So I grew up in the olden days when you put a cartridge into a console and immediately you were playing games.
I had several consoles while growing up, but for the last many years I admit that I never really owned any of the modern gaming consoles. So to try and see what modern gaming is like I purchased a few consoles and games. I now own a:
xbox 360
xbox one
ps3
But from what I've noticed, all of these consoles are requiring the use of internet more and more. It seems as if you can't even use them without downloading tons of crap from the internet every time I turn them on.
What ever happened to just inserting the game and then playing something? This one time I wanted to play a game, but before I could play the game I had to download a ton of sh*t. After that was done, I wasn't even in the mood to play the game anymore.
Also WTF is up with all these trophies and achievements and crap that keep popping up while I'm playing a game? When I had my NES, never did a small icon pop up and say "here's a trophy" good job playing the game. I honestly don't need any reward other than my own personal enjoyment with the game. It seems like I'm being rewarded for doing nothing sometimes, which devalues the trophy and makes it meaningless.
It seems like modern gaming is way more complicated than it needs to be. It should just be, put in the game and F-ing play it. Just think if movies and DVD's and Bluerays worked this way too.
You put in the movie and "oh no" you got to download something first before you can watch your movie and it's going to take 10 minutes. Give me a f-ing break.
Well yeah. It takes away a huge part of what I like about consoles in the first place. At least the Wii U wasn't horrible about that stuff. It still felt kind of like a console.
Starting with the 4K re-release of Star Ocean 4, we are also now seeing video rendering options in consoles games.
It feels absurd when a bought hardcopy of a game is more or less just a download key.
At least, trophies can potentially be great. Nes homebrew side,
Scramble is an example of good trophy design. Basically, it's not just about getting an abstract high score anymore. Once can beat the game, the trophy system provides solid support for voluntary game rules like a no death run or only firing this many shots in a playthrough and so on. The first trophies (beat level x) have debatable use in this regard, but might help introduce the plauer to the trophy system.
This unmotivates me beyond belief too. I don't own a switch/xbone/ps4 and I don't think I ever will, no matter how much I want to play the last of us 2 or super mario odyssey. I simply know what comes along with these new systems and I know it won't change. Certain publishers like capcom, activision and EA.... Ugh!! I run away like it's the plague.
I do like steam though because it has the occasional great game for cheap, and the bigger variety means I have a better chance of getting a game that doesn't have all this modern bs. It requires research, but the only other option is to be exclusively a retro gamer.
Sumez wrote:
Starting with the 4K re-release of Star Ocean 4, we are also now seeing video rendering options in consoles games.
GoldenEye 007 for Nintendo 64 had letterbox settings and pixel aspect ratio settings (for 4:3 or 16:9 TVs) back in 1997. A lot of later N64 games could run in high-resolution mode (480i instead of 240p) with a frame rate hit.
Those are all options relating to your display though. Stuff that's nowadays handled by the console's own system settings.
The options introduced in Star Ocean 4 affects how the game is rendered on the PS4's own hardware, and has nothing to do with differences on your TV.
No, the N64 high resolution options really do increase the rendering resolution, increasing the hardware workload. edit: and some N64 games have an option to enable/disable AA.
Yeah, you'd naively hope that the N64 480i mode would actually re-render the 3D scene every 60Hz and thus be able to ultimately render each refresh at ≈300x224.
For good and ill, the N64 instead gives you a plain 448-pixel high framebuffer and the output stage (the creatively named Video Interface) draws from that framebuffer, optionally with flicker reduction (which is a vertical 1 2 1 filter)
Is that not configurable? There's a vast amount of resolutions the commercial games render at, as measured by N64 emulators.
Right. I didn't mean to insinuate that that's the only video mode.
There's standard library calls to set up one of 14 different video modes, with variants for all of PAL, NTSC, PAL-M, and "full screen PAL". More or less the combinatorial set of
* 320x224 vs 640x448
* bilinear vs no filtering for the scaler
* interlaced vs not
* 16bpp vs 32bpp
The actual Video Interface hardware itself supports full modelines with a fixed pixel clock (≈12MHz), framebuffer width, and a simple X/Y scaler to expand (or shrink) the framebuffer to the output surface, as well as a few other toggles (gamma compensation, dithering?)
I really should get around to writing that test firmware that will let me try generating arbitrary modelines.
Erockbrox wrote:
But from what I've noticed, all of these consoles are requiring the use of internet more and more. It seems as if you can't even use them without downloading tons of crap from the internet every time I turn them on.
You can literally just
not connect them to the internet and use them exactly the way you're asking, though. It won't ever check for updates if you don't have the internet connected. Aside from games that are online multiplayer only, very few games require always-online. (It's generally a
PR disaster whenever this is attempted.)
On PS3 it would check for updates whenever you started a game (though you always had the option to ignore the update and play anyway), but I very much appreciate that the PS4 will check for and download updates periodically when not in use so it's almost never a thing that gets in the way when starting up a game. Big exception: the first time you play a game it checks for updates right then and there, since it's the first your console knows about it.
The original version of the XBone was going to have some sort of always-online bullshit requirement but they had already realized this was stupid before launch and there was an immediate OS update to allow offline use.
AFAIK PS3/PS4 games always ship with the latest version of system software on disk, so if they do require an OS update it can be applied without using the internet. Not sure about XB1.
Erockbrox wrote:
Just think if movies and DVD's and Bluerays worked this way too.
Do you not actually own any blu-rays? A large portion of them
do this already, generally to download new previews to play before you get to the movie. (Again, can usually be prevented by not allowing your blu-ray player to connect to the internet... but the off switch UI for this feature is sometimes annoying to find/use depending on the player, especially if your player is a video game system that you otherwise want to use with the internet.)
Yeah but if you don't update your game you don't even get a game, you get a glitch fest. Okay I exaggerate, but sometimes it's exactly that.
That's not an exaggeration, that is exactly how it is in many cases. Examples: Yooka-Laylee, Witcher 3... and many more. I think there are a few examples of PS4 games that won't even run, or at least aren't beatable without the initial patch. The Hitman Season 1 disc release doesn't have all the episodes on the disc, and will definitely require the extra download. It's all a placebo.
Indie games* rarely get a disc release because of all the overhead involved.
It may become even less common with ESRB changing its rate structure recently. This doesn't affect people who play only AAA games, but I imagine that most people interested in both NESdev and modern consoles are also interested in playing indie games on modern consoles.
* Using ceoyoyo's definition: financed by an entity too small for venture capital.
Sumez wrote:
I think there are a few examples of PS4 games that won't even run, or at least aren't beatable without the initial patch.
I think there are more than a few examples of pre-internet games that fit this description as well.
But yes the situation is obviously different now. People
expect post-release maintenance of problems, and similarly developers
expect to do the same, and the release process has adapted to take this into account. ...and the reality of this is some games that would have been
cancelled in a pre-patch era instead get released with the hope of recovering enough loss to make it to patch. Hard to compare this to the previous era, because they just wouldn't exist then, they would have just died before you heard about them.
A lot of glitches that people make a big stink about in, e.g.
Assassin's Creed Unity aren't any more critical than the average NES game bug. Most game releases for consoles with a QA gatekeeping process like PS4/XB1/Switch are as playable as
most games from the SNES era, but now there is a demand to fix even minor problems. If using Relm's sketch ability broke your save in Final Fantasy III in 1994, you wouldn't be getting a viral tweet about it with a patch the following week, you'd just start over, or give up.
Overall, if you want to play your PS4 totally offline, it's actually
pretty viable, IMO. They have a testing process specifically designed to ensure this, and with extremely rare exceptions it
does work.
...but taking patches improves the experience overall, and with a second generation the UI has gotten better (i.e. passive update downloads instead of up-front). In most cases you really can just ignore and skip the update when you start playing, but most people actually want the content of that patch, even though they're not happy about waiting for it at that particular moment. Initial install to hard disk is still a frequent problem, though... but at least that seems to be faster and less prominent in this generation than the previous one. (...and PC gamers were living with that one since the beginning anyway.)
At least those weren't released with the mindset that they can always patch the game as they go along since they have the internet. Shipping unfinished products has become a very deliberate marketing strategy in recent years.
Sumez wrote:
At least those weren't released with the mindset that they can always patch the game as they go along since they have the internet. Shipping unfinished products has become a very deliberate marketing strategy in recent years.
Yes, some are released like that, because they can be. The vast majority of users will download and install patches. Nobody sets out with this as a target goal*; a game that's unfinished at launch is
terrible marketing. That's not a marketing strategy, that's a coping strategy. It's a desperate attempt to get enough momentum to continue working on the game.
That's beside the point I'm making though. My point is that
most switch/PS4 games are "complete" and playable 100% offline, and they really do QA for this. If you want to play your PS4 offline, you can actually DO it; the majority of games are fine on disc.
There
are games that suck at release and later get a little better, but if you're comparing against the average NES game... they just suck at release
and forever instead.
Already there's more than twice as many games out for PS4 than the NES had in its entire lifetime. There's more visible coverage of games than ever, and there's just more games overall, so it's easy to point to examples where a game did a bad thing. The equivalent of "unfinished at release" is just either cancelled, or released as a terrible game anyway in the NES era.
The nice thing about all this extra visible coverage is at least you have a much better chance to spot the duds before you buy them.
* Well, there's early access but that's a bit of a different situation, and not applicable to major consoles.
I'm still waiting for the 'free' copy of SSB4 that came with my Wii U to download. I bought my Wii U a year ago.
Don't even get me started on the DLC.
You also have to delete all internet connection settings to make the thing work offline. And then re-enter them from scratch every time you actually want to go online.
I will not be buying a Switch.
If you want to use eShop on satellite, you may have to drive your Wii U into town and park it in a restaurant to use its complimentary WLAN connection to the Internet. You won't need to carry a monitor, will you?
Wii-u has its own screen already
Rahsennor wrote:
I'm still waiting for the 'free' copy of SSB4 that came with my Wii U to download. I bought my Wii U a year ago.
Yeah, I don't know if that means you expected a download code in the box to be a disc, or if you don't have a suitable internet connection, but either way that's a fair beef to have with it.
Rahsennor wrote:
You also have to delete all internet connection settings to make the thing work offline. And then re-enter them from scratch every time you actually want to go online.
I'd agree that the Wii U internet settings UI is pretty terrible. Did you find yourself wanting to make it go offline and online again frequently? (I never wanted to force it offline, but I did wish it was easier to switch the WiFi connection because I sometimes took it to a friend's house.)
Rahsennor wrote:
I will not be buying a Switch.
I wouldn't get a Switch either.
In my view the Wii U had about 10 worthy games, and then between Wii emulation and Virtual Console (eventually) there was a bunch decent backlog stuff on it, if you hadn't played it before.
The Switch, with no backward compatibility and no VC... not really expecting enough to appear there unless it lasts many years, unlike the Wii U.
Rahsennor wrote:
I'm still waiting for the 'free' copy of SSB4 that came with my Wii U to download.
You're not missing much.
rainwarrior wrote:
I wouldn't get a Switch either.
I was gullible enough to get one. If you already bought a Wii U (or possibly even if you haven't), don't get a Switch. The
worst "best" game on the Switch, Breath of the Wild, is on the Wii U. The performance is worse, but the performance on the Switch version is bad anyway (especially for the Xbox 360 visuals). I personally don't like any Mario Kart game other than Super Mario Kart, but there's no reason to get Mario Kart 8 Deluxe 8 Deluxe if you already have Mario Kart 8 (unless you were
that distraught about having no Battle Mode). I'll be damned if ARMS keeps you entertained for more than 30 minutes. Nobody gives a shit about Pokken, but it's also on the Wii U anyway. While Mario Kart 8 Deluxe is Mario Kart 8 with slight improvements (except removing firehopping, because people who lacked enough skill to do it kept whining to Nintendo), Splatoon 2 is an inferior version of Splatoon 1, even before all of Splatoon 1's updates (the contents of which should have been there on Splatoon 2's release). I don't know about Super Mario Odyssey; it's supposed to be very good, but so was Breath of the Wild.
rainwarrior wrote:
Did you find yourself wanting to make it go offline and online again frequently?
Any time I want to play online or browse the shop, I have to
1) turn my laptop into a wifi hotspot
2) pause downloads (they "helpfully" re-enable themselves every time you turn the console off, and I can't afford to pay hundreds of dollars in overage fees and/or get cut off for a month)
3) navigate through the craptastic settings app
4) type in my longass wifi password
5) play the game
6) navigate through the settings app again
7) delete all connection settings so that next time I turn it on it doesn't lock up for five minutes spamming error messages.
I should add that this is my
second Wii U. The first one died within 24 hours.
rainwarrior wrote:
That's not a marketing strategy, that's a coping strategy.
Hmm.... you'd be surprised. I think you might have a little too much faith in the integrity of triple A video game marketing.
EDIT: Don't know why I specifically mentioned triple-A. This happens anywhere someone's trying to make money off video games. I can tell you with 100% certainty that companies deliberately cut down severely on the QA process knowing that they can always fix issues that might exist when the game goes gold later - some times still before the actual release through a day one patch.
Sumez wrote:
At least those weren't released with the mindset that they can always patch the game as they go along since they have the internet. Shipping unfinished products has become a very deliberate marketing strategy in recent years.
God, I don't play any online games but this souds awful. Linux for instance insists on upgrading constantly, even debian stable distribution which is supposed to be stable has upgrades every week or so you should install. Why ?
Thanks to the internet, we can constantly download patches that fix vulnerabilities. But the internet is the reason those vulnerabilities exists in the 1st place. Thus if a machine can live without being connected, it's best to leave it unconnected, a lot of vulnerability problems would be gone, even if this means a couple of "features" taken off the product.
In the end, the Internet is just like computer themselves were before being connected : They spend 80% of the time to solve problems caused by themselves, and only 20% of the time solving problems already existing before, but in a much more efficient way.
Seems that "the quick little play" while my wife/daughter/whoever gets ready to leave are gone in the new console generation
At least 3DS allows you to choose when to install updates (the actual downloading of system updates may happen automatically though) for the system or for games and games can normally be played without being updated, also updates tend to be quite small. The exception are games and apps that requires internet to work and such, including the eShop app and the UFO catcher game. I guess online mode in games also requires latest updates.
But Wii U seems to install updates automatically and PS3 seems to download tons of stuff every single time you start something. I wonder how the Switch works.
Fisher wrote:
Seems that "the quick little play" while my wife/daughter/whoever gets ready to leave are gone in the new console generation
I'd say it's the opposite, actually?
Dunno about the other platforms, but with PS4 at least you resume and suspend games as long as you don't switch to another game in between, so it's really quick to pick up and put down something in sessions.
Even if there
was a patch waiting to download you can always just skip it if you want to play right now. (...and patches normally install in the background when you're not using the thing rather than right before you play the game. You only get interrupted for a first-time play, and only if you don't choose to skip it.)
On both of these fronts it's a vast improvment over the last generation.
rainwarrior wrote:
On both of these fronts it's a vast improvment over the last generation.
Glad to know that!
Thanks!!
I really wish I could share rainwarrior's enthusiasm. The PS4 definitely works better than PS3, but Sony's patching system is still incredibly dumb. You pretty much need to re-download every single asset of a game to patch some minor changes in the code. Back in the previous generation, PS3 updates of several gigs would be a few megabytes in their X360 counterparts. Now that PS4 is my "system of choice" for this generation, it actually makes me miss the previous one.
Nintendo also uses per-file cumulative patches. So if your game has just a few big files, a change to one file means the entire file is in the patch.
Does this mean it takes up the space of both the patched file and the original file? I'm talking about cases where the patch is in a separate title from the game and may even possibly be deleted to downgrade the game.
Sumez wrote:
Sony's patching system is still incredibly dumb. You pretty much need to re-download every single asset of a game to patch some minor changes in the code. Back in the previous generation, PS3 updates of several gigs would be a few megabytes in their X360 counterparts.
That's
not due to Sony, that's on whatever devs prepared those patches. You absolutely could make small concise patches on the PS3 (I have firsthand experience of this), and you can on PS4 too. If there were equivalent patches on 360 and PS3 that were significantly different in size like that, it's because someone implemented the patch badly on the PS3.*
...but I fully agree that patches and game downloads in general are HUGE now, and I think it's hella stupid. Super wasteful.
Edit: * After looking up some stuff, I had forgotten that MS also had a maximum patch size policy for 360 (because of it's tiny min-spec for storage) and Sony didn't for PS3, so maybe a case of
having to solve the size problem for one platform and not putting in the effort on the other where it wasn't strictly required. You still
can make compact patches on the PS3 though, and many devs did make an effort to do this.
Sumez wrote:
I really wish I could share rainwarrior's enthusiasm.
TBH I'm more enthusiastic about PC gaming these days than consoles, and I really despise the whole locked system thing, but I own consoles anyway because I want to play their games.
I'm mostly just trying to point out that at least the patching problem that OP complained about can be bypassed (for offline games, at least), and even when not bypassed it's usually more convenient now than before.
Pokun wrote:
Does this mean it takes up the space of both the patched file and the original file? I'm talking about cases where the patch is in a separate title from the game and may even possibly be deleted to downgrade the game.
The patch takes the size of the new file. If the file was huge, so is the patch.
rainwarrior wrote:
That's not due to Sony, that's on whatever devs prepared those patches. You absolutely could make small concise patches on the PS3 (I have firsthand experience of this), and you can on PS4 too. If there were equivalent patches on 360 and PS3 that were significantly different in size like that, it's because someone implemented the patch badly on the PS3.*
I'll trust you as I don't have any first-hand experience myself, but at the very least it must have been much easier to make smaller, effective patches on the 360, considering how consistent this difference is with pretty much every single update I've had to endure on either system. I have
never seen a small game patch on neither PS3 nor PS4, so I'm curious where you've seen them.
My "source" though is someone I know who's been working in the industry, who himself was claiming about how retarded he thought Sony's patching system was. I'm sure he has had some reason to claim that.
Sumez wrote:
rainwarrior wrote:
That's not due to Sony, that's on whatever devs prepared those patches. You absolutely could make small concise patches on the PS3 (I have firsthand experience of this), and you can on PS4 too. If there were equivalent patches on 360 and PS3 that were significantly different in size like that, it's because someone implemented the patch badly on the PS3.*
I'll trust you as I don't have any first-hand experience myself, but at the very least it must have been much easier to make smaller, effective patches on the 360, considering how consistent this difference is with pretty much every single update I've had to endure on either system. I have
never seen a small game patch on neither PS3 nor PS4, so I'm curious where you've seen them.
My "source" though is someone I know who's been working in the industry, who himself was claiming about how retarded he thought Sony's patching system was. I'm sure he has had some reason to claim that.
Well, I've seen PS3 patches <1MB and I've seen ones >1GB. I can't remember specific examples, and I can't say that I've done any surveys of how big equivalent patches were on different systems, but I did work on file systems stuff for both PS3 and 360 and tested patching, and neither of them seemed like a stupid system to me at the time.
The 360 launched with a 20GB hard drive version, and later an even smaller 4GB version. The smallest PS3 hard drive was 60GB. Microsoft put some rather severe restrictions on how big a patch could be. I forget the details of the size, and recall that they used some weird "xbox unit" of measurement, but it was
really small. This did mean that developers
had to find some way to make the patch more compact for 360. Not only that but they were encouraged to keep file sizes smaller in general just because a lot of users wouldn't have the space to spare.
DLC was a whole separate thing on the 360, and not subject to that size restriction, but with unrestricted update size on the PS3, something that happened a lot was that some developers stuck "DLC" content into a PS3 update patch rather than in a separate DLC download where it belonged... sort of like the "on disc DLC" thing but "in patch DLC" instead. Maybe more convenient for them to roll it out that way, but the developers were stealing this convenience from their customers' bandwidth.
This is not caused by the PS3 system itself, just by developers taking advantage of a less regulated environment. Many developers
did properly separate DLC content downloads from update patches, but I did see a lot of cases where it was not-- on the 360 MS was watching over this matter.
The 360's optical media was also DVD, rather than the PS3's blu-ray. For disc based games at least this meant that sometimes it was sensible to just ship bigger/uncompressed data on the PS3. The other thing I recall about this is that the 360 file system layer had some convenient built in compression library, and the PS3 did not. So if you had developed for the 360 first and were relying on it, porting to the PS3 could leave you with the task of implementing your own compression system to compensate... or possibly just leaving things uncompressed.
So... that's basically it, in my view. I didn't play nearly as much stuff on 360 so I don't have a good basis for comparison, but I can believe that you routinely saw smaller patch sizes on it for the reasons above, none of which are really anything to do with the patching system itself, just MS was more strict about what went where and how much. I think the most egregious differences are probably just the conflating of DLC with update patches on the part of PS3 developers.
One excuse for in-patch DLC is to allow online multiplayer between players who have bought the DLC and players who have not. This is the case, for example, with Super Smash Bros. For.
There's a lot of factors that could make it more convenient, even in a single player game. I can see why developers would choose to do it, but it does require the point of view that bandwidth is "cheap". (Or more cynically: offloading it to customers' bandwidth is "spending someone else's money".)
Looking it up, I remembered that the 360 patch size restrictions were basically built around the 64MB
memory unit accessory. They wanted it to be possible to put patches on this device. I don't know what the rules are for XB1, but I kinda doubt they have patch size restrictions any more, since the reason for this on 360 was pretty specific and entirely obsolete.
Erockbrox wrote:
It seems like modern gaming is way more complicated than it needs to be. It should just be, put in the game and F-ing play it.
I couldn't agree more. I get so annoyed every time I turn on a modern console. I went over to my brother's house the other day, and he asked me to load up a game on his XBox while he grabbed something from the other room. I thought I would be able to figure it out on my own, but I honestly was like "I don't even know WTF I'm looking at." I ended up having to create some profile and do all this bullshit, and by the time we got it all up and running, I was so annoyed that I didn't find anything about the experience enjoyable.
Besides creating profiles and downloading content and all that shit, I'm totally not interested in modern games. I'm like dead inside anytime I see Gears of War types of games. The color schemes make me feel depressed. The characters make me feel depressed. I feel like there is so much to look and and so much going on that it just sucks the life out of me. Oh, and then you need to spend all this time learning how to actually play the f-ing game through some in-game tutorial. I just don't care enough/at all.
Usually you only need to create a profile the first time you start the system or if you want to add new users though.
But yeah I really don't like lengthy tutorials in games. Especially not the really boring ones or if you only want to try the game out for a quickie.
I'm with Celius all the way. Current game consoles and most games don't appeal to me at all.
To be honest I know squat about modern games (the more recent ones I have are from arround 2007-2008), but from what I see they seem to be all about violence and boobs. Not that those didn't exist in old games, but they were somewhat less prominent.
Bregalad wrote:
To be honest I know squat about modern games
I know very little too, mostly from seeing my brother playing on his PC when I go visit. One thing I absolutely despise about modern games are the attempts to create realistic graphics... "realistic" graphics, in addition to being boring, always look fake and weird. Another thing I can't stand is when games have a lot of movies, cutscenes, or other kinds of non-interactive sections. Tutorial levels that try to teach you a billion commands and give you tons of instructions before you can get to the actual game are also incredibly annoying.
Quote:
I know very little too, mostly from seeing my brother playing on his PC when I go visit.
Oh I see. In my family I am the younger bro, so I'm definitely not going to learn anything about newer games by visiting my eldest bro ^^. Also my younger cousins had a Wii I think but they stopped to interest for games past this point so they're probably not much more up to date than I am.
tokumaru wrote:
Another thing I can't stand is when games have a lot of movies, cutscenes, or other kinds of non-interactive sections.
This is hardly new, games had that in the early 90s. Myst for instance. As with everything I think it can make game great if used great, and terrible if used poorly.
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Tutorial levels that try to teach you a billion commands and give you tons of instructions before you can get to the actual game are also incredibly annoying.
This is hardly new, annoying tutorials have been there in the late 90s. Again, some games have great tutos too, so this is always a possibility. The presence of a tuto is not what makes a game good or bad. I agree it's hard to have a tuto without it getting in the way of gameplay, but if it contians humour then it's ok I think.
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One thing I absolutely despise about modern games are the attempts to create realistic graphics... "realistic" graphics, in addition to being boring, always look fake and weird.
Well the trend to have graphics more and more realistic is inevitable, but I'm pretty sure on side of that there has always been games with cartoonish look, or has it disapeared ?
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Tutorial levels that try to teach you a billion commands and give you tons of instructions before you can get to the actual game are also incredibly annoying.
Sometimes the best tutorials are the ones which don't feel like tutorials. For example SMB NES level 1-1, this level is a tutorial level, however it never really feels like one.
I've played other games where they literally sit you down for 10 minutes and painstakingly talk you through a tutorial. Some of these tutorials are boring and frustrating because I just want to play the game, not have to wait for this thing to end.
tokumaru wrote:
Another thing I can't stand is when games have a lot of movies, cutscenes, or other kinds of non-interactive sections. Tutorial levels that try to teach you a billion commands and give you tons of instructions before you can get to the actual game are also incredibly annoying.
What's the alternative when a game's mechanics genuinely aren't discoverable, such as those of
Tetrisphere where an A press will cost you one of your three lives unless the cursor is in the right place, and you are unlikely to be able to tell what the right place is unless you know the rules of the game? Not all games come with printed manuals, especially if purchased used.
Bregalad wrote:
In my family I am the younger bro, so I'm definitely not going to learn anything about newer games by visiting my eldest bro
Well, my brother is 3 years younger than me, and we liked the same games as kids, but I stopped caring at some point (around the early 2000's), while he kept going. It could've been the other way around, so I don't see why the older brother can't be more into games than the younger one.
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This is hardly new
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This is hardly new
True, but these were some of the things that drove me away from gaming, and AFAIK are still very common.
Quote:
I'm pretty sure on side of that there has always been games with cartoonish look, or has it disapeared ?
Sure, and those are usually the ones that can make me mildly interested in newer games, but not enough to justify the purchase of a modern console or gaming PC.
I also greatly dislike how everything is temporary these days... Consoles don't last, everything is a download and relies on companies providing the services you need in order to play the games you "own" (downloads, servers, DRM, etc.).
This year I had my first experience with Steam, because of Sonic Mania. Being the classic Sonic fan that I am, I couldn't miss the opportunity of playing the genuine sequel to Sonic & Knuckles, so I had to play by the modern rules. The game was cool and all, but the modern aspects of the experience really put me off, like not having a physical copy of the game (meaning I have to rely on Steam not closing down if I want to own the game forever) and those obnoxious achievements notifications.
tepples wrote:
What's the alternative when a game's mechanics genuinely aren't discoverable
I tend to not like games that have undiscoverable machanics to begin with, so I can't really think of any alternatives. I like games that teach you through actual gameplay, implicitly... If that's not possible, I probably won't like the game anyway.
With clever and thoughtful design you can usually communicate rules intuitively and non-verbally.
In your specific example of Tetrisphere, maybe have the first level not give the player any option - let there be only one place to put the piece. That would communicate what a correct placement of the piece looks like without the player risking failure. Then make the next level give the player two or three options, with one obviously correct. The player will then get to reinforce their intuition about what the rule is and feel a sense of accomplishment. Alternatively, they'll realize they didn't properly grasp the rule the first time around and try again; once they pick the correct spot, they'll (hopefully) see the pattern by comparison with the first level, and will then have the rule down pat.
Some good "reading":
The Witness,
The Design of Everyday Things,
Anna Anthropy on SMB,
Sequelitis on Mega Man X.
I don't mean to imply that tutorials can (or should) be avoided at all times. But lots of modern games are way too obtrusive about it. They should be a last resort, I think.
adam_smasher wrote:
This is like, one of my favorite videos, ever.
tepples wrote:
tokumaru wrote:
Another thing I can't stand is when games have a lot of movies, cutscenes, or other kinds of non-interactive sections. Tutorial levels that try to teach you a billion commands and give you tons of instructions before you can get to the actual game are also incredibly annoying.
What's the alternative when a game's mechanics genuinely aren't discoverable, such as those of
Tetrisphere where an A press will cost you one of your three lives unless the cursor is in the right place, and you are unlikely to be able to tell what the right place is unless you know the rules of the game? Not all games come with printed manuals, especially if purchased used.
Maybe I'm just an old curmudgeon, but I still think a manual is the right place to communicate a lot of this stuff. Some games end up with really boring intro levels as they try to teach you the mechanics (either by tutorial, which is terrible, or really boring "learn by doing" levels), when it could be taught perfectly well with a few pages of manual text.
I realize there was a period of time when rentals were very popular, before the internet was popular, when it was common to end up with a game and no manual. But now we don't need to worry about it -- the internet is ubiquitous enough to assume that if you managed to get your hands on a game and a system to play it, you probably have a way to download a manual. Plus the manual gives you something fun to look at when you're not playing the game.
Bregalad wrote:
Well the trend to have graphics more and more realistic is inevitable, but I'm pretty sure on side of that there has always been games with cartoonish look, or has it disapeared ?
I feel there's more variety in games than ever before, partly because there's so much happening at a lower budget scale right now.
For every "AAA" game spending tons of money and trying not to stick their neck out, there's about 1000 indie games trying something weird. Most of them will fail, but a few of them are really good! For the last several years I've been much more interested in this area of modern games than the big budget ones.
There's tons of games coming out now that don't have overt annoying tutorials, or cutscenes, or aren't about a violent premise etc. if that's what you want, and tons that do as well; there's a pretty wide spectrum here.
I feel like big budget games like I do about big budget movies. I just feel like every movie/game is getting shoved down my throat as "the most epic event of all time ever". In the end, I so don't care, and I resent the idea that I'm feeding some giant corporation by being lured into the hype. No thank you. We all know that the next movie/game will be followed up by something even more "epic", so what is even the point.
Quote:
Well the trend to have graphics more and more realistic is inevitable, but I'm pretty sure on side of that there has always been games with cartoonish look, or has it disapeared ?
There are still plenty of games with unrealistic graphics, but I tend to be visually impaired by ones that are super realistic. There is too much detail to look at, it often makes it difficult to distinguish in-game objects from the level map. Suddenly, I get hit with some tiny bullet that I could barely see because the post-apocalyptic piles of rubble everywhere are so detailed, my eyes don't know where to focus.
Well if graphical detail gets in the way of gameplay it's a design fault, not that you aren't used to modern graphics.
I'm with Rainwarrior though, all kinds of games still exists, although some genres may have almost died out or are only represented in the form of minigames or cheap download-exclusive games due to their simple nature (e.g. maze games like Pacman or Heiankyou Alien, or text-based adventures etc). But because there's so much to choose between nowadays it's just so much harder to keep yourself up to date. Especially considering a lot of us now are full-time working adults and don't have as much time as we used to have as kids. If you don't keep up it's very easy to get blinded by the big AAA titles and other hyped stuff and think it's the only things out there nowadays.