Less is More

[lewismistreated]

11 hours ago, HarryBizzle said:

Geometry Wars 2: Retro Evolved is a much better game than 3. The latter is far too spread out and sprawling. 2 only had 6 modes to hammer away at and getter ever better and angrier at. 

 

@lewismistreated I don’t know if you’re still out there, but buried away in the depths of my soul is special hatred for you and your god damn Pacifism score.

 

This pleases me far more than it rightly should. 

 

Tetris 99. Loads up super snappy, and then boom, you're murdering fools right away in the best Battle Royale game out there and it's just bloody Tetris.

[mushashi]

10 hours ago, Sarlaccfood said:

Not really.

 

Jedi Fallen Order

Resident Evil 2 Remake

Devil May Cry 4

Control

Sekiro 

 

all from 2019, never mind the whole gen.

 

 

 

The only one which was very successful out of those was the Star Wars game, so successful that EA have changed their minds on not making big budget single player offline games and have greenlit it to printmoney.gif until it doesn't.

 

The others are merely successful and wouldn't make any of the other big publishers change their development plans. The future of the mega-budget game is open-world or service games, that's where the proper money is.

 

Internet forum darling CDPR pretty much only make those types of games, the next FromSoft title is going to be that too and Capcom's most financially successful game ever is one too. It's even looking like Microsoft's biggest brand, Halo is going to turn itself into one.

[therearerules]

Luigi's Mansion 1 vs 3

Maybe it's rose tinted glasses, but 1 was creative puzzly ghost after creative puzzly ghost in a big interconnected mansion. 3 is all compartmentalised, with a lot of purposeless wandering around, and so many options for control your hand becomes a mangled claw. Most of it is room after room of ghost waves, which are just a bit dull tbh. It feels like there's a lot of padding to draw out the run time, rather than the all killer no filler original.

[Parksey]

Any game with bloody pages and pages of "lore". Not only do they read like Wikipedia entries, but they contain as much verve and life as one. Often just dry, detached text with characters and place names that just seem to be the worst kind of fan fiction. 

 

They pile on the lore, but forget to tell any interesting stories in the game or telling stories badly. 

 

Developers do this, mistaking breadth for depth, when really you can tell interesting stories with a handful of characters in a handful of places. The game and gameplay should be where your world building takes place, not in a bloody menu screen, with passages by mediocre writers. 

 

An urban myth says Ernest Hemingway (yeah I'm taking this high brow, with a false sense of superiority) was once boasted he could write a story with only four words. He went with "For sale: baby shoes, never worn". 

 

You look at games like Destiny, with pages and pages, years and years of little lore tidbits that are fine with the little side glances and flavour, but they have been treading water on the main plot and actually finishing plot strands since 2014, and still with a sense of just tenuously making stuff up as they go alone. 

 

You look at Halo, a game that was basically B-movie pulp in the first game (and no worse for it), then got spun out into a po-faced, dull "Halo universe"-style story that, at it's worst, required you to read a bloody spin-off novel to learn who Halo 4's protagonist was. 

 

It's indulgent and smacks of developers losing sight and scope of their literary ability. Of always feeling the need to go bigger, wider, further back in time to add "history" to their worlds. Making character related or connected to others, having everything entwined or coincidental happenings and meetings. It's sort of what the Star Wars prequels get criticised for, but you can probably level it at any big video game series. 

 

A story is about how you tell it, not about how much you tell. 

 

And yes, I'm aware I could have followed my own advice and just said "I hate lore", so I'm going to chalk this up to inadvertent genius and being so cleverly ironic, okay? 

[dumpster]

I have debated this recently with friends playing Forza on Gamepass, who played Hydro Thunder Hurricane with me for 1 race before saying "is that it?" Because the race ended. But the game is supposed to be three minutes of noisy fast racing, you simply select another track and play as many times as you like.  I couldn't get into Forza because as an arcadey racer is just has too much going on. I don't want to drive around to find races. I don't want to take part in a race that has different route choices, because, you know, it's a race! Why would you have different route choices in a race? 

 

Meanwhile, when you play the original Ridge Racer, you have 1 main car, and one  track. The turning circle of the car, the braking, the drift mechanism, the maximum speed are all tuned to the track and the two go together. When you finally unlock the black car it is exactly the right handling to allow an expert player to complete the race after lots of practice. If you make a game with 50 cars and 50 tracks you can't tune it in that same way. Most Forza style games involve buying new vehicles or upgrades and you win the race because your car goes faster than everyone else, where in Ridge Racer it's your skill and practice being rewarded.

 

Burnout Paradise is a brilliant game (I only discovered the motorbikes recently and it's given the game a new lease of life) but the open world and lack of satnav means that I've never learned any of the courses, and whilst the city is meticulously crafted and impressive in its scale, I've driven through some brilliant short cuts, done stunts, ended up driving high up in a railway bridge, all great gaming moments but I have no idea where any of them are on that massive map and can't find them again.  So, whilst BP is an amazing game, the big selling point of the amazing big city and network of events actually detracts from the fun, especially if you are in a 9 minute long race and happen to take a wrong turn at a junction.

[Camel]

3 hours ago, Parksey said:

Any game with bloody pages and pages of "lore". Not only do they read like Wikipedia entries, but they contain as much verve and life as one. Often just dry, detached text with characters and place names that just seem to be the worst kind of fan fiction. 

 

They pile on the lore, but forget to tell any interesting stories in the game or telling stories badly. 

 

Developers do this, mistaking breadth for depth, when really you can tell interesting stories with a handful of characters in a handful of places. The game and gameplay should be where your world building takes place, not in a bloody menu screen, with passages by mediocre writers. 

 

An urban myth says Ernest Hemingway (yeah I'm taking this high brow, with a false sense of superiority) was once boasted he could write a story with only four words. He went with "For sale: baby shoes, never worn". 

 

You look at games like Destiny, with pages and pages, years and years of little lore tidbits that are fine with the little side glances and flavour, but they have been treading water on the main plot and actually finishing plot strands since 2014, and still with a sense of just tenuously making stuff up as they go alone. 

 

You look at Halo, a game that was basically B-movie pulp in the first game (and no worse for it), then got spun out into a po-faced, dull "Halo universe"-style story that, at it's worst, required you to read a bloody spin-off novel to learn who Halo 4's protagonist was. 

 

It's indulgent and smacks of developers losing sight and scope of their literary ability. Of always feeling the need to go bigger, wider, further back in time to add "history" to their worlds. Making character related or connected to others, having everything entwined or coincidental happenings and meetings. It's sort of what the Star Wars prequels get criticised for, but you can probably level it at any big video game series. 

 

A story is about how you tell it, not about how much you tell. 

 

And yes, I'm aware I could have followed my own advice and just said "I hate lore", so I'm going to chalk this up to inadvertent genius and being so cleverly ironic, okay? 

 

Agree with this totally. Boring, boring words are no replacement for interesting gameplay. 

 

btw, I'm sure Hemingway was better at counting than you give him credit for.

[matt0]

On 30/05/2020 at 14:19, HarryBizzle said:

Geometry Wars 2: Retro Evolved is a much better game than 3. The latter is far too spread out and sprawling. 2 only had 6 modes to hammer away at and getter ever better and angrier at. 

 

@lewismistreated I don’t know if you’re still out there, but buried away in the depths of my soul is special hatred for you and your god damn Pacifism score.

 

In defence of Geometry Wars 3, there's a surprising number of levels buried in it that I thought were easily as good as the 6 modes from 2.

 

In a perfect world the GW3 we got would have been GW Galaxies 2 and then a true third main game would have been a refinement of a well chosen 5-10 levels from that.

[matt0]

To echo @Parksey's post, there's more implied world building and hooks for the imagination in a well chosen line of intro text from an old arcade game then any given AAA title. For all the lore and tie in comics and TV shows and novels, Halo's story is basically a very inefficient version of:

 

Quote

Blast off and strike the evil Bydo Empire!

 

Then, there's this, which piles a lot of world building in to a single sentance:

 

Quote

Ninja related crime these days, white house is not the exception!

 

A slightly wordier one from Arkanoid:

 

Quote

After the mothership "Arkanoid" was hit a spacecraft "Vaus" scrambled way. Only to be trapped in space, warped by someone...

 

The ropey translations instill an otherworldly magic to a lot of these.

[Gremill]

Recently, Lonely Mountain has really stood out for me as an example of doing something really, really simple extremely bloody well. Simple controls, getting from A to B as quickly as possible within a lovely and chilled environment. Rinse, repeat. Very morish too, a good sign of simplicity working the way it should.

[metallicfrodo]

On 30/05/2020 at 18:29, mushashi said:

 

Naming a non-open world or service game that has been very successful on non-Nintendo platforms is pretty difficult this gen.

 

 

Well lets take a look at the top 20 selling games of 2019 in the US (easiest place to get figures for)

 

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2019

NBA 2K20

Madden NFL 20

Borderlands 3

Mortal Kombat 11

Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order

Super Smash Bros. Ultimate

Kingdom Hearts III

Tom Clancy’s The Division 2

Mario Kart 8

Grand Theft Auto V

Red Dead Redemption II

Minecraft

FIFA 20

Anthem

Pokemon Sword

Resident Evil 2 2019

Luigi’s Mansion 3

Days Gone

New Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe

 

If we ignore the Nintendo games we are left with 15. 8* of which are non-open world or service games, and that's just in the last year. So I'd say it's pretty easy to name a successful non-open world non-Nintendo game this gen, especially when you consider that the top 3 aren't... Unless you don't count Call of Duty as being a very successful game, or you think that those games only sold on Nintendo platforms.

 

*I don't 'think' KH3 is an open world game.

 

[ox1973]

Slay the Spire

 

A rogue like deck builder but that doesn't do it justice. It is the most perfectly balanced game I have ever played (perhaps the best game I have ever played). I have sunk over 400 hours into this (on PC and Switch) and when it comes out on mobile (imminent) I will buy it for the third time. Perfection.

 

FTL

 

The prequel to Into the Breach. Just as good. No flab on this either.