This is what I like to call, “lawnmower talk”. Normally, when you talk about art, you talk about how it made you feel, or what it meant to you, or how it spoke to you… With video games, the conversation is often: how does it look, how does run, how does it handle? Which is pretty much what you would say about a piece of luxury machinery, like one of those rideable lawn mowers. Obviously, video games are a very technical form of art, so that kind of technical talk is important. But when it becomes the only thing that matters, that’s when the conversation transforms into “lawn mower talk”, at least in my opinion. We are the only industry that treats our art this way. Retro games are also a victim of this as well. Something like Silent Hill 2 is seen as needing to be “remade” even though all of its artistic choices were perfect and still are today. It’s gameplay design is seen as an outdated relic and not something that was deliberately designed to make you feel a certain way. As an industry, we have gotten used to defending “games as art” and calling them art. But we still don’t really treat them as such, at least not entirely. Certain qualities (usually non-interactive components) are lauded for being artistic, but the actual gameplay (the most important part) is not always seen as a form of artistic expression.
thats because the totality of video game making is overall MUCH LARGER than the totality of most other mediums, so there is a lot more to talk about in terms of its “art”. i.e. u cant say a book is good solely based on the cover art. so the art here is maybe a crucial 10% of importance in a movie, the sfx(practical and cgi) are nearly 60-90% of the focus and hard to ignore. for games the art is 100% important, what changes is the style etc. or music. the song is 100% of what really matters where as in a game, its like 20% of importance but still CRUCIAL to its total reception. video games are also a Program meaning its operational capacity does matter. imagine watching a movie in theaters that buffers, freezes, etc due to any reason. no bueno. all of this matters. imo gameplay is the DEFINING characteristic for a good game, something modern games are severly lacking in despite the visual and audio polish. dragons dogma is NOT (from what ive seen) a noteworthy good example of a “good” game. in fact its proof of how “bad” the current generation is. id much rather play a creative game with complete and fun mechanics that motivate me to play then anything that looks great but is absolutely monotonous in exectuion
@@enishi4ty5 True, and I definitely agree with your opening and closing statements. I haven’t play DD2, but I plan to. But yeah, with video games, programming is both an operational aspect (as you said) but it is also an artistic aspect. How gameplay functions is very much an artistic statement/experience. I don’t think many people recognize that yet. I’m sure more people will in time since in the future we will have more games with more creative mechanics that push the boundaries of gameplay as both a fun and artistic experience.
@@seangdovic4967 u feel me fam! i hope we get back to games being so insanely creative/fun we don’t want to put them down. the current “mmo-lite grindfest” aka live service style isn’t inherently bad but it’s such a lazy way to release something that “looks polished” but is in fact lacking its core feature: a satisfying gaming experience (start to finish).. imo gaming creatively peaked at like Skyrim. all the gems like absolver, horizon etc faded into oblivion chasing a trend hopefully it gets better 🙏🏾
someone named bob bobson had commented a good reply (but its not showing up in my app) basically saying they can tell i didnt play and the games method of engaging with player through traversal is actually good. since i havent played DD2 and probably wont unless it hits a sale, i wont argue that. my main point was to say “fast travel” shouldnt be missed in your game. theres a fair point that modern gamers are spoiled by FT being in most games and so expecting it in DD2 and not getting it is an unfair strike for a game that had its own plans from the start. if it is well executed i have no complaints. from a designer AND consumer stance, i believe games without fast travel are likely better prepared for an immersive experience. the devs WANT you to stumble upon places that aren’t OBVIOUSLY highlighted or experience the world on your own terms(within established rules and mechanics) w/o playing DD2, my only surface level complaint is if there is FT i shouldn’t have to pay real world money to use it, especially if traversal and exploration are so monotonous id rather fast travel than explore. i also FIRMLY believe games should naturally cater to the lowest expected casual player and build UP from there. too many games are jumping to endgame difficulty in a dumb attempt to stay ahead of modern gamers which is killing the actual fun for 87% of people who don’t speed run insane difficulty for shiny drops for specific loadouts to hit specific benchmarks. Monster hunter usually starts u off gathering flowers before you slay the amaterasu sky eating dragon or whatever. IF DD2 is in fact good i think people will notice. not just the hardcore or niche group who enjoy particular aspects. if the main draw to video games (gameplay, moving the player around the world) is a common complaint then its not a good sign tho..
@@enishi4ty5 A friend of mine played it and said he was always running into new stuff when making his way from one point to the next. So, I think they wanted the player to experience all of the dynamic encounters/systems which is why they don’t have it. Naturally, there will be times when a game needs fast travel. But I feel that most of the time there is a clear difference when a flaw exists intentionally versus when it’s just a sloppy oversight. Too often I see people look at intentional design choices and call them “flaws”. Like, it isn’t a flaw when it makes the experience more engaging.
It's precisely because of all the hostile and unintuitive features of Dragons Dogma that I had an experience that I'll probably still be thinking fondly about many years from now. Long winded personal anecdote below. Thanks to the long travel time between settlements, coupled with the steep price to rest at inns (I didn't understand the value of camping in the early game), I arrived at the capital half dead, broke, and severely undergeared. I decided to look around the capital for quests to make some money, making sure to avoid agreeing to any quest that would require a lot of travel time or danger. Suddenly, one of the random NPCs I talk to mentions that a guy I met a while back was just sent on a suicide mission and "won't survive the night". I don't get a quest marker or anything, but the game has already conditioned me to take its NPC dialogue seriously. As a player, it's unclear to me whether the timer starts now or when I pick up the quest later, but its a risk I'm unwilling to take. So I track down the guy's wife, and ask her about it. I get a quest, a map marker, and a confirmation that I am indeed on a timer. I check the map, the guy's further out than I've ever had to walk before, in completely uncharted territory. It's like 5pm in game, and for all I know I only have until morning, so I have neither the time nor money to gear myself up OR recover my health, which is currently capped at about 40% until I rest. The game is not going to wait for me to be prepared. So I just start SPRINTING blind and half dead into the wilderness after this guy. I pick up pawns on the road along the way, hoping they'll at least give me a fighting chance. One of them says she knows the way because her Master has already done the quest, so I ask her to lead and now I'm sprinting after her. We run past goblin ambushes, bandit camps, a charging minotaur, everything, as it slowly gets darker and darker. Eventually, it's the middle of the night and it's pitch black. I can see on the map I'm only like a 5 minute walk away, but I can't see in front of my face, we're getting constantly turned around and ambushed by undead, and the pawn I picked up is too busy fighting them off to guide me through the dark. I painstakingly drag myself over to the quest objective, just in time to see the guy I was sent to save being slapped around by a giant monster I can barely make out in the darkness. I do my best but as expected it's completely beyond my abilities right now. My pawns die, I get slapped around for 10 minutes, and its all I can do to simply scare the thing off. But it's too late, the guy I was sent to save was killed in the battle. I even get a quest failed notification. Feeling defeated, out of desperation I decide to burn the one Wakestone I had to revive him and see if that somehow 'unfails' the quest. To my shock, it actually does. The quest notification reappears, completes itself, saying I saved him, the guy even verbally comments on being brought back to life. I limp back to the capital in the morning, and the wife showers me with way more gold than I've ever seen and a set of shiny new fighter equipment that is still better than pretty much anything I've found 40 hours in. I went from half-dead and destitute to thriving, purely because I met the game on its own terms, and treated a life or death situation like an actual life or death situation. Now, I know I probably made a lot of dumb assumptions during that quest, like I probably would've been okay if I had just waited to talk to the wife, it's possible the guy wouldn't have literally died by morning, etc, but that's the point! If the game had been more clear about its systems, I wouldn't have had to act on those assumptions. If the game had reliable fast travel, if it was willing to wait for me to do that quest when I was actually ready for it, if the game didn't have a super punishing economy, if you didn't lose max health until you rest, if the game wasn't willing to throw completely unwinnable challenges at you, if the game wasn't willing to let you completely mess things up and get people killed, then this experience would never have happened for me. It would've just been a marker on the map that I got around to like 20 hours later, early in the morning, well equipped and way stronger. I would've kicked the thing's ass and fast traveled home. A smooth, efficient experience, but completely unmemorable, just another sidequest to tick off my list.
That's personal long winded summary of events might have convinced me to check it out. So, never discount the possibility of personal experience, I guess, LDsprite.. I really hope that's isn't your real name, maybe there was a side quest, in the morning, where you picked that up..
The problem seem to be on how gamers over the last few decades ended up thinking of videogames as goal/objective oriented, instead of the experience of playing oriented, players are now focused on the goal, instead of the process leading to it, gameplay in their eyes become an obstacle to to their goal, it is probably a consequence of how gamers started to see games more like a competition than just a game, there is nothing wrong with videogames wasting your time with gameplay experiences...because that's what games and the act of playing is...
It’s not just video games, but rather the economic circumstances of the 90s and on led to us Millenials being taught very thoroughly that wasting time is a terrible thing, and that only through constant productivity can we achieve success. We carried that into our adulthood, and now struggle to take time to just waste time because of the emphasis on productivity drilled into us as kids.
@@dominiccastsI mean there are matters in life that do infact require productivity and as much as videogames are a great time waste they are in fact not the most useful thing you can be doing
@@addex1236 Yes, and taking the attitude that everything must be productive into video games makes no sense for that exact reason. Video games are not productive or useful, but doing productive or useful things is not the only thing to do in life, we need to rest and shift mental gears as well. Trying to play video games productively is like working during a vacation.
Arguably that applies more to old school gamers than it does to gaming today. Going right back to the arcade days of highscores, and then early console games and hardcore PC sims and RTS games that dominated for a long time where the challenge was the whole point. Story, world building and lore was pretty limited outside of RPGs. It's only since the early 2000s really that we've come to expect almost every game to have a fleshed out world and well written story experience for the player to immerse himself into.
This is how I feel about the "QoL" improvements in the newer Monster Hunter games. I started with Monster Hunter World, but in going back and playing the older games, I find I really enjoy a lot of the friction that World and Rise removed. I like hot and cold drinks, I like inventory limits, I like not being able to warp back to camp, etc.
Hopefully Wilds is able to bring back some of that friction. I noticed in the trailer that your raptor ride thingy is carrying another weapon in it's side holster. Perhaps a hint to having no instant camp teleport.
I made a similar journey and am more mixed - some of that friction was good and some of it needed to go. I think they can stand to bring a little bit back but to me World was close to a sweet spot
Wilds is at least bringing back hot/cold drinks are it looks like no more warping to camp, you have to set up a pop up camp that can get destroyed by monsters. Seems like friction is back in some capacity
I think the problem with both audience demanding less friction in games and the companies who comply to them are to blame for *a lot* of modern releases just not having much staying power past its launch year (or month), regardless of playtime and content I remember once Mark Brown came to this conclusion when comparing Far Cry 2 to Far Cry 4 and its subsequent entries: the latter are bombastic adventure to breeze through like in an action movie, and the former being this brutal endurance experience you are unlikely to forget, like an emotional scar
Far Cry 2 will always be an amazing experience and the atmosphere when playing was absolutely stunning. Far Cry 3 was amazing for doing its own thing while combining elements from the first 2 Far cry games. Everything else after has been copying Far cry 3's success with each entry somehow getting worse.
What really struck me with this video is that you frequently used the word "optimized" as opposed to "improved." Optimization in this context sounds like the act of trying to better something in a very formulaic and almost sanitizing way, a method of making games to a very calculated extent. But that's not how art works. Contrast that with improvement, which can mean any number of things to make something subjectively better, even if it sounds strange or even contradictory on paper. That was a great choice of words that resonated with me big time. And yes, I'm still of the mindset that Deadly Premonition was a game that openly changed how games criticism could and should be approached, so it's nice to hear it brought up here. Awesome work.
totally agree, and I will also add that even though "optimization" pursues making the experience smoother, in some cases it doesn't really entail an "improvement" to the experience btw, I really like your videos, nice to see you here!
SuperBunnyhop once said “some of the most interesting games are the most flawed” in reference to The Witcher 1 - it’s an amazing experience you won’t get anywhere else, but it’s also far from perfect.
Don't forget about vampire masquerade bloodlines, a game that was really bugged but yet it's gained a cult following over the years despite it being broken but yet people still enjoy it and I can see why, it's a pretty fun game.
Seeing people saying "I have a job and kids, I don't have time for games without fast travel" about dragon's dogma 2 makes me a bit sad. In a way we got there because of the last 15 years of open world games that set up this expectation, but travelling in dragon's dogma IS the game. If you put unlimited fast travel there's barely anything remaining to the experience. They made travelling engaging, you have to make important choices, think about your resources and if you want to spend your limited ferrystones for each travel. I'm 80 hours in and I'm still enjoying travelling around. I'm honestly amazed capcom greenlit a high budget game so niche. It's very clearly not for everyone, but if it's for you, it's great.
@@louisgworldDoubt it, as a father my gaming is typically 2-8 hours a week, so even 50 hours (which used to play in a month easy!) no is a quarter year commitment... I played Death Stranding for ~20 hours, because the travel was fun, but than it became to slow/repetitive and I moved on
engagement ≠ fun and if most people dont find the traversal in a video game fun that’s enough evidence for me. most open world games DON’T need fast travel and they’re worse off for having it if we’re being honest. for reference: gun to my head i do not know if skyrim has fast travel. f76 has it and it’s mostly useful to get back to my base or join times events but otherwise bethesda games (up to 76) had enough i would’ve never asked for fast travel. gta 5 doesn’t need it either. making fast travel a grind is the same as selling me oxygen
I got a kid and a job and mostly play games without fast travel. I'm not trying to play through a game every week or month though. Can't wait for Outward 2!
@@bnjkf9u3I think there are people with legitimate time constraints like yourself of course, but the other poster is right, a lot of people who bitch about inconvenience and a lack of time really just mean a lack of time for anything other than their main games that they will sink hundreds if not thousands of hours into. It just feels more socially acceptable to blame it on kids or a busy life than sinking another hundred hours into League of Legends or whatever. If you see this crap on Steam forums for instance, seeing how much time someone actually has for games is often just a couple clicks away.
Majority of AAA games have been optimized to make the player feel productive above all else. It's all about achievement and consuming as much content as possible, rather than providing a experience
Palworld has quicktravel, but you still have to hoof it to the nearest eagle statue, and they're kilometers apart. So far so standard. But the feeling you get when you finally catch your first flying mount and can soar over terrain like it's nothing is amazing, and it wouldn't work if you hadn't spent hours walking everywhere on foot before that point. You get an appreciation for how large the world is, and when you're able to fly around you can FEEL how much time and effort you're saving. (And if you're careless your bird can get knocked out stranding you in rough terrain, which can also give you a memorable experience - found that out first-hand)
I only have one thing to say: THANK YOU FOR THIS! Art is not a product that needs to "function", it's a form of human expression that simply wants to be experienced. And sometimes friction is a vital part of that experience. Like Patrick Boivin said in a recent episode of his podcast "Castle Superbeast", talking about Dragons Dogma 2: Friction makes sparks fly.
"Art is not a product that needs to "function", it's a form of human expression that simply wants to be experienced." Cool but if my experience is shit i will call it shit... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Art still needs to function and is a product in many many cases. I get what you're saying. Video games absolutely need to function and they are absolutely a product though. The art direction, controls, challenges etc all need to work together to deliver a good experience to most of the intended audience who are paying for these games. I appreciate art, I mean look at my username , but even in art if there was no type of standard or function we wouldn't have art teachers. If someone showed me a figure drawing they did I can tell if they are a beginner because the mistakes don't look intended and don't function for the experience he or she aimed to visually create
@@Exist2Inspire87 That's fine. You're not guaraneed anything with art. Sometimes it won't work for you. You just have to decide if you mostly want products or you want art.
This video speaks so deeply to my soul, the exact perspective I advocate for in my position at a major game publication, and an increasing need to help with media literacy in a medium that has yet to see its peak. This is literally a topic I wanted to do for The Kurt Locker, so THANK YOU for being on the same page.
@@WritingOnGames YOU ARE THE WORST, because of people like you resources that could be used in boss fights and game mechanics are wasted on pointless collectible hunts in a walking simulator, I SINCERELY HATE YOU and what you people have done to games.
I'm convinced the biggest problem with the Horizon franchise is that it isn't flawed enough. It's so smooth and polished that it's impossible to remember any detail.
I think its flaws are pretty visible. Non compelling dialogue and voice performances from NPC's, copy and paste Ubisoft world design, cluttered looting system. Not sure making the game jankier would really fix it. But if they had been more ambitious and tried new things, there probably would be a lot more jank, so in that sense maybe you're right
The art comparison is valid in general, but in DD2 specifically, the microtransactions exist in tandem with the "time wasting" design, which, intentionally or not, does prey upon players with vulnerabilities in a similar way that gambling does. Capcom's choosing to place microtransactions to circumvent the frustrations the developers crafted cheapens the artistic merit of the game. Not to a dire degree, but to a noticable one. Ultimately, these frustrations end up mountains instead of mole hills only if you don't enjoy the core experience or are not being enticed by a more meta experience (such as a mystery to solve, an intriguing plot, or characters to enjoy the company of). If someone enjoys the experience, it's easier to overlook quirks and oddities. An example i think of us Fallout: New Vegas pre-order dlc (later bundled into the ultimate edition). It ruins the difficulty curve of the early game and cheapens the artistic merit of the developers, but i don't mind it because combat challenge isn't one of the most compelling experiences of FNV. It also helps that i can choose to just drop them on the ground in Doc Mitchell's house if i want that challenge.
I'll admit I didn't like the fast travel thing till I realized 1. there's ox carts 2. the world is fun to explore (just remember a camping kit) the game gives me Elden Ring levels of "world I can get lost in for a bit". Great video.
I love Morrowind in all its weirdness and "datedness". I think it's cool that your quest log is your character's journal and you needs to flip through the pages chronologically to find directions some yokel gave you because you don't have magical GPS embedded into your brain. I like that getting around takes more than picking a spot on a menu and teleporting there. I even like the janky real time/d&d hybrid combat. People hate "jank" these days, but many of the best experiences out there are at least a little janky. If it goes down too smooth how will you know it was even there at all?
Dragon's Dogma 2 is the closest modern game to that Morrowind experience. Other than MAYBE Outward or Enshrouded? It has pinned quest markers on the map sometimes, sure, but most times you have to actually investigate and explore to get anywhere.
I don't think calling the quest menu in Morrowind "jank" is accurate. I'd say it is like that because the designers made it so deliberately. People need to think a bit more before they say that a certain feature is "jank" or "dated" or that the game could use some more QoL features. And I don't mean that as an attack to your original post. But don't get me wrong, a lot of beloved older games have design issues, but the issues aren't necessarily the ways in which they are different from modern games.
This video nailed what I've been frustrated by. Absolutely zero consideration went into asking why the creators may have made a given choice, people instantly go "It's a flaw, the developers did a bad job, and should patch this". If my expectations are the requirements, and deviating from them is a failure, then I will never appreciate anything new again. It's a creative dead end to approach art this way!
The problem is many creators make choices that add friction not for art but for profit. I can only think how much other art would be damaged if you could make more money by wasting people's time. I think some games are nearly not art but a product. Just think about how the design of games were affected in the arcade days to make you spend more!
@@MADCATMK3103 this is true but it has absolutely no relevance to the game being discussed now. also this was a thing in writing in the past, a lot of the time writers ended up paid by the word and this is one of the primary reasons very old books were so incredibly long and in some cases they were much longer than they needed to be
@@MADCATMK3103sure but adding friction, either for art or for profit, has a chance to backfire massively. Look at The Last Guardian, for example. The friction in that game is purposeful. That doesn’t stop it from sucking ass.
Oh I agree it can backfire! The problem is when it's for profit it will be some level of hostile for the player. I will give an example of a game being better for art, it would be Dark Souls. The one I find fascinating is the early Armored Core games. They are a pain but that's the point. They lose friction as the series progresses.@@lman318
Just from the title I will say Number one reason why I love death Stranding flaws and all I literally could not imagine it any other way Infact I love it BECAUSE of it's uniquqe flaws To paraphrase RUclipsr Bricky: *"Alan Wake is proof that people would rather play a unique 6/10 game than a boring 9/10"*
I wonder if the Dragon's Dogma 2 discussion would have played out differently had it not been for the microtransaction controversy. Capcom assigned a numerical dollar value to traversal, so anyone running across the map won't be considering the art and experience; they'll be thinking of the cost.
I wonder when people like you will stop peddling nonense they heard about a game they obviously havent played. I guess it's too hard to do research for yourselves. There is NO mtx involving fast travel for God's sake. There are two ways to fast travel in this game, through FERRYSTONES and OXCARTS. None of which you can buy. You can make a ONE TIME purchase to buy a PORTCRYSTAL (10 of them in game and again you can only buy One) which is a fast travel marker you manually place and use FERRYSTONES to fast travel too and that's it. Yall are so guillable that's insane
Most people would still probably still say the same things about it, good or bad since the first game ended up being a cult classic to some and a messy jank to others, I personally vibed with DDDA and now DD2 even though I've completed it and I'm just chilling on NG+ at the moment. It's not a perfect game by any means and it has its flaws, but I thoroughly enjoyed my time with it.
Something people are ignoring is that it is not fast travel they're selling. The microtransaction is a single fast travel point item that you have to decide where to place by going there yourself. You can't buy more than 1 portcrystal with real money and you are only allowed to have a maximum of 10 placed on the map. This also doesn't include that a portcrystal by itself is worthless, you need to use a ferrystone to actually fast travel which are pretty expensive (10k gold).
@@Lahdee You can find about close to 5 port crystals in-game and the sphinx can dupe one of them. Ferrystone is okay but it's the journey to get to said destination which makes it worthwhile.
Recently, I've been playing GTA III for the first time. Never touched a GTA game, and a friend of mine has always recommended them. It is an old, janky piece of shit sometimes. I found a payphone where the game told me to steal a fast car and enter a race, which I proceeded to bash my head against for about an hour because the driving controls are so hard to parse. I found myself in love with how unapproachable and alien it often feels. That same friend told me there were a bunch of cheat codes to try, so I summoned myself a tank, turned on anti-gravity, and just started fucking around for a few hours. Turned on the code where citizens start beating the shit out of each other on the streets. I have no clue what's going on half the time, other than people asking me to steal ice cream trucks and plant car bombs, or go talk to some dude named Luigi. Yet, it is one of the most memorable experiences I've had with a game in a long time because it is absolutely unlike anything else I have ever played. No matter what's going on, I'm having a wonderful time, even if I walk into a gunfight and die in five seconds, or my cars explode after ten light grazes against a wall. There's just something about it that draws me in to play more. I'm almost always laughing along with how absurd it is. I'm sure that as I progress through the franchise, it will become more and more approachable. Maybe that will even make it more fun. But there's an absurdist comedy to how rough GTA III feels which I wonder about losing as I approach more recent entries. A "modern" gamer would have looked at my play session and give me strange looks for going back. I think we might all enjoy this medium more if we learned to laugh along with it.
Well, I totally agree with this, I also look at a game like cyberpunk 2077 and think wow it’s just such a better game now because it’s so much smoother. So it kind of depends on the game a bit.
There's a false equivalency happening here wherein the assumption is that folks who are against the monetization of fast travel are entirely the same folks who think it should be a standard. The game could have just not ever had fast travel at all if that was the desired outcome of the developers in the first place. I wouldn't mind that. I didn't mind having to work toward it in the Souls games. I don't mind games that don't have it outright. But that doesn't mean I can't find this monetization scheme as something I don't ever want to support. I'd rather suffer through a game that for the sake of its intended design had me trudging through its world and slapping me across the face until I git gud. But to do that and also dangle a "QOL" feature in my face for added cost to an already full priced game? It's an insult.
they didn't do that. you are allowed to buy exactly 1 portcrystal ever, which allows you to have exactly 1 extra destination point, which is a really small thing when you'll have 7 of them late in a playthrough and i think you can have 10 or more in new game plus but could be wrong about that. you literally aren't having a feature dangled in your face. i get that you're very angry but when you post something based on completely false information, all you do is waste everyone's time
@@MalkuthSephira I love this "I get that you're very angry" line. I'm not angry. I saw a game I thought was interesting. Then I saw an incredibly long DLC list full of grind skips, and a fast travel item. That's gross. It was gross for games before this, and it's gross now. So any interest in getting it disappeared for me. Yes, I'm aware they're all things you can get in the game. But is that an excuse for the monetization practice? No. It is not. It has never been. Maybe take a look at what the actual concerns people have about a game of this price and what precedent this sets for the rest of AAA instead of psychoanalyzing someone based on a RUclips comment and pretending their differing stance is invalid just because you disagree. Because dying on the hill of making excuses for gross DLC practices is an even bigger waste of time.
"There's a false equivalency happening here wherein the assumption is that folks who are against the monetization of fast travel are entirely the same folks who think it should be a standard." Literally nobody said that. I'm not sure why you're putting words in people's mouths.
@@aolson1111 We're really gonna pretend like our guy Hamish here wasn't, three minutes into this very same video, putting words in the mouths of people buying the MTX? Like he wasn't making assumptions about people who might have entirely valid criticisms of this game? He clarifies in the in-video text that he's not talking about accessibility concerns, but I think he misses the point that some of the negative views towards DD2 are not because of its artistic levels of jank, but its monetization of the very same convenience mechanics that he's criticizing.
Yeah having completed DD2 the discourse surrounding it makes me really, really irritated. It has me wondering if the MTX discourse hasn't kind of poisoned people towards DD2 when I hadn't spent a cent on its MTX. I didn't need to; they are completely superfluous and, honestly, the game is better off if you never look ONCE at the storefront. The friction is the point. The rough edges are the point. The pain points are the compelling part. Discourse surrounding games really does feel a lot like discussing software and not about discussing art, and it makes talking about DD2 absolutely maddening to me, because the fact that DD2 pushes back so often and so frequently is what makes it so compelling to me! I LOVE the fact that its systems and world constantly push back against me! I love the fact that i can't trust the ox carts, that ferrystones are expensive IN-GAME, that portcrystals must be placed BY YOU, and that you MUST REST in order to recover after a grueling fight. Going uphill makes stamina recover slower. Stairs are tiring! You have to properly pace your running...you know...like in real life. Jogging IRL isn't a constant sprint you have to pace yourself; save the sprint for when it's most important. (That said doing a Ravenous Lunge and doing a paintrain across the map at max speed is the funniest thing ever and I hope it stays like this, but I digress) It has me approaching traveling in the game like I would a roadtrip; Oh, I'm here! I might as well do a few quests while I'm in town. It makes the world feel so much larger when you can truly internalize the distance and in-game time it took to two locations. I found myself memorizing paths, recognizing landmarks. Honestly the fact that Dragon's Dogma 2 exists with this intentional pushback and this kind of budget should viewed as a minor miracle. The fact that it was made at all and it COMMITTED to its bit (including its frankly bonkers decision surrounding the endgame) makes me kind of love it. Not in spite of its warts and complications but BECAUSE of it. Turns out, art that bites back kinda rules! There is another element about the DD2 discourse that does trouble me though and it's this impression that it's somehow not intentional, that DD2 just stumbled into being full of friction and it's like...Itsuno has been in the industry since the 90s. The staff are all Capcom vets. Is it really that much of a stretch to think that it's intentional? There's a bizarre unwillingness to engage with video games in good faith; it's never intentional friction, oh clearly they're just incompetent. Or worse, it's clearly cynical. It's like this urge to condescend and grouse at designers for not fitting the ideals of players 1:1. Honestly I want more games like DD2*. I know it won't happen because that's kind of the nature of big budget art in our capitalist hellscape but the fact that it exists in 2024 makes me unbelievably happy. *without the cash shop but tbh it's capcom, they've been doing this tipjar shit since for years now.
@@joeykeilholz925 you're completely correct lmao. THAT part of DD2 sucks ass. Like I don't think Vernworth running like shit is part of the design document of Dragon's Dogma 2.
People have been primed by the industry to see travel between points as friction that pushes you to buy MTX to skip needless tedium, as seen with Ubisoft and mobile games. Capcom shot themselves in the foot by setting DD2 up in the same way by implementing the MTX storefront, which is why I have little empathy for them in this situation. The game itself is much more enjoyable when actually doing the travelling, but if the forefront tells you to do the same thing as AC games selling you Grind-skippers then the audience will react accordingly.
I want more game like this too, but the cynic in me is telling that after this "backlash" most devs/publishers will just hunker down even deeper and keep churning out the same old safe shite as per usual. As you said, it really is a miracle that we even got a game like this seeing as even Elden Ring bowed down to the lowest common denominator in many ways.
@@MoiderahOfVideosI think they overreached with the tech... Again... Like with DD1. Itsuno's a certified Kojima-grade lunatic whose entire MO is pushing the boundaries to shattering point in whatever bizarre direction he feels like. The game's fantastic. Personal GOTY candidate, unless late game Sand Land or something manages to utterly blow my mind capitalizing on the Steambot Chronicles-like/Mega Man Legends-like subsubsubgenre. Not likely it's going to be THAT brilliant (although it looks like it'll be at least great), but here's hoping. Also fun fact: If you do everything "right" and see everything the pre-endgame world has to offer, DD2 offers exactly enough portcrystals to cover every single major destination you will ever need. I counted. I set my network up perfectly and counted. By NG+ you have to place them all again manually, but you'd hit the hard cap like 1/5 of the way through that anyway.
I think games are just like any other artistic medium. Some pieces of art are deep and complicated with heavy themes and interesting characters, some pieces are mechanically impressive with tight design and meticulous pacing, and some pieces are focused on spectacle with impressive scope and budget. All this is to say I think its fine for people to prefer one style of artistic creation over another so long as they recognize that's what's happening and don't try to criticize a piece with a different artistic priority for not appealing to them.
a lot of the complaints people have about dragons dogma 2 make me feel like they really didnt want to play dragons dogma 2, like they talk about the lack of fast travel and the quests that arent explicitly outlined with everything you need to do, and i really feel like if the devs caved and added quest markers for every little thing and let you use camp sites or riftstones for fast travel then it would lost a lot of what made it feel like dragons dogma
Every year i introduce a new cohort of students to both killer7 and Deadly Premonition. To show that something interesting can be provided even though the component elements individually aren't "the best". killer7 especially confuses students the most at first but then they begin to understand the significance.
May I recommend the works of Icepick Lodge? They have probably made some of the best examples of ludonarrative harmony in gaming with Pathologic and The Void. They also make good examples of how games can be other things than just fun while still being entertaining and engaging.
"if given the chance players will optimise the fun out of games" is forever topical and applicable. games by definition are just an artificial challenge being presented, most gamers do not realize this basic truth. now the key lies in how interesting the designer can make overcoming that challenge. sometimes the gameplay is just boring. sometimes the gameplay is not for that person's taste. sometimes it's just a clash of expectation vs reality. and there is teleportation in the game in fact. the dialogue doesn't even seem be handled properly.
you don't get to tell me what is fun or not your presumptuous @@@, maybe you have fun in walking simulators and pointless collectible hunts, maybe you have infinite to waste on that @@@@@ but i would much rather all the development time and money that was wasted on that trash be used on something much more worthwhile like bosses and game mechanics, you people are @@@ upon the industry and i wish you were @@@@@@, please never spew that @@@@ opinion again.
I tend to believe that a lot of the games that have had a sense of historical reevaluation in terms of their quality (Haunting Ground, God Hand, the Bouncer) as well as games that I’ve found to be interesting partially because of their clunkiness (Rocket Robot on Wheels, the Maximo series, Rumble Roses, and the like) would kind of be reviled by the same people who praise them SPECIFICALLY because of how weird and semi-unintuitive their mechanics are. It’s a shame too, because there’s a lot of games that people crap on now, that 15 years from now are gonna get the exact same treatment that God Hand did, but c’est la vie I guess.
Okay, so I agree with the overall thesis of this video. There are a lot of "flawed" games that I love, and many games that eschew "industry standards" because of their design ethos or artistic intention, but I have to ask honestly though, if Dragon's Dogma 2 wants you to travel between each town on foot aside from specific fast travel locations and methods, why are they selling ways to bypass that part of the game for extra money? If the game was designed around the feel of the larger world and the experience of living and moving in it, why undercut the design by selling shortcuts? The cynicism that people have toward this decision is entirely justified because we can tell that many games will add microtransactions to games that set the overall game feel to something closer to what you might expect the experience to be (permanent XP boosts are a good example). I'm fine with having many games that don't click with everyone, but when microtransactions are added on to, let's say, give people the opportunity to adjust the game to their own pace for extra cash instead of just adding those features in as optional free content for players to take or leave at will, it really feels like the shareholders have more influence than the designers in how a game is designed.
I saw the Jimquisition video about dragon's dogma and it actively made me lose braincells. "If you say you like walking around this world, you're lying!" Maybe the game just isn't for you?
Jim is a great critic of the industry, but should not review games. Thought they learned that lesson after their tonally deaf and totally wrong review of BoTW.
Yeah. I respect them as a critic of the industry, but I consider their taste in games to be pretty bad. And I really don't like how they talk about mechanics they don't like.
It was a truly awful take. It think it lead me to realize that they are so fervent on consumer advocacy because they really only see games as products more than art forms. I didn't go into a movie like Mandy wanting to feel comfortable, why would I want the same out of all games?
This is what I've been saying. A 7/10 game often means a lot more to me than a modern, so-called "9/10" game. A game that is fun, yet flawed, is supremely more interesting and memorable than a game that is objectively well-made, but lacks identity.
I think you are missing the point when it comes to Dragon's Dogma. Sure, clunky controls of Deadly Premonition is what makes the game memorable. But imagine if there was an option to buy better driving phisics, better combat etc. as microtransactions. Then playing that game normally would feel like a waste of time too. In reality developers probably did everything they could to make that game what it is. But knowing that they made these improvements and they are under a paywall would ruin the whole experience, at least to me.
Couldn't agree more. Video games are unique among popular media, in that they give meaningful pushback when you want to experience them. In other words you watch a movie, you experience a game because you took active participation. I often prefer to play games that others have dubbed as "awful" or "dated" then I do playing a game that checks all the boxes of being what is considered top tier. Often those games are kind of soulless, I would rather play an imperfect game that has noticeable issues but you can tell the dev team poured their passion into it than a game feels like it was made by committee of what is industry expectation. Games like the first Alan Wake, Batman Arkham Origins, or Watch Dogs 1.
Totally with you on killer7. Even with the clunky controls and some of the worst bosses I’ve ever fought in a game, it ended up being my favourite game I played last year. I’ve heard a lot about how horror games combat systems are purposefully designed to be shitty and hard to control since it reinforces how weak and afraid you’re supposed to feel. Killer7 isn’t horror in genre, but its gameplay keeps you paranoid going around every corner, just as if you’re running around an abandoned building being hunted by invisible exploding monsters. You know, because you are.
Also to some extent, it enhance the theme of the game's story for not being fully in-control of your fate as the Killer7 are just cannon fodders for their corrupt government.
I don't want to bring up any names, but I watched a video about Dragon's Dogma 2 yesterday that really bothered me. I haven't played the game, so I obviously don't know if I would agree that the things they pointed out are actually problems in Dragon's Dogma 2 specifically. What bothered me was the implication that those are problems which video games have in general. That repeated backtracking is bad by defualt, that forcing a player to traverse larger distances without the option of fast traveling is disrespectful of the player's time. Death Stranding is a game that does those things, but it's so clearly what the entire game is built around. It wants the player to consider the paths, to reflect on their journeys as well as their surroundings. While I'm a firm believer in that video games should be way more customizable than they often are (kinda like how Pathologic 2 did it) I also believe that, had there been a bunch of "quality of life options" at the very start, it would have undermined the entire artistic purpose of Death Stranding. And for what? So that it can be exactly like other open world AAA games? How terribly boring would that be!? Thank you for making this video. I really wanted to vent after I watched that other one yesterday, and this video satisfied that need.
I think I wholeheartedly agree with you, especially with the ''not being able to fast travel is inherently bad'' part. I think this video here is a direct response to the very same person you have your grievance with, given the quotes at the start of the video. As Pathologic 2 is my favorite game, I'm curious what you meant to say when you brought up with the ''customizability of Pathologic 2.'' I didn't understand exactly what you meant with that.
@@thirduncle5366I’m referring to all the different sliders that allows you to customize the difficulty level, and by extension how you the whole game is played. If I remember it correctly there is one slider for walking speed, for example. Since the whole game is about traversing the town, and not having enough time to go everywhere you need to, speeding up walking kind of ruins one of the most important aspects of the game. *However*, I think the game is so clear about how it *wants* you to play, about what is the intended experience, that options like that don’t bother me. Though if someone were to say that the intended experience is “bad”, and that playing around with the sliders is the only way of making it “good”, that would bother me.
Fantastic video! I’ve been thinking about this topic a lot too. It’s why I hate when something is called “dated” or not up to “modern standards.” I feel like we’re missing out on so many cool experiences because certain styles aren’t trendy anymore. While things like tank controls and fixed camera angles aren’t popular anymore, I still think there’s potential to create fresh gameplay experiences with them. I’m glad you brought Rise of Ronin’s traversal feeling mindless. I felt this way about God of War Ragnarok Uncharted style climbing. The giant wall climb in Asgard didn’t impress me because I was just pushing up the whole time like every other climbable surface. And hell, games with inconvenient can become beloved because of that. Shuhei Yoshida thought Demon’s Souls was garbage when he tried it, and now look at FromSoftware. And hell, look at how the original Dragon’s Dogma got a dedicated fanbase over the years. I can’t remember the interview, but I know Hideaki Itsuno said that he predicts not everyone will like DD2 100%, but the people that are really into it will like it 120% or above. I hope those folks are having a nice time
I'm of two minds: - Usually reviewers are the first ones to see a game and set the tone for its discussion. Reviewing games is more time intensive than any other art review, so reviewers will over emphasize problems with what they perceive to be wasting their time. - On the other hand, games among art have both the best ability to waste someone's time, and also the best ability to psychologically manipulate a person into wasting that time (often in the goal of boosting the perceived value of things in game to push microtransaction sales.) So time wasting is both a valid criticism, and also one often pulled out early by tired reviewers behind on quota.
This is on point. I am a musician and have to tell myself often enough to not cater to my audience or listen to the stupid social media algorithms that dictate the modern day success of any pop culture media.
A game that comes to mind from this is The Sinking City. From gameplay perspective it's janky with odd combat and movement. But I thought the game was awesome, and it's probably because of that stuff that made it memorable for me.
One of my favorite open-ish game is still Shenmue, just because the game asks me to actually look at the world and ask people around to find the way forward, instead of overlaying a marker on the screen.
Just recently played Mafia definitive edition. The driving mechanics are “rough” by modern standards, yet they were still so memorable to me. Really feels like you’re trying to manuever a heavy steel box around, which matched perfectly with the prohibition era vehicles at the time. Same feeling is present in how every mission immediately starts after the other with a jumpcut to another location. Not exactly the most “modern” solution, but I felt like it helped immerse me in the main character’s hectic/nonstop lifestyle where you never even get a chance to consider how the jobs you’re doing are getting increasingly immoral. Agree that a game having character should be praised rather than attacked.
I have the Feeling that the MMORPG players behaviour (nothing against them I am also guilty of doing that for a time) is bleeding into the culture as a whole. We are so focused on min-maxing everything, look for guides on how to be most efficent in games. Where are all the chests, where do I find the best loot. How to 100% everything. Together with trying to "gain" the most out of it. Which prohibits us from forming a deeper connection with the game itself. So we tend to just consume the art and not understanding it. A great experiment for that is just asking people what the critic or the broader Topics of a game beyound it's direct story is. "What thing is the driving force behind Kratos development in GoW (2018)" etc. EDIT: Also we are really bad at distinguishing between things that can and should be optimised (like the inventory in skyrim) and those that are more than a superficial layer and do play a more important role in shaping the experienece as a whole (like the inventory management of Resident evil, or a lot of helldivers 2)
This is something I’ve really had to come to terms with in the last 10 years or so, that I don’t only love my favorite games in SPITE of their flaws, but also because of them.
Hang on, how does this view work with cyberpunk 2077? From what I've heard it was a buggy mess, and that's still a problem isn't it? I doubt that really made the experience better for anyone, or more artistic. I think there's a meaningful distinction to be made between "imperfections" that are intentional and ones that aren't, or between ones that suit a game and ones that don't.
This is exactly how I feel when people say they hate old-school turn-based RPGs with random encounters, and celebrate when newer RPGs remove them. Yes, it can be annoying when you keep getting hit with random battles. But that’s the design of the game! It’s not some dated flaw, it’s a feature.
I feel the same way but with dungeons.. "I don't like when dungeons frustrating". Like the whole purpose of a dungeons is to be challenging, it's supposed to be annoying and have minor annoyances that drain your resources..
@@alsaiduq4363 Exactly, half the fun of dungeons in JRPGs is managing your resources to make it through alive, and random encounters add to that stress. It’s like complaining that shooting zombies in Resident Evil is clunky and they don’t give you enough ammo. That’s kinda the point!
The only issue is when you have little recourse around it. The caves in Pokémon are mostly hated. Some resistance is good, as it helps differentiate the areas and you have to prep ahead of time because you don’t know where the exits are or how long until you can exit. But they were often too long, had little variety in Pokémon to catch (not even useful ones until way later), and what items you could use didn’t last long or weren’t readily available (you wouldn’t have much money in the early game). I prefer random encounters because it’s more exciting than just seeing a new critter roam in the wild. But there’s areas where the balance could be adjusted and still serve it’s purpose. Big labyrinths where every few steps could result in a random encounter and there’s no “safe” ground (that isn’t susceptible to attacks, like avoiding grass in the overworld), just ends up being frustrating, and not in an “overcoming a challenge” way. It’s like walking into a wall, and there’s not a lot you can do about it. The bike helps but that’s also later and the caves are still big enough for it to still be a nuisance. The flip side of doing that wrong though is Sword/Shield. Calling it a cave is laughable given it has no branching paths and is so short to walk through (even compared to walking through one of the earlier games without random encounters). You can easily avoid the Pokémon and I think there’s maybe 2 trainers which are the only thing that forced you to stop. It’s effectively a decorative tunnel, as opposed to a part of the environment that functions differently from other areas. Scarlet/Violet was better, but everything is spread so far apart that it doesn’t have that sense of anxiety the original caves had.
stuff like this is why i appreciate someone like yoko taro. his games aren’t afraid to make you do the most tedious things over and over again in order to really get a point across, whether it be replaying the 2nd half of nier 4-5 times to experience the full story or literally every aspect of drakengard.
YES YES YES. These days I really appreciate a game that is a bit thorny and unconventional, precisely because it is that. There's a million other games where every piece of friction has been sanded away to make them feel like every other game. We don't need yet another one. Trying different things is where innovation comes from, and gives games a distinct personality. Having an experience that had its ups and downs is way more engaging and memorable than one that just hums along being inoffensively fine too. People need to be way more willing to meet a game where it's at rather than demanding it give them everything they think they want with minimal inconvenience. Even if that results in something that isn't for you, or even if it "fails" at what it's trying to be, that's valuable and interesting to examine in its own right too. It's not some personal insult to the player if a game tries something that doesn't quite pan out.
Yeah. One of my favorite games I've been playing recently is Beyond The Citadel. It's the sequel to The Citadel, which was a boomer shooter that came out a few years ago, notable for having a mix of unusually realistic guns, simple but powerful movement, and a 90's anime-esque art style. Beyond The Citadel made a major change to how weapons work. Instead of hitting Reload to reload it, you use three different buttons. One to take the magazine out, one to put it in, and one to cock it (pull the slide or charging handle, for example). They also made it so that, if an enemy is taken out by a part of their body below the waist being shot off (legs, possibly hips), they will sometimes play dead, then use a pistol to shoot the player. These mechanical changes drastically changed the feel of the game. The lean mechanic changed from being handy but forgettable, to being almost a necessity, as the cognitive load from managing my guns was too high to dodge bullets and retaliate at the same time. It meant that I could very much be on the defensive in a fight, while still having lots of resources. Also, guns can jam in Beyond The Citadel, and how often they do that is dependent on how damaged they are. This can completely upset the balance of a firefight at any time, putting the player on the defensive. Or forcing the player into a more offensive route, say, using the axe for example. All of this, combined with the art style and sound design, creates an incredibly tense FPS that does not really fit in any genre I know of. It's great. And I've just been playing beta versions, not the full release.
gamemakerstoolkit just made a video on a very similar topic and i have to say im on the side of not impeding players to envoke a feeling when its a gameplay focused game. If youre making hellblade or death stranding, cool, do all your artsy nonsense. But if youre making a rogue like or monster hunter, make it as frictionless as possible to get into the gameplay. You do something in between the 2 and we will probably say the game is poorly designed.
To be honest, while I generally understand and agree with the argument that some degree of flaws or clunk to a game is desirable, I also think it's an issue that is dependent on the context and intent of the game. Like yes there is also the player element sure, but I've had instances of games doing largely the same thing that I have absolutely loved in one case, and fucking loathed in others. And the difference will lie in one or two small decisions that change the feeling entirely, that may not even be a strictly mechanical decision. And Even within the purely mechanical zone, if the game does not adaquetly build towards the intended experience it doesn't really matter what the intent is if the legwork to have it work wasn't done enough. You can say what your goal is all you like, and players WILL tolerate some absolute nonsense, but only if the game actually gets you to buy in. Like I enjoy just wandering through game worlds a lot, but even games that intend you to do it can be more infuriating than not if they don't nail it (and this is said as someone who genuinely loved the sailing in wind waker, a feature so maligned that the remaster added a speed up option to correct what was to me perfectly paced)
No one is asking for perfect games. We're asking that features that have been included in previous releases not be taken out of future ones for mass appeal or to be resold as microtransactions or DLC. I think people want efficiency when the game is too repetitive and dull for its own good. A game as packed with action and content as Fallout 4 actually could have done well without fast travel, same as Elden Ring, but they respect our time, so they gave us fast travel, with some restrictions. I think the fact that Bathesda and Larian both release super fun but glitchy titles is a testament to gamer's indifference to the idea of perfection in gaming. Hell, some gamer;s idea of perfection is having a sexy protagonist like Stellar Blade and ignoring the "woke" agenda. And as for musician's being lauded for shitty antisocial behavior is boomerism. The most successful musical artists are the ones that cater to their audience most successfully (Taylor Swift, Beyonce,) not the overindulgent GG Allin Types who attract an audience of edgy teen masochists. But even by that standard, GG Allin aint no Hidetaka Miyazaki.
I highly respect your writing and effort, but I disagree quite firmly with this. While I understand where you're coming from with the Naplm Death analogy, I think a more accurate analogy would be trying to listen to a Napalm Death album, but in order to do so, you must have two very large bikers shaking you violently while you listen. The thing with games is that in order to enjoy them, you have to actively interact with it, and that's where badly implemented or missing mechanics can make somebody's experience much worse, or even put people off entirely. Take, for example, Alan Wake. I've seen people play the first game and just stop after an hour or so or even the tutorial, because the control scheme for aiming in that game is so weird that people either really don't like the janky torch aiming and would rather use anything else, or even think the game has a bug because there's no reticle when there logically should be. Or consider the Resident Evil series, which has begrudgingly added autosaves and the ability to aim and move at the same time, Or The Evil With 2, which removed the black bars of the original and was immediately the better for it. DD2 tying fast travel to consumables is disgusting due to the microtransactions, but even if tje microtransactions weren't there, it would still be a pretty silly idea, because having fast travel has never stopped people from willingly going oit to explore. If you're fast travelling, generally that's because you either know where you need to go and have been there before, so want to save time tra elling the whole of Skyrim, or you don't want to interact with the open world, and if the reason is the latter, YOU'VE GOT A PROBLEM. Killer 7 being on rails makes it weird, not necessarily bad, and the awful car controls in Deadly Premonition are part of what makes that game's legendary ineptitide compelling. It's great that you like Deadly Premonition, but that driving in any other better game would be a deal breaker for many players because it stands in the way of enjoying an otherwise good game. Some games are rough around the edges, or a product of a time when we hadn't figured out how to do things yet, and a great many of the people who love those games, love them in spite of those flaws, not necessarily because of them. In closing, I'd like to leave you with the following thought: Suicide Squad isn't a bad game because it does everything all the other games do: it's a bad game because it does nothing other games don't do.
I feel so vindicated watching this!!! Dragon’s Dogma 2’s “inconveniences” are part of its design and experience! Too bad the microtransactions make it so people think the lack of fast travel is simply to sell more ferrystones. Excellent video 🙌
It's especially bizarre seeing people ape the talking point that the travel is long to sell more ferrystones, when you can't even buy ferrystones using MTX. Only a single Portcrystal. It's such a bafflingly common talking point when it's complete misinformation; and this is coming from someone who absolutely despises MTX.
There's some middle grounds, though. Like when Tactics Ogre Reborn came out, it changed so many specific things that, while modernizing the work, almost told you a story and it went along. Like how one particular unit type got heavily buffed, so when us long timers went to go recruit it...we wondered where it went from an early area. It seemed to just be removed. But then, coming back on glorious fashion, there was the Zombie Cyclops in a late game dungeon, front and center to let you know he got promoted. Things like the crafting recipes required less grind of random areas (having mostly been relocated to a few floors of a particular dungeon, this was just for the basic stuff) , but also mentally established this feeling that "yeah, these dragon lords down here really were studying something, huh?" One of the big frustrations of original players was when the AI would steal your loot, but rather than just give it to the player (which many players use cheats to do for the big community overhaul mod of that version), you can now kill that unit to steal it back. It's an extra step, but feels so cathartic. They could have dropped the near nonexistent drop rates of the end game gear, but instead now you get a sort of improved version of randomized loot, where their base numbers and additional skills are the same, but instead now can be merged into a vastly improved version, while scattering these versions to way more places. In most games I would prefer the rarity of the original, but in an odd twist, that version was also a remake, the original original of which was this generous, but just never got around to making those items special. They could have just upscaled the graphics, but instead took the time to remake the local province for backgrounds from in game assets. They could have just improved the music, but also added more audio sliders for those moments where you just set the team to AI to gather materials, and only need to check in to see who's still alive. I could go on for hours about the little weird changes they made to improve it, but "modern game bad" discourse often just labels it as a simple port or cash grab, when it's an insanely good revision of an already insane game. (Who makes up to like 6 alternate cutscenes with 4+ variations for a 600 hour + game that adapts to things constantly? Folks legitimately demanded a ground up remake of that.)
Been playing dark souls for the first time and after putting some 60 hours into the game i have been putting it off. There comes a point in the game where after the 10th boss you have fought, walking the 300th time from the bonfire 3 minutes at a time that you just dont feel like its worth it. Maybe ill try pushing on a bit further tho
100% Agree. When I was younger, I played a lot of FFXI, which at the time had a lot of friction in the game world in relation to travel from place to place. As the player level and resources go up, the friction goes down, but it was still usually a bit of a hassle to get somewhere remote. You experience the wonder of strange new vast landscapes. Your first time, you may not have a map, or if you do, its a vague map. Its part of what made the experience memorable. It also cost you a lot of time and the game was extremely grindy.
Dang, this was a wonderful video. It almost feels like a perfect thesis on why games are art. It also reminds me of a janky game that I love, Blue Reflection, because there is nothing else like it. Just looking at my recommendations next to this, I reminded that there are people who do challenge runs, intentionally adding friction in where there was none before. Something like a Pokemon Nuzlocke exists because people don't always want to be able to just get away with having their Pokemon faint. A setup where they get attached, and mourn the losses of their favourites. Saying that reminds me of Twitch Plays Pokemon, which added so much friction that a relatively straightforward game became a days long undertaking, and spawned a temporary, crazy community.
Is it bad to want a fast travel to waypoints you've already been? (ala Sites of Grace in Elden Ring). You've already had to explore the area to get there.
The travel, both in time and space, is part of the game's main loop, it's not just about exploration. Maybe you have misjudged how long the travel will take you and now you have to deal with skeleton and minotaur ambushes on the road, maybe there is a drake you didn't expect, turning what would be routine into an experience. It won't happen every time, and if it did, it wouldn't exactly be a surprise, yeah?
great video! full heartedly agree with everything! *however*... in music, in film, et al, there are the same voices that parrot the same noxious complaints we get about games like you illustrated. the difference is not just that people will tell those to shove it. in videogame world there is also similar backlash. the real difference is amounts of those, both in relation to the other and in absolute terms AAAND art is taken seriously in film, music and other mediums but not in some forms like games. the unspoken perception in society is still that videogames are infantile or purely entertainment. not substantial. the vocal minorities and vocal majorities echoing childish complaints at games that are invalid are a manifestation that perpetuates and justifies the perception of videogames as infantile and until the status quo changes these dynamics will also not change. videogames, along some other cultural things, have just breached from being perceived as a negative passion to have, dorkly, to mainstream recently. it has not even been 1 generation since, much less the 3 generations that are needed to completely change a status quo. once the kids that were born after that change have kids, then we can maybe expect a change.
Thing is fast travel is needed when a world is big enough. After I have seen the sites a few times I want to be able to teleport because its boring passing through the same location 100s of times just for the sake of it. Like the reason the mafia games are boring outside of their stories. There is non stop driving.
@@tyler-xo3rb so if you had an hour long commute in each direction and someone offered you the ability to fast travel back and forth instantly and for free you would deny it?
I don't see the problem in pucking a map location and being driven there, I loved doing that in FFXV, let Ignis drive and enjoy the view. In that game it helps that doing that feeds into the role playing element.
THe problem was mostly the feeling that selling Fast Travel created, is that it was something that the it was taken out of the game to sell for convenience, which can create a feeling that the lack of easy available Fast Travel was mostly a busisness decision to drive people even few ones to buy the Fast Travel microtransactions, so in the end whle games definitely can and should strive to be an artistic medium, when the surrounding discourse is about some mechanics that is bein sold than the it becomes a busisness decision not a artistic one, even if most players experiencing the game dont needed to buy the Fast Travel, just the option being there tarnish Dragons Dogma 2 decision as a artistic one.
I still think making fast travel accessible from the start after Dark Souls 1 was a mistake by Fromsoft. One of my core memories from gaming is being stuck in Blighttown in DS1 with no idea how to get out. That was a terrifying experience and I felt so accomplished when I finally heard that Firelink Shrine music again
Thanks for this. All the games i really enjoy involve some manner of preperation and limited travel options because that fuels the exploration that i enjoy so much. Having thay conflated with bad game deaign is baffling to me. Morrowind, Outward, Kingdom Come, and Dragons Dogma are my jam, and, yeah, they all have their issues, but the exploration isnt one of them. I just got kinda bummed when Steph Sterling called me a bootlicker with bad taste :(
“After all, the world is not a stage-not to me: nor a theatre: nor a show-house of any sort. And art, especially novels, are not little theatres where the reader sits aloft and watches...and sighs, commiserates, condones and smiles. That's what you want a book to be: because it leaves you so safe and superior, with your two-dollar ticket to the show. And that's what my books are not and never will be...Whoever reads me will be in the thick of the scrimmage, and if he doesn't like it if he wants a safe seat in the audience-let him read someone else.” D. H Lawrence
We should always have fast travel option. At the begining of a game it can be fun not using this mechanic but after a while running trough the same map/zones over and over turns tedious no matter how much amazing the open world is.
Actually for DD2, I’d say it WAS designed this way on purpose, both for gameplay reasons, but ALSO because of greed. There are purchasable custom fast-travel points that you can SET down wherever you want, and that costs REAL money. And these are items that in-game, you can play 30+ hours and maybe never get organically without buying them for real cash. It’s super scummy, to design it this way, knowing it’s frustrating to get around, and then SELL an EASIER experience once it’s released. Absolutely anti-consumer, and even predatory.
I got several after around 40 hours of ingame time and haven't really felt the need of placing them down anywhere so far except for maybe the elven village when I was stumbling around there and during my sphinx questing. But once you are done with certain areas, you can simply pick them up again to use them somewhere else. They are designed to be used short term and not placed down permanently, which is why there's also a limit on how many you can place down simultanously to begin with. I honestly fail to see the scummy anti consumer behavior here, when the game already hands you more than enough portcrystals to cover pretty much every big area in the game, not to mention the oxcarts that can be used to reach pretty much every major location. If anyone still feels inclined to waste money on an additional port crystal, then by all means, they absolutely deserve it and should honestly pay even more than that for their stupidity.
There is *a* purchasable fast travel point. One. Out of 10 possible placements, when the game gives you around 6 or 7 one playthrough...and there is about 6 or 7 location worth fast travelling to.
For me, the imperfection of DD2 is in what rewards it has for exploration. I would typically consider rich environmental storytelling and interesting, intricate armor/weapons to be a compelling reward for exploring. Unfortunately what DD2 rewards you with for entering cave #47 is the same enemy types you saw in caves #1-46, for creature parts that serve considerably less interesting purposes. Larian made exploring their games more enjoyable than anything DD2 ever did. There's just not enough meat on the gaming experience to make "discovering" the next cave feel like a compelling experience. THAT is where I think the real complaints about fast travel actually stem from.
Movies are cut all the time for viewer experience. Books have editors for a reason. It's fine for a game to make an experience difficult on purpose, but it's also fine to critizise the game for that so that people who don't want that experience can stay away from it. It's like your friend warning you a movie is very artsy or slow before starting to watch it. Maybe you're not in the mood for that so it's good to know about it.
Music is even more commercialized than games in my opinion. Goal is just to get as many listeners as possible. Sure there is independent musicians where that is not the goal, but that is true for gaming too and not the mainstream. It's the difference between a consumer product and an independent artist making a passion project. For consumer products, consumer input is actually very very helpful. And to say it is not used in other media is just a straight up lie. Why would movies otherwise have test screenings???
Honestly ive been feeling this way for a long time. Whenever someone mentions "quality of life" improvements in a game i sigh. Ppl seem to want a frictionless game that doesnt have anything weird or unusual, things that would have stood out in the ps2 era. Also this obsession we seem to have about getting through things is tied to people not wanting to do stuff like actually explore the game world or do more manual tasks like walking places, which robs the worlds of a more tactile nature that i prefer (should've waited till the end of the video as u pretty much cover a lot of what I say in my comment 😅)
Some of my favorite games of all time also have giant flaws. Both the first and second Dragons Dogma are far from perfect, but shining through the rough patches are absolute gems of game design that make them so unique and thrilling to play and experience. I will never forget my pawn casting their first High Bolide on some poor unsuspecting Saurians and absolutely murdering the entire forest in the crossfire. Nor will I ever forget the moment I parried a Minotaurs charge and my pawn used the opening to send him off a cliff.
Perfectly smooth, optimized games (especially AAA) tend to be unengaging. I'm playing The Forest at the moment and it's very non hand-holdy, rough around the edges experience but damn if it isn't fascinating.
At the end of the day just like in movies, literature or other art/entertainment forms, videogames are sometimes more product than art. I think it's always a spectrum between a "polished easy to consume product" and a work of genuine artistic expression but where a particular game falls depends mostly on the decision of the corporation paying for the creation of the games.
For me this debated often comes down to an audience's willingness (and expectation) to feel confused and challenged by games. When I play games with non-gamers (or those with limited experience) they often really struggle when presented with ambiguity; exclaiming they are "stupid" or "bad at the game". But for me this is just a miscategorisation of the feeling; games are about figuring out systems, combinations of actions and puzzles to overcome things, so that confusion/challenge is a fundamental part of what makes gaming experiences meaningful. Of course, there can be good confusion, bad confusion and totally unintended confusion. But I feel, like you say, a lot of these feelings of friction are intentional to hit home the emotional affect of the experience. That said, it's also very complex when talking about big studio games and QOL. It really depends where you think the game stands on the scale of entertainment product to purely artistic endeavour--a scale which is incredibly subjective, especially to fans. And there's definitely something to be said about AAA game friction/jank vs the same friction/jank in indie or art games--given your expectation as a player and the general player base who would engage with either type of game.
5:00 I think if Napalm Death were charging extra to remove "faults" in their performance, the discussions of their style would look a lot more like how we talk about games. Similarly, people defend From Software's artistic vision because they actually show a commitment to that vision. The audience isn't to blame here. While I accept that develepors may have microtransactions forced on them, designing gameplay to be tedious without microtransactions IS a well known tactic and I am not willing to simply "respect the artists vision" when the art itself does not.
Rocco Botte from Mega64 said something recently that "games becoming more mainstream have done it more a disservice" and he's right. So many big and small games take into consideration what will be viewed by the most people and how to appease them. The mainstream doesn't know what they want and usually has shit bland taste, I've grown to really love the more weird stuff. I do hope though some big developers notice this pattern and try to add a bit more weird and allow their games to have more friction and allow themselves to express themselves more. If a mechanic in a game has an option to put down a controller during gameplay, that's the equivalent of "this could have been an email" and that means it sucks.
For me, DD2 is just a not good example for your point. My experience was marred by repetitiveness-encountering the same enemies in caves and along roads became tedious. Additionally, interactions with ox carts were frustratingly predictable as they were frequently attacked by goblins or other creatures. Worse yet, there were instances where the carts glitched, accelerating to unrealistic speeds. This lack of polish starkly contrasts with the intriguing oddities of Armored Core VI-a title I've thoroughly enjoyed through three complete playthroughs-and the immersive experience of Elden Ring. In my view, DD2 could have benefited from additional development time, which unfortunately Capcom did not provide.
While i totaly agree that no studio should implement a function only because all the competitors do it, i am quite embarrassed by the argument of "art". By definition, art can be anything and thus have mostly been used to cover up dissonant, unpleasant, or just boring things. The "art" argument have been so frequently used as a social statut marker, an inside joke to deter the peasants, i feel like snobbery to use it. Games, books, movies, are more or less interactive systems which convey experience, but at the center of it may be a (thin line of) pleasure, to keep the gamer, reader, viewer in a good mood and able to feel and think about the experience. If a medium deliberately try to bore me, even a purely educationnal one, it as lost it's potential to communicate a feeling and should be prepared to be rejected
I feel like there are plenty of games that get leeway from their audiences. Provided they don't feel like they're trying to carve up your wallet like a Thanksgiving turkey.
This video resonates with me so much. Any time I hear the term "quality of life" thrown around in the gaming sphere, I'm always cautious about what this actually entails. Sometimes this means eschewing genuinely irritating or archaic game mechanics, while other times it means diluting the experience. One example for me is the Metroid Prime remake, which lets players use standard dual-stick aiming and regular FPS controls. Most players are just going to do this because that's what they're used to. But the original Gamecube version has a completely different control setup, one where the left stick lets you walk and turn, the L button lets you strafe and lock on to enemies, holding down the R button lets you free-aim and look above/below you, while the right stick switches between different weapons. On paper it sounds restrictive and archaic, but in practice it remains one of my favourite things about the game. Not just because it's different, but because the game world is designed around this mostly forced perspective, switching between locking on to larger enemies and carefully aiming at swarms of smaller ones, and making investigating a new area a more active and deliberate process than just swinging your vision across everything. It can be an unwieldy control scheme to begin with, but truly accentuates the experience. Simply being handed the "modern" way to play, even as a mere option, is robbing many players of this aspect of the experience that they wouldn't have even considered in the first place. Same goes for the original Dark Souls and its choice to not let you warp between bonfires for a majority of the game, and even when you unlock that ability, it's limited between some very specific locations. The world is designed for you to open up shortcuts, learn the layout of many areas and build up an idea of a fixed, cohesive world. This honestly elevates the game above others in its series for me, and I can much more clearly remember my way around its areas than any of the other FromSoft games. And you could say "well, just don't warp between bonfires in those other games", but the problem is those games aren't designed to be played that way! It'd be like saying I really appreciate not having a map in Souls games as it encourages me to explore and learn the environment, and being told I should play every game without a map if that's the case. GTA would be a nightmare! And yes, Jimquisition, I thoroughly enjoyed and appreciated walking back and forth through the same areas with the same enemy placement. For someone who once lambasted gaming journalists who talked about the death of horror games and said "horror games are just bad because aiming is bad and you're just scrabbling around in the dark looking for keys", your tune has changed a lot when it happens to concern something that you're either not a fan of or don't understand. There's also this discussion in the card game world where people are constantly clamouring for cards that improve their decks to an almost pinpoint state of efficiency, despite risk being an inherent factor in why these games are even fun to begin with. Games are more than just a matter of optimising how well we can do things. Scorn is an amazing example of using inadequacy, obtuseness and roughness to heighten the overall experience. Sometimes, you need to be taken out of your comfort zone. It doesn't always work, and you're not guaranteed to like games such as Killer 7 or Death Stranding. But I'd rather play through a couple games I don't like with some interesting ideas than have everything ground into homogenous, inoffensive sludge.
I can’t relate to your specific examples, but I do in the sense of “diluting the experience”. Discounting the Wii remasters, in Pikmin 3 you had motion control support. This was great as it meant you could move and aim in different directions, and also had much finer control of the cursor, more in-line with an RTS on PC. For a game that’s all about micro-management, and only being able to throw one unit at a time, it’s incredibly useful and intuitive. Because you have this higher degree of precision (and it was in HD so everything was sharper), enemies were given weak points. Now it’s not just “throw a Pikmin at a Bulborb”, but you could throw them at their eyeballs and stun them. It wouldn’t have really worked before. At best you could sneak up on their backside but that’s it. And these weak points were added to a bunch of enemies. It rewards skilled and inquisitive players by aiming for a small target. With Pikmin 4, that’s gone. Now you don’t even aim like in the original games even. It had a really harsh auto lock-on mechanic (which is dumb because there’s a dedicated lock-on button too). In the demo alone, when there’s a ton of little bugs scattering about, the cursor has a hard time figuring out which one I actually want to target. Then they added the dog which can carry _all_ your Pikmin across water (no need for planning ahead or splitting up because of it), but also carry them and have a free “hit”. Because if a boss/enemy hits you while you’re riding it, it just knocks you and your Pikmin off. Whereas if you were just walking around, it’d actually take a chomp star you instead. That was all in the name of “accessibility” to gain a new audience. They didn’t try to make an RTS more appealing, they just diluted it from being an RTS and more like an action game. I wasn’t gonna touch it until someone fixed it with mods. Which is thankfully mostly the case, but stupid that these features couldn’t be part of a dedicated “easy mode” instead. Or even just default option you could toggle off. I don’t even know what the point is. If your goal is to “make it more profitable” by making it less of itself, why even bother? They could easily work on a number of other games that’d sell way better than Pikmin anyway. And sure for the dog you could “choose not to use it” but that’s always a poor excuse. It’s a huge feature the game is designed around. If it has a negative effect or it will be more fun not using it, that’s an indictment. And it’s not even in a “Zelda 3 hearts challenge” type of way. If you can cross bodies of water will all Pikmin because of the dog, then it’s no longer an obstacle. Sure, ice Pikmin help with that too, but that requires dedicating X amount of your crew to keeping it frozen. If your max then is 40, and you want red Pikmin with you because say there’s a fire enemy there (reds are impervious), but the pool requires 20 ice Pikmin to freeze it, that’s an interesting management question you get to choose to solve. Risk only being able to bring half your crew to the benefit of fewer possible Pikmin dying because they’re immune to fire, or bring a whole squad of water Pikmin but risk them getting burned. I know there’s some ledges that require the dog, but how it’s implemented already circumvents one of the games’ biggest hurdles. That doesn’t make it more interesting, that just makes it easier. And it reduces the usefulness of one of your types.
Right, that makes sense. There are no objectively wrong choices in game design. Just choices and consequences. There are things you rarely see in games because the way they affect the game feel doesn't suit most of them. But it does suit some of them. A good designer can pick the less popular option when it suits their game.
I can see where you're coming from but games with time saving microtransactions make me feel like the game has been deliberately made worse in order to encourage the purchase of them. I have trouble seeing how or why else the microtransactions would exist at all. Sorry for the poor English.
100% what this guy is selling. This is why I've been dissapointed in every Final Fantasy they've put out for the better part of two decades but had a grand time with janky stuff like Valkyrie Elysium and am super stoked that they're letting Akitoshi Kawasu make more Saga games. Saga, the series that took one look at "quality of life", laughed, and ran the other way. Give me weird, ambitious and interesting. Give me a direction. Give me vision. The last thing I want is "a lack of friction". Friction is where fun lives! I don't play games to void out and make time pass. I play games because they offer an endless potential of unique experiences you can't get anywhere else. There's nothing unique about rote homogeneity. Btw, just because it's a crazy thing I keep seeing come up; the idea of DD not having fast travel being bad is wild and clearly comes from ignorance. If you could fast travel from any point to any point instantly and for free there's be no game. The traveling is "the level". It'd be like starting a Mario level and then fast traveling to the goalpost skipping the all the gameplay. All you'd be able to do in DD with typical fast travel is pick up quests you can't complete and browse vendors you can't engage with. The game they're imaging being made worse by it's absence doesn't exist. Or at least it's not this one. Also the teleport stones are pretty common (I have a dozen just collecting dust in storage) and Ox Carts are essentially free fast travel between major hubs. People are just complaining without any idea of or context for what they're discussing.
I have the feeling that if Death Stranding was released today it would be considered a "mediocre" game because fast travel in this game is also *very* limited and you only unlock it in chapter 3. And I'm saying this knowing very well that the game was only released 5 years ago.
Completely unrelated point of not having fast travel in DD2, DS is a mediocre game despite its attempt to create an entirely new genre.. One game is intentionally niche, while the other is desperation to prove itself as an art! The only reason it's not criticized as much is because the game has Kojima's name tied to it..
@@TheGameianDark wildly disagree. death stranding is incredibly unique, one of my favorite games ever, and it's very weird to think kojima is "desperate" to do just about anything. his games have been bizarre and ambitious from the start.
@@TheGameianDark Genuine question: What is mediocre in DS? I mean, you can have an opinion that it's "bad", sure, to each their own... But mediocre? Exactly where? Maybe the action 3rd person shooter parts and the "regular white middle aged rough voice dude" protagonist, I guess? Seriously, you can't say a game is mediocre and say it attempted to create an entirely new genre in the same sentence.
@@TheGameianDark Well videogames can be art and also can be enjoyed, beauty is in the eye of the beholder after all. You will either love Death Stranding or you will hate it, it's just that and it's good to have such games because it allows for experimentation in the games industry where some games play it safe and just do the tried and true method of do the same thing over and expect good results. It's good to take risks and even better when they pay off, remember how Dark Souls started off? That was not something for everyone and now look where we are, we have tons of games with the "Souls-like" genre and it's just going to keep on going.
This is a message that really needs to get out. I think a lot of the most potent and strongest games were the ones that just felt so strange to behold. Often their weird contrivances actually keep me in the loop, one way or another. Its some quirk, some unknown, or some strange quality, it keeps the game and pace flowing and mixed with your mind, and really compels you to play it. Now turn instead to "streamlined games", well guess what? Some of them just lose me because of their clutter, and other times traits they believe were focus tested for me to love are what send me away. Borderlands sunk a small addiction in me, but when I was over it, I was just finished with its entire gimmick. I was so fed up with blasting apart a cool battle scene, only to spend minutes at a time picking through the field and comparing data, and numbers, and discard the stupid guns telling me it was a superior assault rifle with an 8-mag count. The industry now says to RPG everything, put looting mechanics all over, but that drives me away and makes the experience a total slog, more so than any such weird setup with a strange and exotic walk & on-rail system, or one game that uniquely employs sudden tank controls, etc. When the FPS genre had a small boom in platforming games, I felt almost liberated to tell all the whiners "See! It can be fun!", only to see those games intensify into cool arcade slashers, and neat tricks. It doesn't mean some before it weren't flawed, but it was in those flaws they were finding and working to something or inspiring the future that ended in something amazing. When I see a game like Dragon's Dogma 1 or 2, the fans aren't just telling you the game is totally perfect. Nobody is, or means it that way. We're all laughing and quoting dumb lines that are over-repeated, discussing the odd quirks, that one time the game completely screwed you over, or how it let you hire a strange online hairy midget dude with a high-pitched female's voice. But we're laughing with the journey, finding and solving complex treasures under the surface, and baffled to find the most obscure and odd little details hidden around or reacted to by an unconventional design system. When we're not busy throwing pigs around, we're discussing some niche philosophies and strange sights we came across, and then celebrating not only that there was a sequel, but the devs IMPROVED goofy animal catching games. Sure it sucks with absolute rage that they lock us to one save in an RPG of all genres, but genuine hard flaws and fun-blockers aside, we still power through because of how awesome the other content is, and the layers and silly systems that make it as fun as it can be weird. When I got the sequel, made camp for the first time, and was hit with a real filmed video of someone cooking steak in high detail, I burst out laughing and just said "Of course DD would do this." It was just amusing, and so much more memorable than some other game doing a cooking buff on any sense of a "normal way". And the Dragons Plague? OMG, its amazing to watch this turn into one big meta game of paranoia, and misinformation, as the conclusions seem to shift around, and tips include killing your in-game pals over some pretty average quirks, almost making it a crazy social game that does have big consequences if you lose the warnings. It has me just fascinated, and immersed, once even booting up the game and playing more of it by mistake of just "let me check something out" moment going on. This is what art made out of passion does. Its strange, its rough, its distinct, and it calls to the right person to have a far better experience than the tens of people all sharing a solid okay time with a factory-produced brand formula result.
I won't lie, I actually get a lot of enjoyment from janky games. In fact, during sales I'll often look for these games just so I can experience them. Akiba's Trip, Deadly Premonition, the original Dragon's Dogma, and both Oceanhorn games are some of my favorites. They have obvious flaws, but it's those flaws combined with the good each of them has that make them a lot more memorable than a lot of triple A games. Or heck, even some double A games like the Neptunia and Senran Kagura series are two I've enjoyed over the years because of the passion on display.
I have a perfect example. GTA 4. The ''flaws'' of that game is what makes the replay-ability so strong. There are multiple stupid ways that you can screw up a mission, killing an important npc, the easy cheat code access, the sometimes terrible driving mechanics making driving missions more challenging, yet FUN! Don't get me started on how the freedom you have. Everything is so straight and linear in GTA 5 and I just know that GTA 6 will be the same.
One of my biggest regrets is picking up Killer7 in Blockbuster because i thought it looked cool, asking the guy behind the counter if it was any good. His review was less than glowing and i put it back on the shelf.
This is what I like to call, “lawnmower talk”. Normally, when you talk about art, you talk about how it made you feel, or what it meant to you, or how it spoke to you… With video games, the conversation is often: how does it look, how does run, how does it handle? Which is pretty much what you would say about a piece of luxury machinery, like one of those rideable lawn mowers.
Obviously, video games are a very technical form of art, so that kind of technical talk is important. But when it becomes the only thing that matters, that’s when the conversation transforms into “lawn mower talk”, at least in my opinion.
We are the only industry that treats our art this way. Retro games are also a victim of this as well. Something like Silent Hill 2 is seen as needing to be “remade” even though all of its artistic choices were perfect and still are today. It’s gameplay design is seen as an outdated relic and not something that was deliberately designed to make you feel a certain way.
As an industry, we have gotten used to defending “games as art” and calling them art. But we still don’t really treat them as such, at least not entirely. Certain qualities (usually non-interactive components) are lauded for being artistic, but the actual gameplay (the most important part) is not always seen as a form of artistic expression.
thats because the totality of video game making is overall MUCH LARGER than the totality of most other mediums, so there is a lot more to talk about in terms of its “art”.
i.e. u cant say a book is good solely based on the cover art. so the art here is maybe a crucial 10% of importance
in a movie, the sfx(practical and cgi) are nearly 60-90% of the focus and hard to ignore.
for games the art is 100% important, what changes is the style etc.
or music. the song is 100% of what really matters where as in a game, its like 20% of importance but still CRUCIAL to its total reception.
video games are also a Program meaning its operational capacity does matter. imagine watching a movie in theaters that buffers, freezes, etc due to any reason. no bueno.
all of this matters.
imo gameplay is the DEFINING characteristic for a good game, something modern games are severly lacking in despite the visual and audio polish.
dragons dogma is NOT (from what ive seen) a noteworthy good example of a “good” game. in fact its proof of how “bad” the current generation is.
id much rather play a creative game with complete and fun mechanics that motivate me to play then anything that looks great but is absolutely monotonous in exectuion
@@enishi4ty5 True, and I definitely agree with your opening and closing statements. I haven’t play DD2, but I plan to. But yeah, with video games, programming is both an operational aspect (as you said) but it is also an artistic aspect. How gameplay functions is very much an artistic statement/experience. I don’t think many people recognize that yet. I’m sure more people will in time since in the future we will have more games with more creative mechanics that push the boundaries of gameplay as both a fun and artistic experience.
@@seangdovic4967 u feel me fam! i hope we get back to games being so insanely creative/fun we don’t want to put them down. the current “mmo-lite grindfest” aka live service style isn’t inherently bad but it’s such a lazy way to release something that “looks polished” but is in fact lacking its core feature: a satisfying gaming experience (start to finish)..
imo gaming creatively peaked at like Skyrim. all the gems like absolver, horizon etc faded into oblivion chasing a trend hopefully it gets better 🙏🏾
someone named bob bobson had commented a good reply (but its not showing up in my app) basically saying they can tell i didnt play and the games method of engaging with player through traversal is actually good.
since i havent played DD2 and probably wont unless it hits a sale, i wont argue that. my main point was to say “fast travel” shouldnt be missed in your game.
theres a fair point that modern gamers are spoiled by FT being in most games and so expecting it in DD2 and not getting it is an unfair strike for a game that had its own plans from the start. if it is well executed i have no complaints.
from a designer AND consumer stance, i believe games without fast travel are likely better prepared for an immersive experience. the devs WANT you to stumble upon places that aren’t OBVIOUSLY highlighted or experience the world on your own terms(within established rules and mechanics)
w/o playing DD2, my only surface level complaint is if there is FT i shouldn’t have to pay real world money to use it, especially if traversal and exploration are so monotonous id rather fast travel than explore.
i also FIRMLY believe games should naturally cater to the lowest expected casual player and build UP from there. too many games are jumping to endgame difficulty in a dumb attempt to stay ahead of modern gamers which is killing the actual fun for 87% of people who don’t speed run insane difficulty for shiny drops for specific loadouts to hit specific benchmarks. Monster hunter usually starts u off gathering flowers before you slay the amaterasu sky eating dragon or whatever.
IF DD2 is in fact good i think people will notice. not just the hardcore or niche group who enjoy particular aspects. if the main draw to video games (gameplay, moving the player around the world) is a common complaint then its not a good sign tho..
@@enishi4ty5 A friend of mine played it and said he was always running into new stuff when making his way from one point to the next. So, I think they wanted the player to experience all of the dynamic encounters/systems which is why they don’t have it.
Naturally, there will be times when a game needs fast travel. But I feel that most of the time there is a clear difference when a flaw exists intentionally versus when it’s just a sloppy oversight. Too often I see people look at intentional design choices and call them “flaws”. Like, it isn’t a flaw when it makes the experience more engaging.
It's precisely because of all the hostile and unintuitive features of Dragons Dogma that I had an experience that I'll probably still be thinking fondly about many years from now.
Long winded personal anecdote below.
Thanks to the long travel time between settlements, coupled with the steep price to rest at inns (I didn't understand the value of camping in the early game), I arrived at the capital half dead, broke, and severely undergeared.
I decided to look around the capital for quests to make some money, making sure to avoid agreeing to any quest that would require a lot of travel time or danger.
Suddenly, one of the random NPCs I talk to mentions that a guy I met a while back was just sent on a suicide mission and "won't survive the night". I don't get a quest marker or anything, but the game has already conditioned me to take its NPC dialogue seriously.
As a player, it's unclear to me whether the timer starts now or when I pick up the quest later, but its a risk I'm unwilling to take. So I track down the guy's wife, and ask her about it.
I get a quest, a map marker, and a confirmation that I am indeed on a timer.
I check the map, the guy's further out than I've ever had to walk before, in completely uncharted territory.
It's like 5pm in game, and for all I know I only have until morning, so I have neither the time nor money to gear myself up OR recover my health, which is currently capped at about 40% until I rest. The game is not going to wait for me to be prepared.
So I just start SPRINTING blind and half dead into the wilderness after this guy. I pick up pawns on the road along the way, hoping they'll at least give me a fighting chance. One of them says she knows the way because her Master has already done the quest, so I ask her to lead and now I'm sprinting after her. We run past goblin ambushes, bandit camps, a charging minotaur, everything, as it slowly gets darker and darker.
Eventually, it's the middle of the night and it's pitch black. I can see on the map I'm only like a 5 minute walk away, but I can't see in front of my face, we're getting constantly turned around and ambushed by undead, and the pawn I picked up is too busy fighting them off to guide me through the dark.
I painstakingly drag myself over to the quest objective, just in time to see the guy I was sent to save being slapped around by a giant monster I can barely make out in the darkness.
I do my best but as expected it's completely beyond my abilities right now.
My pawns die, I get slapped around for 10 minutes, and its all I can do to simply scare the thing off. But it's too late, the guy I was sent to save was killed in the battle. I even get a quest failed notification.
Feeling defeated, out of desperation I decide to burn the one Wakestone I had to revive him and see if that somehow 'unfails' the quest.
To my shock, it actually does. The quest notification reappears, completes itself, saying I saved him, the guy even verbally comments on being brought back to life. I limp back to the capital in the morning, and the wife showers me with way more gold than I've ever seen and a set of shiny new fighter equipment that is still better than pretty much anything I've found 40 hours in. I went from half-dead and destitute to thriving, purely because I met the game on its own terms, and treated a life or death situation like an actual life or death situation.
Now, I know I probably made a lot of dumb assumptions during that quest, like I probably would've been okay if I had just waited to talk to the wife, it's possible the guy wouldn't have literally died by morning, etc, but that's the point! If the game had been more clear about its systems, I wouldn't have had to act on those assumptions.
If the game had reliable fast travel, if it was willing to wait for me to do that quest when I was actually ready for it, if the game didn't have a super punishing economy, if you didn't lose max health until you rest, if the game wasn't willing to throw completely unwinnable challenges at you, if the game wasn't willing to let you completely mess things up and get people killed, then this experience would never have happened for me. It would've just been a marker on the map that I got around to like 20 hours later, early in the morning, well equipped and way stronger. I would've kicked the thing's ass and fast traveled home. A smooth, efficient experience, but completely unmemorable, just another sidequest to tick off my list.
people like you is why games keep getting worse
That's personal long winded summary of events might have convinced me to check it out. So, never discount the possibility of personal experience, I guess,
LDsprite..
I really hope that's isn't your real name, maybe there was a side quest, in the morning, where you picked that up..
The problem seem to be on how gamers over the last few decades ended up thinking of videogames as goal/objective oriented, instead of the experience of playing oriented, players are now focused on the goal, instead of the process leading to it, gameplay in their eyes become an obstacle to to their goal, it is probably a consequence of how gamers started to see games more like a competition than just a game, there is nothing wrong with videogames wasting your time with gameplay experiences...because that's what games and the act of playing is...
It’s not just video games, but rather the economic circumstances of the 90s and on led to us Millenials being taught very thoroughly that wasting time is a terrible thing, and that only through constant productivity can we achieve success. We carried that into our adulthood, and now struggle to take time to just waste time because of the emphasis on productivity drilled into us as kids.
@@dominiccastsI mean there are matters in life that do infact require productivity and as much as videogames are a great time waste they are in fact not the most useful thing you can be doing
@@addex1236 Yes, and taking the attitude that everything must be productive into video games makes no sense for that exact reason. Video games are not productive or useful, but doing productive or useful things is not the only thing to do in life, we need to rest and shift mental gears as well. Trying to play video games productively is like working during a vacation.
"videogames as goal/objective oriented"
It was always like that. You are not as smart as you think. Gaymers are pathetic gambling addicts.
Arguably that applies more to old school gamers than it does to gaming today. Going right back to the arcade days of highscores, and then early console games and hardcore PC sims and RTS games that dominated for a long time where the challenge was the whole point.
Story, world building and lore was pretty limited outside of RPGs. It's only since the early 2000s really that we've come to expect almost every game to have a fleshed out world and well written story experience for the player to immerse himself into.
This is how I feel about the "QoL" improvements in the newer Monster Hunter games. I started with Monster Hunter World, but in going back and playing the older games, I find I really enjoy a lot of the friction that World and Rise removed. I like hot and cold drinks, I like inventory limits, I like not being able to warp back to camp, etc.
Hopefully Wilds is able to bring back some of that friction. I noticed in the trailer that your raptor ride thingy is carrying another weapon in it's side holster.
Perhaps a hint to having no instant camp teleport.
I made a similar journey and am more mixed - some of that friction was good and some of it needed to go. I think they can stand to bring a little bit back but to me World was close to a sweet spot
Wilds is at least bringing back hot/cold drinks are it looks like no more warping to camp, you have to set up a pop up camp that can get destroyed by monsters.
Seems like friction is back in some capacity
I think the problem with both audience demanding less friction in games and the companies who comply to them are to blame for *a lot* of modern releases just not having much staying power past its launch year (or month), regardless of playtime and content
I remember once Mark Brown came to this conclusion when comparing Far Cry 2 to Far Cry 4 and its subsequent entries: the latter are bombastic adventure to breeze through like in an action movie, and the former being this brutal endurance experience you are unlikely to forget, like an emotional scar
Far Cry 2 will always be an amazing experience and the atmosphere when playing was absolutely stunning. Far Cry 3 was amazing for doing its own thing while combining elements from the first 2 Far cry games. Everything else after has been copying Far cry 3's success with each entry somehow getting worse.
We need to accept that:
1) Not all games are for everyone and
2) You don't need to play every game out there
and those things are fine
What really struck me with this video is that you frequently used the word "optimized" as opposed to "improved." Optimization in this context sounds like the act of trying to better something in a very formulaic and almost sanitizing way, a method of making games to a very calculated extent. But that's not how art works. Contrast that with improvement, which can mean any number of things to make something subjectively better, even if it sounds strange or even contradictory on paper. That was a great choice of words that resonated with me big time. And yes, I'm still of the mindset that Deadly Premonition was a game that openly changed how games criticism could and should be approached, so it's nice to hear it brought up here. Awesome work.
totally agree, and I will also add that even though "optimization" pursues making the experience smoother, in some cases it doesn't really entail an "improvement" to the experience
btw, I really like your videos, nice to see you here!
SuperBunnyhop once said “some of the most interesting games are the most flawed” in reference to The Witcher 1 - it’s an amazing experience you won’t get anywhere else, but it’s also far from perfect.
Yoko Taro has definitely mastered this approach!
Don't forget about vampire masquerade bloodlines, a game that was really bugged but yet it's gained a cult following over the years despite it being broken but yet people still enjoy it and I can see why, it's a pretty fun game.
The lost art of the GOATed 6/10 game
@@qaztim11 Pathologic, for sure. :D
For me, the epitome of this kind of game is the original Pathologic. Best 6/10 out there, and one of my favorite games.
Seeing people saying "I have a job and kids, I don't have time for games without fast travel" about dragon's dogma 2 makes me a bit sad.
In a way we got there because of the last 15 years of open world games that set up this expectation, but travelling in dragon's dogma IS the game. If you put unlimited fast travel there's barely anything remaining to the experience.
They made travelling engaging, you have to make important choices, think about your resources and if you want to spend your limited ferrystones for each travel. I'm 80 hours in and I'm still enjoying travelling around.
I'm honestly amazed capcom greenlit a high budget game so niche. It's very clearly not for everyone, but if it's for you, it's great.
Many of those who say that pour hundreds of hours into other RPG's.
@@louisgworldDoubt it, as a father my gaming is typically 2-8 hours a week, so even 50 hours (which used to play in a month easy!) no is a quarter year commitment...
I played Death Stranding for ~20 hours, because the travel was fun, but than it became to slow/repetitive and I moved on
engagement ≠ fun and if most people dont find the traversal in a video game fun that’s enough evidence for me.
most open world games DON’T need fast travel and they’re worse off for having it if we’re being honest. for reference: gun to my head i do not know if skyrim has fast travel. f76 has it and it’s mostly useful to get back to my base or join times events but otherwise bethesda games (up to 76) had enough i would’ve never asked for fast travel. gta 5 doesn’t need it either. making fast travel a grind is the same as selling me oxygen
I got a kid and a job and mostly play games without fast travel.
I'm not trying to play through a game every week or month though. Can't wait for Outward 2!
@@bnjkf9u3I think there are people with legitimate time constraints like yourself of course, but the other poster is right, a lot of people who bitch about inconvenience and a lack of time really just mean a lack of time for anything other than their main games that they will sink hundreds if not thousands of hours into. It just feels more socially acceptable to blame it on kids or a busy life than sinking another hundred hours into League of Legends or whatever.
If you see this crap on Steam forums for instance, seeing how much time someone actually has for games is often just a couple clicks away.
A game for everybody is a game for nobody. -Arrowhead Games
Unless your name is Grand Theft Auto (for the very large majority of gamers)
@@misterhoobomaster so, you agree that it's not for everyone? Very large majority is not everyone.
Majority of AAA games have been optimized to make the player feel productive above all else. It's all about achievement and consuming as much content as possible, rather than providing a experience
Plus anti frustration features
Palworld has quicktravel, but you still have to hoof it to the nearest eagle statue, and they're kilometers apart. So far so standard. But the feeling you get when you finally catch your first flying mount and can soar over terrain like it's nothing is amazing, and it wouldn't work if you hadn't spent hours walking everywhere on foot before that point. You get an appreciation for how large the world is, and when you're able to fly around you can FEEL how much time and effort you're saving. (And if you're careless your bird can get knocked out stranding you in rough terrain, which can also give you a memorable experience - found that out first-hand)
I only have one thing to say: THANK YOU FOR THIS! Art is not a product that needs to "function", it's a form of human expression that simply wants to be experienced. And sometimes friction is a vital part of that experience. Like Patrick Boivin said in a recent episode of his podcast "Castle Superbeast", talking about Dragons Dogma 2: Friction makes sparks fly.
Checked to see if anyone had quoted Pat yet in here and glad I did. He really nailed it with that one.
"Art is not a product that needs to "function", it's a form of human expression that simply wants to be experienced."
Cool but if my experience is shit i will call it shit... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Art still needs to function and is a product in many many cases. I get what you're saying. Video games absolutely need to function and they are absolutely a product though. The art direction, controls, challenges etc all need to work together to deliver a good experience to most of the intended audience who are paying for these games. I appreciate art, I mean look at my username , but even in art if there was no type of standard or function we wouldn't have art teachers. If someone showed me a figure drawing they did I can tell if they are a beginner because the mistakes don't look intended and don't function for the experience he or she aimed to visually create
I would argue that 'functioning' is the single most important thing a videogame could do. Can't experience art if the game doesn't even work.
@@Exist2Inspire87 That's fine. You're not guaraneed anything with art. Sometimes it won't work for you. You just have to decide if you mostly want products or you want art.
This video speaks so deeply to my soul, the exact perspective I advocate for in my position at a major game publication, and an increasing need to help with media literacy in a medium that has yet to see its peak. This is literally a topic I wanted to do for The Kurt Locker, so THANK YOU for being on the same page.
YOU ARE THE BEST
@@WritingOnGames YOU ARE THE WORST, because of people like you resources that could be used in boss fights and game mechanics are wasted on pointless collectible hunts in a walking simulator, I SINCERELY HATE YOU and what you people have done to games.
I'm convinced the biggest problem with the Horizon franchise is that it isn't flawed enough. It's so smooth and polished that it's impossible to remember any detail.
I completely agree!
Yup and it's boring, it's an experience you will forget in a month
You can't have soul without jank.
I think its flaws are pretty visible. Non compelling dialogue and voice performances from NPC's, copy and paste Ubisoft world design, cluttered looting system. Not sure making the game jankier would really fix it. But if they had been more ambitious and tried new things, there probably would be a lot more jank, so in that sense maybe you're right
It's so perfect you don't even need to use a mini map.
The art comparison is valid in general, but in DD2 specifically, the microtransactions exist in tandem with the "time wasting" design, which, intentionally or not, does prey upon players with vulnerabilities in a similar way that gambling does.
Capcom's choosing to place microtransactions to circumvent the frustrations the developers crafted cheapens the artistic merit of the game. Not to a dire degree, but to a noticable one.
Ultimately, these frustrations end up mountains instead of mole hills only if you don't enjoy the core experience or are not being enticed by a more meta experience (such as a mystery to solve, an intriguing plot, or characters to enjoy the company of). If someone enjoys the experience, it's easier to overlook quirks and oddities. An example i think of us Fallout: New Vegas pre-order dlc (later bundled into the ultimate edition). It ruins the difficulty curve of the early game and cheapens the artistic merit of the developers, but i don't mind it because combat challenge isn't one of the most compelling experiences of FNV. It also helps that i can choose to just drop them on the ground in Doc Mitchell's house if i want that challenge.
I'll admit I didn't like the fast travel thing till I realized 1. there's ox carts 2. the world is fun to explore (just remember a camping kit) the game gives me Elden Ring levels of "world I can get lost in for a bit". Great video.
I love Morrowind in all its weirdness and "datedness". I think it's cool that your quest log is your character's journal and you needs to flip through the pages chronologically to find directions some yokel gave you because you don't have magical GPS embedded into your brain. I like that getting around takes more than picking a spot on a menu and teleporting there. I even like the janky real time/d&d hybrid combat.
People hate "jank" these days, but many of the best experiences out there are at least a little janky. If it goes down too smooth how will you know it was even there at all?
As a friend of mine said while we were playing EDF and having a blast:
"The best games are all at least a little bit shitty."
The older you get the more you appreciate the 7/10 titles, that fit your niche instead of the polished 10/10 masterpiece for the masses.
Dragon's Dogma 2 is the closest modern game to that Morrowind experience. Other than MAYBE Outward or Enshrouded? It has pinned quest markers on the map sometimes, sure, but most times you have to actually investigate and explore to get anywhere.
Morrowind is still the best open world game ever made.
I don't think calling the quest menu in Morrowind "jank" is accurate. I'd say it is like that because the designers made it so deliberately. People need to think a bit more before they say that a certain feature is "jank" or "dated" or that the game could use some more QoL features. And I don't mean that as an attack to your original post.
But don't get me wrong, a lot of beloved older games have design issues, but the issues aren't necessarily the ways in which they are different from modern games.
This video nailed what I've been frustrated by. Absolutely zero consideration went into asking why the creators may have made a given choice, people instantly go "It's a flaw, the developers did a bad job, and should patch this".
If my expectations are the requirements, and deviating from them is a failure, then I will never appreciate anything new again. It's a creative dead end to approach art this way!
The problem is many creators make choices that add friction not for art but for profit. I can only think how much other art would be damaged if you could make more money by wasting people's time. I think some games are nearly not art but a product. Just think about how the design of games were affected in the arcade days to make you spend more!
@@MADCATMK3103 this is true but it has absolutely no relevance to the game being discussed now. also this was a thing in writing in the past, a lot of the time writers ended up paid by the word and this is one of the primary reasons very old books were so incredibly long and in some cases they were much longer than they needed to be
I think this is a case where this is reasonble, because they literaly sell easier fast travel
@@MADCATMK3103sure but adding friction, either for art or for profit, has a chance to backfire massively. Look at The Last Guardian, for example. The friction in that game is purposeful. That doesn’t stop it from sucking ass.
Oh I agree it can backfire! The problem is when it's for profit it will be some level of hostile for the player. I will give an example of a game being better for art, it would be Dark Souls. The one I find fascinating is the early Armored Core games. They are a pain but that's the point. They lose friction as the series progresses.@@lman318
Just from the title I will say
Number one reason why I love death Stranding flaws and all I literally could not imagine it any other way
Infact I love it BECAUSE of it's uniquqe flaws
To paraphrase RUclipsr Bricky:
*"Alan Wake is proof that people would rather play a unique 6/10 game than a boring 9/10"*
I wonder if the Dragon's Dogma 2 discussion would have played out differently had it not been for the microtransaction controversy. Capcom assigned a numerical dollar value to traversal, so anyone running across the map won't be considering the art and experience; they'll be thinking of the cost.
I wonder when people like you will stop peddling nonense they heard about a game they obviously havent played. I guess it's too hard to do research for yourselves. There is NO mtx involving fast travel for God's sake. There are two ways to fast travel in this game, through FERRYSTONES and OXCARTS. None of which you can buy.
You can make a ONE TIME purchase to buy a PORTCRYSTAL (10 of them in game and again you can only buy One) which is a fast travel marker you manually place and use FERRYSTONES to fast travel too and that's it. Yall are so guillable that's insane
Most people would still probably still say the same things about it, good or bad since the first game ended up being a cult classic to some and a messy jank to others, I personally vibed with DDDA and now DD2 even though I've completed it and I'm just chilling on NG+ at the moment. It's not a perfect game by any means and it has its flaws, but I thoroughly enjoyed my time with it.
Something people are ignoring is that it is not fast travel they're selling. The microtransaction is a single fast travel point item that you have to decide where to place by going there yourself. You can't buy more than 1 portcrystal with real money and you are only allowed to have a maximum of 10 placed on the map. This also doesn't include that a portcrystal by itself is worthless, you need to use a ferrystone to actually fast travel which are pretty expensive (10k gold).
@@Lahdee You can find about close to 5 port crystals in-game and the sphinx can dupe one of them. Ferrystone is okay but it's the journey to get to said destination which makes it worthwhile.
@@ImproperStandby I know I'm just explaining that what they are selling is not "fast travel" as some people seem to think
Recently, I've been playing GTA III for the first time. Never touched a GTA game, and a friend of mine has always recommended them. It is an old, janky piece of shit sometimes. I found a payphone where the game told me to steal a fast car and enter a race, which I proceeded to bash my head against for about an hour because the driving controls are so hard to parse.
I found myself in love with how unapproachable and alien it often feels. That same friend told me there were a bunch of cheat codes to try, so I summoned myself a tank, turned on anti-gravity, and just started fucking around for a few hours. Turned on the code where citizens start beating the shit out of each other on the streets. I have no clue what's going on half the time, other than people asking me to steal ice cream trucks and plant car bombs, or go talk to some dude named Luigi.
Yet, it is one of the most memorable experiences I've had with a game in a long time because it is absolutely unlike anything else I have ever played. No matter what's going on, I'm having a wonderful time, even if I walk into a gunfight and die in five seconds, or my cars explode after ten light grazes against a wall. There's just something about it that draws me in to play more. I'm almost always laughing along with how absurd it is.
I'm sure that as I progress through the franchise, it will become more and more approachable. Maybe that will even make it more fun. But there's an absurdist comedy to how rough GTA III feels which I wonder about losing as I approach more recent entries. A "modern" gamer would have looked at my play session and give me strange looks for going back.
I think we might all enjoy this medium more if we learned to laugh along with it.
Killer7 seen you have my like
Exactly
Well, I totally agree with this, I also look at a game like cyberpunk 2077 and think wow it’s just such a better game now because it’s so much smoother. So it kind of depends on the game a bit.
i think QoL things are just relevant based on whether they aid or hinder the intended experience
There's a false equivalency happening here wherein the assumption is that folks who are against the monetization of fast travel are entirely the same folks who think it should be a standard. The game could have just not ever had fast travel at all if that was the desired outcome of the developers in the first place. I wouldn't mind that. I didn't mind having to work toward it in the Souls games. I don't mind games that don't have it outright. But that doesn't mean I can't find this monetization scheme as something I don't ever want to support. I'd rather suffer through a game that for the sake of its intended design had me trudging through its world and slapping me across the face until I git gud. But to do that and also dangle a "QOL" feature in my face for added cost to an already full priced game? It's an insult.
they didn't do that. you are allowed to buy exactly 1 portcrystal ever, which allows you to have exactly 1 extra destination point, which is a really small thing when you'll have 7 of them late in a playthrough and i think you can have 10 or more in new game plus but could be wrong about that. you literally aren't having a feature dangled in your face. i get that you're very angry but when you post something based on completely false information, all you do is waste everyone's time
@@MalkuthSephira I love this "I get that you're very angry" line. I'm not angry. I saw a game I thought was interesting. Then I saw an incredibly long DLC list full of grind skips, and a fast travel item. That's gross. It was gross for games before this, and it's gross now. So any interest in getting it disappeared for me. Yes, I'm aware they're all things you can get in the game. But is that an excuse for the monetization practice? No. It is not. It has never been. Maybe take a look at what the actual concerns people have about a game of this price and what precedent this sets for the rest of AAA instead of psychoanalyzing someone based on a RUclips comment and pretending their differing stance is invalid just because you disagree. Because dying on the hill of making excuses for gross DLC practices is an even bigger waste of time.
@@MalkuthSephiraMicrotransactions make art worse, period.
"There's a false equivalency happening here wherein the assumption is that folks who are against the monetization of fast travel are entirely the same folks who think it should be a standard."
Literally nobody said that. I'm not sure why you're putting words in people's mouths.
@@aolson1111 We're really gonna pretend like our guy Hamish here wasn't, three minutes into this very same video, putting words in the mouths of people buying the MTX? Like he wasn't making assumptions about people who might have entirely valid criticisms of this game? He clarifies in the in-video text that he's not talking about accessibility concerns, but I think he misses the point that some of the negative views towards DD2 are not because of its artistic levels of jank, but its monetization of the very same convenience mechanics that he's criticizing.
Yeah having completed DD2 the discourse surrounding it makes me really, really irritated. It has me wondering if the MTX discourse hasn't kind of poisoned people towards DD2 when I hadn't spent a cent on its MTX. I didn't need to; they are completely superfluous and, honestly, the game is better off if you never look ONCE at the storefront.
The friction is the point. The rough edges are the point. The pain points are the compelling part. Discourse surrounding games really does feel a lot like discussing software and not about discussing art, and it makes talking about DD2 absolutely maddening to me, because the fact that DD2 pushes back so often and so frequently is what makes it so compelling to me! I LOVE the fact that its systems and world constantly push back against me! I love the fact that i can't trust the ox carts, that ferrystones are expensive IN-GAME, that portcrystals must be placed BY YOU, and that you MUST REST in order to recover after a grueling fight. Going uphill makes stamina recover slower. Stairs are tiring! You have to properly pace your running...you know...like in real life. Jogging IRL isn't a constant sprint you have to pace yourself; save the sprint for when it's most important. (That said doing a Ravenous Lunge and doing a paintrain across the map at max speed is the funniest thing ever and I hope it stays like this, but I digress)
It has me approaching traveling in the game like I would a roadtrip; Oh, I'm here! I might as well do a few quests while I'm in town. It makes the world feel so much larger when you can truly internalize the distance and in-game time it took to two locations. I found myself memorizing paths, recognizing landmarks.
Honestly the fact that Dragon's Dogma 2 exists with this intentional pushback and this kind of budget should viewed as a minor miracle. The fact that it was made at all and it COMMITTED to its bit (including its frankly bonkers decision surrounding the endgame) makes me kind of love it. Not in spite of its warts and complications but BECAUSE of it. Turns out, art that bites back kinda rules!
There is another element about the DD2 discourse that does trouble me though and it's this impression that it's somehow not intentional, that DD2 just stumbled into being full of friction and it's like...Itsuno has been in the industry since the 90s. The staff are all Capcom vets. Is it really that much of a stretch to think that it's intentional? There's a bizarre unwillingness to engage with video games in good faith; it's never intentional friction, oh clearly they're just incompetent. Or worse, it's clearly cynical. It's like this urge to condescend and grouse at designers for not fitting the ideals of players 1:1.
Honestly I want more games like DD2*. I know it won't happen because that's kind of the nature of big budget art in our capitalist hellscape but the fact that it exists in 2024 makes me unbelievably happy.
*without the cash shop but tbh it's capcom, they've been doing this tipjar shit since for years now.
Friction in design is one thing, but the performance issues are just painful to the eye
@@joeykeilholz925 you're completely correct lmao. THAT part of DD2 sucks ass. Like I don't think Vernworth running like shit is part of the design document of Dragon's Dogma 2.
People have been primed by the industry to see travel between points as friction that pushes you to buy MTX to skip needless tedium, as seen with Ubisoft and mobile games. Capcom shot themselves in the foot by setting DD2 up in the same way by implementing the MTX storefront, which is why I have little empathy for them in this situation. The game itself is much more enjoyable when actually doing the travelling, but if the forefront tells you to do the same thing as AC games selling you Grind-skippers then the audience will react accordingly.
I want more game like this too, but the cynic in me is telling that after this "backlash" most devs/publishers will just hunker down even deeper and keep churning out the same old safe shite as per usual. As you said, it really is a miracle that we even got a game like this seeing as even Elden Ring bowed down to the lowest common denominator in many ways.
@@MoiderahOfVideosI think they overreached with the tech... Again... Like with DD1. Itsuno's a certified Kojima-grade lunatic whose entire MO is pushing the boundaries to shattering point in whatever bizarre direction he feels like.
The game's fantastic. Personal GOTY candidate, unless late game Sand Land or something manages to utterly blow my mind capitalizing on the Steambot Chronicles-like/Mega Man Legends-like subsubsubgenre. Not likely it's going to be THAT brilliant (although it looks like it'll be at least great), but here's hoping.
Also fun fact: If you do everything "right" and see everything the pre-endgame world has to offer, DD2 offers exactly enough portcrystals to cover every single major destination you will ever need. I counted. I set my network up perfectly and counted. By NG+ you have to place them all again manually, but you'd hit the hard cap like 1/5 of the way through that anyway.
I think games are just like any other artistic medium. Some pieces of art are deep and complicated with heavy themes and interesting characters, some pieces are mechanically impressive with tight design and meticulous pacing, and some pieces are focused on spectacle with impressive scope and budget. All this is to say I think its fine for people to prefer one style of artistic creation over another so long as they recognize that's what's happening and don't try to criticize a piece with a different artistic priority for not appealing to them.
a lot of the complaints people have about dragons dogma 2 make me feel like they really didnt want to play dragons dogma 2, like they talk about the lack of fast travel and the quests that arent explicitly outlined with everything you need to do, and i really feel like if the devs caved and added quest markers for every little thing and let you use camp sites or riftstones for fast travel then it would lost a lot of what made it feel like dragons dogma
Agreed. Most discussions about game design often are too superficial.
Every year i introduce a new cohort of students to both killer7 and Deadly Premonition. To show that something interesting can be provided even though the component elements individually aren't "the best". killer7 especially confuses students the most at first but then they begin to understand the significance.
May I recommend the works of Icepick Lodge? They have probably made some of the best examples of ludonarrative harmony in gaming with Pathologic and The Void. They also make good examples of how games can be other things than just fun while still being entertaining and engaging.
"if given the chance players will optimise the fun out of games" is forever topical and applicable.
games by definition are just an artificial challenge being presented, most gamers do not realize this basic truth. now the key lies in how interesting the designer can make overcoming that challenge. sometimes the gameplay is just boring. sometimes the gameplay is not for that person's taste. sometimes it's just a clash of expectation vs reality.
and there is teleportation in the game in fact. the dialogue doesn't even seem be handled properly.
you don't get to tell me what is fun or not your presumptuous @@@, maybe you have fun in walking simulators and pointless collectible hunts, maybe you have infinite to waste on that @@@@@ but i would much rather all the development time and money that was wasted on that trash be used on something much more worthwhile like bosses and game mechanics, you people are @@@ upon the industry and i wish you were @@@@@@, please never spew that @@@@ opinion again.
I tend to believe that a lot of the games that have had a sense of historical reevaluation in terms of their quality (Haunting Ground, God Hand, the Bouncer) as well as games that I’ve found to be interesting partially because of their clunkiness (Rocket Robot on Wheels, the Maximo series, Rumble Roses, and the like) would kind of be reviled by the same people who praise them SPECIFICALLY because of how weird and semi-unintuitive their mechanics are. It’s a shame too, because there’s a lot of games that people crap on now, that 15 years from now are gonna get the exact same treatment that God Hand did, but c’est la vie I guess.
Okay, so I agree with the overall thesis of this video. There are a lot of "flawed" games that I love, and many games that eschew "industry standards" because of their design ethos or artistic intention, but I have to ask honestly though, if Dragon's Dogma 2 wants you to travel between each town on foot aside from specific fast travel locations and methods, why are they selling ways to bypass that part of the game for extra money? If the game was designed around the feel of the larger world and the experience of living and moving in it, why undercut the design by selling shortcuts? The cynicism that people have toward this decision is entirely justified because we can tell that many games will add microtransactions to games that set the overall game feel to something closer to what you might expect the experience to be (permanent XP boosts are a good example).
I'm fine with having many games that don't click with everyone, but when microtransactions are added on to, let's say, give people the opportunity to adjust the game to their own pace for extra cash instead of just adding those features in as optional free content for players to take or leave at will, it really feels like the shareholders have more influence than the designers in how a game is designed.
I saw the Jimquisition video about dragon's dogma and it actively made me lose braincells. "If you say you like walking around this world, you're lying!" Maybe the game just isn't for you?
Jim is a great critic of the industry, but should not review games. Thought they learned that lesson after their tonally deaf and totally wrong review of BoTW.
Yeah. I respect them as a critic of the industry, but I consider their taste in games to be pretty bad. And I really don't like how they talk about mechanics they don't like.
It was a truly awful take. It think it lead me to realize that they are so fervent on consumer advocacy because they really only see games as products more than art forms. I didn't go into a movie like Mandy wanting to feel comfortable, why would I want the same out of all games?
@@gumpthegreat1 BotW is mid af
@@In.New.York.I.Milly.Rock. Then so is DD2.
This is what I've been saying. A 7/10 game often means a lot more to me than a modern, so-called "9/10" game. A game that is fun, yet flawed, is supremely more interesting and memorable than a game that is objectively well-made, but lacks identity.
This is the #1 thing that's been bothering me about gaming discourse for a while and you've expressed it beautifully. Thank you!
I think you are missing the point when it comes to Dragon's Dogma. Sure, clunky controls of Deadly Premonition is what makes the game memorable. But imagine if there was an option to buy better driving phisics, better combat etc. as microtransactions. Then playing that game normally would feel like a waste of time too. In reality developers probably did everything they could to make that game what it is. But knowing that they made these improvements and they are under a paywall would ruin the whole experience, at least to me.
Couldn't agree more. Video games are unique among popular media, in that they give meaningful pushback when you want to experience them. In other words you watch a movie, you experience a game because you took active participation. I often prefer to play games that others have dubbed as "awful" or "dated" then I do playing a game that checks all the boxes of being what is considered top tier. Often those games are kind of soulless, I would rather play an imperfect game that has noticeable issues but you can tell the dev team poured their passion into it than a game feels like it was made by committee of what is industry expectation. Games like the first Alan Wake, Batman Arkham Origins, or Watch Dogs 1.
Totally with you on killer7. Even with the clunky controls and some of the worst bosses I’ve ever fought in a game, it ended up being my favourite game I played last year. I’ve heard a lot about how horror games combat systems are purposefully designed to be shitty and hard to control since it reinforces how weak and afraid you’re supposed to feel. Killer7 isn’t horror in genre, but its gameplay keeps you paranoid going around every corner, just as if you’re running around an abandoned building being hunted by invisible exploding monsters. You know, because you are.
Also to some extent, it enhance the theme of the game's story for not being fully in-control of your fate as the Killer7 are just cannon fodders for their corrupt government.
I don't want to bring up any names, but I watched a video about Dragon's Dogma 2 yesterday that really bothered me. I haven't played the game, so I obviously don't know if I would agree that the things they pointed out are actually problems in Dragon's Dogma 2 specifically. What bothered me was the implication that those are problems which video games have in general. That repeated backtracking is bad by defualt, that forcing a player to traverse larger distances without the option of fast traveling is disrespectful of the player's time. Death Stranding is a game that does those things, but it's so clearly what the entire game is built around. It wants the player to consider the paths, to reflect on their journeys as well as their surroundings. While I'm a firm believer in that video games should be way more customizable than they often are (kinda like how Pathologic 2 did it) I also believe that, had there been a bunch of "quality of life options" at the very start, it would have undermined the entire artistic purpose of Death Stranding. And for what? So that it can be exactly like other open world AAA games? How terribly boring would that be!?
Thank you for making this video. I really wanted to vent after I watched that other one yesterday, and this video satisfied that need.
I think I wholeheartedly agree with you, especially with the ''not being able to fast travel is inherently bad'' part. I think this video here is a direct response to the very same person you have your grievance with, given the quotes at the start of the video. As Pathologic 2 is my favorite game, I'm curious what you meant to say when you brought up with the ''customizability of Pathologic 2.'' I didn't understand exactly what you meant with that.
@@thirduncle5366I’m referring to all the different sliders that allows you to customize the difficulty level, and by extension how you the whole game is played. If I remember it correctly there is one slider for walking speed, for example. Since the whole game is about traversing the town, and not having enough time to go everywhere you need to, speeding up walking kind of ruins one of the most important aspects of the game. *However*, I think the game is so clear about how it *wants* you to play, about what is the intended experience, that options like that don’t bother me. Though if someone were to say that the intended experience is “bad”, and that playing around with the sliders is the only way of making it “good”, that would bother me.
Fantastic video! I’ve been thinking about this topic a lot too. It’s why I hate when something is called “dated” or not up to “modern standards.” I feel like we’re missing out on so many cool experiences because certain styles aren’t trendy anymore. While things like tank controls and fixed camera angles aren’t popular anymore, I still think there’s potential to create fresh gameplay experiences with them.
I’m glad you brought Rise of Ronin’s traversal feeling mindless. I felt this way about God of War Ragnarok Uncharted style climbing. The giant wall climb in Asgard didn’t impress me because I was just pushing up the whole time like every other climbable surface.
And hell, games with inconvenient can become beloved because of that. Shuhei Yoshida thought Demon’s Souls was garbage when he tried it, and now look at FromSoftware. And hell, look at how the original Dragon’s Dogma got a dedicated fanbase over the years. I can’t remember the interview, but I know Hideaki Itsuno said that he predicts not everyone will like DD2 100%, but the people that are really into it will like it 120% or above. I hope those folks are having a nice time
I'm of two minds:
- Usually reviewers are the first ones to see a game and set the tone for its discussion. Reviewing games is more time intensive than any other art review, so reviewers will over emphasize problems with what they perceive to be wasting their time.
- On the other hand, games among art have both the best ability to waste someone's time, and also the best ability to psychologically manipulate a person into wasting that time (often in the goal of boosting the perceived value of things in game to push microtransaction sales.)
So time wasting is both a valid criticism, and also one often pulled out early by tired reviewers behind on quota.
This is on point. I am a musician and have to tell myself often enough to not cater to my audience or listen to the stupid social media algorithms that dictate the modern day success of any pop culture media.
A game that comes to mind from this is The Sinking City. From gameplay perspective it's janky with odd combat and movement. But I thought the game was awesome, and it's probably because of that stuff that made it memorable for me.
In the weirdly poignant words of one Pat Stares At, “Friction makes sparks fly."
One of my favorite open-ish game is still Shenmue, just because the game asks me to actually look at the world and ask people around to find the way forward, instead of overlaying a marker on the screen.
If only there wasn't so much godforsaken backtracking dialougue
Just recently played Mafia definitive edition. The driving mechanics are “rough” by modern standards, yet they were still so memorable to me. Really feels like you’re trying to manuever a heavy steel box around, which matched perfectly with the prohibition era vehicles at the time.
Same feeling is present in how every mission immediately starts after the other with a jumpcut to another location. Not exactly the most “modern” solution, but I felt like it helped immerse me in the main character’s hectic/nonstop lifestyle where you never even get a chance to consider how the jobs you’re doing are getting increasingly immoral.
Agree that a game having character should be praised rather than attacked.
I have the Feeling that the MMORPG players behaviour (nothing against them I am also guilty of doing that for a time) is bleeding into the culture as a whole.
We are so focused on min-maxing everything, look for guides on how to be most efficent in games. Where are all the chests, where do I find the best loot. How to 100% everything.
Together with trying to "gain" the most out of it. Which prohibits us from forming a deeper connection with the game itself. So we tend to just consume the art and not understanding it.
A great experiment for that is just asking people what the critic or the broader Topics of a game beyound it's direct story is.
"What thing is the driving force behind Kratos development in GoW (2018)" etc.
EDIT: Also we are really bad at distinguishing between things that can and should be optimised (like the inventory in skyrim) and those that are more than a superficial layer and do play a more important role in shaping the experienece as a whole (like the inventory management of Resident evil, or a lot of helldivers 2)
This is something I’ve really had to come to terms with in the last 10 years or so, that I don’t only love my favorite games in SPITE of their flaws, but also because of them.
We should however be wanting to get as close as possible to perfect without actually getting there. Never stop striving for better.
Hang on, how does this view work with cyberpunk 2077? From what I've heard it was a buggy mess, and that's still a problem isn't it? I doubt that really made the experience better for anyone, or more artistic. I think there's a meaningful distinction to be made between "imperfections" that are intentional and ones that aren't, or between ones that suit a game and ones that don't.
This is exactly how I feel when people say they hate old-school turn-based RPGs with random encounters, and celebrate when newer RPGs remove them. Yes, it can be annoying when you keep getting hit with random battles. But that’s the design of the game! It’s not some dated flaw, it’s a feature.
And those same kids that complain about that are the sames than then go on and play the new pokemons games, and claim they are good.
Yes but it doesn’t have to be a feature that you like. I don’t think random battles are a flaw (kind of), but I find them so boring and paddy.
I feel the same way but with dungeons..
"I don't like when dungeons frustrating". Like the whole purpose of a dungeons is to be challenging, it's supposed to be annoying and have minor annoyances that drain your resources..
@@alsaiduq4363 Exactly, half the fun of dungeons in JRPGs is managing your resources to make it through alive, and random encounters add to that stress. It’s like complaining that shooting zombies in Resident Evil is clunky and they don’t give you enough ammo. That’s kinda the point!
The only issue is when you have little recourse around it. The caves in Pokémon are mostly hated. Some resistance is good, as it helps differentiate the areas and you have to prep ahead of time because you don’t know where the exits are or how long until you can exit.
But they were often too long, had little variety in Pokémon to catch (not even useful ones until way later), and what items you could use didn’t last long or weren’t readily available (you wouldn’t have much money in the early game). I prefer random encounters because it’s more exciting than just seeing a new critter roam in the wild. But there’s areas where the balance could be adjusted and still serve it’s purpose. Big labyrinths where every few steps could result in a random encounter and there’s no “safe” ground (that isn’t susceptible to attacks, like avoiding grass in the overworld), just ends up being frustrating, and not in an “overcoming a challenge” way. It’s like walking into a wall, and there’s not a lot you can do about it. The bike helps but that’s also later and the caves are still big enough for it to still be a nuisance.
The flip side of doing that wrong though is Sword/Shield. Calling it a cave is laughable given it has no branching paths and is so short to walk through (even compared to walking through one of the earlier games without random encounters). You can easily avoid the Pokémon and I think there’s maybe 2 trainers which are the only thing that forced you to stop. It’s effectively a decorative tunnel, as opposed to a part of the environment that functions differently from other areas. Scarlet/Violet was better, but everything is spread so far apart that it doesn’t have that sense of anxiety the original caves had.
stuff like this is why i appreciate someone like yoko taro. his games aren’t afraid to make you do the most tedious things over and over again in order to really get a point across, whether it be replaying the 2nd half of nier 4-5 times to experience the full story or literally every aspect of drakengard.
YES YES YES. These days I really appreciate a game that is a bit thorny and unconventional, precisely because it is that. There's a million other games where every piece of friction has been sanded away to make them feel like every other game. We don't need yet another one. Trying different things is where innovation comes from, and gives games a distinct personality. Having an experience that had its ups and downs is way more engaging and memorable than one that just hums along being inoffensively fine too. People need to be way more willing to meet a game where it's at rather than demanding it give them everything they think they want with minimal inconvenience. Even if that results in something that isn't for you, or even if it "fails" at what it's trying to be, that's valuable and interesting to examine in its own right too. It's not some personal insult to the player if a game tries something that doesn't quite pan out.
Yeah. One of my favorite games I've been playing recently is Beyond The Citadel. It's the sequel to The Citadel, which was a boomer shooter that came out a few years ago, notable for having a mix of unusually realistic guns, simple but powerful movement, and a 90's anime-esque art style.
Beyond The Citadel made a major change to how weapons work. Instead of hitting Reload to reload it, you use three different buttons. One to take the magazine out, one to put it in, and one to cock it (pull the slide or charging handle, for example). They also made it so that, if an enemy is taken out by a part of their body below the waist being shot off (legs, possibly hips), they will sometimes play dead, then use a pistol to shoot the player.
These mechanical changes drastically changed the feel of the game. The lean mechanic changed from being handy but forgettable, to being almost a necessity, as the cognitive load from managing my guns was too high to dodge bullets and retaliate at the same time. It meant that I could very much be on the defensive in a fight, while still having lots of resources.
Also, guns can jam in Beyond The Citadel, and how often they do that is dependent on how damaged they are. This can completely upset the balance of a firefight at any time, putting the player on the defensive. Or forcing the player into a more offensive route, say, using the axe for example.
All of this, combined with the art style and sound design, creates an incredibly tense FPS that does not really fit in any genre I know of. It's great. And I've just been playing beta versions, not the full release.
gamemakerstoolkit just made a video on a very similar topic and i have to say im on the side of not impeding players to envoke a feeling when its a gameplay focused game. If youre making hellblade or death stranding, cool, do all your artsy nonsense. But if youre making a rogue like or monster hunter, make it as frictionless as possible to get into the gameplay. You do something in between the 2 and we will probably say the game is poorly designed.
To be honest, while I generally understand and agree with the argument that some degree of flaws or clunk to a game is desirable, I also think it's an issue that is dependent on the context and intent of the game.
Like yes there is also the player element sure, but I've had instances of games doing largely the same thing that I have absolutely loved in one case, and fucking loathed in others. And the difference will lie in one or two small decisions that change the feeling entirely, that may not even be a strictly mechanical decision.
And Even within the purely mechanical zone, if the game does not adaquetly build towards the intended experience it doesn't really matter what the intent is if the legwork to have it work wasn't done enough. You can say what your goal is all you like, and players WILL tolerate some absolute nonsense, but only if the game actually gets you to buy in.
Like I enjoy just wandering through game worlds a lot, but even games that intend you to do it can be more infuriating than not if they don't nail it (and this is said as someone who genuinely loved the sailing in wind waker, a feature so maligned that the remaster added a speed up option to correct what was to me perfectly paced)
No one is asking for perfect games. We're asking that features that have been included in previous releases not be taken out of future ones for mass appeal or to be resold as microtransactions or DLC. I think people want efficiency when the game is too repetitive and dull for its own good. A game as packed with action and content as Fallout 4 actually could have done well without fast travel, same as Elden Ring, but they respect our time, so they gave us fast travel, with some restrictions. I think the fact that Bathesda and Larian both release super fun but glitchy titles is a testament to gamer's indifference to the idea of perfection in gaming. Hell, some gamer;s idea of perfection is having a sexy protagonist like Stellar Blade and ignoring the "woke" agenda. And as for musician's being lauded for shitty antisocial behavior is boomerism. The most successful musical artists are the ones that cater to their audience most successfully (Taylor Swift, Beyonce,) not the overindulgent GG Allin Types who attract an audience of edgy teen masochists. But even by that standard, GG Allin aint no Hidetaka Miyazaki.
I highly respect your writing and effort, but I disagree quite firmly with this. While I understand where you're coming from with the Naplm Death analogy, I think a more accurate analogy would be trying to listen to a Napalm Death album, but in order to do so, you must have two very large bikers shaking you violently while you listen. The thing with games is that in order to enjoy them, you have to actively interact with it, and that's where badly implemented or missing mechanics can make somebody's experience much worse, or even put people off entirely. Take, for example, Alan Wake. I've seen people play the first game and just stop after an hour or so or even the tutorial, because the control scheme for aiming in that game is so weird that people either really don't like the janky torch aiming and would rather use anything else, or even think the game has a bug because there's no reticle when there logically should be. Or consider the Resident Evil series, which has begrudgingly added autosaves and the ability to aim and move at the same time, Or The Evil With 2, which removed the black bars of the original and was immediately the better for it. DD2 tying fast travel to consumables is disgusting due to the microtransactions, but even if tje microtransactions weren't there, it would still be a pretty silly idea, because having fast travel has never stopped people from willingly going oit to explore. If you're fast travelling, generally that's because you either know where you need to go and have been there before, so want to save time tra elling the whole of Skyrim, or you don't want to interact with the open world, and if the reason is the latter, YOU'VE GOT A PROBLEM. Killer 7 being on rails makes it weird, not necessarily bad, and the awful car controls in Deadly Premonition are part of what makes that game's legendary ineptitide compelling. It's great that you like Deadly Premonition, but that driving in any other better game would be a deal breaker for many players because it stands in the way of enjoying an otherwise good game. Some games are rough around the edges, or a product of a time when we hadn't figured out how to do things yet, and a great many of the people who love those games, love them in spite of those flaws, not necessarily because of them.
In closing, I'd like to leave you with the following thought: Suicide Squad isn't a bad game because it does everything all the other games do: it's a bad game because it does nothing other games don't do.
I feel so vindicated watching this!!! Dragon’s Dogma 2’s “inconveniences” are part of its design and experience! Too bad the microtransactions make it so people think the lack of fast travel is simply to sell more ferrystones. Excellent video 🙌
It's especially bizarre seeing people ape the talking point that the travel is long to sell more ferrystones, when you can't even buy ferrystones using MTX. Only a single Portcrystal. It's such a bafflingly common talking point when it's complete misinformation; and this is coming from someone who absolutely despises MTX.
There's some middle grounds, though. Like when Tactics Ogre Reborn came out, it changed so many specific things that, while modernizing the work, almost told you a story and it went along. Like how one particular unit type got heavily buffed, so when us long timers went to go recruit it...we wondered where it went from an early area. It seemed to just be removed. But then, coming back on glorious fashion, there was the Zombie Cyclops in a late game dungeon, front and center to let you know he got promoted. Things like the crafting recipes required less grind of random areas (having mostly been relocated to a few floors of a particular dungeon, this was just for the basic stuff) , but also mentally established this feeling that "yeah, these dragon lords down here really were studying something, huh?"
One of the big frustrations of original players was when the AI would steal your loot, but rather than just give it to the player (which many players use cheats to do for the big community overhaul mod of that version), you can now kill that unit to steal it back. It's an extra step, but feels so cathartic.
They could have dropped the near nonexistent drop rates of the end game gear, but instead now you get a sort of improved version of randomized loot, where their base numbers and additional skills are the same, but instead now can be merged into a vastly improved version, while scattering these versions to way more places.
In most games I would prefer the rarity of the original, but in an odd twist, that version was also a remake, the original original of which was this generous, but just never got around to making those items special.
They could have just upscaled the graphics, but instead took the time to remake the local province for backgrounds from in game assets. They could have just improved the music, but also added more audio sliders for those moments where you just set the team to AI to gather materials, and only need to check in to see who's still alive.
I could go on for hours about the little weird changes they made to improve it, but "modern game bad" discourse often just labels it as a simple port or cash grab, when it's an insanely good revision of an already insane game. (Who makes up to like 6 alternate cutscenes with 4+ variations for a 600 hour + game that adapts to things constantly? Folks legitimately demanded a ground up remake of that.)
That happens when the Ubisoft formular is the standard for the industry...
Been playing dark souls for the first time and after putting some 60 hours into the game i have been putting it off. There comes a point in the game where after the 10th boss you have fought, walking the 300th time from the bonfire 3 minutes at a time that you just dont feel like its worth it. Maybe ill try pushing on a bit further tho
100% Agree. When I was younger, I played a lot of FFXI, which at the time had a lot of friction in the game world in relation to travel from place to place. As the player level and resources go up, the friction goes down, but it was still usually a bit of a hassle to get somewhere remote. You experience the wonder of strange new vast landscapes. Your first time, you may not have a map, or if you do, its a vague map. Its part of what made the experience memorable. It also cost you a lot of time and the game was extremely grindy.
Dang, this was a wonderful video. It almost feels like a perfect thesis on why games are art.
It also reminds me of a janky game that I love, Blue Reflection, because there is nothing else like it.
Just looking at my recommendations next to this, I reminded that there are people who do challenge runs, intentionally adding friction in where there was none before. Something like a Pokemon Nuzlocke exists because people don't always want to be able to just get away with having their Pokemon faint. A setup where they get attached, and mourn the losses of their favourites.
Saying that reminds me of Twitch Plays Pokemon, which added so much friction that a relatively straightforward game became a days long undertaking, and spawned a temporary, crazy community.
Is it bad to want a fast travel to waypoints you've already been? (ala Sites of Grace in Elden Ring). You've already had to explore the area to get there.
The travel, both in time and space, is part of the game's main loop, it's not just about exploration. Maybe you have misjudged how long the travel will take you and now you have to deal with skeleton and minotaur ambushes on the road, maybe there is a drake you didn't expect, turning what would be routine into an experience. It won't happen every time, and if it did, it wouldn't exactly be a surprise, yeah?
Some games arent for everyone, thats just how art kinda work's
Great piece and my views exactly. Another example for you: The two-and-half-minute long sweeping scene in Twin Peaks The Return, Part 7.
great video! full heartedly agree with everything! *however*... in music, in film, et al, there are the same voices that parrot the same noxious complaints we get about games like you illustrated. the difference is not just that people will tell those to shove it. in videogame world there is also similar backlash. the real difference is amounts of those, both in relation to the other and in absolute terms AAAND art is taken seriously in film, music and other mediums but not in some forms like games. the unspoken perception in society is still that videogames are infantile or purely entertainment. not substantial.
the vocal minorities and vocal majorities echoing childish complaints at games that are invalid are a manifestation that perpetuates and justifies the perception of videogames as infantile and until the status quo changes these dynamics will also not change.
videogames, along some other cultural things, have just breached from being perceived as a negative passion to have, dorkly, to mainstream recently. it has not even been 1 generation since, much less the 3 generations that are needed to completely change a status quo. once the kids that were born after that change have kids, then we can maybe expect a change.
Thing is fast travel is needed when a world is big enough. After I have seen the sites a few times I want to be able to teleport because its boring passing through the same location 100s of times just for the sake of it. Like the reason the mafia games are boring outside of their stories. There is non stop driving.
@@tyler-xo3rb so if you had an hour long commute in each direction and someone offered you the ability to fast travel back and forth instantly and for free you would deny it?
@@thewhitewolf58 wow its just like that adam sandler movie
@@thewhitewolf58 This is a game we are talking about not real life, stop trying to make that statement like you have some grand gotcha lol.
@@thewhitewolf58 Is a work commute a game that you can stop playing at any time?
This is why Double A and 7/10 titles are often more interesting and entertaining than 10/10 masterpieces
I don't see the problem in pucking a map location and being driven there, I loved doing that in FFXV, let Ignis drive and enjoy the view.
In that game it helps that doing that feeds into the role playing element.
THe problem was mostly the feeling that selling Fast Travel created, is that it was something that the it was taken out of the game to sell for convenience, which can create a feeling that the lack of easy available Fast Travel was mostly a busisness decision to drive people even few ones to buy the Fast Travel microtransactions, so in the end whle games definitely can and should strive to be an artistic medium, when the surrounding discourse is about some mechanics that is bein sold than the it becomes a busisness decision not a artistic one, even if most players experiencing the game dont needed to buy the Fast Travel, just the option being there tarnish Dragons Dogma 2 decision as a artistic one.
You can't even buy fast travel in DD2.
WTF are you talking about? Fast travel wasn't taken out of the game.
I still think making fast travel accessible from the start after Dark Souls 1 was a mistake by Fromsoft. One of my core memories from gaming is being stuck in Blighttown in DS1 with no idea how to get out. That was a terrifying experience and I felt so accomplished when I finally heard that Firelink Shrine music again
Thanks for this.
All the games i really enjoy involve some manner of preperation and limited travel options because that fuels the exploration that i enjoy so much. Having thay conflated with bad game deaign is baffling to me. Morrowind, Outward, Kingdom Come, and Dragons Dogma are my jam, and, yeah, they all have their issues, but the exploration isnt one of them.
I just got kinda bummed when Steph Sterling called me a bootlicker with bad taste :(
“After all, the world is not a stage-not to me: nor a theatre: nor a show-house of any sort. And art, especially novels, are not little theatres where the reader sits aloft and watches...and sighs, commiserates, condones and smiles. That's what you want a book to be: because it leaves you so safe and superior, with your two-dollar ticket to the show. And that's what my books are not and never will be...Whoever reads me will be in the thick of the scrimmage, and if he doesn't like it if he wants a safe seat in the audience-let him read someone else.” D. H Lawrence
We should always have fast travel option. At the begining of a game it can be fun not using this mechanic but after a while running trough the same map/zones over and over turns tedious no matter how much amazing the open world is.
Actually for DD2, I’d say it WAS designed this way on purpose, both for gameplay reasons, but ALSO because of greed.
There are purchasable custom fast-travel points that you can SET down wherever you want, and that costs REAL money. And these are items that in-game, you can play 30+ hours and maybe never get organically without buying them for real cash.
It’s super scummy, to design it this way, knowing it’s frustrating to get around, and then SELL an EASIER experience once it’s released. Absolutely anti-consumer, and even predatory.
I got several after around 40 hours of ingame time and haven't really felt the need of placing them down anywhere so far except for maybe the elven village when I was stumbling around there and during my sphinx questing. But once you are done with certain areas, you can simply pick them up again to use them somewhere else. They are designed to be used short term and not placed down permanently, which is why there's also a limit on how many you can place down simultanously to begin with. I honestly fail to see the scummy anti consumer behavior here, when the game already hands you more than enough portcrystals to cover pretty much every big area in the game, not to mention the oxcarts that can be used to reach pretty much every major location.
If anyone still feels inclined to waste money on an additional port crystal, then by all means, they absolutely deserve it and should honestly pay even more than that for their stupidity.
@@pluesch. You make an array of good points, my experience with the game isn’t universal!
You can only buy a single portcrystal. Useless.
There is *a* purchasable fast travel point. One. Out of 10 possible placements, when the game gives you around 6 or 7 one playthrough...and there is about 6 or 7 location worth fast travelling to.
For me, the imperfection of DD2 is in what rewards it has for exploration. I would typically consider rich environmental storytelling and interesting, intricate armor/weapons to be a compelling reward for exploring. Unfortunately what DD2 rewards you with for entering cave #47 is the same enemy types you saw in caves #1-46, for creature parts that serve considerably less interesting purposes. Larian made exploring their games more enjoyable than anything DD2 ever did. There's just not enough meat on the gaming experience to make "discovering" the next cave feel like a compelling experience. THAT is where I think the real complaints about fast travel actually stem from.
Movies are cut all the time for viewer experience. Books have editors for a reason.
It's fine for a game to make an experience difficult on purpose, but it's also fine to critizise the game for that so that people who don't want that experience can stay away from it.
It's like your friend warning you a movie is very artsy or slow before starting to watch it. Maybe you're not in the mood for that so it's good to know about it.
Music is even more commercialized than games in my opinion. Goal is just to get as many listeners as possible.
Sure there is independent musicians where that is not the goal, but that is true for gaming too and not the mainstream. It's the difference between a consumer product and an independent artist making a passion project.
For consumer products, consumer input is actually very very helpful. And to say it is not used in other media is just a straight up lie. Why would movies otherwise have test screenings???
Honestly ive been feeling this way for a long time. Whenever someone mentions "quality of life" improvements in a game i sigh. Ppl seem to want a frictionless game that doesnt have anything weird or unusual, things that would have stood out in the ps2 era. Also this obsession we seem to have about getting through things is tied to people not wanting to do stuff like actually explore the game world or do more manual tasks like walking places, which robs the worlds of a more tactile nature that i prefer (should've waited till the end of the video as u pretty much cover a lot of what I say in my comment 😅)
Some of my favorite games of all time also have giant flaws. Both the first and second Dragons Dogma are far from perfect, but shining through the rough patches are absolute gems of game design that make them so unique and thrilling to play and experience. I will never forget my pawn casting their first High Bolide on some poor unsuspecting Saurians and absolutely murdering the entire forest in the crossfire. Nor will I ever forget the moment I parried a Minotaurs charge and my pawn used the opening to send him off a cliff.
Perfectly smooth, optimized games (especially AAA) tend to be unengaging. I'm playing The Forest at the moment and it's very non hand-holdy, rough around the edges experience but damn if it isn't fascinating.
At the end of the day just like in movies, literature or other art/entertainment forms, videogames are sometimes more product than art. I think it's always a spectrum between a "polished easy to consume product" and a work of genuine artistic expression but where a particular game falls depends mostly on the decision of the corporation paying for the creation of the games.
For me this debated often comes down to an audience's willingness (and expectation) to feel confused and challenged by games.
When I play games with non-gamers (or those with limited experience) they often really struggle when presented with ambiguity; exclaiming they are "stupid" or "bad at the game". But for me this is just a miscategorisation of the feeling; games are about figuring out systems, combinations of actions and puzzles to overcome things, so that confusion/challenge is a fundamental part of what makes gaming experiences meaningful.
Of course, there can be good confusion, bad confusion and totally unintended confusion. But I feel, like you say, a lot of these feelings of friction are intentional to hit home the emotional affect of the experience.
That said, it's also very complex when talking about big studio games and QOL. It really depends where you think the game stands on the scale of entertainment product to purely artistic endeavour--a scale which is incredibly subjective, especially to fans. And there's definitely something to be said about AAA game friction/jank vs the same friction/jank in indie or art games--given your expectation as a player and the general player base who would engage with either type of game.
5:00 I think if Napalm Death were charging extra to remove "faults" in their performance, the discussions of their style would look a lot more like how we talk about games. Similarly, people defend From Software's artistic vision because they actually show a commitment to that vision.
The audience isn't to blame here. While I accept that develepors may have microtransactions forced on them, designing gameplay to be tedious without microtransactions IS a well known tactic and I am not willing to simply "respect the artists vision" when the art itself does not.
Rocco Botte from Mega64 said something recently that "games becoming more mainstream have done it more a disservice" and he's right. So many big and small games take into consideration what will be viewed by the most people and how to appease them. The mainstream doesn't know what they want and usually has shit bland taste, I've grown to really love the more weird stuff. I do hope though some big developers notice this pattern and try to add a bit more weird and allow their games to have more friction and allow themselves to express themselves more. If a mechanic in a game has an option to put down a controller during gameplay, that's the equivalent of "this could have been an email" and that means it sucks.
For me, DD2 is just a not good example for your point. My experience was marred by repetitiveness-encountering the same enemies in caves and along roads became tedious. Additionally, interactions with ox carts were frustratingly predictable as they were frequently attacked by goblins or other creatures. Worse yet, there were instances where the carts glitched, accelerating to unrealistic speeds. This lack of polish starkly contrasts with the intriguing oddities of Armored Core VI-a title I've thoroughly enjoyed through three complete playthroughs-and the immersive experience of Elden Ring. In my view, DD2 could have benefited from additional development time, which unfortunately Capcom did not provide.
While i totaly agree that no studio should implement a function only because all the competitors do it, i am quite embarrassed by the argument of "art". By definition, art can be anything and thus have mostly been used to cover up dissonant, unpleasant, or just boring things. The "art" argument have been so frequently used as a social statut marker, an inside joke to deter the peasants, i feel like snobbery to use it.
Games, books, movies, are more or less interactive systems which convey experience, but at the center of it may be a (thin line of) pleasure, to keep the gamer, reader, viewer in a good mood and able to feel and think about the experience. If a medium deliberately try to bore me, even a purely educationnal one, it as lost it's potential to communicate a feeling and should be prepared to be rejected
I feel like there are plenty of games that get leeway from their audiences. Provided they don't feel like they're trying to carve up your wallet like a Thanksgiving turkey.
This video resonates with me so much. Any time I hear the term "quality of life" thrown around in the gaming sphere, I'm always cautious about what this actually entails. Sometimes this means eschewing genuinely irritating or archaic game mechanics, while other times it means diluting the experience.
One example for me is the Metroid Prime remake, which lets players use standard dual-stick aiming and regular FPS controls. Most players are just going to do this because that's what they're used to. But the original Gamecube version has a completely different control setup, one where the left stick lets you walk and turn, the L button lets you strafe and lock on to enemies, holding down the R button lets you free-aim and look above/below you, while the right stick switches between different weapons. On paper it sounds restrictive and archaic, but in practice it remains one of my favourite things about the game. Not just because it's different, but because the game world is designed around this mostly forced perspective, switching between locking on to larger enemies and carefully aiming at swarms of smaller ones, and making investigating a new area a more active and deliberate process than just swinging your vision across everything. It can be an unwieldy control scheme to begin with, but truly accentuates the experience. Simply being handed the "modern" way to play, even as a mere option, is robbing many players of this aspect of the experience that they wouldn't have even considered in the first place.
Same goes for the original Dark Souls and its choice to not let you warp between bonfires for a majority of the game, and even when you unlock that ability, it's limited between some very specific locations. The world is designed for you to open up shortcuts, learn the layout of many areas and build up an idea of a fixed, cohesive world. This honestly elevates the game above others in its series for me, and I can much more clearly remember my way around its areas than any of the other FromSoft games. And you could say "well, just don't warp between bonfires in those other games", but the problem is those games aren't designed to be played that way! It'd be like saying I really appreciate not having a map in Souls games as it encourages me to explore and learn the environment, and being told I should play every game without a map if that's the case. GTA would be a nightmare!
And yes, Jimquisition, I thoroughly enjoyed and appreciated walking back and forth through the same areas with the same enemy placement. For someone who once lambasted gaming journalists who talked about the death of horror games and said "horror games are just bad because aiming is bad and you're just scrabbling around in the dark looking for keys", your tune has changed a lot when it happens to concern something that you're either not a fan of or don't understand.
There's also this discussion in the card game world where people are constantly clamouring for cards that improve their decks to an almost pinpoint state of efficiency, despite risk being an inherent factor in why these games are even fun to begin with. Games are more than just a matter of optimising how well we can do things. Scorn is an amazing example of using inadequacy, obtuseness and roughness to heighten the overall experience. Sometimes, you need to be taken out of your comfort zone. It doesn't always work, and you're not guaranteed to like games such as Killer 7 or Death Stranding. But I'd rather play through a couple games I don't like with some interesting ideas than have everything ground into homogenous, inoffensive sludge.
I can’t relate to your specific examples, but I do in the sense of “diluting the experience”.
Discounting the Wii remasters, in Pikmin 3 you had motion control support. This was great as it meant you could move and aim in different directions, and also had much finer control of the cursor, more in-line with an RTS on PC. For a game that’s all about micro-management, and only being able to throw one unit at a time, it’s incredibly useful and intuitive. Because you have this higher degree of precision (and it was in HD so everything was sharper), enemies were given weak points. Now it’s not just “throw a Pikmin at a Bulborb”, but you could throw them at their eyeballs and stun them. It wouldn’t have really worked before. At best you could sneak up on their backside but that’s it. And these weak points were added to a bunch of enemies. It rewards skilled and inquisitive players by aiming for a small target.
With Pikmin 4, that’s gone. Now you don’t even aim like in the original games even. It had a really harsh auto lock-on mechanic (which is dumb because there’s a dedicated lock-on button too). In the demo alone, when there’s a ton of little bugs scattering about, the cursor has a hard time figuring out which one I actually want to target. Then they added the dog which can carry _all_ your Pikmin across water (no need for planning ahead or splitting up because of it), but also carry them and have a free “hit”. Because if a boss/enemy hits you while you’re riding it, it just knocks you and your Pikmin off. Whereas if you were just walking around, it’d actually take a chomp star you instead.
That was all in the name of “accessibility” to gain a new audience. They didn’t try to make an RTS more appealing, they just diluted it from being an RTS and more like an action game. I wasn’t gonna touch it until someone fixed it with mods. Which is thankfully mostly the case, but stupid that these features couldn’t be part of a dedicated “easy mode” instead. Or even just default option you could toggle off. I don’t even know what the point is. If your goal is to “make it more profitable” by making it less of itself, why even bother? They could easily work on a number of other games that’d sell way better than Pikmin anyway. And sure for the dog you could “choose not to use it” but that’s always a poor excuse. It’s a huge feature the game is designed around. If it has a negative effect or it will be more fun not using it, that’s an indictment. And it’s not even in a “Zelda 3 hearts challenge” type of way. If you can cross bodies of water will all Pikmin because of the dog, then it’s no longer an obstacle. Sure, ice Pikmin help with that too, but that requires dedicating X amount of your crew to keeping it frozen. If your max then is 40, and you want red Pikmin with you because say there’s a fire enemy there (reds are impervious), but the pool requires 20 ice Pikmin to freeze it, that’s an interesting management question you get to choose to solve. Risk only being able to bring half your crew to the benefit of fewer possible Pikmin dying because they’re immune to fire, or bring a whole squad of water Pikmin but risk them getting burned. I know there’s some ledges that require the dog, but how it’s implemented already circumvents one of the games’ biggest hurdles. That doesn’t make it more interesting, that just makes it easier. And it reduces the usefulness of one of your types.
Right, that makes sense. There are no objectively wrong choices in game design. Just choices and consequences. There are things you rarely see in games because the way they affect the game feel doesn't suit most of them. But it does suit some of them. A good designer can pick the less popular option when it suits their game.
I can see where you're coming from but games with time saving microtransactions make me feel like the game has been deliberately made worse in order to encourage the purchase of them. I have trouble seeing how or why else the microtransactions would exist at all. Sorry for the poor English.
100% what this guy is selling.
This is why I've been dissapointed in every Final Fantasy they've put out for the better part of two decades but had a grand time with janky stuff like Valkyrie Elysium and am super stoked that they're letting Akitoshi Kawasu make more Saga games. Saga, the series that took one look at "quality of life", laughed, and ran the other way.
Give me weird, ambitious and interesting. Give me a direction. Give me vision. The last thing I want is "a lack of friction". Friction is where fun lives!
I don't play games to void out and make time pass. I play games because they offer an endless potential of unique experiences you can't get anywhere else.
There's nothing unique about rote homogeneity.
Btw, just because it's a crazy thing I keep seeing come up; the idea of DD not having fast travel being bad is wild and clearly comes from ignorance.
If you could fast travel from any point to any point instantly and for free there's be no game. The traveling is "the level". It'd be like starting a Mario level and then fast traveling to the goalpost skipping the all the gameplay.
All you'd be able to do in DD with typical fast travel is pick up quests you can't complete and browse vendors you can't engage with.
The game they're imaging being made worse by it's absence doesn't exist. Or at least it's not this one.
Also the teleport stones are pretty common (I have a dozen just collecting dust in storage) and Ox Carts are essentially free fast travel between major hubs. People are just complaining without any idea of or context for what they're discussing.
I have the feeling that if Death Stranding was released today it would be considered a "mediocre" game because fast travel in this game is also *very* limited and you only unlock it in chapter 3.
And I'm saying this knowing very well that the game was only released 5 years ago.
Completely unrelated point of not having fast travel in DD2, DS is a mediocre game despite its attempt to create an entirely new genre.. One game is intentionally niche, while the other is desperation to prove itself as an art! The only reason it's not criticized as much is because the game has Kojima's name tied to it..
@@TheGameianDark wildly disagree. death stranding is incredibly unique, one of my favorite games ever, and it's very weird to think kojima is "desperate" to do just about anything. his games have been bizarre and ambitious from the start.
@@TheGameianDark Genuine question: What is mediocre in DS? I mean, you can have an opinion that it's "bad", sure, to each their own... But mediocre? Exactly where? Maybe the action 3rd person shooter parts and the "regular white middle aged rough voice dude" protagonist, I guess? Seriously, you can't say a game is mediocre and say it attempted to create an entirely new genre in the same sentence.
@@TheGameianDark Well videogames can be art and also can be enjoyed, beauty is in the eye of the beholder after all. You will either love Death Stranding or you will hate it, it's just that and it's good to have such games because it allows for experimentation in the games industry where some games play it safe and just do the tried and true method of do the same thing over and expect good results. It's good to take risks and even better when they pay off, remember how Dark Souls started off? That was not something for everyone and now look where we are, we have tons of games with the "Souls-like" genre and it's just going to keep on going.
@@espelhogamerI would say the storytelling and dialogue in general are pretty mediocre.
This is a message that really needs to get out. I think a lot of the most potent and strongest games were the ones that just felt so strange to behold. Often their weird contrivances actually keep me in the loop, one way or another. Its some quirk, some unknown, or some strange quality, it keeps the game and pace flowing and mixed with your mind, and really compels you to play it. Now turn instead to "streamlined games", well guess what? Some of them just lose me because of their clutter, and other times traits they believe were focus tested for me to love are what send me away. Borderlands sunk a small addiction in me, but when I was over it, I was just finished with its entire gimmick. I was so fed up with blasting apart a cool battle scene, only to spend minutes at a time picking through the field and comparing data, and numbers, and discard the stupid guns telling me it was a superior assault rifle with an 8-mag count. The industry now says to RPG everything, put looting mechanics all over, but that drives me away and makes the experience a total slog, more so than any such weird setup with a strange and exotic walk & on-rail system, or one game that uniquely employs sudden tank controls, etc. When the FPS genre had a small boom in platforming games, I felt almost liberated to tell all the whiners "See! It can be fun!", only to see those games intensify into cool arcade slashers, and neat tricks. It doesn't mean some before it weren't flawed, but it was in those flaws they were finding and working to something or inspiring the future that ended in something amazing.
When I see a game like Dragon's Dogma 1 or 2, the fans aren't just telling you the game is totally perfect. Nobody is, or means it that way. We're all laughing and quoting dumb lines that are over-repeated, discussing the odd quirks, that one time the game completely screwed you over, or how it let you hire a strange online hairy midget dude with a high-pitched female's voice. But we're laughing with the journey, finding and solving complex treasures under the surface, and baffled to find the most obscure and odd little details hidden around or reacted to by an unconventional design system. When we're not busy throwing pigs around, we're discussing some niche philosophies and strange sights we came across, and then celebrating not only that there was a sequel, but the devs IMPROVED goofy animal catching games. Sure it sucks with absolute rage that they lock us to one save in an RPG of all genres, but genuine hard flaws and fun-blockers aside, we still power through because of how awesome the other content is, and the layers and silly systems that make it as fun as it can be weird. When I got the sequel, made camp for the first time, and was hit with a real filmed video of someone cooking steak in high detail, I burst out laughing and just said "Of course DD would do this." It was just amusing, and so much more memorable than some other game doing a cooking buff on any sense of a "normal way". And the Dragons Plague? OMG, its amazing to watch this turn into one big meta game of paranoia, and misinformation, as the conclusions seem to shift around, and tips include killing your in-game pals over some pretty average quirks, almost making it a crazy social game that does have big consequences if you lose the warnings. It has me just fascinated, and immersed, once even booting up the game and playing more of it by mistake of just "let me check something out" moment going on. This is what art made out of passion does. Its strange, its rough, its distinct, and it calls to the right person to have a far better experience than the tens of people all sharing a solid okay time with a factory-produced brand formula result.
Accessibility option are very important tho. What is art for if we can't engage with it?
I won't lie, I actually get a lot of enjoyment from janky games. In fact, during sales I'll often look for these games just so I can experience them. Akiba's Trip, Deadly Premonition, the original Dragon's Dogma, and both Oceanhorn games are some of my favorites. They have obvious flaws, but it's those flaws combined with the good each of them has that make them a lot more memorable than a lot of triple A games. Or heck, even some double A games like the Neptunia and Senran Kagura series are two I've enjoyed over the years because of the passion on display.
I have a perfect example. GTA 4. The ''flaws'' of that game is what makes the replay-ability so strong. There are multiple stupid ways that you can screw up a mission, killing an important npc, the easy cheat code access, the sometimes terrible driving mechanics making driving missions more challenging, yet FUN! Don't get me started on how the freedom you have. Everything is so straight and linear in GTA 5 and I just know that GTA 6 will be the same.
One of my biggest regrets is picking up Killer7 in Blockbuster because i thought it looked cool, asking the guy behind the counter if it was any good. His review was less than glowing and i put it back on the shelf.