Video Games- Game of the Year

[Clueless Northman]

7 hours ago, IlyaP said:

I actually kind of like this. Sure it slows down the gameplay a bit, but it also makes exploration a bit more interesting. I can see the merit in this decision. It doesn't hold the hands of players. 

Well, that was how it had been on all video games at the time. There's a reason why people were critical of minimap showing objectives and directions in the 2000s - that seemed kind of cheap and dumbing down the games.

That said, there are also plenty of help online if you're stuck, don't have an excellent memory, or play Morrowind from time to time instead of immersing totally in it for weeks, because then you might forget where is this settlement, or who you should talk to, and the Quest Journal is kind of limited. Since I was playing it a lot, I did the "let's visit the city and take all quests as I found them", but that wouldn't work in Vivec, too big, I did one district after the other. For help, here for instance: Morrowind:Morrowind - The Unofficial Elder Scrolls Pages (UESP)

Last note: reading books and notes can be quite interesting or amusing. There's a lot of backstory in some books - specially about what actually happened eons ago with Vivec, Nerevar and the other fellows.

  

7 hours ago, Martell Spy said:

One thing Morrowind had was that great levitation spell. Really handy when in the mountains and stuff. Sadly I think they way toned it down in later games.

You couldn't levitate at all in Oblivion... It was so frustrating.

[Toth]

52 minutes ago, Clueless Northman said:

You couldn't levitate at all in Oblivion... It was so frustrating.

I mean... you could with cheats, which I did plenty of times for fun, but it unfortunately caused you to fall through roofs and towers because they didn't bother to properly check collisions in the areas you weren't supposed to go to. Not to mention that they were stupidly bland, I found the fortifications of the Imperial City really jarringly puny.

[Werthead]

3 hours ago, Clueless Northman said:

Well, that was how it had been on all video games at the time. There's a reason why people were critical of minimap showing objectives and directions in the 2000s - that seemed kind of cheap and dumbing down the games.

It's interesting that GTA3 marks things on your map...but you don't have a map! The only way to see them is on the minimap and that just shows the direction of things, not a line going from your character to the destination. Driving in a straight line to your objective but then halting because you suddenly realise it's on the other side of the river and you should have been going in the opposite direction to get to the bridge or tunnel is quite frustrating, but it does mean you need to pay attention to the mission briefings.

Vice City IIRC brought in an actual map screen and San Andreas allowed you to set waypoints.

Modern games do hold your hand a bit more, but I think people also neglect how massive modern game worlds are compared to older games. Skyrim's map size is well over twice the size of Morrowind's, and Oblivion's is closer to three times. Morrowind feels a lot bigger than it is because fast travel is limited and the draw distance is so poor that it obscures the landscape.

[Toth]

56 minutes ago, Werthead said:

Modern games do hold your hand a bit more, but I think people also neglect how massive modern game worlds are compared to older games. Skyrim's map size is well over twice the size of Morrowind's, and Oblivion's is closer to three times. Morrowind feels a lot bigger than it is because fast travel is limited and the draw distance is so poor that it obscures the landscape.

And yet Daggerfall was like 10.000 times the size of Morrowind. The fast-travel system came with a fucking search engine to google for the town you wanted to travel to! XD

Also damn you! Damn you all to hell! All these discussions about TES and the fact that I have started using TES ambience soundtracks as a backdrop when working (which... actually worked in helping me focus, so heads up for that!) has caused a craving to explore a Bethesda open world. So... I was weighing between buying the remaining addons for Skyrim or Fallout 4 and what with the whole Pandemic thing going on decided to buy Fallout 4. I... played for about an hour and a half yesterday and only managed to get out of the vault, meet up with Mr. Handy and then head for the next town over...

... and now woke up with an excruciating tendosynovitis in my index finger. Oh right, I forgot I can't play shooters anymore for a prolongued amount of time because my body has become too decrepit! Fuck...

[IlyaP]

1 hour ago, Toth said:

Also damn you! Damn you all to hell! All these discussions about TES and the fact that I have started using TES ambience soundtracks as a backdrop when working (which... actually worked in helping me focus, so heads up for that!) has caused a craving to explore a Bethesda open world.

Have you had a chance to try Daggerfall: Unity? It's a glorious thing. It's taken the game I tried as a kid in the late 90s and made it far more accessible and enjoyable.  

[Toth]

17 minutes ago, IlyaP said:

Have you had a chance to try Daggerfall: Unity? It's a glorious thing. It's taken the game I tried as a kid in the late 90s and made it far more accessible and enjoyable.  

Never heard of it, I just played the original Daggerfall back when Bethesda made it free and found it already really enjoyable.

[Werthead]

Yup, Daggerfall was much larger but it also all looked exactly the same and was procedurally generated. And the Morrowind thing of "go here and look for a tree" to guide you to your destination wouldn't work with that system either. It was interesting that it created a world of that scope, but when there's nothing really interesting to do but fight auto-generated monsters among auto-generated 2D trees, it doesn't mean much and you need to fast-travel everywhere anyway if you want to complete the game within a single human lifetime.

It was better than Arena though, where there isn't actually a proper worldspace and if you try to walk from one town or province to another, the game crashes a few minutes after leaving town.

Of course, the alternative when you walk across the province of Skyrim in one afternoon despite the province being canonically about 300 miles across, is quite weird as well.

[Slurktan]

So I've run into a key problem with the lack of people with PS5's, I have no one to trade for a pure bladestone in Demon's Souls.  I farmed for 6 hours on the weekend and nothing.  The worst part is I did a faith build prior to this Dex one and I randomnly got 2 pure bladestones from killing the black skeletons a total of like 6 times.  I hate random chance lol.

[Fez]

I needed a second game to go alongside Troubleshooter (I'm 40-ish hours into my replay of CP2077 and definitely feeling like that's slowed way down; probably going to wait for more patches before I put much more time into it), so I've started Yakuza 7. And that's a hell of a game so far.

It's only my third Yakuza game; I played all of Yakuza 0, which I liked quite a bit. And I played the first 6-ish hours of Yakuza Kiwami, which I dropped since it just felt so dated (the updated graphics looked great, but almost everything else is that original PS2 game). So I don't have a huge amount of attachment to the series. But Yakuza 7 is hitting all the right notes for me, in both style and substance. Kasuga is such a more interesting character than Kiryu, and the various supporting characters feel way more substantive than Yakuza 0's did. 

It helps that the English dub is really good, and that has made it much easier for me to connect to the characters. In live action film and TV and I prefer subtitles by far, but in video games and animated work I want English dubs.

[briantw]

4 hours ago, Werthead said:

Yup, Daggerfall was much larger but it also all looked exactly the same and was procedurally generated. And the Morrowind thing of "go here and look for a tree" to guide you to your destination wouldn't work with that system either. It was interesting that it created a world of that scope, but when there's nothing really interesting to do but fight auto-generated monsters among auto-generated 2D trees, it doesn't mean much and you need to fast-travel everywhere anyway if you want to complete the game within a single human lifetime.

It was better than Arena though, where there isn't actually a proper worldspace and if you try to walk from one town or province to another, the game crashes a few minutes after leaving town.

Of course, the alternative when you walk across the province of Skyrim in one afternoon despite the province being canonically about 300 miles across, is quite weird as well.

Pretty much every open world has that problem of scale.  It's strange in Assassin's Creed to be able to climb a massive mountain in seconds, or to run across the entirety of England in ten minutes.

[Werthead]

5 minutes ago, briantw said:

Pretty much every open world has that problem of scale.  It's strange in Assassin's Creed to be able to climb a massive mountain in seconds, or to run across the entirety of England in ten minutes.

Open worlds which are based around single cities do seem to do better, especially if the city is fictional (this is where the GTA model of basing your cities on real places but not actually being those places works quite well). But San Francisco in Watch Dogs 2 I think was a reasonable punt. The city felt massive, even if it wasn't really as big as the real thing, and I think the areas in The Witcher 3 did a reasonable job of feeling enormous, especially Novigrad and Beauclair which are the only medieval fantasy cities to feel remotely convincing in size.

The Fallout  games are a bit cheesy - I doubt you can walk from one side of the real DC or Boston to the other in about 15 minutes - but they generally feel closer to the real thing.

Of course, if you now want a 1:1 paradigm you have MS Flight Simulator (the technological marvel of which makes me wonder if we'll eventually see racing games and maybe even action games taking place in a similar 1:1 simulation of the entire planet).

[Fez]

9 minutes ago, briantw said:

Pretty much every open world has that problem of scale.  It's strange in Assassin's Creed to be able to climb a massive mountain in seconds, or to run across the entirety of England in ten minutes.

It's why I wish more open world games went smaller in scope. Disco Elysium's open world was about 2 square city blocks, but was enough for a 20+ hour experience. And that was a small indie team.

I'd love if a major studio did something similar, just scaled in scope. An open world of a full neighborhood, or maybe even a small city, where every single NPC was named and you could identify where they placed in the world. Sort of like what some people envisioned CP2077 might do, but with a smaller scale so it's actually possible.

[Derfel Cadarn]

29 minutes ago, Werthead said:

Open worlds which are based around single cities do seem to do better, especially if the city is fictional (this is where the GTA model of basing your cities on real places but not actually being those places works quite well). But San Francisco in Watch Dogs 2 I think was a reasonable punt. The city felt massive, even if it wasn't really as big as the real thing, and I think the areas in The Witcher 3 did a reasonable job of feeling enormous, especially Novigrad and Beauclair which are the only medieval fantasy cities to feel remotely convincing in size.

The Fallout  games are a bit cheesy - I doubt you can walk from one side of the real DC or Boston to the other in about 15 minutes - but they generally feel closer to the real thing.

Of course, if you now want a 1:1 paradigm you have MS Flight Simulator (the technological marvel of which makes me wonder if we'll eventually see racing games and maybe even action games taking place in a similar 1:1 simulation of the entire planet).

World War 2 Online (renamed Battlefield Europe I think) which launched in 2001 (and still running) depicted Europe in a 50% scale. 

[Fez]

It's only marginally related to video games themselves, but I've found the saga of Gamestop's stock price the past few days to be fascinating.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-01-25/how-wallstreetbets-pushed-gamestop-shares-to-the-moon?sref=xuVirdpv&utm_campaign=socialflow-organic&utm_medium=social&utm_content=business&utm_source=twitter&cmpid=socialflow-twitter-business It's a long article, but I highly recommend it.

Quote

 

Before this year, GameStop was a cash register for bearish traders, who borrowed and sold more shares than the company issued. Hedge funds had been winning so long that they overlooked the tinderbox they were creating should sentiment turn.

Now it has, violently. GameStop, which isn’t expected to turn a profit before 2023, has seen its market value triple to $4.5 billion in three weeks, burning the skeptics whose any attempt to cover is likely to further propel its ascent

 

The TL;DR is that reddit users, alongside a few institutional investors like the founder of Chewy's and Michael Burry (of 'The Big Short' fame) have bought up enough shares of Gamestop that it caused a  squeeze. Short sellers have lost literally billions of dollars, and the value of the stock, went from under $5 last fall up to $76 now. For a brief time earlier today it jumped all the way to $145, so some people got in at the wrong time and lost a lot of money today. But some reddit users have made millions of dollars (one guy has posted proof that a $53,000 investment is now worth $11 million), and folks like Burry (who hasn't said anything publicly) has likely made hundreds of millions.

It's impossible to know how much direct impact this has had on Gamestop itself yet. But so much stock has changed hands that it's entirely possible that some reddit users might end up on the corporate board.

[Rhom]

12 minutes ago, Fez said:

It's only marginally related to video games themselves, but I've found the saga of Gamestop's stock price the past few days to be fascinating.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-01-25/how-wallstreetbets-pushed-gamestop-shares-to-the-moon?sref=xuVirdpv&utm_campaign=socialflow-organic&utm_medium=social&utm_content=business&utm_source=twitter&cmpid=socialflow-twitter-business It's a long article, but I highly recommend it.

The TL;DR is that reddit users, alongside a few institutional investors like the founder of Chewy's and Michael Burry (of 'The Big Short' fame) have bought up enough shares of Gamestop that it caused a  squeeze. Short sellers have lost literally billions of dollars, and the value of the stock, went from under $5 last fall up to $76 now. For a brief time earlier today it jumped all the way to $145, so some people got in at the wrong time and lost a lot of money today. But some reddit users have made millions of dollars (one guy has posted proof that a $53,000 investment is now worth $11 million), and folks like Burry (who hasn't said anything publicly) has likely made hundreds of millions.

It's impossible to know how much direct impact this has had on Gamestop itself yet. But so much stock has changed hands that it's entirely possible that some reddit users might end up on the corporate board.

That's mind boggling to me.

[Rhom]

Since someone mentioned Disco Elysium, I got an email from GoG that has the game at 40% off if anyone is interested.

[Ran]

7 minutes ago, Rhom said:

Since someone mentioned Disco Elysium, I got an email from GoG that has the game at 40% off if anyone is interested.

Same discount on Steam, too.

[Fez]

57 minutes ago, Rhom said:

That's mind boggling to me.

Oh it's all insane. But, from afar, it is fun to watch a bunch of degenerate day traders manipulate a bunch of degenerate gamers into completely fucking over a bunch of degenerate corporate vultures. 

I kinda wish I'd gotten in myself a little bit last summer, when the news came out that Gamestop had at least a little bit of a plan and the fact was that at their low point ($2.80/share) the stock were undervalued even if the company will long-term just continue it's death spiral. It's probably way too late now (and too big a risk, what with the stocks at $76), but it's also possible things spiral really out of control if the short sellers can't cover. Something similar to this (albeit without the reddit angle), happened to Volkswagen in 2008, and it led to VW very briefly being the most valuable company in the world; with shares worth over $1,000 (they'd been trading at around $50 the day before).

[IlyaP]

2 hours ago, Werthead said:

The Fallout  games are a bit cheesy - I doubt you can walk from one side of the real DC or Boston to the other in about 15 minutes - but they generally feel closer to the real thing.

You really can't walk from one side of Bosto to the other in 15 minutes. I found where my hometown should be on the map, and could walk from it (Needham) to Concord in a laughably short 20 minutes or so. And Concord in-game is nowhere near as big as the real place. 

It's a very, very weird sensation to experience, seeing a shrunken, nuked version of where I grew up.

[Werthead]

5 minutes ago, IlyaP said:

You really can't walk from one side of Bosto to the other in 15 minutes. I found where my hometown should be on the map, and could walk from it (Needham) to Concord in a laughably short 20 minutes or so. And Concord in-game is nowhere near as big as the real place. 

It's a very, very weird sensation to experience, seeing a shrunken, nuked version of where I grew up.

There's a good bit in the Noclip Bethesda documentary where they talk about this big storyline revolving around Danvers and Salem having this big rivalry and when they saw the game map they realised the compression had effectively shrunk them into the same town, so they had to throw it all out in favour of a much simpler story (a deathclaw has gotten stuck in the church). They were a bit narked off about, especially the senior designer who was from Boston in the first place.

I think it's why they decided not to go with NYC (their first choice) because the compression there would have been much more noticeable.