A kid comes up to me in a white jacket, gives me a Ritz cracker, and uh, chopped liver, he says, ‘Canopus’. I said, uh, can of peas, my ass, that’s a Ritz cracker and chopped liver!
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Played a bit of the Gundam Evolution playtest. Loosely its Gundam Overwatch, but the movement of the machines is hefty enough nothing feels too light. By a bit I mean I played all the unlocked suits in training mode, then played one live round in the Dom Trooper…and had a bunch of fun, which was neat 'cause PvP games and I don’t get along (just too much stress). I won’t be playing more but, it was alright.
Weirdest fucking thing was not having melee attacks (more specifically, they being relegated to the odd super move or one-off command) for most units. Kinda threw me given how big a role melee kinda plays in the franchise. The classic Gundam without a Beam Saber attack felt weird as hell.
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I looked it up on the old forum archive and all my photo links are broken… but miraculously, they were still crammed into my hard drive:
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So I’m subscribed to this youtube channel that does game easter eggs and there was a bit in a recent video about a bit in Horizon Forbidden West that’s a memorial to a fellow designer who passed. In 25 seconds over about 30 yards Aloy has the following monologue triggers:
What is this place?
Looks like a path.
Someone painted those markings with great care.
I think this is a memorial. Must be for a beloved friend.
Someone left a note.
Holy christ is the whole game like this? It’s absolutely insufferable.
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I had this game for this phone
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this is the kind of thing that happens when you write the lines before you know what the sequence will actually be
the game i’m working on is absolutely filthy with this stuff - you write something like 5-10 player reminder lines because you have no idea how long the actual sequence will be, and then the lines all get recorded, and then someone really wants all of the lines to be used because we already paid for them, but we wouldn’t have to pay for them if we knew what the sequence was before we wrote the lines, but the designers for the sequence want to have the lines so they can pace the sequence appropriately, but they’re not even really playing with the sound on anyway
kill me
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Judging by the reviews, yes, everyone is annoyed by it. She also blurts out puzzle solutions as soon as you walk into the room sometimes
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this is another thing - i don’t think we’ve really figured out just how difficult designing puzzles is in VR with both analog movement via the sticks and free-looking + motion controls via VR, which means we kind of have to design for both paradigms at the same time, which is tough because most of the designers are better versed in the traditional 3d action press-button-to-do-thing paradigm, and as a result there’s a big desire to just “solve it in post” and have puzzle reminder VO playing basically the entire time
in the case of HFW it mostly feels like big teams not trusting each other to make the thing readable (or at least not being 100% aware of what’s happening over on the other team)
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Myst has a lot of that enthusiasm for 3D worlds from the early 90s, where virtual spaces in all kinds of media were treated like museums to fiddle around with strange trinkets and artifacts.
Off and on I’ve been playing Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon. It has a dungeon structure sort of like Zelda but there’s no overlap between any of the rooms. You blindly step into the next room and have no idea if it’s the boss or another little challenge area. It does make me appreciate how a Zelda will set up things like visible locked doors so that you can anticipate what’s coming next and also intuitively get a sense of how big the overall dungeon is.
The overworld is great though. So much big pointless empty space. So little effort to contextualize any of it with game mechanics. Great for just walkin’ around.
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I would honestly really love to know what happened in that development because it feels really pathological. New leadership deciding every time someone got stuck in playtesting had to be patched over with VO? Who knows but I know it had to be something.
HFW has its good points and bad points for sure but what fully stopped me playing right in the middle was the constant backseating from Aloy. It made it feel like a game designed more to be shown off and streamed without interruption (hence why it basically plays itself) than a game made to be played by players. It started to actually stress me out that the game was constantly hurrying me along with no time to think or figure out anything for myself. Just an absolute misery of a game
At some point I decided that I’d maybe replay it someday if they were to patch out the awful non-stop VO, but until it would let me play it like an actual game I just wasn’t interested in spending my spare time being shuttled from one already-solved puzzle to the next, like every time I entered a room the game was yelling “oh just let me do it!” and pulling the controller out of my hands
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This is also exactly what I found irritating about Psychonauts 2. It’s like the cheeky monologuing a LucasArts character does when you use the wrong verb/item but unbidden, all the time!
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petition to contain all environmental dialogue said by my character on a dedicated button
“Press R3 to yammer” is the new “Press X to Shaun”
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In Dragon’s Dogma you can sit a character down at a table and ask them not to talk as much. Maybe other games should take note.
But of course when playing Dragon’s Dogma one can easily forget that wolves hunt in packs and it can be helpful to have that reminder.
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did you know that harpies hate fire
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50 cent: blood on the sand remains a trailblazer to this day
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videogame character: (increasing desperation) this view of the castle is truly astonishing, sirrah. the intricate stonework must well have been a labour of love for whoe’er built it. to think that our travels took us all this way…! if only we could share such vistas with our companions, by hitting F12 to record view before posting it online under the hashtags #visionofeverlith #beautiful #gameart
videogame player: (serenely) bite bite scratch bite kill kill
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I wish the table-talk worked. I know the translation team asked the Dragon’s Dogma team if they could turn down the bark frequency because, well, repetitive emotive combat barks are a much bigger thing in Japan than the west.
they said no
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I think of Horizon: Forbidden West’s dialogue as answering the question: were the hints of restraint we had in walk 'n talks because of taste or because of budget restrictions? If modern obsessively-tested narrative-money games could talk more, would they? And the answer is yes, absolutely, it’s the method that’s wrong
I think the most Sony will take from this, if this feeling is widespread at all, is that constant chatter needs a funny sidekick to bounce off of. Do it like God of War, in other words, but maintain your white-knuckle grip grip on attention so the player doesn’t check their phone or something.
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