I will Siege w u
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the oriental riff is a Wikipedia article that you can read with your ears
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i quit that game after the fly swatting scene, too much kojima slime
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outer worlds is really great imo. i don’t even care about the bugs or the kinda pedestrian combat with how lovely the dialogue writing is and how good it is at letting you play it the way you want.
i love being a compulsive liar and seeing how much trouble that gets me into. i think it’s clever how trauma (in my case, a couple near death experiences involving robots) becomes a permanent part of your character (my character now panics around robots & becomes clumsy and unfocused, so i have to hang back and rely on my party to fight them.) everyone is gay as hell. i got a room of armed goons on my side by realizing they’re all intensely high on fumes from living in the bowels of a starship then convincing them the thing i needed from their storage is actually full of horrible insects and i need to take it away immediately. there’s a goofy jock party member with a bedroom full of anarchist lit who goes on soliloquies on the joy of sport and how satisfying it is to deck your boss. there’s a side quest where you help another party member ask out her new cute butch engineer-captain crush by just like, being a good friend? (my partner and i keep screaming like fan girls over those two lol)
like yeah it’s pulp but it’s well executed pulp with a lot of heart?
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yeah I’m definitely not against the pulpiness, I’m mostly miffed they went back to making compulsive quest flag elder scrolls games and they still feel like sludge (playing any of those always makes me feel like I’m hung over afterward from how my brain slips into going from one thing to the next without much thought, it’s like actively depleting). I’m glad the writing is good enough to carry it though.
(the writing was also exceptionally good in deadfire which not enough people played)
I beat Vicar Amelia and those witches in Charnel Lane today
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i’ve been lying to everyone about being the captain and i am just WAITING for it to bite me in my stupid ass
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This is the best! This is the general narrative conceit of Perspective, the puzzle game about setting up and diving into 2D worlds from a 3D environment – you traverse deeper and deeper into layers and then back up. Originally, I wanted it to end at the desktop as a reality at the top layer, and then a layer above that. I’ve got sketches of the emaciated Half-Life 2-esque prisoners hooked up to these arcade cabinets.
But we pulled the same trick as we did in the previous game and surreptitiously snapped a screenshot of the desktop when the game launched, so that the player could go up a spatial dimension, instead land on the desktop, then reveal it as another layer of the game.
ah! it makes me so happy
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Outer Worlds sure looks like somebody’s already gone over it with ReShade and made it ‘better’
Everything is way to high-contrast but at the same time the darks are all green and it’s all jewel-toned, it’s superficially pretty but it hurts my eyes after a bit
Feels like the 2019 version of Fallout 3/NV’s ‘ah just use bloom to cover it up’
It’s way too sludgy and prescribed for me to give it more than the first planet; I feel like I’m in Obsidian trying to be as on-brand as possible and it’s so predictable in structure and function. I think I’d prefer it was lower-fidelity and I didn’t have to look directly at the characters descended from Oblivion’s face slider (still! they laboriously recreated Bethesda’s putty face just to be on-brand!) and were playing this top-down. Even the level design and the way it puts a treasure chest in every single back alley and dungeon end is…well, it’s work-to-spec.
I’m really pleased that they drastically simplified the ridiculous Vault Time and made it a normal, functioning game mechanic, though
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somehow I went from playing outer worlds to reinstalling Oblivion on my fucking Xbox so I am just having a normal one today. I don’t even like Oblivion that much!!
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Heaven’s Vault, aside from the voice acting, is a marvelous game that I would put on par with Outer Wilds for its feeling of discovery and archaeology-as-primary-mechanic
Good news, you can mute the voice acting
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Ooh, I liked this one, and especially its interface tools for deciphering language and the dynamic timeline that spans millions of years to an hour ago. I really like these modern adventure games that give the player new tools to organize information and build a game around that.
I feel like the art style doesn’t really pull together; there’s a lot of merit in ‘2d sprites in 3d world’ but I don’t think they had the chops or budget to pull it off, which is a real shame.
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I agree, the art style often reads more as ‘upscaled mobile game’ than ‘intentional aesthetic’ but I absolutely love that the nature of the game is one of research and study on an actually interesting setting and cultures.
The sailing bits are also a bit mechanically… not quite right even if they are often where the art style works best.
that being said, its still a remarkable game and from what I understand it still provides 80 days style heavily branching paths with character interaction.
I think that inkle definitely read all of em short’s essays about dialogue structure and internalized it in a way I haven’t seen anyone else do.
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I am, uh, very worried about the amount of thinking we’ve done about our dialogue model in our very systemic game. It’s a frighteningly complex region and I’m not confident we’ll be able to get out of it through mostly NPC-directed interactions. Luckily Emily will be visiting soon
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Looking up their dialogue system, here’s some context on how it works:
The knowledge model we use is designed to be strong but efficient to author; so at any given moment in the script, the writer can quickly test if the game-state is appropriate for a line or action (or location!) to become available; with the test usually having two parts:
Are all necessary conditions met for this action or dialogue line to make sense?
Are any redundancy conditions met? Has anything happened that would invalidate the action?
The first covers things like “unlock this door if you have the right key”, but also “don’t ask someone a question if you don’t think they might know the answer”. The second check covers things like “don’t try to open a door that’s already open”, and “don’t ask someone a question to which you already know the answer.” All requirements are required; but a single redundancy is enough to fail.
Knowledge states are ideas
The answer we’ve found - and quite late in the day! - is to re-use the existing knowledge model. Recall that every conversation line in the game is gated by what states it requires, and what states would make it redundant - that information is already there, and indexed in the game.
In order to tackle the problem of relevance, we’ve started to think of those “required” states not just as requirements, but also as ideas . We’ve begun recording not just which states have been set, but what was set recently . What was the last state to be set? That’s what the protagonist is thinking about, right now. What were the last ten states to be set? That’s what she’s been mulling over in the background.
Then, as we run through the prioritised dialogue list, we ask a slightly modified question: is this line valid , and were any of its trigger states set recently? If they were, then the topic is “closer to surface” of our character’s mind, and should be pushed up to the player.
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What we need is the PT people making a full Silent Hill VR game
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I think the opening roll is probably just sampled from the end of Dueling Banjos?
Still, even if built out of samples, the structures of the songs are exactly the same…
I would love this
on someone else’s head
This would literally, actually kill me
RE7 is really much better than you could imagine
multiple kinds of horror, good atmosphere, etc
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