeling of danger and remoteness is something I often complain about with the games. The originals having a specific long-distance travel interface may have been a way to deal with technical limitations, but it was really effective at making the world seem desolate,every location remote, and every journey dangerous.

In the new games there's usually something literally just over the next hill. I know that's a way of dealing with modern limitations, but it really changed the feel of the game for me. In that case I don't think that changing to a fully 3D, seamless outdoor world was a good thing. I think I'd have much preferred a bunch of smaller 3D locations and a map interface to travel around.

Indeed, I expect that they're the least happy of everyone when the results end up being poor. For us it's a not great piece of media, for them it's probably something they genuinely tried to make the most of which still turned out badly... and probably has their name on it!

Still, regardless of how it gets that way or who's at fault, if it's a turnoff for people then that's that. And despite my defence of certain things I still agree it's something that games can and should work on in general. If we want good writing in games then it has to be considered throughout development and supported holistically, not tacked on at the end.

 

I didn't like spending any time on the alchemy system, found the sword fighting too simplistic, didn't manage to get invested into characters or world, and there was way too much story and dialogs in the game. To me it felt a bit like reading a novel, which I generally don't enjoy all that much and especially not when I'm in the mood for a game - an interactive experience. So far that doesn't sound like TW3 would be different for me than TW1 or TW2.

Good point! It might be one of the things where people will say they don't like it, but if you take it away they won't actually enjoy the overall experience more at all. Reminds me of the "synthesis of happiness" talk by Dan Gilbert, and an experiment he talks about.

I know what you mean, it is part of what contributes to Fallout 4 feeling too casual and too much "laid out for the player's enjoyment, instead of laid out as a challenge for the players, that they end up enjoying anyway". I currently play it in survival mode with a hardcore damage rebalancing mod. In that mode you only save when quitting the game or sleeping in a bed, and you can't fast travel. The mod makes weapon damage so high, that you can kill many enemies with a single rifle headshot or grenade, but you also can die to basically every enemy you meet, and I've died numerous times to laser turrets in ceilings etc.. In Nuka World, there aren't many beds and without fast travel, there's usually up to half an hour of playtime worth of progress "at stake". That adds lots of the feeling of danger back into the game. And without fast travel, I wouldn't really want things to be further apart. At least not without a better way to store/sell stuff on the road or more interesting travel routes.
To me the seemless travel experience is important for immersion. The system in Fallout 1 and 2 made sense and worked well, but in 3D I think disconnected "maps" with travel screens inbetween would have a big negative impact on my enjoyment of the games. It reminds me of "Rage", which I considered to be one of the worst FPS games that I've ever played.

 

Single player games that have hooked me the latest years are (Probably missed some)


Outlast
Metro 2033 & Last light
Alien Isolation
SOMA
Wolfenstein The new order, The old blood, the new colossus (Played these even though I despise Zenimax)

And offcourse Half life games like Black mesa and Half Life 2 with episodes though hl2 cant be consired recent years

I guess what these games have in common are great story and excellent visuals. For me visuals are as important as story and gameplay atleast for singleplayer, I like to take it slow and walk around and explore and look at the world.

 

Yeah, I don't think it's likely to be your cup of tea. It's very much an interactive experience, but one of living a character in a fantasy story rather than being built around game mechanics.

It would also fundamentally change the role playing aspect of that game. There's a lot of implicit decision making and prioritisation. Because you can't do everything you have to be choosy, and that's a large part of how you define your character in that game, probably without even realising it.

The maps being disconnected isn't important to me, the distance is. For me, to evoke the same feeling as the old Fallout games I'd want each populated area to be an oasis of civilisation surrounded by miles of visible wasteland. At that point, even if you can travel seamlessly you'd still want a long-distance travel interface.

That would result in an atmosphere far more like the earlier games. But it wouldn't result in "Post Apocalyptic Elder Scrolls", which is what I assume they really wanted to make, and which they did a pretty good job of.

 

On another note, as soon to be 40 year old male I don't see the point of detailed sex scenes in games. I much rather use that time to have sex with my beautiful wife than watching a bunch of pixels have a go at it.

 

It's fashionable to warp your games into something that appeals to anyone who wants to exhibit their own preferred sexual preferences but you know, that's actually a specific category of games, and you don't need to apply that at all.

If you want a game with all men in it, that is 100% OK. If you want an entirely gay game, that's 100% OK as well. Or 100% all women. Or none.

What would hook me is a game without any of that crap. I want playability and action and intrigue, I honestly could not be more put off by political statements, sexuality statements etc. I honestly do not want to know nor care what preferences tickle people's junk.

I just want to game.

 

Ok, back to my original question: opinions on what falls under a) seem to be deeply personal and there's no real answer for b). When you google for "games for jaded gamers", this thread already is on page one. I suggest we try to end it with a list of games that you think have a chance of being perceived as "fresh" even by people who have been gaming for 20+ years. This can be new games that tread new ground, or old games that don't fall into common formulas and could be perceived as innovative even today, by someone who just never got around to playing it. If you write a description for it, keep it to 1 sentence max. I assume most people will know most games mentioned and they'd rather read a list of 100 quick suggestions and google the ones they don't know about, than read 10 walls of text to stuff they already heard about.

Here's a list that google found:
http://calmdowntom.com/2017/12/ten-games-2017-jaded-gamers-play/


And personally I'll start by recommending some in no specific order:


Jagged Alliance 2 (optionally with community patch for exponentially increased depth) - best turn based tactics game that I know

Mech Commander 1 - not hugely popular at the time but I can't remember ever having played an RTS quite like this

Men of War Assault Squad 2: there is no RTS with more detailed micro management I think, and it has an incredibly high skill ceiling and great replayability

Crusader: No Regret - kind of the answer to "What if twin-stick shooters would favor tactical and methodical gameplay with tons of gadgets and different possibilites to dispatch of your foes?"

FTL - best spaceship crew micromanagement game

Dark Messiah of Might and Magic - not sure how well it holds up, but at the time it felt rather innovative with very visceral combat, involving physics based traps and kicking enemies into these

Condemned - one of the few games where you get a bit of a feeling of "being a detective", mixed with very visceral and brutal melee combat and horror elements, quite scary

Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3, spec ops mode, solo survival - very challenging, rather free-form for how you approach it, feels kind of old-school in the highscore based gameplay without any story, and I ended up playing that more than the zombie survival stuff I think

Devil Daggers - one of the purest, most distilled FPS experiences out there, brutally difficult and if you manage to stay alive for longer than 4 minutes I'll be really impressed

Spec Ops: The Line - most memorable military shooter, imho - no spoilers!

 

I gotta give a nod to any post that mentions JA2 (with 1.13 mod). This is probably the single best "mercenary group" game ever made. The characters, absurd cardboard cutouts that they were, all perfectly fit in the world.

Recently, I put over 200 hours into Divinity Original Sin 2. This is a game that represents almost all of my personal gripes about games. It's an absurd power fantasy where your main character literally becomes god. It's a linear RPG that pretends its semi open. Toward late game, the equipment grinding is absurd (you spend half the time in shops trying to upgrade).

The thing is, the execution in most respects is f***ing unbelievable. The writing is strong, the characters are fun, the combat is just pitch perfect.

I feel like I could take any one element of this game and complain about it for hours, but all together, it simply works. It's just a beautifully crafted game. I watched some videos on the making, and they just play tested and iterated relentlessly. The game is a demonstration of the importance of execution above all.

To one of @BIGTIMEMASTER's points, one of the core discussion points in one of their GDC videos was about funding. In order to afford to be able to make a "good game" they had to secure the funding needed to spend the time required. Unlike most GDC videos, the main guy behind the game really spent time discussing how much funding levels influence a game and how crucial securing funding is to maintaining the integrity of a game.

Video link under spoiler

Spoiler

 

Sounds interesting but I haven't watched it yet.


This also fits the topic well:

Still haven't finished the Far Cry 4 campaign, but I have finished all the open world and sidemission tasks that I cared about (and some that I didn't). It feels to me like a game with "too much" story, for the quality that this story has. It almost feels like solid gameplay is being held back from me and I need to wade through cutscenes and radio conversations of people that I don't care about to get to the fun parts.

 

@Martin-H , are you a fan of the old tactical shooters from Red Storm Entertainment?

One of the devs from back then is making an updated shooter in the same vein as the classic GR and R6 games. Called "Ground Branch" and just released as pre-EA on steam. I've been messing around with it -- and it's legit. Got a handful of EA bugs but nothing game breaking as far as I can tell so far. Worth a play if you like these types of games.

 

No, those were always a bit too hardcore tactical for me. Insurgency is about as realistic as I still enjoy in games and the next release in that franchise is around the corner:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/581320/Insurgency_Sandstorm/

I think it has a solo/coop mode too, at least the old one does, though I mainly played it multiplayer pvp.

But I'll keep an eye on ground branch, thanks for the recommendation! I find interesting that it is an Unreal Engine 4 game, but in screenshots and videos it looks dated as hell. Maybe they had to tune it down so hard to make it run halfway decent? Sandstorm uses UE4 too and there are reports of heavy performance issues in the beta. I suspect it will take a while even after release till they've fixed those, if they even manage to fix it.



I have finished FC4 now and watched alternative endings on youtube.

Spoiler

I don't find this concept of "all endings are basically bad endings" very appealing. I don't necessarily need a "knight-in-shining-armor-ending", but I hate it when games give you choices and then no matter what choice you make, it will point fingers and say "bad choice! ha!". I disliked that about FC3 as well.
There is some solid gameplay in there but I really have to say, in FC4 the story and characters are getting in my way when it comes to enjoying the game. I would have preferred much less scripted narrative and more like the freeform outpost liberation gameplay. I've even replayed a few of them to try different tactics during my playthrough. I could see myself enjoying a game that is more focused on this one aspect, with a little prep- and planning-phase and less scripted narrative, over these typical "ubisoft open world games".

I'm not sure which of the many games that I've started I'll finish next. Sniper Elite 4 is the last I've bought, Dishonored 2 is probably the quickest to finish from where I am, and in Dark Souls 2 and 3 I have some DLC content left that I was struggling with in terms of difficulty.

Honestly some of the most fun I've had in recent months was Ghost Recon Wildlands Online Coop with a friend. I was gonna try play COD:MW3 survival mode with him, but the FOV in the game doesn't go high enough for my friend and he gets nausea and headaches from playing anything with an FOV lower than 100 horizontal iirc.



Offtopic:

Spoiler

I don't want to derail this thread but didn't want to make a new one just for this video either. I think it's some interesting food for thought. But you have to pretend he is talking about gamedev and not about being a musician. Imho it transfers very well:

 

I have no idea, but my first guess would be priorities rather than ability. Their maps need to have a huge amount of area compared to more action-oriented games, which means less designer time per square meter. There's also a heck of a lot more customisation which means things made for flexibility rather than polish.

And, a particular point I learned from a sim developer, LODs are a real pain. In an entertainment game LODing is great because it helps with performance. In a military sim LODs are a liability, because you're trying to train people to scan tree lines and horizons and such and there's LOD popping or fading that interferes with that. Aliasing is also pretty nasty, similar reasons. So the low-fidelity trees and such could be because they're more managable in that regard, rather than a straight up performance concern.

Yeah, that game was a blast. It was definitely a case of the writing being a series of excuses to shoot stuff, but the game itself was cool.

That said, I really wish the campaign were a campaign in the true sense rather than a sequence of episodic missions. For instance, if you screw up a mission I think the enemies should respond appropriately. I want the bad guys to retalliate and take out my safe houses, actively hunt me down once they know I'm there. As it is the game's campaign pretends you do everything perfectly and the only times the bad guys get the drop on you is when it's scripted to happen in a mission. It's still a fun open world romp, and I understand that they wanted an open world shooter rather than a strategic campaign... but I'd have liked those other things, too.

What did you think of the endings to Wildlands? I personally don't think either of them hit the mark, though I have to say I couldn't take the story seriously anyway.

 

I think even without touching a single mesh there is a lot of room for improvement:


I find the lack of cast shadows, better light baking and more intense SSAO quite jarring. Looks like a decade old game to me. Not a dealbreaker necessarily, but I'd assume you can get better performance for the same look with other engines.

She's back:


On a slightly related note, I've seen plenty of comments along the lines of "Battlefield V is dead to me" because... someone from developer or publisher said something along the lines of "If you don't like that we've put women in the game, then don't buy it." ?! I feel like I don't understand half of what is going on in the gaming world nowadays.

I'm fine with that approach. Afaik COD:BO1 was written "gameplay first" too and even though the story ended up being quite chaotic and all over the place, it was one of my favorite COD singleplayer campaigns.

I can see how for some players "more persistent gameplay states" would make for interesting and organic development of scenarios, and lead to more diverse gameplay, more interesting stories and more memorable overall experience. Like my old thread about my no-reloading playthrough of Jagged Alliance 2.
But I also can see how that might be very detrimental for the fun of other players, especially on a first playthrough, where they are still learning and experimenting. If consequences for failure are grave, then that discourages experimentation, leads to players gravitating towards dominant strategies, and overall makes gameplay less varied and interesting if they can successfully finish one mission after the other with their "best gun" or whatever works for them.
Also I like "rewriting the timeline" till at the end I'm looking back at a series of flawless wins, worthy of a cliche hollywood blockbuster. Sometimes in games I've restarted missions not because I have failed them, but because I won them less well than I wanted to, and didn't meat my own personal goals. But that is purely personal preference and there are other people who would like the oposite more.

We started playing Wildlands with me playing on easy and my friend on normal, after wondering why he was dying 10 times as often as me we googled and found out that you can indeed play coop on different difficulties and then we continued to both play on easy for quite a while, after determining through experimentation that at that moment we were having more fun that way. When we were good enough and started to get bored, we cranked it up to the hardest (or second hardest? I can't remember) difficulty and had to retry missions much more often, but overall had more fun and interesting challenges in gameplay. It wouldn't have been fun if every retry would have had consequences to deal with.
The predator bossfight (still on easy!) took us between 5-6 hours (!!!) of trying by the way... that one felt super unfair. That were 3 play sessions of nonstop fighting the same enemy till we had found a strategy that worked... it was a great fiero moment in the end.
And for the last mission I think we've tried for more than an hour too, don't know how long.

I didn't even know there was another ending.

Spoiler

On our playthrough we got the one where Bowman shoots Suenho. It wasn't great but didn't leave a sour taste for me either. Her sacrifice brought a bit of redemption to her in my eyes. During the story I really didn't like her because she was a bit too edgy for me. The twist that I thought I saw coming was that Bowman is playing us and we'll face her as an enemy later. I was a bit surprised that wasn't the case and she herself was being played.

I've showed the alternate ending where she doesn't shoot Suenho to my friend, and we agreed it kind of felt less satisfying then the one where she shoots him. Also I don't understand how the difference between 99% story mission completion and 100% story mission completion justifies the different outcomes. It's not even a choice you can make on your own. I would have understood if you had the option to uncover the truth behind what Sandoval did and get different endings based on that, one where you basically "stay in the dark" about the true reasons for your mission and the one where Bowman shoots Suenho.

Spoiler for "the last of us":

Spoiler

I feel like the whole concept of "alternate" endings in games doesn't really convince me. I can't think of a single game with alternate endings where I thought "that was a great ending". In the end I'll either reload and try out all the other endings or watch them on youtube. The "this is your own story" feeling imho only can happen in games that have truly dynamic game end states instead of the modern "choose your own adventure" style multiple choice endings. In Dwarf Fortress I could see people having very different endings to their stories that they each personally "own" and feel connected to. At the end of Deus Ex:HR it feels like "game end-a-tron 3000 awaiting your input, which cutscene would you like to watch? beep boop beep".
The Last of Us only has one ending, I liked it. It felt very impactful and wasn't out of character for anyone involved imho. I thought about it long after I had finished the game. Would this game have been better if you had the choice whether you take Ellie with you or let them kill her to potentially save humanity? I don't think so. I think it would overall have made the game much less memorable and weakened how strong the story is remembered by players. I think there is something to be said for a cohesive main narrative that is share by all players. You can still have choices, but I'd make them smaller ones that are more of a way of expressing themselves for the player, instead of shaping the narrative in big ways.

 

Please, if you cant recreate the perk called Martyrdom from COD 4 the grenade mechanics are not complex enough

 

There's a good chance it is age related, and by that I mean you've seen it done it by this point and now it takes a really well made game to impress you. I'm not quite 45 yet but I can confirm in my 30's I for the most part spent much less time gaming. That doesn't mean I didn't lose 2 weeks of my life when the new Battletech came out, but games like that are far and few between for me now.

I will say the games I enjoy more now are the low(er) budget indie games, when my son and I kick back on the couch to waste some time we just browse that category and usually find something entertaining for a couple hours(even if it is bad and we make fun of it).

 

I didn't read everything since @Martin-H mentioned the dated graphics in Ground Branch, but yeah they are pretty dated. However, they work. Like, you don't pay much attention to them -- the gameplay is really tense. It is a super small team making the game, so it's probably just about keeping things to a manageable level.

I can run the game maxed out and it keeps up FPS, but it doesn't look current gen. But this is a game that's first and foremost about the gameplay, and even though it's a very early build there is a lot of refinement in the gameplay, so I think that's where the focus has been. Also, it's multiplayer, and that all works pretty good. So I think it's an experienced team that knows how to prioritize very well.

 

Didn't play COD4 multiplayer, but in COD5 it was OP as hell. Insurgency Sandstorm I believe has separate pin drawing and optional lever release before throwing and when you die after drawing the pin you will drop the live grenade and teamkills made from that grenade are attributed as "death grenade" kills to the one that shot you. You can't do the martyrdom thing where you run around with a grenade with drawn safety pin in one hand and still fire a gun with the other. I consider that a good thing.

I'll keep an eye on it, but as an early access game in a highly competitive area it's not very attractive to me at the moment. When I saw first videos for D.U.S.T. I thought that looked cool too, and it went absolutely nowhere. But who knows, maybe in two years or so it's the bomb? The old Insurgency had lots of post launch updates and improvements too.

Thanks for sharing. If it is just age related, there's probably not much to do about it :-/.

That's kind of cheating, couch coop can make almost anything fun. I suggest you try Octodad if you haven't already.

 

I think this is just Early Access work in progress. I'm gonna guess that a lot of these meshes just don't have textures yet.

Looking at gameplay videos and a few stills - it looks like they just haven't finished texturing everything yet. Outdoor scenes have realtime cast shadows and more finished textures and the game looks pretty solid.





Seems like they just haven't gone through all of the scenes and finished them yet. All the indoor stuff looks like it's still in progress.

 

Hah, you are right about that. One game that really drew me in was Else Heart.Break(), so I guess story is a big part of the immersion for me. It is not enough to throw cool mechanics and graphics at me in a game, but if there are characters I can relate to or that are just really interesting it goes a long ways to breaking the 1 hour and dump it routine.

 

Yeah I think those were some older screen shots. It doesn't look fantastic or in keeping up with the latest AAA shooters, but really the graphics aren't bad. Stuff like lighting can easily be improved down the road. The meshes themselves are perfectly fine -- improved textures would probably make them indistinguishable from any AAA game like Wildlands or whatever.

But Ground Branch is basically the exact game fans of the original Red Storm games have been asking for since Ubisoft dramatically changed the Ghost Recon and Rainbow Six series years ago. It feels exactly like an update of those classic games -- though it feels much more challenging to me. Like, it's goddamn hard and I usually crush games on the highest difficulty settings.

It operates almost exactly the same as those old games -- quite simple, you don't need to reconfigure your keyboard or anything -- but with more attention to detail put into creating an even more realistic and tense environment. Definitely not a game for everyone, but if you've been dying to play a legit tactical shooter but aren't into the ridiculous complexity and lousy controls of Arma, this is it. It's a game where you can smoothly move around, make snap shots, sprint from cover to cover, pie corners in a tight indoor environment... and yet if you lose focus for a second, miss some tiny detail behind a bush in the distance, you can die in an instant.


screenshot taken myself:

 

Its possible in reallife so if you want realism its a good thing. Plus you need to execute a thumbs forward dual grip to the pistol to be really effective.

 

Watching the GROUND BRANCH steam video and the movement of the other players look really jerky like there is no filtering to the variable sync. I hope its just a alpha problem

 

I haven't played online yet (much). Just terrorist hunt. It's made by long time AAA vets though. But a tiny team. I think just like 4-5 guys. I'm sure they'll get everything ship shape. I think the super early release is a means to get more money so they can continue improving it.

But all this nitpickey graphical stuff is besides the point. The game fills a market need and is stable. It's way more solid than a lot of games with a lot more money put into them at full release.

I trust these developers.

 

Its a bit dangerous putting up those jerky MP syncs on their Steam store though. In a dev blog sure, but their main trailer. Hmm, I would have waited until atleast that was polished

 

These guys aren't no-name indie devs trying to break into the scene though. It's a spiritual successor to a beloved franchise made by the original developers (a few of them anyway.)

So, interested gamers aren't going to spot some nit-picky stuff and say, "meh, I'll wait for something else." Instead, we are saying, "about goddamn time. Whatever it is, I'll take it!" I mean, the most well established shooter in history -- counter-strike -- still suffers connectivity issues. That's not something that can be totally eradicated. I don't think I have played any online shooter ever that ran flawlessly all the time and didn't frustrate me with some "lag kills" time to time.

 

Yeah but they hav alot of competition these days. Like the game "Ready or not" for example.
That Steam trailer better be good, you just have a few seconds to get a potential customer intersted

 

Reputation > trailer.

Ready or Not is a game I will wait to hear about thoroughly before I purchase it. Fancy graphics mean jack to me. How many games have good graphics but are lousy to play?

I bought Ground Branch almost immediately. I saw it on steam, skimmed through a gameplay video where the person made it apparent that this game is exactly what fans have been askign for for years, and I bought it. Played a few hours, no regrets. Will continue to support the game, file bug reports, etc.

Ready or Not has no reputation. It has to earn it. Does it look incredible? Yes. Will it out sale Ground Branch? Maybe. But Ground Branch is out now and it's a game I've wanted to play for years. RoN isn't either of those things.

Further -- I haven't looked that much into RoN -- but what I have seen was videos in which they listed a bunch of "features." Like open the fluidly or fast, yada yada.

Stuff like that is always too complicated and non-fluid for video games though. In a shooter, I need to be ready to react quick. Also, IRL, none of this stupid opening door S*** is a thing anyway. I mean, I wasn't a SWAT guy, maybe they operate differently, but in the army you either blow the thing up or barge in with force. The "tactics" is more about where you point your gun when you filter in and in what order. Not how you open the door. A video game should make the door opening a non-thing. Just push a button and it opens.

That's a lot of specific details, but it ties into my point that, despite the nice graphics and animations, RoN can still be a poor tactical shooter if they focus on looking cool at the expense of playing well.

 

We have made an entire game around opening doors!

 

Your game?

It's one I have wanted to play bad since I first saw it, but I'm not ready to get into VR yet, unfortunately. But working with your hands is different than a standard controller. I cannot give any opinion on whether or not your simulation is "fluid" enough or not, as I have no familiarity with how VR works whatsoever. From the videos I've seen it looks like you can operate very realistically and -- more importantly -- fast in your game.

 

Yeah, its not comparable. But I think you could make it happen in none VR too, its just harder to achieve a good mechanic . Similar to how the first Splinter Cell revolutionized with using the scroll wheel for more or less stepless speed control.

edit: In VR you can even use the head to open the door

 

Maybe, but I don't see the point.

I did a lot of CQB training in the army with both Rangers and the Special Forces. Doors either get blasted open, kicked open, or flung open by a dude on the side. Then the point guy barges in with as many gun barrels behind him getting into the room as fast as possible. It's a seemingly simple thing but takes a lot of training to get all the muzzles into the room basically at once without flagging each each other or tripping on each other. Also takes training and discipline to stick with your course and trust teammates in the face of danger.

Really not something video games could reproduce. There's a lot of factors involved, and also in most games any walls are bulletproof so pieing corners off just kind of makes more sense most of the time anyway.

Ground Branch does a good job with CQB by taking into account weapon length and also giving PVE enemies extremely fast reaction times. Also, lack of strafing makes it so that when you get into a face off, you are kind of committed and simply have to outshoot the other guy. So, trying to get the enemies long before that stage is what makes a good player.

 

Cant kick open doors here in the EU, they are solid work of art, and the doors goes outward instead of inward

edit: I get you, but it is really nice open the door just slightly and toss in a grenade or flash.

 

So we would blow your doors up then.

Shame for the art...

 

Or blow the hinges off, but my door have pins going out into the frame in 2 directions when you lock it. Plus it weighs a ton.. Anyway. In a game like PUBG you will have given away your posiiton to the entire map

 

yeah, that is why i hate when games make you swithc to grenades and tehn throw and then switch back. I want to open a door, press a single button to quickly fling a grenade inside, and then scoot back while bringing my weapon back up quickly.

Also, grenades in games always suck. I get it, they don't want grenades to be OP. But grenades are OP! They should be OP. If somebody got to your stinking door, you deserve the grenade. When that thing rolls in the room, you should know its all over for everybody inside.

When all weapons in the game become OP, then you've got a tactical shooter!

 

It all depends on which type of speed you want to the gameplay. I can appreciate both ways, switching to grenade instead of hotkey. That requires more teamplay since you the grenadier are vulnerable while operating the nade.

OR you can do it like we did, let them pull the pin while the grenade sits in the vest, grab the grenade and throw it. That way you can still keep your primary up. It do create mistakes thogh when people draw the pin by mistake, like here

Not entirely realistic that you can pull the pin that easy, but hey, its fun

 

Hahaha.

What a ridiculously terrible plan.

Yeah, I get that having to take time and attention to pull out a grenade is more realistic, but I tend to play solo so I like being able to kind of cover multiple peoples positions on my own in a way.

Team play is great, but only if you have an actual team to play with.

 

Another thing thats nice with VR, a mic is mandatory since its built into the headsets. So teamplay is much easier. Since you are forced to use the built in VOIP