Great games, unwelcome legacies

kunst nugget · 07-05-2014 12:05pm

5uspect wrote: »

Unfortunately most of them are often an annoying grind, with a few exceptions. They are an area ripe for innovation but we get the usual dodge, dodge attack weak spot garbage.

I don't really mind some of those grinding boss battles as long as they're not too frustratingly difficult or have too many QTEs thrown in on them. Nothing worse than spending 3 hours frothing at the mouth out of rage because you can't get past that bastarding bastard because you can't punch in the right combination of buttons at the super-autistic speed required and you have to keep replaying the battle endlessly.

The oddest one for me though was the one in the Tomb Raider reboot.

You spend an age to climb up the mountain and I was expecting a big, grinding boss battle and it was all over with one QTE. It was very unfulfilling.

CiDeRmAn · 07-05-2014 4:29pm

Stone Deaf 4evr wrote: »

Whoever thought of spawn triggers - where enemies keep spawning infinitely until you run past an invisible point.

I remember a particularly bad on in the Original Black Ops - just before frank woods gets blown up with a grenade, that base had a long section before you passed the spawn trigger, I was fit to put the controller through the screen doing it.

Worse are games that refuse to spawn enemy until you cross a threshold, I think I bumped into one of those in Battlefield 3, going the wrong way and finding myself in the wrong place with no enemies to fight, only to trip over the invisible line elsewhere and BOOM there they are!

Jericho. · 07-05-2014 10:16pm

Mickeroo wrote: »

Dark Souls fleshes out it's universe by an "info bomb text dump" too but it puts it in the item descriptions instead. I guess it gets away with it by having a more interesting back story.

It does well though by showing them during loading screens as well. Means you continuously get exposed to tidbits that encourage you to dig a little deeper yourself.

Retr0gamer · 07-05-2014 11:11pm

And they are short and concise.

C14N · 08-05-2014 6:01am

gugleguy wrote: »

The case with Shenmue is a prime example of the game creator putting all their eggs in one basket. Shenmue 2 cost 600 million to make. Sega has'nt made a successor of the Dreamcast. In any case if Rhyo haszuki were a real person I would'nt have that much sympathy for him. Actually, he ended up being used in a motorcycle racing game alongside sonic the hedgehog as a racing opponent that Sega later brought out, so he got his just deserts anyway.

The Shenmue games cost a hell of a lot less than $600m to make. They were budgeted as a series and it was $70m for the lot. It's still far outside what it could have done on the DC but $600m in utterly insane, no movie or game has ever even cost half that.

Retr0gamer wrote: »

Whatever game popularised codex for telling it's backstory. I'm going to name check Mass Effect here but it was probably something before that. I enjoyed Mass Effect but my god the codex were a load of old arse. All that nonsense was not needed. The world wasn't that complex that they couldn't tell the important stuff in game. The universe wasn't that interesting, it just being a sci-fi reskin of the fantasy genre mono myth. I'm seeing it in lots of games now and it's not welcome in any of them. If you need to flesh out your universe with a info bomb text dump encyclopedia then you are just a **** writer.

I noticed this today when playing Assassin's Creed 4. The amount of encyclopedic crap in the game is utterly unbearable. It goes on with walls of text for every minor character who pops in and out of the game and it's just completely unnecessary. On the one hand it seems like it's a lot of work putting in all this effort for something practically nobody cares about, on the other, it seems very lazy to just dump all this text onto the disc instead of trying to convey stuff about the character through dialogue or interactions.

johnny_ultimate wrote: »

Sometimes there's a game that does something fresh and innovative, and earns both critical and player acclaim as a result. It adds something new to an existing formula, or hits on a new one entirely, and feels like a breath of fresh air. However, a few years later, that very same innovation becomes a cliche or trope as other games copy and abuse what was once an excellent idea

Maybe I'm just being cynical but I do sort of notice that the video game industry tends towards this stuff. Someone will have a good new idea that works well and 5 others will point at it and instead of saying "that was a nice original idea that livened up that game, I wonder what ideas we could come up with?" they say "that was a nice original idea that livened up that game, let's just do that again". The community aren't much better though, people tend to say "you guys made a great game, give me more of it in the form of a sequel" instead of "you guys made a great game, what else can you come up with?".

RopeDrink wrote: »

Games like RE4,5,6 tend to get unjustly panned for over-use of QTE.

I don't think anyone was criticising RE4 for abusing QTEs, just pointing out that it really helped to popularise them amongst lesser games.

janefisher wrote: »

Assassins Creed black flag has alot of pointless collectables that could easily have not been put in the game

+1. Not sure where it started but Ubi have made a horrible habit of just littering their overworld maps with crap that does nothing but gets in the way. Whether it's feathers or flags or "memory shards" or "almanac pages" or whatever, it's just annoying and takes more away than it contributes.

C14N · 08-05-2014 6:07am

Also, I'd like to bring up COD4 again. It was a good game, but unfortunately it's overwhelming success seemed to kind of doom us to several years of almost every big game copying stuff from COD4. Everyone needed regenerating health, every game needed multiplayer, generic "modern" shooters with red dot scopes were suddenly being made by the bucketload and even Activision just had to go and re-make the game over and over again while taking zero chances with the series.

08-05-2014 11:47am

C14N wrote: »

The Shenmue games cost a hell of a lot less than $600m to make. They were budgeted as a series and it was $70m for the lot. It's still far outside what it could have done o
on the DC but $600m in utterly insane, no movie or game has ever even cost half that.

Plenty of films have, after all production and marketing is accounted for came pretty close to costing $600m and Destiny is costing $500 million.

Reekwind · 08-05-2014 12:28pm

C14N wrote: »

The Shenmue games cost a hell of a lot less than $600m to make. They were budgeted as a series and it was $70m for the lot. It's still far outside what it could have done on the DC but $600m in utterly insane, no movie or game has ever even cost half that.

Apparently Bungie are on track to be the first to pass the $500b mark with Destiny

Stone Deaf 4evr · 08-05-2014 12:59pm

C14N wrote: »

Also, I'd like to bring up COD4 again. It was a good game, but unfortunately it's overwhelming success seemed to kind of doom us to several years of almost every big game copying stuff from COD4. Everyone needed regenerating health, every game needed multiplayer, generic "modern" shooters with red dot scopes were suddenly being made by the bucketload and even Activision just had to go and re-make the game over and over again while taking zero chances with the series.

Every game before that was a WW2 shooter, its just the way of the industry to copy what makes money. Remember all the Extreme sports games on the back of tony hawk? or all the music games after guitar hero? you can go all the way back to when everything was either a side scrolling shooter or platformer as well.

C14N · 08-05-2014 5:43pm

Deleted User wrote: »

Plenty of films have, after all production and marketing is accounted for came pretty close to costing $600m and Destiny is costing $500 million.

I wasn't including marketing budgets but point taken. However as the article points out, Destiny is the first game to reach such lofty heights. A $500m budget still seems to be completely irresponsible levels of spending even for this day and age though. I can't possibly imagine how they sunk that much when GTA 5 was reported to cost around half that to make including marketing (and many reports calling that the biggest ever budget at the time, just a few months ago).

Stone Deaf 4evr wrote: »

Every game before that was a WW2 shooter, its just the way of the industry to copy what makes money. Remember all the Extreme sports games on the back of tony hawk? or all the music games after guitar hero? you can go all the way back to when everything was either a side scrolling shooter or platformer as well.

Good point. I guess it's less COD4's fault and more the industry's "me too" attitude. Although in fairness, there weren't that many Guitar Hero rip-offs. There was Rock Band but that had a clear advantage at the time and it was made by the original Guitar Hero developers. Other than that, it was just an overload of actual Guitar Hero games.

the groutch · 09-05-2014 9:36am

Tutorial levels are something I loathe, originating from Tomb Raider?
I don't want to have to suffer 20 minutes of heavy handidness (press A to jump, move the thumbstick to run, etc.) before I even start the game.
Anyone with any brains will pick it all up in about 30 seconds.

Retr0gamer · 09-05-2014 9:54am

Tomb Raiders tutorial was optional.

It was also good fun and not hand holdy.

CiDeRmAn · 09-05-2014 1:48pm

The tutorial in Metroid Prime was pretty good, teaching the moves under the guise of the opening mission, and making that as action packed as possible, with all the weapons open and the suit powered up.
Dropping then into the air body of the game, powered down and enjoying the less linear and more paced experience of the bulk of the game.
That's how to do it.
This is also in stark contrast with Other M which is good but has a more traditional approach to the opening scenes and it drags on way too long.

Pushtrak · 09-05-2014 5:31pm

It was done well in Alpha Protocol too, really.

CiDeRmAn · 09-05-2014 6:07pm

Pushtrak wrote: »

It was done well in Alpha Protocol too, really.

Damn, I was looking at that in Tesco yesterday and was going to buy it for a fiver, bought Dungeon Siege 3 instead.

Pushtrak · 09-05-2014 8:14pm

CiDeRmAn wrote: »

Damn, I was looking at that in Tesco yesterday and was going to buy it for a fiver, bought Dungeon Siege 3 instead.

Alpha Protocol is a good game, worth buying when you see it again on the cheap. Wish it had sold better, as it looks like there will not be anything more done with the IP due to low sales.

CiDeRmAn · 10-05-2014 1:47pm

Pushtrak wrote: »

Alpha Protocol is a good game, worth buying when you see it again on the cheap. Wish it had sold better, as it looks like there will not be anything more done with the IP due to low sales.

Bugger.
I just can't buy any more, I have just gotten Dragons Crown for the PS3 and Test Drive II the Duel for my Megadrive, I've Kirby Triple Deluxe next week for the 3DS and Mario Kart 8 in 3 weeks.
And thats not including the vast swathe of games not touched yet from the Tesco sale overall.
And the there's Dark Souls 2!

C14N · 12-05-2014 5:47pm

Pushtrak wrote: »

Alpha Protocol is a good game, worth buying when you see it again on the cheap. Wish it had sold better, as it looks like there will not be anything more done with the IP due to low sales.

It came with the Sega Humble Bundle a few weeks back. Wasn't planning on going near it but might give it a go if it's got any interesting ideas.

Retr0gamer · 12-05-2014 6:02pm

C14N wrote: »

It came with the Sega Humble Bundle a few weeks back. Wasn't planning on going near it but might give it a go if it's got any interesting ideas.

Just stick with it. The opening mission is utter cack. After that it starts to get good. Also the combat is really poor but you play it for the dialogue and the choices you make because unlike other games like anything from Bioware or Bethesda your choices make a huge difference.

Pushtrak · 12-05-2014 6:36pm

C14N wrote: »

It came with the Sega Humble Bundle a few weeks back. Wasn't planning on going near it but might give it a go if it's got any interesting ideas.

As far as weapon choice goes. Pistol. Always pistol.

Pushtrak · 31-07-2014 1:17pm

Haven't been around in a while, C14N did you get around to Alpha Protocol? Ciderman, still going through that backlog?

Great games, unwelcome legacies

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