Videogames - The definitive Edition, remastered

[Denvek]

Ahhh, Doom Eternal, where after facing the first boss you're immediately dropped into a battle with two more of them simultaneously.

[Werthead]

9 hours ago, The Anti-Targ said:

Ohhh this is so me. As soon as full voice work came along in RPG games my tolerance level for text only for in game dialogue and narrative dropped precipitously. And I have never been a reader of the Codex.

As soon as full voice work came along in CRPGs, the quality of writing in CRPGs dropped off a cliff and has never really recovered, although a few games (New Vegas, The Witcher 3) have made some attempts to keep standards up.

I don't mind lots of text in a game. In fact, I read so much faster than I can take information in from someone speaking that I always switch on subtitles and mash the "SKIP" button in dialogue scenes like there is no tomorrow, it gets the pertinent information across much faster.

I think the key problem is the ability to rewrite dialogue and adjust things based on revisions is so much more limited with fully-voiced games. The voice recording takes weeks or months by itself so they have to lock the script so much earlier and then can't make changes at all, which reduces creativity and the ability to revise things at the last minute. The Witcher 3 and, from the look of it, Cyberpunk 2077 got round this by doing rewrites up until a few months before release and just re-recording the revised dialogue, which meant for both games some actors worked for two years on each project. Obviously most companies are never going to do that and are happy to leave the dialogue being expository and pretty soulless (hi, Bethesda).

[Gorn]

I'm not sure how much voice acting is to blame for reduced writing standards, Both KotOR games, first three Mass Effect games and the Dragon Age games had some amazing dialogues, and they were all fully voiced games. So did the first Witcher, and I doubt that CD Project Red could afford to do multiple sets of voice recording back then.

And a lot of old text-only CRPGs don't really stand up to modern-day replays (rare gems like Baldurs Gate II or Planescape Torment excepted). BG1 for example had a lot of writing, but it was below the standards of late-2000s peak Bioware. Neverwinter Nights was a text-only game with completely forgettable writing, and so was Icewind Dale. I'd even go so far to say that Fallout: New Vegas had better writing than either of the two original Fallout games.

[Relic]

1 hour ago, Gorn said:

and so was Icewind Dale. 

Icewind Dale, and the sequel, had like almost no writing, from what i recall. Was pretty much just battles

[Heartofice]

I also put subtitles on for games with dialogue because speech takes so long to get through and it’s quicker to read it.

But that gets to my point, I don’t have time to listen to dreary exchanges over and over again, and so really don’t have the time or patience to read pages of text in games. 
 

Something like Disco Elysium you really need to read it all to get the most out of the experience, and actually that means the percentage of reading to.. actually doing something interactive isn’t a good ratio. It’s like having lots of cutscenes, except you have to read them.

I know years ago this might not have been an issue for me.  But when I have less than an hour of free time, I don’t want to spend it reading cutscenes

[Werthead]

2 hours ago, Gorn said:

I'm not sure how much voice acting is to blame for reduced writing standards, Both KotOR games, first three Mass Effect games and the Dragon Age games had some amazing dialogues, and they were all fully voiced games. So did the first Witcher, and I doubt that CD Project Red could afford to do multiple sets of voice recording back then.

And a lot of old text-only CRPGs don't really stand up to modern-day replays (rare gems like Baldurs Gate II or Planescape Torment excepted). BG1 for example had a lot of writing, but it was below the standards of late-2000s peak Bioware. Neverwinter Nights was a text-only game with completely forgettable writing, and so was Icewind Dale. I'd even go so far to say that Fallout: New Vegas had better writing than either of the two original Fallout games.

KotOR was not fully-voiced (it had a silent protagonist, for starters, and your character had more dialogue in the game than anyone else).

Mass Effect had some good writing but it also had some godawful cringe exposition-fests. The quality of the writing also declined through the series, culminating in the godawful finale. Dragon Age's writing quality was also highly uneven (especially in the third game), but the first game was in development for well over five years, allowing them to hone the writing a lot more. The Witcher was also in development for over four years, which was an immense amount of time for games of that era. 

Icewind Dale 1 and 2 were combat-focused dungeon games, they didn't have much writing in them by design. BG1 was fine, it got the job done well, and BG2 was hugely better (Jon Irenicus's monologues were excellent). Neverwinter Nights was a multiplayer-focused toolset, the base campaign was pretty ropey (the two expansions had better writing).

[Fez]

21 minutes ago, Werthead said:

Mass Effect had some good writing but it also had some godawful cringe exposition-fests. The quality of the writing also declined through the series, culminating in the godawful finale. Dragon Age's writing quality was also highly uneven (especially in the third game), but the first game was in development for well over five years, allowing them to hone the writing a lot more. The Witcher was also in development for over four years, which was an immense amount of time for games of that era. 

It depends on what writing we're talking about. I think ME3 and DA:I both had the absolute best character moments and dialog in their respective series. While, ME2 and DA:2 had the best plot writing. And ME1 and DA:O had the best worldbuilding writing.

Funny how the series' mirrored each other so much.

[Werthead]

2 hours ago, Fez said:

It depends on what writing we're talking about. I think ME3 and DA:I both had the absolute best character moments and dialog in their respective series. While, ME2 and DA:2 had the best plot writing. And ME1 and DA:O had the best worldbuilding writing.

Funny how the series' mirrored each other so much.

A lot of the good moments in ME3 (I bailed on DA:I after about ten hours when I realised what an absolutely miserable piece of excrement it was) were very much paying off things set up in the earlier games, which felt fairly straightfoward. Some of the storylines were paid off well, some were not and some were okay. None of it made up for the ending.

The main lesson to take away from ME3 was that spending eight years of development time and two full games with one writer, then swapping him out for two other, much worse writers for the finale is a really, really bad idea (not that Karpyshyn's ideas were necessarily fantastic, but they were much more coherent and consistent with what was being set up in ME1-2; ME3's ending was the new team phoning it in after bingeing BSG a few too many times).

[Rhom]

4 hours ago, Werthead said:

A lot of the good moments in ME3 (I bailed on DA:I after about ten hours when I realised what an absolutely miserable piece of excrement it was) were very much paying off things set up in the earlier games, which felt fairly straightfoward. Some of the storylines were paid off well, some were not and some were okay. None of it made up for the ending.

I stuck out DA:I... but I'm glad to know I'm not the only one that found it to be awful.

[Werthead]

Took a break from BSG: Deadlock (finished the main campaign and started the first expansion but realised I'd burned out a bit on it) to play Yakuza 0, which I picked up on Steam on a whim a while back.

Definitely a bit dated in terms of game design and it has that odd old-game-remastered feel of the textures and graphics being great (especially the faces) but the models and animation being really stiff. I was quite surprised to see that the game was relatively new-ish (2015), it feels like a mid-2000s game.

Still, entertaining story and characters so far, not to mention a truly shocking amount of karaoke.

[Fez]

Finished Disco Elysium. There was one particular quest chain I didn't finish that I really should've, and some skill checks I never beat, but overall I think it was a pretty complete run (at least, as complete as my character build would let me have). Took about 20 hours. And, I don't think I'm saying anything new here, but, that's a really good game. I spent a bit of time online after finishing it, and it seems like at least some people didn't like the ending, but I thought it was really satisfying for what the game was.

I do wish I learned more about The Pale though. That whole side of the world building was something I didn't get to experience much of, but I had so few points in Inland Empire or any of the other relevant skills that I was locked out of it.

[RumHam]

3D Printed HOTAS to PS4 controller thingy

I don't have a ps4 controller to try it on, but that looks awesome. Especially since it seems hard to get a HOTAS at a decent price since Flight Simulator launched. 

[Werthead]

I had to bail on Yakuza 0. The story was promising but my patience for games that are 80% cutscenes to 20% gameplay was long ago exhausted, and the engine, graphics and controls are quite astonishingly primitive for a game made in 2015.

I switched to Gears Tactics and it's solid, shooty fun, XCOM without the meta-strategic layer. I'm not a huge fan of the "give everyone 500 hit points and have guns doing 50-200 points of damage on often-impenetrable factors" thing. I think XCOM's much lower damage, hp and armour ratings works better, but this is solid so far.

[Soylent Brown]

I managed to get through Yakuza 0, but I was very fucking relieved when it was over. The best bits of the game for me were the little weird side quests you bumped into occasionally.

[Inkdaub]

I just bought Pumpkin Jack, Raji and Remothered.  They all look pretty good so we'll see.

[Soylent Brown]

Finally made myself finish RDR2. What a load of shit that was. Out of the 60 hours I played, I must have spent 30+ hours riding my fucking horsey from A to B.

It looks lovely of course, and the characters are great and it's well acted, but all of the travelling, on-rails button-holiding bullshit, and all of the areas where the game forces your guy to slow to a crawl utterly ruin the game for me. The story loses its way about two thirds through and goes full stupid too.

Some of the sides quests were fun, but I ended up skipping a lot of them because I couldn't face spending 20 minutes travelling there and back. Horses suck.

[Ramsay B.]

I’ve tried twice to get into RDR2 and just can’t do it. Bored to tears both times.

I went back to playing Ghost of Tsushima after the new update. It is fun, and I was hoping it would keep me busy until the PS5 but I don’t know. Multiplayer stuff like this gets old for me pretty quickly. Although it is great that Sucker Punch gave us this new content. What a weird concept to release a fully functional game then give the fans more content for free. I naively hope other companies take note.

[Jace, Extat]

I didn't even finish the prologue of RDR2. I know when I've been had.

[Heartofice]

9 hours ago, Jace, Basilissa said:

I didn't even finish the prologue of RDR2. I know when I've been had.

The prologue is a real struggle, I prayed that the whole game wasn't like that. It wasn't but it also wasn't quite the free open world I had imagined it was from the things I'd heard. 

It's a game on rails, but it has put in a lot of effort to disguise that fact. Sure you can go around from town to town and wander anywhere you like, but there is no real point to doing that, as theres nobody to really meet and nothing to do. You could spend hours hunting and playing the various mini games, but there is no real benefit. You could put in a load of game time to try and craft the best items and weapons, but it doesn't change the game at all because you can complete it without doing any of that (actually the game isn't a challenge at all). Basically the games lays out what to do next and you go do it. Even mid quest you have almost no freedom, you just press buttons and wait for a cutscene. 

There is also the honour system, which sounds really awesome, but actually has no real bearing on the game. I wanted to play my character evil and go around robbing banks and holding people up and getting a ton of cash.. but there is little benefit to doing so, it just makes the game more annoying. 

Is it one of the most overrated games of all time? Maybe. It really put me off playing anything on my playstation, and I got the the playstation almost exclusively to play RDR2. I'm of the opinion that if this is held up as a great PS game then I'm really not missing out. It has the depth of a puddle.

[Red Tiger]

If it's made by a big-name studio, is open-world, has good graphics and is third-person, it wil get rave reviews in the west.

Notice that none of those things include "actual good gameplay".