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It’s one of those niche games you never see anyone talking about until you discover it and keep always seeing people talking about it

Cats dying from alcohol poisoning

(I’m guessing Just Cause?)

EDIT: yup it’s dwarf fortress

I’m tired of shooters too, and I just stopped playing them. Sure it’d be nice to see more diverse AAA games, but it’s not like we live in an age with few games coming out.

Death Stranding is a good example of how you can make a game that doesn’t revolve around shooting (even if it still has shooting), and that’s a game with a AAA budget. Luckily we’re not in the seventh gen anymore.

I get that, maybe I simply don’t have that itch to scratch.

For me at least, an open world is almost pointless if there is no meaningful storytelling of some kind. Meaningful storytelling doesn’t necessarily equals to good writing. BOTW to me has an awesome storytelling because of the way its game and narrative design make your journey the story. Just wondering around in Hyrule creates a story without needing complex quests and NPCs. New Vegas on the other hand puts you in a world with several factions you can interact with and NPCs with awesomely written quests you can approach in different subtle ways that impact how the quest goes, and while you do so it shows you how it all impacts the lives of normal people living in the wasteland.

Skyrim just doesn’t do that, and it’s ok. If I wanted to find cool loot, level up and fight big monsters, that would be the perfect game but it’s just not for me. To each their own I guess, there’s plenty of games for everyone to enjoy!

Oh wow! Sounds like I should check it out then!

It looks really interesting but it seems very inspired by JRPGs, and I’m not really a fan of those. I’m afraid I could get bored by endless repetitive dialogue and other shenanigans of the genre

Old school Zelda or new school Zelda? Because when it comes to dungeons, BOTW/TOTK aren’t really at the top of the series

I’m biased in the opposite way since I started with Fallout New Vegas, but to me FO3 wasn’t THAT good either. It’s a good game, but its narrative design is still mediocre. FO4 was a really good upgrade in terms of gunplay, but I hated the story, side quests and the changes to the perks system.

To me, Bethesda games feel like big worlds with lots of quests and items, but completely flat narratively and thematically/philosophically.

I don’t really get how people’s problem with Bethesda is bugs and glitches, which are completely solvable, and not the writing that makes you want to remove some brain tissue from your skull so it doesn’t bother you that much

Which would not be a problem if Cyberpunk 2020 (and most cyberpunk media today) was not stuck in the 80s

This is something I almost never see discussed, but it’s probably what made me tired of cyberpunk stuff. It became a parody and a part of what it was supposed to criticize

Yeah, sometimes it feels as if what the developers (well, the writers to be fair) want to say is “look how cool this world is”. Or at the very least as if they wrote the game without subtext or thematic coherence: again, as if they produced a game that’s still in its preproduction stage

I don’t have a problem with the time management itself as much as the fact that, at least up until the third (second? I don’t know, the one about the asshole artist) palace you never get to understand it and enjoy. There’s always something to do to push the story forward (but actually not, because we absolutely need to meet to say the same two things we said the night before and come to the same conclusion) or some tutorial that prevents you from actually hang out with a character or do anything else, and when finally you get enough time to get the hang of it and start planning your days there’s some other stuff that gets in the way.

Maybe if the story was more condensed in terms of dialogue/useless filler and more diluted in terms of when the game stops for story events it would have been nicer.

I played it when it came out after I found it in an underground chest on a desert island and got probably halfway through. I didn’t really mind the performance issues (they were BAD, don’t get me wrong) but I hated how the game was broken to its core. It wanted to be both an open ended RPG and a narrative action adventure game, resulting in something I like to describe using this metaphor: if the game was talking to you, it would sound like “YOU CAN BE WHOEVER YOU WANT, CHOOSE YOUR PAST AND WRITE YOUR FUTURE! But actually no, you’re a predetermined character with an established personality and traits. BUT YOU CAN CHOOSE HOW YOU INTERACT WITH THE WORLD AND ITS CHARACTERS AND WATCH THE CONSEQUENCES OF YOUR ACTIONS UNFOLD! But not really, choices slightly change the way you get from point A to point B, except maybe in the sidequests”.

Regarding the open ended “write your own story” RPG aspect of it, It’s INFURIATING choosing to have a certain attitude towards a character when the game gives you the option just to see the protagonist act in a completely different (and totally unambiguous) way in the next line of dialogue, but the game creates this kind of contradictions even by itself. I remember that in the beginning of the game you see V freaking out when they realises that Johnny is in their head, insulting him and screaming and asking him to leave their head. Then you start playing, go in the street and not even 5 minutes later you can trigger a cutscene from a side quest where you see the two of them getting along like two good old friends. That shouldn’t happen, and it’s just completely broken narrative design that spoils me the evolution of the relationship between V and Johnny. They could have avoided it by simply unlocking the side quest after a few main missions.

On the Action-RPG side of things, everything’s great on paper but with deeply flawed execution. I wanted to be an hacker, and after not even half of the game I could kill EVERY enemy in a building before even entering it. The same goes for the shooting, where you have a classic resistances and weaknesses system (e.g. if I shoot fire bullets enemy A will get x.5 damage and enemy B will get x2 damage) that is literally useless. After a while I stopped paying attention to it and it didn’t make a difference, not a noticeable one at least (and it would have been useless anyway since I could kill people just by staring at them through walls).

Overall, performance aside, it felt like an alpha version of a game, where you have some systems that kinda interact with each other and that not only need to be smoothed but often times reworked from the ground up. It is (or at least was at the time) a game without internal coherence from a semiotic point of view: it kinda knows what it wants to tell you but not well enough to not completely fail in how it tells you.

Of course they patched it since, and it looks like this dlc could address some of these problems, but I think that the criticism focused on the wrong things.

The city is beautiful though, probably the only time I felt like walking in a real city, and the game still kept me hooked for 20-ish hours so it probably isn’t completely terrible. It’s also worth mentioning that I was, using accurate and scientific terminology, hyped as fuck for this game as if it was the second coming of Christ and this surely impacted my judgement of it.

God Celeste’s OST is so good

I would have loved that game if it didn’t assume that the player was a complete idiot who had to get the same information ten times in a row in 30 minutes of generic dialogue, just to play 30 minutes of boring tutorials and then another 30 minutes of pointless dialogue.

It’s a long game that doesn’t need to be. I like the “social sim” aspect of it, and even if I’m not into turn based combat it felt really good, but I just can’t stand hours of pointless dialogue and neverending tutorials. I mean, I’m 20/30 hours into the game and you really need to spend this much time introducing mechanics that are just evolutions of preexisting mechanics?

But this is a problem I have with every JRPG. They all seem cool before playing them, but when I do they feel to me like extremely bloated games. I’d love a nice straightforward 20 hours JRPG

I remember playing a bit of Fable 2 on my aunt’s XBox as a kid and not really getting it. Has it aged well? Or should I just wait for this new one?

Right, I forgot it was theirs. It looked very cool, or at least different compared to similar games

Looks really interesting! I’m curious to know how guided the climbing will be. For now it seems like something between the freedom of BOTW/TOTK (which is an obvious inspiration) and the railroad-ness of Uncharted.

On a side-note, did DONTNOD make any games that are not narrative adventures a la Life is Strange other than Remember Me?

I think that the death of stumble upon reflects this very well. I used to spend hours on it, finding website that were about specific niche topics, art, or were interactive experiences of every kind. Now websites don’t really exist in that shape anymore, or at least don’t have the same resonance. If Internet was the real world, it would be a cyberpunk dystopia

I’m Gen Z and when I was little my parents were (rightfully) very careful with how much time I spent on the internet. Even so, I saw from a distance the old internet, where forums were a thing and you could find lots of cool websites that people made for reasons that weren’t limited to promoting or selling something.

When I discovered Reddit it was like I could somehow experience that time, but for many the decline had already started.

I love interacting with people, asking and answering questions, discovering and making others discover new things, but I just can’t stand feeling like everything and everyone is trying to sell me something anymore.

Now that I’m here, I feel like this could be the place, at least for a while.