It's not an eastern or western thing. It's a studio thing. Anyone else remember how Dead Space had all the hud elements intergrated on the player character. Most modern games just do the bare minimum in terms of UX.
it's not an eastern or a western thing, but a lot of the western games industry has a bunch of thinly veiled racism towards Japanese games and developers, haven't you noticed how poorly japan gets represented in most game awards, and this new showing of western devs feeling entirely justified to dunk on a Japanese game just because they think they can get away with making fun of this stupid Japanese game.
@@RahkshiMaster I would argue that it appears to be a western eastern thing because the western AAA industry is so incestuous that it degenerated to a point where every big western games follow a similar formula. If you go to western indies or even smaller European games you will notice that the way of doing things can fluctuate a lot. Oh but I totally agree on the thinly veiled racism of the big western studios towards anything that doesn't follow their standards. The only value I find in the game awards is the occasional interesting trailer for a new game. Everything else is a waste of time.
@@ghirahimlefabuleux8984 Lot of this yeah; pressure to perform and sell well means aping all the trends that are successful, be that UX, open world formulas, chasing the GAS dream, etc. Even back before those specific ones it was always a thing to chase trends (the fighting game boom, for instance), its just that the industry is so massive that its fallen into the same trappings as the movie industry: Pleasing investors by getting high sales and appealing to the widest possible audience (which means super clear UX that can be seen as borderline patronizing, just for the people who need their hand held more).
For a while I think AAA western devs have been afraid of people not finishing their games. So they have all the quest markers, objectives and voice acting to make sure you know exactly what to do and when to do it. I don't think Miyazaki/Fromsoft really give a shit if you finish their games, they have no problem with you being stuck on a dungeon or boss for hours, like it or not.
More importantly, they don’t care if you do everything the first time. I’m pretty sure you can go to the last level in Eldin Ring after beating two of the main bosses If your game is fun, players will spend more time to learn everything.
Yeh it's honestly wild, I understand that if your spending 10 million dollars on some pretty assets for an area you'll want to FORCE the player to LOOK AT THIS MONEY. But for something to feel special, you can't show it off. The player has to stumble across it to make them feel that point of discovery. Miyazaki gets that and I'm glad we can get this style of game despite the 'money showoff' temptation of beeg budget game.
Western Game Devs: "Elden Ring has awful UI/UX!“ Western Games: "Use your joystick to slowly drag this cursor across the menu and hold the A button for 2 seconds to confirm every menu interaction."
That has to be one of the most baffling changes I've seen in recent games. It reminds me of how certain games when ported to PC would have terrible menus because they'd only work with buttons, even though you've got a perfectly good mouse right there. And now we're getting the reverse, these feel like PC menus thrown onto the console version so that they didn't have to design two UIs.
I'm willing to bet this "hold button to do every interaction" thing is some usability thing gone amok. I remember when games first started giving people the option of changing mashing inputs to hold inputs for the benefit of people with disabilities, and I thought it was awesome then. Then they started appearing on basically every possible interaction where a simple singular press would have sufficed. I bet you some designer went "What if we did this for EVERY interaction? Then our game will be double compatible for people with disabilities." And then nobody spoke up about how stupid that would be.
@@matrix3509 That doesn't really make sense if you think about it. the benefit to people with disabilities is that mashing is hard, so you replace it with a hold. Changing a quick press to a hold benefits no one.
@@MetalGearRAY675 That's why I said it was stupid. But it wouldn't surprise me at all if some UI designer was dumb enough to think it was actually genius. We've seen what passes for UI with most games, and yes its pure speculation, but its not outside the realm of possibility.
Pat screaming “THEY ARE NOTHING! NOTHING!!” about the Grafted Scion room made me actually cry from laughter. I feel it so hard. The only reason I beat them was because ,after multiple… and I mean MULTIPLE attempts of beating my head against the wall, I shot the one above the item with an arrow and it just… died. Like it straight up just fell like it got knocked off the ceiling instead of it’s normal animation for some reason and died from the fall damage
A lot of enemies either spawn above the fall distance to instakill them, or have attacks that launch them high enough to do so. If you can knock them off the walls, or stagger them at the height of the jump, or even just position them so they hit a ceiling texture, you can cheese so many of these enemies. I think the best example is the wolf of radagon in Raya Lucaria. There are rafters, walkways, and the globe all hanging above the room, and if you can get it to do its jump attack into one of these things, it'll side off of them and die of fall damage.
What blows my mind about the dark souls portion of Elden ring is the pathing through the areas. Sure there's shortcut porn, but there's also like eight different ways to go through the area and they all intersect at points.
I spent at least 10 hours scraping every inch of Stormveil Castle and it wasn’t until hour 6 or 7 that I felt like I had a decent mental map of the place- backtracking and seeing how many places the “stealthy” and “through the front gate” routes linked up and/or were basically the same place fucked me up
@@iller3 The game is a open world that contains enclosed areas with non-open world design. The non-open areas DO funnel you, because there's ultimately only one endpoint of them, unlike the open world.
@@NormalLee67 I can completely relate. I laughed my ass off several times because I found a path through a dungeon while exploring that's easier to traverse than the path that I've been throwing myself at for an hour
Hot Take: When your UX design philosophy talking points mirror Phil Fish's take on Japanese game development, maybe you should reevaluate your position.
You really gotta respect (?) Phil Fish for just openly saying "fuck these Japanese games I am BETTER than them" instead of trying to hide behind game design talk and stuff. Just say it with your whole chest, people. We already know what you mean.
He didn't say he was better than them. He just said they sucked. And during that time period they did and it was right before Japanese games made a huge resurgence in quality. It was still rude as hell though.
I find it so hilarious that not only did Horizon get overshadowed by a bigger game, but that this video has the main character from Horizon on the thumbnail but these guys overshadow Horizon AGAIN by talking about things that are loosely related to it It's like, "nah we got more interesting topics to go over right now"
Who ever was in charge of releasing Horizon should be fired. Legitimately that game should have been released a month before or 2 months after Elden Ring. I was seeing advertisements for that game and was thinking oh right Elden Ring comes out soon.
@@ishmaelambrosine6458 it’s not but we all have to admit Horizon is a niche game that not very many played the first time and a sequel to a niche game released at the same time Elden Ring came out and it’s a From Soft game with everything people loved about Soulsborne games mixed into an open world. It’s steep competition and salty devs and Horizon fans aren’t making it look any better.
@@ishmaelambrosine6458 lol I have a lot of fun with Forbidden West. I hate that this game is the straw that broke the camels back when it comes to open world games. It's fun, the fights are cool and I think it looks gorgeous
"There's a boss near the end of the game where you can glitch into his arena and his AI doesn't turn on" What's worse is that he's one of the coolest boss fights in the game!
I did that glitch on one character just to try it out, only to create an entirely new character just to actually fight him coz I regret having to miss out on an awesome boss battle lol (not to mention I can't get the white mask invaders equipment anymore)
Keep in mind the first Horizon game released not only during the Switch's launch week but also Breath of The Wild's launch so it's almost like Sony loves launching this series along with the heavy hitters of the year.
It more likely they are hoping it would blow Zelda and later Elden ring away. If they won on that comparison it would look amazing and be embbeded in peoples mind instead the opposite happened.
@@sonicboomers122 22:36 you make a similar point to woolie here. The problem is they thought they could beat out a Hugely successful legacy franchise that has both a rabid fan base, plus the casual crowd drawn in by GRRM. I’m not a marketing genius but just seeing GRRM on the box should have made Horizons team go maybe we should put some distance between us and them.
I wonder if the reason why western game devs are so prone to saying that something is "bad game design" is because they went to college for game design, where they were told "oh, [feature]? that's bad game design. No icons on the world map? that's bad game design. The game not telling where to go every single second of playing it? That's bad game design." If you're an indie dev who started out as just a software dev, you ain't gonna have any idea what "bad game design" even fucking means and you're instead going to go off of the games that you enjoy (aka, like, actual player-approved "good game design")
More like, it was their Marketing sales monetization departments who told them that... Guarantee there was some focus group attached to that which found it would increase the likelyhood of certain _kinds_ of "playtime Retention" which lead to Micro purchases or gamepass renewals
@@hatsunemikufanboy I assumed as much, since the same thing happens in software dev, too "Well, back in university, they told us that XYZ is bad design" This sentiment commonly comes from people who are bad at the thing they have a degree in (they went into software dev but only got a degree through memorization and theory, not through actually knowing how to code), so they just parrot what their professors told them without a second thought
I don’t even think characters talking vs. not talking in gameplay is necessarily an eastern vs western thing. I remember Marty O’Donnell talking about how Master Chief in Halo 1-3 barely talked because they didn’t want him to think or say things that the player might not be thinking or saying. Then 343 became the new devs and Halo 4 came out and Chief never shuts up, and I remember hearing on a podcast where Marty himself said he thought it was incredibly jarring to play. Hell it’s part of why Rookie is just straight up silent in ODST.
Playing Dying Light 2 and Elden Ring at the same time makes me realize how much I really dislike how overwhelming UI designs are in a lot of open world games. Granted most of them I can turn off but I absolutely dislike having a bunch of icons fill my screen.
The maps literally fill me with OCD dread, I must clean them up, they're distracting. Its nice to not know where everything is at or even hidden from you, even if Elden Ring is down right absurd with hiding some of them.
Pretty much the reason why most japanese games are unbearable to me. Many keep trying to hide how uninspired and boring they are with exploding UI elements that take up half the screen. Then the rest of japanese games are masterful at it.
A problem with turning them off is, "Was the game designed so you don't need it?" Did the quest giver give you enough information that you can piece stuff together? Does the game let you ask NPCs about the quest you are on to gather more clues? Some of these games seem to completely rely on the UI to get the player to where they need to be.
Damn, I really agree with Pat’s “two games” argument with Red Dead 2. Luckily I enjoy both of them, but I can see how that wouldn’t gel with some people.
@@XShrike0 exactly. Like I'd say the gunslinger missions are another perfect example from RDR2. You cant shoot Belle and you can't not shoot the others. And the 1 you can shoot the gun from his hand, he pulls a pistol laughs at you and suicides. The rest don't register their gun as a unique target.
"run arthur we're ambushed this is unwinnable" and you're gunning down guys with the semi-auto shotgun, and then you get mission failed....it was just so annoying that you have literally zero control in missions
Probably one of my favorite examples of non-linearity in a GTA game is during the torture mission of GTA 5, you can skip all but the first torture sections by shooting the guy with a big beard, big belly, and a redshirt. Michael and Dave Norton don't know they shot the right person but they assume they did. You skip the next three or four torture sections. GTA IV had a lot of these similar non-linear choices that I kinda wish were in RDR2 and even RDR1.
I saw a few non linear moments. You can shoot a man to skip a scene where you question where to find a man. You shoot his pal as soon as they notice you and it goes to a new scene where he freaks out that you killed his friend and surrenders the information without questioning
But doesn't the mission require you to do all the torture options in order to get the perfect mission rating? Because I took the shot based on memory and remember getting a bronze. Not that is important but I do feel like the game still forces you to play it a certain way if you go for completion.
@@supremacistdawn The world was not ready for The Adventure of Cookies and Cream. Perhaps Elden Ring will ready us for a truly challenging game such as that.
The more I see people talking about this kinda stuff, the more I realize that "good game design" is kind of subjective. Like, I knew a guy in college who was upset that Shadow of the Colossus just had you wandering through the map with no obstacles or enemies in between the colossi fights... and while yeah, that might be considered "bad" level design, but that is also the reason why people enjoyed that game in the first place! Some people enjoy the sense of exploration and finding shit out by themselves! I also totally understand why someone might be put off by Elden Ring's lack of UI, but that doesn't mean it's bad. I went into it with very little knowledge of Souls games, missed the combat tutorial, and still managed to enjoy the game because it's not actually that hard to figure it out on your own...
It really is. I tend to like weird esoteric shit. Like, not everybody can get into Space Station 13, ya know? I don't get why people need to stick their dicks into something others love and cry about changing it.
Following up on Pat talking about movie discourse on social media - there are so many unironic/dead serious tweets about how the new Batman movie was "too serious" and "didn't have enough jokes" and its legitimately flabbergasting.
Woolie bringing up "the Grafted" spider things right after the point where his last Playthrough video left of is perfect timing. That was peak Miyazaki "raising the stakes" and summoning a SECOND monster closet out of nowhere
I think the interesting thing about the "2 games" conversation is that Elden Ring's 2 games don't really get in the way of one another. They aren't dissonant. You have options to tackle things I'm your own way just as you can out in the open world. NPC quests are just as non hand holding as they are in the open world. The design philosophy carries over beautifully. In a game RDR2 that isn't the case. You can go anywhere do whatever you want out in the open world. But the moment you begin a bespoke quest you are suddenly in rails. The design has this grating sense of dissonance.
It really makes you think regarding the overall philosophies and culture guiding western game design. Too many devs have been acting like entitled pricks for a long time now, it's clearly not an isolated issue.
You can tell the lash out is fear driven. "What if I'm out of touch? No, it's the gamers and Japanese who are wrong". Western devs tend to be a certain kind of person, certainly the ones in AAA studios. The kind of person that thinks the world is out to get them and will always double down on their BS and just ban criticism rather than reflect on it.
Lots of Japanese devs are pricks, too. They're just generally less public about it/they're not doing it in English so you don't notice it. Game development and publishing is toxic and egotistical the whole world over, and at all budget/studio sizes. America's got the loudest pricks, but there are entitled pricks all throughout Europe and Asia.
Yup. I'm playing and enjoying both Elden Ring and Horizon, alternating days with them. I'm having a great time. These petty clan wars don't help anything and don't make any games better, just like the console wars didn't help anything in the 90s. People have to learn getting in pissing matches over video games isn't a substitute for a personality. Play one, or both, or three or four games, or whatever. Just enjoy video games. It's what they're there for.
It is, but remember it's also fine not to. It's totally okay to think horizon is trash, or elden ring is badly designed. Whatever. It's not a big deal.
I like western and Japanese games but I prefer Japanese games way more. Western devs are so far up their own asses these days it's ridiculous. And Sony treats Japanese devs like shit.
It’s the arrogance that makes me dislike Horizon. And a dev ranting other games with different play styles is basically unprofessional. They are salty for the success of other devs.
Pat isn't lying about the whole 'boss fights are outdated' thing during the late 2000s. Mass Effect 3 is a classic example of how detrimental that maxim is, some execs thought that a boss fight with the Illusive Man would be lame so at the end of the game the conflict with him is resolved purely through a dialogue wheel despite the game explicitly laying groundwork for a fight. One of the many reasons why the ending is so universally hated is the rug pull where instead of fighting the Illusive Man in his iconic empty office, you get an unwanted rematch with his right hand man instead.
i remember reading that rocksteady didn't want to put bossfights in arkham asylum wich is crazy considering the potencial bosses that batman has with ist villains, then arkham knight came out and i saw how right that article was about rocksteady philosphy
@@lanius6259 The Joker in Arkham Asylum is biggest reason that not every game needs boss fights. Honestly I think the takeaway from these discussions is that not every game needs to be the same and creators should just do what they want.
@@Kango234 i absolutely agree nevertheless arkham city had some great boss fights and origins had them as that game saving grace, i think in the end each developer should be allowed to stick to their strenght
@@lanius6259 not every game needs boss fight, but rocksteady's problem has always been that they are pretty terrible at designing boss fights, outside of that one Mr freeze encounter. I went back to origins on PC recently and my god, outside of some annoying design issues like how you unlock certain upgrades with challenges that game is incredible and it's bosses are better than I would have thought possible given Batman's control scheme. I wish the aspects of the design that WB Montréal excelled at were carried forward into Knight.
The best modern GTA levels are the assassination missions in 4 that give you free reign and access to the whole map to take down the target like going and finding a helicopter to land on his head is a valid strategy and it’s a breath of fresh air after the hyper scripted missions
One open world game that should have had a silent protagonist (or at least mostly silent) was Avalanche's Mad Max. He barely speaks in the films! Yet whenever you collect mementos of the old world, Max has to point out the obvious of every single trinket he finds. Yes, Max, the old world was different. The player doesn't need you to explain how to feel.
I never played that game, but that's pretty stupid. I mean, we (the players) have the same perspective on the old world that Max does because we currently LIVE in the old world. If anything, I feel like him saying nothing would actually give him more character because while we are shocked to see how things in his time compare to how we live, his silence would be his acknowledgement of it as an unremarkable everyday part of his reality. Like, imagine if Kenshiro had to monologue about how "life used to be different" after he exploded a bunch of dudes instead of just moving on.
@@gdhuertas07 Yeah, speaking of which, how good is that game? It's on sale super-cheap on PSN right now and I'm not 100% sure on whether I should get it. It went kinda under my radar when it came out, and I don't remember how well received it was.
@@MoostachedSaiyanPrince If it's cheap, I'd recommend it. The world itself is beautiful, and it nails the atmosphere of the Mad Max films brilliantly. I'd say it's flawed but fascinating.
Demon's Souls & Dark Souls 1 had bad UX with confusing list diving. Since they implemented grids in DS2 there really isn't any problem outside of figuring out what you recently got ... But now Elden Ring has 'sort by recently acquired' so that's now solved. Western UX philosophy is definitely to make everything a mobile game, showing as little information as possible due to 'Visual Noise'. So i assume the argument is that stats screens with a bunch of Scary numbers is 'objectively bad' to them.... But its an RPG bruh, hiding those numbers would actually make the game More confusing cus then you wouldn't be able to build your character... And Elden Ring has a less cluttered HUD than all western RPGs that fill it with quest markers (on minimap and ingame), quest objectives, quest notifications... So much for avoiding 'Visual Noise'.
And there are even some cases where I think Elden Ring falls behind on revealing information. The big one is how physical defense values are broken up between Slash/Pierce/Strike, but offensive values aren't. At least, not in the main UI.
@@billyfig1 yeh that's been a series problem for sure. For the longest time i thought that meant if say, a weapon did standard/slash for example it did both... But datamining channels revealed that PER attack move you are doing that does that specific dmg type. Like maybe its all standard but your R2 is slash.... Def confusing. I'd honestly be down to collapse that general 'attack power' number to see each moves dmg, type, stamina use... Oh and I'll add too, Sekiro's posture system... That had a whole bar for it right? This game actually has that, its called Stance, and its completely invisible to the player... Less 'visual noise' but now ya gotta mentally keep track of that which is more confusing to me.
To be 100% fair here. Yes. An RPG should absolutely have stat lists and the like, but having two stats called Robustness and Immunity that aren't explained at all really is kinda trashy. From has definitely improved, but there's still a lot of menu jank that people would not be forgiving so easily in a game by literally any other company. Like, why DOES the pouch have 2 extra slots you can't use without opening the menu, and yet it still removes those items from your regular item bar? Did we really need a fast selection method for the right side of the menu that's faster than menu searching but slower than cycling your regular item bar? And if I'm missing some method to use those items from the last two pouch slots... why isn't that explained anywhere?
@@DairunCates Well I personally use those 2 extra pouch slots for items I use frequently BEFORE battle, so I don't have to dig for them, and I use the bottom bar for flasks and spirits only and the 4 directional slots of the pouch are for Torrent and throwables.
@@DairunCates Just to give a heads up to you or anyone else that doesnt know, all stats have a tool tip text attached to em. If you click select you can bring up the help menu and can scroll through what every stat does. But its def true they could explain the RPG stats even more. I think in general the RPG building is what is the most difficult about souls games. This goes beyond UX though, it's more of the concepts of the game itself. Oh the two pouches are a quick bar menu. Its actually a bit of a funny UX journey there. The Pouch comes from Bloodborne. It was a quick access menu so you could use items without menudiving and not filling up your 'use item' spot. This was also in Dark Souls 3. The pouch was in the center of the screen though. They updated this in multiple ways here. Now the pouch is accessed mostly by using Use button as a shift key for the dpad, which is actually amazing. The weird part is theres just 2 old-quick access slots ... Yeh i have no idea why its just two. Dpad has to be 4, but they coulda kept the 6 quick access like before. Also it was shifted to the right, placing it into a sidebar. This is so the menu doesnt obstruct where your going which is good but now the quick items arent apparent... And yeh only 2 slots makes it not as useful as it was. Which btw, yeh for multiplayer its much more useful. Resins or healing consumables the most likely candidates, but yeh now those can be on dpad shift.
i’m one of those people who is playing elden ring as their first souls game and is loving every single second, and i also find it really interesting how upset some people are getting about the game’s open world/quest design. i can’t play most open world games (most western ones, that is) because of the map and the quest logs. the amount of information being shared quickly becomes overwhelming to my ADHD brain and i turn the game off. hell, i picked up the first HZD game on sale a couple years ago and haven’t finished it for this exact reason. so elden ring’s open world design is refreshing. i got one of those “go and find this thing” side quests pat talked about and the lack of specific directions actually felt amazing. instead of “here is the exact pathway to complete this quest and also we’re going to constantly remind you every 20 seconds what you have to do” it was “here’s a thing you can do if u wanna, just go play the game as you have been” and i LOVE that
There is something incredibly sad in that developers like these, who are supposed to make games for us don't get why these basic things that existed for decades now are appealing. Makes me want to say "Go play some video games before making one, because you clearly don't have enough exp" to them.
@@OfficerHotpants ...and that [Richard]-measure is usually the metrics of Boards of Directors like the ones who all fell in behind people like Bobby Kotick and Strauss Zelnick
@@OfficerHotpants I mean, I wouldn't say nothing good could come out of that contest, but at the same time, I don't know if there was ever good things out of it.
I played every AssCreed from 1 to Black Flag and I haven't touched one since. It really felt to me that Black Flag was the perfect feather in their cap as far as game design went, and as soon as I finished it I was like, "welp there is nowhere for them to go from here and I have no desire to ever play another one." Now I look at AssCreed like I look at Madden, or Call of Duty. "These games must be for SOMEONE, because they keep getting made, but they sure as shit aren't for me." What's insane to me is that they just took those amazing sailing mechanics and didn't give us some kind of age of sail sim. So much potential in those mechanics, just thrown into the trash.
i like open world dialogue when it reveals more about our character, how they feel about their environment, things that remind them of little past events we may not have been privy to, etc. it connects the character to the world. But when the character is essentially dropping the same tutorial tips every time they pass a certain marker, or not trusting the player to do simple puzzle objectives without blurting out the answer 5 minutes in, it just feels like the game is backseating me with my own character and nagging me to play their way. Let me struggle! let me earn my experiences with the game!
Immortals Fenyx Rising was pretty inspired by breath of wild, I don’t think it left the impression Ubisoft had hoped because nobody seems to remember it lol.
I think the issue is people aren't used to a game that doesn't hold your hand. Some people when they first experience soulsborne titles they have a very positive reaction, it feels very freeing to just figure things out yourself. Thats what happened to me with demons souls, and I fell in love with that style when dark souls 1 came out. Other people have really adverse reactions to the lack of structure, and they hate it. They get frustrated and confused, not because they are stupid, but because they are so conditioned to a particular style, that anything else is irritating to them. My girlfriend is like this, she likes mario games and other Nintendo platformers, she tried elden ring and was immediately overwhelmed by the amount of stuff to remember. Its important to remember that other people have different preferences and that's fine. Its also important to remember, Elden ring fucking rules...
My gf asked if she should buy it as well, since she saw I was very hyped for it, i was hesitant and told her "it's really good...but I don't think you'll play more than 20 minutes since it's really hard and thus not your cup of tea... Guess who's now in front of me out of spite.
I found a NPC in Elden Ring that spoke to me and asked me to take a castle south of a point I hadn’t found yet. 1 I like that I didn’t get a pop up with an exact distance count to that point
Horizon has a neat world and some cool scifi concepts but I hate the characters, story and some of the gameplay. It reminds me of the time I downloaded Life is Strange. It seemed right up my alley. But almost as soon as I got into it in the school I could not enjoy anything because the characters were so horrifical obnoxious it ruined the whole thing for me. I still can't get over the whole "selfie artist" fucking shit. Made me want to puke.
As I get older I prefer more linear games. Just dont have the time anymore. However, very rarely, if the open world is engaging and fun to explore, like spiderman, then I'm down for it.
Western open world design is super linear though. It doesnt feel like that because the map is big, but its still a do one-then two-then three to poggress sort of thing. You can do sidequests... but it so rarely doesnt drag by the eigth time you have fought that same mini boss
@@FlameHidden eh i'd argue that i had more fun playing something like fallout 4 than i did with a japanese open world game. i can't comment on something like elden ring, breath of the wild or arceus as i haven't played them yet but the ones that i did play seem to have a bad habit of being rather empty and having really nothing to do in the overworld or structured like an MMO. i feel like the dead rising or shenmue, yakuza & MGS5 were the only ones i played not like that.
@@xsoultillerx This is the part of the reason I don’t play many open world games. I don’t like feeling like I have to wander aimlessly for an hour to find a single unique encounter or decent reward. Luckily, Elden Ring is essentially a massive open area FILLED with nearly nothing but unique encounters with the rewards often being a handful of consumables to help you upgrade your weapons or craft more items to help you fight, but also decidedly brand new items that can help you change your arsenal/playstyle wildly if you wanted to. Players can find a surprisingly good early game weapon simply by exploring some ruins right nearby the starting area, and that sort of design incentivizes exploring everywhere throughout the entire game, because you actually get excited about the encounters AND the rewards. No obnoxious UI needed. “I SHOULD INVESTIGATE THAT CAVE OVER THERE…”
Shame they didn't talk about the mask-off xenophobia I'm seeing from these people on Twitter. It's always been around and was very prevalent in the 7th gen but it seems ER getting this attention has opened some old wounds.
That's always been the most infuriating thing when people discuss game anything about Japanese media. I'm not saying they don't have issues that should be brought up, but people do it in such a childish and disrespectful way. It's insane how hypocritical they.
@@Gaz_3 Some devs are talking like having ui/ux problems is a japanese game problem and that the "Japanese style"of games like Elden Ring instantly throw them off.
People blow the amount of dialogue Snake had out of proportion. He talks a lot in the audio tapes and several missions. He's downright chatty in Ground Zeroes and Code Talker.
Spoilers... I think that one is for a different discussion since that is intended because YOU are Snake, not because of gameplay reasons. I get that people don't like Kojima's meta shit but that is why there is no inner monologue and very little dialogue.
The UI designer for BF2042 had the audacity to bitch about Elden Ring's UI. The guy has no legs to stand on when it took him 4 months to actually put in a scoreboard into the game.
Say what you will about Last of Us Part 2 but the open world section near the start of that game is the first time i've seen a western developer design exploration in a way that allows you to stumble upon discovery. Letting players just run around and find shit as opposed to holding their hand is a net good
The only thing I dislike about Elder ring is finding cool bait enemies, they are tough normal enemies in a remote special looking area, but there is nothing special about them. Not even the satisfaction is enough reward for the pain they induce.
Yeah, the fact that many of them respawn and only yield a pitiful amount of runes makes fighting them more trouble than its worth. I wish they took more cues from Sekiro in this area because the minibosses were actually a blast to go out of your way and fight in that one.
Yeah, leveling in the early game was painful for me personally because you just need to bash your head against dungeons and bosses or else you won't be leveling up. I'd also extend that criticism to the lack of upgrade materials outside of mine areas. Killing normal enemies in the overworld, minibosses or evergoal fights gives an absolute pittance of runes and almost never drop smithing stones because they usually give you other things like weapons or spells instead. The problem is that early game, leveling up and upgrading your weapon are the most important part of progression because you probably don't have the stats yet to use the things minibosses and evergoal fights give you. It's probably the weakest part of the game in my perspective other than how often you can be stunned and killed before you can roll or react.
there are a a lot of enemies in this game that are playing a different game, like their just so fast and have so much health, and yeah, 400 souls for the knights in stormveil? the little vulgar militia guys outside the beast sanctum are like 1000 and i can kill them with a backstab and a couple slashes, they’re attacks are slow too, plus you don’t lose a third of your souls when you die in the overworld. oh and i never found a good source for smithing stone 1, i had to get the item to unlock it in the twin husks shop
@@ViperJoe shoutout to the like 4 or 5 respawning Erdtree burial watchdogs in that catacomb in the mountains because it totally makes sense to make a scaled-down version of a boss a respawning enemy. I eventually ran past them.
I remember you guys had the exact same conversation about eastern vs western developers on the old channel while you were playing Sam's dlc in Revengance. You guys should take a look at Sol Cresta since it's solely published and developed by Platinum, it might be a palette cleanser for Babylon's Fall. I plan on getting the Limited Run Version of it.
Oh god Monster Hunter quest descriptions, maybe my favorite one is a Rajang quest where the description is that a shitty princess wants a Rajang rug and that opens a quest for Kirin where she got bored of the Rajang so now go get a Kirin one.
Linear quests can be great. Like I love plenty of questlines in New Vegas or Witcher games, probably cus those try to have branching paths and different outcomes. But it can make NPCs and yourself feel like actors, and especially that NPCs are just machines meant to give you quests to add to your todo list. But the way FromSoftware does these abstract, obstructing info, NPC questlines make a lot more sense for an open world. It makes characters feel like they are on a journey too, adventuring along and you meet together by happenstance. Adds alot to making the world feel 'living'.
@@RahkshiMaster Witcher 3 is definitely the best way of doing heavily scripted questlines. I remember an interview describing their process was designing the quests to be 20-30 minute tv episodes. So the pacing is great, you get to see the start and end of a story, but like a tv show characters can become reoccuring and you get to see longer story arcs. Honestly alot of the side quests were better than the main quest. Plus, Witcher does the trick of not telling you what choices matter until 20 hours later. Hiding that info, to surprise you of the consequences.. it gives a lil taste of what fromsoft bases their entire questlines on.
Though at the same time they also make it feel like you're the only one doing anything in the world or mattering despite many of the games telling the contrary and that our character is just more tenacious and brave than most, but not important (even the chosen undead was an intentional misnomer), since you're the only one who moves their quests, and by extension, their lives, along. All of which are usually very easy to miss entirely, mess up, or lose out entirely just by playing the game in a way they don't want for the quests or going out of a set order. Though that's not exclusive to ER, but all of From's souls games. It's more the style and tradition of how the game operates than anything, so at least it's an expected way to do quests and can be worked with easily
@@Valanway Well few NPCs are going that 'main' path your taking. Solaire is trying to become the sun, Seigmeyer is trying to find his daughter, etc. They all have their own goals, which is what dictates the logic of their quest. Something you may not be told immediately since your just two strangers meeting each other. So while yeh, we are Protagonist causing event triggers to further quests behind the scenes (usually its just defeating a boss or entering an area) you still gotta go lookin' for that character. They could end up where ever they want, which is enough autonomy to not just be ducks waddling behind Da Main Guy. Like say, Pathologic takes this hidden info obtuse questing and cranks it to 11. Not only does player action move npc quests, but also the passage of time itself.... I would say, this works in Pathologics case for its theme, but the amount of moving pieces is a bit intense. People already claim souls quests are bullshit because 'me main character, why npc mad i killed their brother? doesnt make sense bro' if NPCs actually progressed via time intervals and beat the game before you (no joke, this type of concept was in the works for Oscar before they scrapped it) itd be too much to handle honestly.
@@RahkshiMaster I think Witcher 3 at least had better player autonomy than RDR2 when it comes to missions. If you’re doing a quest with Yennefer, at any point you can just leave her there and go play some Gwent on the other end of the map, and then come back days later - there moght even be some dialogue about abandoning her. It’s unrealistic but it respects the player’s choices better.
a big factor of what i enjoy from an open world is whether or not there's stuff to do after i finish the game like side quest, events & random encounters. like pat brought up AC: brotherhood as a "gold standard" but i felt like there's almost nothing to do in that game's overworld once you finish the main game & DLCs.
My first Jrpg was Yakuza like a dragon. Now I'm not saying fallout, my personal favorite series all time, isnt good. Yakuza was next level story telling, I felt for the characters every moment and loved the cliches. Definitely stands on its own level in terms of design to me, kinda like MH.
I haven't played Like a Dragon yet, but it makes me so happy to hear a western RPG fan played and enjoyed it. It's so funny since most people who avoid Japanese games cite an anime art style or that you're playing as a bunch of teenagers. So you would think that a game where you play as a bunch of realistic, middle aged men would blow up. But nope, actually playing the game is not as fun as complaining on the internet it seems.
I keep seeing this strange idea that Horizon and Ubisoft games are unpopular. Their ridiculous, consistently high sales state otherwise. I was floored when I found out Horizon 1 sold 20 million copies. These things are clearly popular, and I'm not sure there even is THE ONE TRUE BEST STYLE open world game. The various iterations of open world excel in some areas and sacrifice other things. It's better to look at this as open world having subgenres.
I think it gets overlooked alot but I really loved Arkham Knight's mechanic of 'following the bat symbol to you waypoint.' A very Batman way around maps
Elden Ring is so good it's managed to make talking about it on the internet with people actually feel like being back in grade school and talking with the other kids in your class.
Man, I've tried playing genshin, and exploration in that game is actually pretty fun sometimes. There's some really cool locations you can find and dungeons to explore, however I absolutely hate the amount of unskippable dialogue that you have to go through to do ANY sort of quest in that game. It's not even interesting dialogue, it's just overly detailed explanations about what you have to do to finish whatever quest. Reminds me of the ssethtzeentach quote; "it was at that point I realized the saddest job you can have is not being a games journalist, it's being an RPG dialogue writer."
having smashed my head against Mohg for as long as I did I can say that the arena fog gate work around needs to stay. and I beat Milania without coop or npc ashes so it's not even about the boss hitting hard, he just never stops attacking.
An important thing to note is the actual completion rate, sure being told what to do each second sucks but people are very very very very dumb and will forget what they’re doing or what to even do. So moving to make things more relaxed only decreases completion rate
It doesn't even have to be people being dumb. If you only have a handful of hours to sit down and play on weekends, with five day periods between each session it can be easy to forget what you were doing the last time.
@FrozenOver0 so write a note? You literally have a phone, if you have the memory of a gold fish that's a you problem and sounds kinda like you're dumb
Two of the most popular and renowned AAA games of all time are GTA V and Skyrim which both have really minimalistic HUDs in game. You get a radar, the health bars, the objective flashes a couple times, and the other elements pop out as needed. They don't crowd the fucking screen with bullshit.
Now I might get lambasted for saying this, but as much as I love elden rings open ended, figure it out yourself nature, I do ever so slightly wish we got just a little bit more when it comes to where we should go with quests. I’m not saying it should be marked on the map for every single one, but there are so many npc’s that just give you nothing in terms of where to go or what to do to trigger the next part. Some are great, I met a guy once that said, “hey there’s a castle to the south can you go kill the big guy there” but then there’s the big wolf man with the badass sword who says, “I hate this guy, you should kill him.” And I have no idea where to even start looking for that person, even though I REALLY want to continue his quest and I don’t want to resort to looking stuff up online. Like, I’m not asking for a marker on a map or for the game to just railroad me towards the exact location, but just gimme a starting point.
Definitely agree on that. I did a quest today where the only direction I was given was to go "up the way" while in the middle of a foggy swamp with no roads around. I appreciate having to figure it out for myself, but I wish I could have at least gotten a cardinal direction to go off of instead of wandering around in the swamp in all directions for half an hour before I found what I was looking for. Fromsoft's vague quest design worked well in their other games since their worlds were far more constrained, but it doesn't work quite so well in a massive open world.
I also agree. Another thing i don't like is that if you forgot what they said, or didn't understand them first time, sometimes you can't talk to them again.
The most absurd one I've encountered so far is a quest guy said "Hey meet me in [This Zone]" and I went there and they were nowhere to be seen. Turns out they were just in a completely different area and I was supposed to talk to another NPC entirely to learn that.
The funniest part is that they are shitting on designs that western games have done in the past and was praised. But for some reason they just dont want to do it
I don't think pat is in the wrong for not liking and dropping rdr2, but it is a massive game and if you make it as far into it as he did in his streams without figuring out that when you're in a mission you need to be completely focused on the mission, then some of you running into a wall with the game is on you too, not just the restrictive design.
Seems like Woolie will eventually have to play a modern Rockstar game to at least get a better understanding of these grievances. Pat isn't the best person when it comes to explaining these grievances clearly, which I'm elated to hear him recommend NakeyJake's video on RDR2. That video beautifully sums up the major flaws that game unfortunately suffers from.
The way Pat explained it, and the way Woolie seemed to interpret it, makes RDR2 sound like literally everything was gated off/restricted unless you did it one way. In reality it was just Pat being salty that he can't sequence break main story missions.
Looking back on it, I've found myself kind of soured to the little side stories that a lot of games, open world ones especially, give their side quests. I like Pat's example of how monster hunter gives you a text crawl of stuff to justify it, some of which are actually pretty entertaining, but most people don't pay attention to because they only care about what monster(s) are on it. I appreciate a game having stories to tell, i appreciate games wanting a more natural means of pushing players into cool side areas, but I rarely care about the games' "why?" Edit because i just thought of an addendum: Games that are better at encouraging exploration via gameplay actually get hit by this worse. If the story is taking time away from me doing the fun part then the less it's presence matters, regardless of the actual quality.
So hearing Pat talk about the scions is similar to how I got fed up with all those dragons on that one part of the map, so I said fuck it and systematically exterminated them, only for them to give like 1000 runes each, even though the big sleepy one in the same area that everybody cheeses using bleed will drop at least 70000. That shit boils my blood into sludge.
I didn't think that watching this particular thing would tip me off to two areas i was still thinking about in Elden Ring and the fact there is more there. for the brigde I beat the bois and didn't htink to roll off the bridge it's brutal lol... now i need to go back x.x for the record barricade shield and guard counters work very well 1v1 for them imo.
"Why are you gonna go in that swamp shithole?" "I dunno, maybe there's something cool in it." Patches: "Hey! Lookit that down there! I think I see something shiny!... how about you go check it out?"
I find it funny that the most consistent complaints for protagonists that I have seen come up is "This character is too silent and boring" and "This character will not fucking shut up I hate them"
It's a hard balance to strike and it has peaks and valleys the more fantastical/unrelatable the prognostic gets. Joel from the Last of Us was a normal dude who quipped a lot and had Ellie as a good soundboard. Aloy from Horizon is some wierd clone with advanced tech who talks a lot and explains almost nothing to the other characters because she's the chosen one. In Final Fantasy 14 the chosen one (Warrior of Light / WoL) doesn't talk untill the expansions and for the most part is treated as the muscle. The WoL ends wars, kills gods, time travels, and visits other dimensions while giving a curt nod and fist bump to anyone in trouble. By the time you get to put words in the WoL's mouth despite how extreme and alien they are as a character you know the character so well you don't feel any dissonance between dialogue and action. In this respect FF14 achieved the best of both worlds by simultaneously having a silent protag you can ascribe your own thoughts and motivations to while also dishing out solid one liners as the situation warranted.
Me, personally. I feel that Alloy does the "Open world protagonist" dialogue the best (of games I've played anyway). Its better than constant text popups reminding you to do shit over and over again. Like every game ever will constantly pop up with shit like "Hey you still have skill points to spend" and I keep screaming "I KNOW! IM SAVING UP FOR A SKILL!" Also, in Horizon Zero Dawn in particular (haven't played Forbidden West yet) subqests are done particularly well in that like, 80% of the time after you go do what the quest giver told you to do, you can just move on to the next thing without having to break up the gameplay by returning to town. You get your quest reward and XP without having to go back and talk to anyone. Alloy is just like "Whelp, that's done. Moving on." I can't tell you how much better the game is for not having to go back to the quest giver for every gat dang quest you finish.
I don't even know what that guy was talking about when he said she chimes in about quests a lot that Pat somehow turned into a negative after praising it last week. I think early on there was some of that but I've gotten way further into the game and barely hear any of the commentary like that anymore. Heck they even patched it to lower the amount of ambient dialogue she has about items you gather getting put into storage (it was annoying, and is way better now).
@@Madman6884 haven’t played the new one yet so I wouldn’t know but I didn’t mind her being a bit chatty in the first one. Not just because it makes sense seeing as how she’s literally a nutter mountain woman with zero social skills who makes sense to talk to themselves, but because I like having the feedback.
The UX designer from a game where you have to unequip weapons from a weapon wheel instead of just making a bigger weapon wheel when the game only has like 10 weapons isn't exactly someone whose opinion should carry much weight.
Two reasons. First, later weapons have up to three ammo types. Ergo 18 slots. And two, not all of those weapon types are what everyone is gonna want to use. I'd rather have two regular bows with different ammo types to them than bother with, say, a precision bow. I'd call variety and customization a pretty solid reason.
@@Madman6884 And what about the people who want to use more than 4 weapons? There were 7 weapons that I liked and I was constantly pausing mid-fight to fuck with the weapon wheel. You know what would've solved that? Bigger weapon wheel (or Ratchet & Clank style layered weapon wheel)
5:06 I remember when I was on Twitter and I came across a guy who was getting dunked on because, basically, "tactical turned based games are a lost cause and irrelevant", ie. Fire Emblem, Advance Wars, XCOM. The guy had also put out a pissed off tweet saying "I won't respond to anyone who isn't asking a genuine question". And I remember thinking (naively) to myself, "Gee, Twitter only has so many characters. Maybe there's some important context missing here? Perhaps I WILL ask this guy genuinely to explain himself." So I tweeted back at the guy and asked "What's the context behind this? I enjoy this genre, but I want to understand. What flaws do you see and why do you not think it can't ever be improved upon, ever, unlike literally every other genre?" and he was just like "Read my article" with a link. And I paused. And I thought to myself "This guy is advertising at me instead of explaining himself genuinely like he promised. His opinion that an entire genre can't evolve and should be scrapped because of that literally makes no sense-- Wait a minute, an opinion!? That doesn't matter to me or how I enjoy things!" And then I simply LEFT.
I feel like this Eastern vs Western is only going to get worst going foward now since China and Korea are now known parts of the game industry like Chinese games are often mobile so theyve been invisible until Genshin blew up (granted they're seen as the best mobile games) but its there
To be fair on horizon I've seen to a lot people take this UX discourse discussion and just turn it into a Horizon VS Elden Ring thing or like it was all Horizon devs being salty in that tweet which is wrong.
I think a great way to tell if an open world game is good is to ask yourself “is my game good without the open world?” Elden ring without the open world is dark souls, which is a good game. The Ubisoft formula game without the open world is a series of menial tasks with a few potentially interesting story quests interspersed. That doesn’t sound fun to me.
For about 10 hours or more of elden ring i was way too strong for the area i was in. I was basically going back and scraping the land for anything i missed and i was just wiping out everything, even bosses, without much challenge. It felt like i earned it, cus i wandered off and got a bunch of materials and cool weapons to make me super strong. I DESERVED to smack down some bosses in only a couple of hits. That feeling just feels great
Im going through my first plythrough of a souls game and its dark souls prepare to die edition. And I adore the game. That being said it reminds me of a more elaborate Maximo ps2 which gave me almost the same sense of adventuring and figure things out on your own and be careful with every step you take kind of wonder.
To be fair, Both Sony and FromSoft fucked Guerilla. If Elden wasn't getting pushed Guerilla should've backed out and forced a delay no matter what Sony says. You're losing more money having your sales taken by Elden than not selling at all.
I tried the DS1 games a couple times and it didn't clique for me but Elden ring was just perfectly designed for me personally and contextualized everything plus getting into that side of Woolie's content and after putting 180 hours into my first playthrough I went back and have now beaten bloodborne and gotten to sen's castle in ds1. Once you find the rythem the game wants you to play its very similar to playing music
The fact that you didn't call this Horizon Zero Shade is killing me Woolie. KILLING ME!
It's not an eastern or western thing. It's a studio thing. Anyone else remember how Dead Space had all the hud elements intergrated on the player character. Most modern games just do the bare minimum in terms of UX.
The Ui of dead space 1 is so good having the hp on the back is one my favorite things ever.
it's not an eastern or a western thing, but a lot of the western games industry has a bunch of thinly veiled racism towards Japanese games and developers, haven't you noticed how poorly japan gets represented in most game awards, and this new showing of western devs feeling entirely justified to dunk on a Japanese game just because they think they can get away with making fun of this stupid Japanese game.
If map marker mainia is minimum, I'm terrified to see what "too much" is.
@@RahkshiMaster I would argue that it appears to be a western eastern thing because the western AAA industry is so incestuous that it degenerated to a point where every big western games follow a similar formula. If you go to western indies or even smaller European games you will notice that the way of doing things can fluctuate a lot.
Oh but I totally agree on the thinly veiled racism of the big western studios towards anything that doesn't follow their standards. The only value I find in the game awards is the occasional interesting trailer for a new game. Everything else is a waste of time.
@@ghirahimlefabuleux8984 Lot of this yeah; pressure to perform and sell well means aping all the trends that are successful, be that UX, open world formulas, chasing the GAS dream, etc. Even back before those specific ones it was always a thing to chase trends (the fighting game boom, for instance), its just that the industry is so massive that its fallen into the same trappings as the movie industry: Pleasing investors by getting high sales and appealing to the widest possible audience (which means super clear UX that can be seen as borderline patronizing, just for the people who need their hand held more).
For a while I think AAA western devs have been afraid of people not finishing their games. So they have all the quest markers, objectives and voice acting to make sure you know exactly what to do and when to do it. I don't think Miyazaki/Fromsoft really give a shit if you finish their games, they have no problem with you being stuck on a dungeon or boss for hours, like it or not.
More importantly, they don’t care if you do everything the first time. I’m pretty sure you can go to the last level in Eldin Ring after beating two of the main bosses If your game is fun, players will spend more time to learn everything.
Yeh it's honestly wild, I understand that if your spending 10 million dollars on some pretty assets for an area you'll want to FORCE the player to LOOK AT THIS MONEY.
But for something to feel special, you can't show it off. The player has to stumble across it to make them feel that point of discovery. Miyazaki gets that and I'm glad we can get this style of game despite the 'money showoff' temptation of beeg budget game.
Ash lake in Dark Souls 1 wasn’t discovered for a full 3 months until after the release.
not all of this is for the better though. The game is amazing but we dont have to act like it foesnt have glaring flaws.
@@Zangelin It does have flaws(It crashed 3 times for me) it’s just nice playing something that feels different.
Western Game Devs: "Elden Ring has awful UI/UX!“
Western Games: "Use your joystick to slowly drag this cursor across the menu and hold the A button for 2 seconds to confirm every menu interaction."
That has to be one of the most baffling changes I've seen in recent games. It reminds me of how certain games when ported to PC would have terrible menus because they'd only work with buttons, even though you've got a perfectly good mouse right there. And now we're getting the reverse, these feel like PC menus thrown onto the console version so that they didn't have to design two UIs.
I'm willing to bet this "hold button to do every interaction" thing is some usability thing gone amok. I remember when games first started giving people the option of changing mashing inputs to hold inputs for the benefit of people with disabilities, and I thought it was awesome then. Then they started appearing on basically every possible interaction where a simple singular press would have sufficed.
I bet you some designer went "What if we did this for EVERY interaction? Then our game will be double compatible for people with disabilities." And then nobody spoke up about how stupid that would be.
@@matrix3509 That doesn't really make sense if you think about it. the benefit to people with disabilities is that mashing is hard, so you replace it with a hold. Changing a quick press to a hold benefits no one.
@@MetalGearRAY675 That's why I said it was stupid. But it wouldn't surprise me at all if some UI designer was dumb enough to think it was actually genius. We've seen what passes for UI with most games, and yes its pure speculation, but its not outside the realm of possibility.
I think it’s a hold in case you’re not sure you wanna do that thing but it did get old 5 years ago
Elden Ring so good it's causing people to revert back to 7th gen levels of barely holding back slurs when talking about Japanese games.
I think it's barely holding back slurs in general
I've seen a few where they so badly want to say Japan but drop the letters A and N.
Nothing makes racism come out more than incompetence.
@@soliduswasright678
It's fuckin' great, makes my day even better
@@soliduswasright678 JP?
Pat screaming “THEY ARE NOTHING! NOTHING!!” about the Grafted Scion room made me actually cry from laughter. I feel it so hard. The only reason I beat them was because ,after multiple… and I mean MULTIPLE attempts of beating my head against the wall, I shot the one above the item with an arrow and it just… died. Like it straight up just fell like it got knocked off the ceiling instead of it’s normal animation for some reason and died from the fall damage
Elden Ring: We take those!
Whatever, fuck it. You won!
A lot of enemies either spawn above the fall distance to instakill them, or have attacks that launch them high enough to do so.
If you can knock them off the walls, or stagger them at the height of the jump, or even just position them so they hit a ceiling texture, you can cheese so many of these enemies.
I think the best example is the wolf of radagon in Raya Lucaria. There are rafters, walkways, and the globe all hanging above the room, and if you can get it to do its jump attack into one of these things, it'll side off of them and die of fall damage.
What blows my mind about the dark souls portion of Elden ring is the pathing through the areas. Sure there's shortcut porn, but there's also like eight different ways to go through the area and they all intersect at points.
I spent at least 10 hours scraping every inch of Stormveil Castle and it wasn’t until hour 6 or 7 that I felt like I had a decent mental map of the place- backtracking and seeing how many places the “stealthy” and “through the front gate” routes linked up and/or were basically the same place fucked me up
that just sounds like "Funneling with extra steps" to me.. it doesn't make me think "Ultime OPEN world!" game
@@iller3 The game is a open world that contains enclosed areas with non-open world design. The non-open areas DO funnel you, because there's ultimately only one endpoint of them, unlike the open world.
@@NormalLee67 I can completely relate. I laughed my ass off several times because I found a path through a dungeon while exploring that's easier to traverse than the path that I've been throwing myself at for an hour
@@iller3 maybe you should try funneling some bitches into your life
Hot Take: When your UX design philosophy talking points mirror Phil Fish's take on Japanese game development, maybe you should reevaluate your position.
What did he say? I never really paid attention to the whole “west vs jp” design/development philosophy
@@JaneDoe-my8xq ruclips.net/video/yKUGwlFJAHw/видео.html
haha, that's a *Quality* pull!
@@JaneDoe-my8xq it was pretty racist.
@@JaneDoe-my8xq He said Japanese games suck. like, just blanket all games from Japan are bad.
Open world dialogue feels like the video game equivalent of Zack Snyder using a pop rock song to tell you how to feel
You really gotta respect (?) Phil Fish for just openly saying "fuck these Japanese games I am BETTER than them" instead of trying to hide behind game design talk and stuff. Just say it with your whole chest, people. We already know what you mean.
He didn't say he was better than them. He just said they sucked. And during that time period they did and it was right before Japanese games made a huge resurgence in quality. It was still rude as hell though.
@@bargaintuesday812 Okay yeah I remembered it as him decrying Japanese games against his own. Still a prick though.
@@bargaintuesday812 And now its western games that are terrible.
@@Zangelin No? Western games are still the best and are as good as they've ever been.
@@bargaintuesday812 I think trying to call one or the other better is just feeding into the issue as a whole.
I find it so hilarious that not only did Horizon get overshadowed by a bigger game, but that this video has the main character from Horizon on the thumbnail but these guys overshadow Horizon AGAIN by talking about things that are loosely related to it
It's like, "nah we got more interesting topics to go over right now"
Who ever was in charge of releasing Horizon should be fired. Legitimately that game should have been released a month before or 2 months after Elden Ring. I was seeing advertisements for that game and was thinking oh right Elden Ring comes out soon.
Maybe we can all calm down a bit. Horizon 2 sold very very well. It's not a flop by any means
@@ishmaelambrosine6458 it’s not but we all have to admit Horizon is a niche game that not very many played the first time and a sequel to a niche game released at the same time Elden Ring came out and it’s a From Soft game with everything people loved about Soulsborne games mixed into an open world. It’s steep competition and salty devs and Horizon fans aren’t making it look any better.
@@ishmaelambrosine6458 lol I have a lot of fun with Forbidden West. I hate that this game is the straw that broke the camels back when it comes to open world games. It's fun, the fights are cool and I think it looks gorgeous
Basically it's so unimportant that even making fun of it feels unimportant.
That giant face in Stormveil is even wilder cause there's a bloodstain there from a NPC that triggers the path to ANOTHER ENDING
I can't tell if your fucking with me or not.
"There's a boss near the end of the game where you can glitch into his arena and his AI doesn't turn on"
What's worse is that he's one of the coolest boss fights in the game!
I did that glitch on one character just to try it out, only to create an entirely new character just to actually fight him coz I regret having to miss out on an awesome boss battle lol (not to mention I can't get the white mask invaders equipment anymore)
Keep in mind the first Horizon game released not only during the Switch's launch week but also Breath of The Wild's launch so it's almost like Sony loves launching this series along with the heavy hitters of the year.
Still better than what EA did to Titanfall, which I'm like 90% convinced was intentional sabotage.
Only 90%?
It more likely they are hoping it would blow Zelda and later Elden ring away. If they won on that comparison it would look amazing and be embbeded in peoples mind instead the opposite happened.
@@sonicboomers122 22:36 you make a similar point to woolie here. The problem is they thought they could beat out a Hugely successful legacy franchise that has both a rabid fan base, plus the casual crowd drawn in by GRRM.
I’m not a marketing genius but just seeing GRRM on the box should have made Horizons team go maybe we should put some distance between us and them.
@@23kurtzy Hubris is God's mightiest sword.
I wonder if the reason why western game devs are so prone to saying that something is "bad game design" is because they went to college for game design, where they were told "oh, [feature]? that's bad game design. No icons on the world map? that's bad game design. The game not telling where to go every single second of playing it? That's bad game design."
If you're an indie dev who started out as just a software dev, you ain't gonna have any idea what "bad game design" even fucking means and you're instead going to go off of the games that you enjoy (aka, like, actual player-approved "good game design")
i went to uni for games tech and yeah you fuckin nailed it
Because it makes you feel valid, because obviously all of your choices are the right one
More like, it was their Marketing sales monetization departments who told them that... Guarantee there was some focus group attached to that which found it would increase the likelyhood of certain _kinds_ of "playtime Retention" which lead to Micro purchases or gamepass renewals
@@hatsunemikufanboy I assumed as much, since the same thing happens in software dev, too
"Well, back in university, they told us that XYZ is bad design"
This sentiment commonly comes from people who are bad at the thing they have a degree in (they went into software dev but only got a degree through memorization and theory, not through actually knowing how to code), so they just parrot what their professors told them without a second thought
Good point
I don’t even think characters talking vs. not talking in gameplay is necessarily an eastern vs western thing. I remember Marty O’Donnell talking about how Master Chief in Halo 1-3 barely talked because they didn’t want him to think or say things that the player might not be thinking or saying. Then 343 became the new devs and Halo 4 came out and Chief never shuts up, and I remember hearing on a podcast where Marty himself said he thought it was incredibly jarring to play.
Hell it’s part of why Rookie is just straight up silent in ODST.
Go play a tales game and tell me japanese games don't have characters talking in combat
Playing Dying Light 2 and Elden Ring at the same time makes me realize how much I really dislike how overwhelming UI designs are in a lot of open world games. Granted most of them I can turn off but I absolutely dislike having a bunch of icons fill my screen.
The maps literally fill me with OCD dread, I must clean them up, they're distracting. Its nice to not know where everything is at or even hidden from you, even if Elden Ring is down right absurd with hiding some of them.
BOTW's pro mode is *Chef's kiss*
Pretty much the reason why most japanese games are unbearable to me. Many keep trying to hide how uninspired and boring they are with exploding UI elements that take up half the screen. Then the rest of japanese games are masterful at it.
A problem with turning them off is, "Was the game designed so you don't need it?" Did the quest giver give you enough information that you can piece stuff together? Does the game let you ask NPCs about the quest you are on to gather more clues? Some of these games seem to completely rely on the UI to get the player to where they need to be.
@@vaan_ P5?
Damn, I really agree with Pat’s “two games” argument with Red Dead 2. Luckily I enjoy both of them, but I can see how that wouldn’t gel with some people.
The Red Dead video from NakeyJakey he mentioned covers this in better detail, check it out if you have the time.
Yeah, I loved RDR2 but the missions are super restrictive. The quality is high enough for me not to mind but I get why people hate it
Second on watching Nakey Jakey. Pat forgot to mention the video is fucking hilarious.
I shot a guy in RDR2 during a story mission and failed. Restarted and literally 2 minutes later I was forced to shoot and killed him
That is one of the worst gaming experiences. It makes me question why am I even given control here?
@@XShrike0 exactly. Like I'd say the gunslinger missions are another perfect example from RDR2. You cant shoot Belle and you can't not shoot the others. And the 1 you can shoot the gun from his hand, he pulls a pistol laughs at you and suicides. The rest don't register their gun as a unique target.
"run arthur we're ambushed this is unwinnable" and you're gunning down guys with the semi-auto shotgun, and then you get mission failed....it was just so annoying that you have literally zero control in missions
Probably one of my favorite examples of non-linearity in a GTA game is during the torture mission of GTA 5, you can skip all but the first torture sections by shooting the guy with a big beard, big belly, and a redshirt. Michael and Dave Norton don't know they shot the right person but they assume they did. You skip the next three or four torture sections. GTA IV had a lot of these similar non-linear choices that I kinda wish were in RDR2 and even RDR1.
I did exactly that and still failed the mission.
I saw a few non linear moments. You can shoot a man to skip a scene where you question where to find a man. You shoot his pal as soon as they notice you and it goes to a new scene where he freaks out that you killed his friend and surrenders the information without questioning
@@Broomer52 there’s one where the agency wants Michael to snipe some guy, you can just shoot whoever you want and Michael is like, “eh close enough”
Trevor hard carried those forgettable story missions
But doesn't the mission require you to do all the torture options in order to get the perfect mission rating? Because I took the shot based on memory and remember getting a bronze. Not that is important but I do feel like the game still forces you to play it a certain way if you go for completion.
Elden Ring is making all of the Sandbox Generator companies shook it seems.
As a literal first time playing a FS game... like, ever. I'm having a blast, been an amazing experience do far!
Welcome maker, enjoy your time
@@AnarchicArachnid For sure. Already like 50 hours in and still finding fun stuff to do
you mean you missed out on the hidden gem The Adventures of Cookie & Cream??
@@supremacistdawn The world was not ready for The Adventure of Cookies and Cream. Perhaps Elden Ring will ready us for a truly challenging game such as that.
@@supremacistdawn now that’s a pull
The more I see people talking about this kinda stuff, the more I realize that "good game design" is kind of subjective. Like, I knew a guy in college who was upset that Shadow of the Colossus just had you wandering through the map with no obstacles or enemies in between the colossi fights... and while yeah, that might be considered "bad" level design, but that is also the reason why people enjoyed that game in the first place! Some people enjoy the sense of exploration and finding shit out by themselves!
I also totally understand why someone might be put off by Elden Ring's lack of UI, but that doesn't mean it's bad. I went into it with very little knowledge of Souls games, missed the combat tutorial, and still managed to enjoy the game because it's not actually that hard to figure it out on your own...
It really is. I tend to like weird esoteric shit. Like, not everybody can get into Space Station 13, ya know? I don't get why people need to stick their dicks into something others love and cry about changing it.
Following up on Pat talking about movie discourse on social media - there are so many unironic/dead serious tweets about how the new Batman movie was "too serious" and "didn't have enough jokes" and its legitimately flabbergasting.
I just watched it and it felt like a Joel Schumacher movie with a little more subtlety. THAT was serious?
Woolie bringing up "the Grafted" spider things right after the point where his last Playthrough video left of is perfect timing. That was peak Miyazaki "raising the stakes" and summoning a SECOND monster closet out of nowhere
Trying to release an open world game at the start of 2022 is like the Dark Souls of game development
Elden Ring is the Dark Souls of Video Games
Bottom text
...it'll keep happening when a Japanese dev does an open world game.
It happened with BOTW
Its happening with ER
AND its going to happen with BOTW 2.
Sony's treatment of Japanese devs these last few years is appalling.
I think the interesting thing about the "2 games" conversation is that Elden Ring's 2 games don't really get in the way of one another. They aren't dissonant. You have options to tackle things I'm your own way just as you can out in the open world. NPC quests are just as non hand holding as they are in the open world. The design philosophy carries over beautifully.
In a game RDR2 that isn't the case. You can go anywhere do whatever you want out in the open world. But the moment you begin a bespoke quest you are suddenly in rails. The design has this grating sense of dissonance.
It’s insane how horizon has been overshadowed twice by an arguably better game
Arguably?
It really makes you think regarding the overall philosophies and culture guiding western game design. Too many devs have been acting like entitled pricks for a long time now, it's clearly not an isolated issue.
You can tell the lash out is fear driven.
"What if I'm out of touch? No, it's the gamers and Japanese who are wrong".
Western devs tend to be a certain kind of person, certainly the ones in AAA studios. The kind of person that thinks the world is out to get them and will always double down on their BS and just ban criticism rather than reflect on it.
Western devs always did want to be Hollywood
Lots of Japanese devs are pricks, too. They're just generally less public about it/they're not doing it in English so you don't notice it. Game development and publishing is toxic and egotistical the whole world over, and at all budget/studio sizes. America's got the loudest pricks, but there are entitled pricks all throughout Europe and Asia.
Devs are Entitled!? Get your head out of your ass, moron.
@@renaigh Yes they clearly are. They can't accept that they make trash games, they *neeeed* to drag down good games to feel better about themselves.
Remember it's fine to like both games. A beef between two employees or corporations doesn't actually have anything to do with you.
Yup. I'm playing and enjoying both Elden Ring and Horizon, alternating days with them. I'm having a great time. These petty clan wars don't help anything and don't make any games better, just like the console wars didn't help anything in the 90s. People have to learn getting in pissing matches over video games isn't a substitute for a personality.
Play one, or both, or three or four games, or whatever. Just enjoy video games. It's what they're there for.
You reap what you sow
It is, but remember it's also fine not to. It's totally okay to think horizon is trash, or elden ring is badly designed. Whatever. It's not a big deal.
I like western and Japanese games but I prefer Japanese games way more. Western devs are so far up their own asses these days it's ridiculous. And Sony treats Japanese devs like shit.
It’s the arrogance that makes me dislike Horizon. And a dev ranting other games with different play styles is basically unprofessional. They are salty for the success of other devs.
Pat isn't lying about the whole 'boss fights are outdated' thing during the late 2000s. Mass Effect 3 is a classic example of how detrimental that maxim is, some execs thought that a boss fight with the Illusive Man would be lame so at the end of the game the conflict with him is resolved purely through a dialogue wheel despite the game explicitly laying groundwork for a fight. One of the many reasons why the ending is so universally hated is the rug pull where instead of fighting the Illusive Man in his iconic empty office, you get an unwanted rematch with his right hand man instead.
I remember that vibe during the time too
i remember reading that rocksteady didn't want to put bossfights in arkham asylum wich is crazy considering the potencial bosses that batman has with ist villains, then arkham knight came out and i saw how right that article was about rocksteady philosphy
@@lanius6259 The Joker in Arkham Asylum is biggest reason that not every game needs boss fights. Honestly I think the takeaway from these discussions is that not every game needs to be the same and creators should just do what they want.
@@Kango234 i absolutely agree nevertheless arkham city had some great boss fights and origins had them as that game saving grace, i think in the end each developer should be allowed to stick to their strenght
@@lanius6259 not every game needs boss fight, but rocksteady's problem has always been that they are pretty terrible at designing boss fights, outside of that one Mr freeze encounter. I went back to origins on PC recently and my god, outside of some annoying design issues like how you unlock certain upgrades with challenges that game is incredible and it's bosses are better than I would have thought possible given Batman's control scheme. I wish the aspects of the design that WB Montréal excelled at were carried forward into Knight.
so good to hear the oys getting excited about souls at the end reminds me of the good old days
The best modern GTA levels are the assassination missions in 4 that give you free reign and access to the whole map to take down the target like going and finding a helicopter to land on his head is a valid strategy and it’s a breath of fresh air after the hyper scripted missions
A classic Pat, going to the other absolute extreme.
I wish you kept the next ten seconds in where pat looks at chat and says everyone is saying "what?"
One open world game that should have had a silent protagonist (or at least mostly silent) was Avalanche's Mad Max. He barely speaks in the films! Yet whenever you collect mementos of the old world, Max has to point out the obvious of every single trinket he finds. Yes, Max, the old world was different. The player doesn't need you to explain how to feel.
I never played that game, but that's pretty stupid. I mean, we (the players) have the same perspective on the old world that Max does because we currently LIVE in the old world. If anything, I feel like him saying nothing would actually give him more character because while we are shocked to see how things in his time compare to how we live, his silence would be his acknowledgement of it as an unremarkable everyday part of his reality. Like, imagine if Kenshiro had to monologue about how "life used to be different" after he exploded a bunch of dudes instead of just moving on.
@@MoostachedSaiyanPrince Exactly. I really enjoyed Mad Max otherwise, but stuff like that kept me from fully immersing myself.
@@gdhuertas07 Yeah, speaking of which, how good is that game? It's on sale super-cheap on PSN right now and I'm not 100% sure on whether I should get it. It went kinda under my radar when it came out, and I don't remember how well received it was.
@@MoostachedSaiyanPrince If it's cheap, I'd recommend it. The world itself is beautiful, and it nails the atmosphere of the Mad Max films brilliantly. I'd say it's flawed but fascinating.
Demon's Souls & Dark Souls 1 had bad UX with confusing list diving. Since they implemented grids in DS2 there really isn't any problem outside of figuring out what you recently got ... But now Elden Ring has 'sort by recently acquired' so that's now solved.
Western UX philosophy is definitely to make everything a mobile game, showing as little information as possible due to 'Visual Noise'. So i assume the argument is that stats screens with a bunch of Scary numbers is 'objectively bad' to them.... But its an RPG bruh, hiding those numbers would actually make the game More confusing cus then you wouldn't be able to build your character...
And Elden Ring has a less cluttered HUD than all western RPGs that fill it with quest markers (on minimap and ingame), quest objectives, quest notifications... So much for avoiding 'Visual Noise'.
And there are even some cases where I think Elden Ring falls behind on revealing information. The big one is how physical defense values are broken up between Slash/Pierce/Strike, but offensive values aren't. At least, not in the main UI.
@@billyfig1 yeh that's been a series problem for sure. For the longest time i thought that meant if say, a weapon did standard/slash for example it did both... But datamining channels revealed that PER attack move you are doing that does that specific dmg type. Like maybe its all standard but your R2 is slash.... Def confusing.
I'd honestly be down to collapse that general 'attack power' number to see each moves dmg, type, stamina use...
Oh and I'll add too, Sekiro's posture system... That had a whole bar for it right? This game actually has that, its called Stance, and its completely invisible to the player... Less 'visual noise' but now ya gotta mentally keep track of that which is more confusing to me.
To be 100% fair here.
Yes. An RPG should absolutely have stat lists and the like, but having two stats called Robustness and Immunity that aren't explained at all really is kinda trashy.
From has definitely improved, but there's still a lot of menu jank that people would not be forgiving so easily in a game by literally any other company.
Like, why DOES the pouch have 2 extra slots you can't use without opening the menu, and yet it still removes those items from your regular item bar? Did we really need a fast selection method for the right side of the menu that's faster than menu searching but slower than cycling your regular item bar? And if I'm missing some method to use those items from the last two pouch slots... why isn't that explained anywhere?
@@DairunCates Well I personally use those 2 extra pouch slots for items I use frequently BEFORE battle, so I don't have to dig for them, and I use the bottom bar for flasks and spirits only and the 4 directional slots of the pouch are for Torrent and throwables.
@@DairunCates Just to give a heads up to you or anyone else that doesnt know, all stats have a tool tip text attached to em. If you click select you can bring up the help menu and can scroll through what every stat does.
But its def true they could explain the RPG stats even more. I think in general the RPG building is what is the most difficult about souls games. This goes beyond UX though, it's more of the concepts of the game itself.
Oh the two pouches are a quick bar menu. Its actually a bit of a funny UX journey there.
The Pouch comes from Bloodborne. It was a quick access menu so you could use items without menudiving and not filling up your 'use item' spot. This was also in Dark Souls 3. The pouch was in the center of the screen though.
They updated this in multiple ways here. Now the pouch is accessed mostly by using Use button as a shift key for the dpad, which is actually amazing.
The weird part is theres just 2 old-quick access slots ... Yeh i have no idea why its just two. Dpad has to be 4, but they coulda kept the 6 quick access like before.
Also it was shifted to the right, placing it into a sidebar. This is so the menu doesnt obstruct where your going which is good but now the quick items arent apparent... And yeh only 2 slots makes it not as useful as it was.
Which btw, yeh for multiplayer its much more useful. Resins or healing consumables the most likely candidates, but yeh now those can be on dpad shift.
i’m one of those people who is playing elden ring as their first souls game and is loving every single second, and i also find it really interesting how upset some people are getting about the game’s open world/quest design. i can’t play most open world games (most western ones, that is) because of the map and the quest logs. the amount of information being shared quickly becomes overwhelming to my ADHD brain and i turn the game off. hell, i picked up the first HZD game on sale a couple years ago and haven’t finished it for this exact reason. so elden ring’s open world design is refreshing. i got one of those “go and find this thing” side quests pat talked about and the lack of specific directions actually felt amazing. instead of “here is the exact pathway to complete this quest and also we’re going to constantly remind you every 20 seconds what you have to do” it was “here’s a thing you can do if u wanna, just go play the game as you have been” and i LOVE that
Absolutely I feel this so hard
You can at least give me a hint on were the npc is going so I can continue the quest line and not have to look at the entire map.
It's my first too but it's the first game i've played since Dragons Dogma that made me feel like I was on a real adventure.
There is something incredibly sad in that developers like these, who are supposed to make games for us don't get why these basic things that existed for decades now are appealing. Makes me want to say "Go play some video games before making one, because you clearly don't have enough exp" to them.
I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of these people haven't touched a controller at a casual level since the ps2 days or earlier
@@OfficerHotpants ...and that [Richard]-measure is usually the metrics of Boards of Directors like the ones who all fell in behind people like Bobby Kotick and Strauss Zelnick
@@OfficerHotpants I mean, I wouldn't say nothing good could come out of that contest, but at the same time, I don't know if there was ever good things out of it.
I literally just learned about the hanging pots RIGHT before they started talking about that zone in the elden ring tutorial
It comes up again in like an ancient knight's tomb.
Really enjoyed HZD when I played it, being Ubi-free since ac3 probably helped a bit.
You and I have been on the same train. I killed the dad in A3 and said fuck it, that amounted to nothing, I'm out.
I played every AssCreed from 1 to Black Flag and I haven't touched one since. It really felt to me that Black Flag was the perfect feather in their cap as far as game design went, and as soon as I finished it I was like, "welp there is nowhere for them to go from here and I have no desire to ever play another one." Now I look at AssCreed like I look at Madden, or Call of Duty.
"These games must be for SOMEONE, because they keep getting made, but they sure as shit aren't for me."
What's insane to me is that they just took those amazing sailing mechanics and didn't give us some kind of age of sail sim. So much potential in those mechanics, just thrown into the trash.
i like open world dialogue when it reveals more about our character, how they feel about their environment, things that remind them of little past events we may not have been privy to, etc. it connects the character to the world. But when the character is essentially dropping the same tutorial tips every time they pass a certain marker, or not trusting the player to do simple puzzle objectives without blurting out the answer 5 minutes in, it just feels like the game is backseating me with my own character and nagging me to play their way. Let me struggle! let me earn my experiences with the game!
I missed the fact Pat mentioned Nakey Jakey when I listened to the podcast before this clip, cool that he mentioned it, that Red Dead video is great.
Immortals Fenyx Rising was pretty inspired by breath of wild, I don’t think it left the impression Ubisoft had hoped because nobody seems to remember it lol.
To be honest, this is the first time I'm hearing of it.
I think the issue is people aren't used to a game that doesn't hold your hand. Some people when they first experience soulsborne titles they have a very positive reaction, it feels very freeing to just figure things out yourself.
Thats what happened to me with demons souls, and I fell in love with that style when dark souls 1 came out.
Other people have really adverse reactions to the lack of structure, and they hate it. They get frustrated and confused, not because they are stupid, but because they are so conditioned to a particular style, that anything else is irritating to them.
My girlfriend is like this, she likes mario games and other Nintendo platformers, she tried elden ring and was immediately overwhelmed by the amount of stuff to remember.
Its important to remember that other people have different preferences and that's fine.
Its also important to remember, Elden ring fucking rules...
For me, it was Gothic in 2001 and the first Monster Hunter game for the PSP.
My gf asked if she should buy it as well, since she saw I was very hyped for it, i was hesitant and told her "it's really good...but I don't think you'll play more than 20 minutes since it's really hard and thus not your cup of tea... Guess who's now in front of me out of spite.
I found a NPC in Elden Ring that spoke to me and asked me to take a castle south of a point I hadn’t found yet. 1
I like that I didn’t get a pop up with an exact distance count to that point
There was no need for the Horizon devs to throw shade when there game is gonna do great regardless. Been enjoying my time with it.
Horizon has a neat world and some cool scifi concepts but I hate the characters, story and some of the gameplay. It reminds me of the time I downloaded Life is Strange. It seemed right up my alley. But almost as soon as I got into it in the school I could not enjoy anything because the characters were so horrifical obnoxious it ruined the whole thing for me. I still can't get over the whole "selfie artist" fucking shit. Made me want to puke.
@@Gaia_Gaistar I like the characters story and gameplay. Don't like Life is Strange though so don't really have an opinion on that
@@Gaia_Gaistar "HELLA."
As I get older I prefer more linear games. Just dont have the time anymore. However, very rarely, if the open world is engaging and fun to explore, like spiderman, then I'm down for it.
Western open world design is super linear though. It doesnt feel like that because the map is big, but its still a do one-then two-then three to poggress sort of thing. You can do sidequests... but it so rarely doesnt drag by the eigth time you have fought that same mini boss
@@FlameHidden eh i'd argue that i had more fun playing something like fallout 4 than i did with a japanese open world game.
i can't comment on something like elden ring, breath of the wild or arceus as i haven't played them yet but the ones that i did play seem to have a bad habit of being rather empty and having really nothing to do in the overworld or structured like an MMO.
i feel like the dead rising or shenmue, yakuza & MGS5 were the only ones i played not like that.
@@xsoultillerx This is the part of the reason I don’t play many open world games. I don’t like feeling like I have to wander aimlessly for an hour to find a single unique encounter or decent reward. Luckily, Elden Ring is essentially a massive open area FILLED with nearly nothing but unique encounters with the rewards often being a handful of consumables to help you upgrade your weapons or craft more items to help you fight, but also decidedly brand new items that can help you change your arsenal/playstyle wildly if you wanted to. Players can find a surprisingly good early game weapon simply by exploring some ruins right nearby the starting area, and that sort of design incentivizes exploring everywhere throughout the entire game, because you actually get excited about the encounters AND the rewards. No obnoxious UI needed. “I SHOULD INVESTIGATE THAT CAVE OVER THERE…”
Shame they didn't talk about the mask-off xenophobia I'm seeing from these people on Twitter. It's always been around and was very prevalent in the 7th gen but it seems ER getting this attention has opened some old wounds.
That's always been the most infuriating thing when people discuss game anything about Japanese media. I'm not saying they don't have issues that should be brought up, but people do it in such a childish and disrespectful way. It's insane how hypocritical they.
mask off xenophobia?
what do you mean
@@Gaz_3 Some devs are talking like having ui/ux problems is a japanese game problem and that the "Japanese style"of games like Elden Ring instantly throw them off.
@@Tiven321 theres more extreme examples like this UI is an example of Japanese brain utility or some shit. No clue what I was reading.
@@Tiven321 That's pretty close minded of them
Idk man MGSV suffered greatly from damn near no dialogue from Snake
That's the other extreme
People blow the amount of dialogue Snake had out of proportion. He talks a lot in the audio tapes and several missions. He's downright chatty in Ground Zeroes and Code Talker.
Spoilers...
I think that one is for a different discussion since that is intended because YOU are Snake, not because of gameplay reasons. I get that people don't like Kojima's meta shit but that is why there is no inner monologue and very little dialogue.
Snake not talking was the least of that games issues.
Snake talks, just not in cutscenes and those are the least of the problems with V.
Say “Thank you Elden Ring” for pushing Horizon out of the narrative in less than a week of its release.
Thank you Elden Ring!
Thank you Elden Ring
Thank you Elden Ring
Thank you..Elden Souls
Thank you Elden Ring! , but, Hole. *Ring Gesture*
Elden Ring feels like a game that doesn't want to be 100%'d. If you miss something oh well, that's fine, you probably didn't need it.
The UI designer for BF2042 had the audacity to bitch about Elden Ring's UI. The guy has no legs to stand on when it took him 4 months to actually put in a scoreboard into the game.
Say what you will about Last of Us Part 2 but the open world section near the start of that game is the first time i've seen a western developer design exploration in a way that allows you to stumble upon discovery. Letting players just run around and find shit as opposed to holding their hand is a net good
The only thing I dislike about Elder ring is finding cool bait enemies, they are tough normal enemies in a remote special looking area, but there is nothing special about them. Not even the satisfaction is enough reward for the pain they induce.
My only problem is I can’t scrape the walls. I keep finding new areas, help I found a flaming church I haven’t even found the first boss.
Yeah, the fact that many of them respawn and only yield a pitiful amount of runes makes fighting them more trouble than its worth. I wish they took more cues from Sekiro in this area because the minibosses were actually a blast to go out of your way and fight in that one.
Yeah, leveling in the early game was painful for me personally because you just need to bash your head against dungeons and bosses or else you won't be leveling up. I'd also extend that criticism to the lack of upgrade materials outside of mine areas. Killing normal enemies in the overworld, minibosses or evergoal fights gives an absolute pittance of runes and almost never drop smithing stones because they usually give you other things like weapons or spells instead. The problem is that early game, leveling up and upgrading your weapon are the most important part of progression because you probably don't have the stats yet to use the things minibosses and evergoal fights give you. It's probably the weakest part of the game in my perspective other than how often you can be stunned and killed before you can roll or react.
there are a a lot of enemies in this game that are playing a different game, like their just so fast and have so much health, and yeah, 400 souls for the knights in stormveil? the little vulgar militia guys outside the beast sanctum are like 1000 and i can kill them with a backstab and a couple slashes, they’re attacks are slow too, plus you don’t lose a third of your souls when you die in the overworld.
oh and i never found a good source for smithing stone 1, i had to get the item to unlock it in the twin husks shop
@@ViperJoe shoutout to the like 4 or 5 respawning Erdtree burial watchdogs in that catacomb in the mountains because it totally makes sense to make a scaled-down version of a boss a respawning enemy. I eventually ran past them.
I remember you guys had the exact same conversation about eastern vs western developers on the old channel while you were playing Sam's dlc in Revengance. You guys should take a look at
Sol Cresta since it's solely published and developed by Platinum, it might be a palette cleanser for Babylon's Fall. I plan on getting the Limited Run Version of it.
Oh god Monster Hunter quest descriptions, maybe my favorite one is a Rajang quest where the description is that a shitty princess wants a Rajang rug and that opens a quest for Kirin where she got bored of the Rajang so now go get a Kirin one.
Linear quests can be great. Like I love plenty of questlines in New Vegas or Witcher games, probably cus those try to have branching paths and different outcomes. But it can make NPCs and yourself feel like actors, and especially that NPCs are just machines meant to give you quests to add to your todo list.
But the way FromSoftware does these abstract, obstructing info, NPC questlines make a lot more sense for an open world. It makes characters feel like they are on a journey too, adventuring along and you meet together by happenstance. Adds alot to making the world feel 'living'.
Witcher 3's quests are very linear and scripted, but they make up for them by being incredibly well written.
@@RahkshiMaster Witcher 3 is definitely the best way of doing heavily scripted questlines. I remember an interview describing their process was designing the quests to be 20-30 minute tv episodes. So the pacing is great, you get to see the start and end of a story, but like a tv show characters can become reoccuring and you get to see longer story arcs. Honestly alot of the side quests were better than the main quest.
Plus, Witcher does the trick of not telling you what choices matter until 20 hours later. Hiding that info, to surprise you of the consequences.. it gives a lil taste of what fromsoft bases their entire questlines on.
Though at the same time they also make it feel like you're the only one doing anything in the world or mattering despite many of the games telling the contrary and that our character is just more tenacious and brave than most, but not important (even the chosen undead was an intentional misnomer), since you're the only one who moves their quests, and by extension, their lives, along. All of which are usually very easy to miss entirely, mess up, or lose out entirely just by playing the game in a way they don't want for the quests or going out of a set order. Though that's not exclusive to ER, but all of From's souls games. It's more the style and tradition of how the game operates than anything, so at least it's an expected way to do quests and can be worked with easily
@@Valanway Well few NPCs are going that 'main' path your taking. Solaire is trying to become the sun, Seigmeyer is trying to find his daughter, etc. They all have their own goals, which is what dictates the logic of their quest. Something you may not be told immediately since your just two strangers meeting each other.
So while yeh, we are Protagonist causing event triggers to further quests behind the scenes (usually its just defeating a boss or entering an area) you still gotta go lookin' for that character. They could end up where ever they want, which is enough autonomy to not just be ducks waddling behind Da Main Guy.
Like say, Pathologic takes this hidden info obtuse questing and cranks it to 11. Not only does player action move npc quests, but also the passage of time itself.... I would say, this works in Pathologics case for its theme, but the amount of moving pieces is a bit intense. People already claim souls quests are bullshit because 'me main character, why npc mad i killed their brother? doesnt make sense bro' if NPCs actually progressed via time intervals and beat the game before you (no joke, this type of concept was in the works for Oscar before they scrapped it) itd be too much to handle honestly.
@@RahkshiMaster I think Witcher 3 at least had better player autonomy than RDR2 when it comes to missions. If you’re doing a quest with Yennefer, at any point you can just leave her there and go play some Gwent on the other end of the map, and then come back days later - there moght even be some dialogue about abandoning her. It’s unrealistic but it respects the player’s choices better.
Days Gone is really a godsend to this concept, it’s almost a parody of this where deacon is explicitly crazy for talking to himself all the time
a big factor of what i enjoy from an open world is whether or not there's stuff to do after i finish the game like side quest, events & random encounters.
like pat brought up AC: brotherhood as a "gold standard" but i felt like there's almost nothing to do in that game's overworld once you finish the main game & DLCs.
My first Jrpg was Yakuza like a dragon. Now I'm not saying fallout, my personal favorite series all time, isnt good. Yakuza was next level story telling, I felt for the characters every moment and loved the cliches. Definitely stands on its own level in terms of design to me, kinda like MH.
I haven't played Like a Dragon yet, but it makes me so happy to hear a western RPG fan played and enjoyed it. It's so funny since most people who avoid Japanese games cite an anime art style or that you're playing as a bunch of teenagers. So you would think that a game where you play as a bunch of realistic, middle aged men would blow up. But nope, actually playing the game is not as fun as complaining on the internet it seems.
I keep seeing this strange idea that Horizon and Ubisoft games are unpopular. Their ridiculous, consistently high sales state otherwise. I was floored when I found out Horizon 1 sold 20 million copies. These things are clearly popular, and I'm not sure there even is THE ONE TRUE BEST STYLE open world game. The various iterations of open world excel in some areas and sacrifice other things. It's better to look at this as open world having subgenres.
I think it gets overlooked alot but I really loved Arkham Knight's mechanic of 'following the bat symbol to you waypoint.' A very Batman way around maps
Elden Ring is so good it's managed to make talking about it on the internet with people actually feel like being back in grade school and talking with the other kids in your class.
Man, I've tried playing genshin, and exploration in that game is actually pretty fun sometimes. There's some really cool locations you can find and dungeons to explore, however I absolutely hate the amount of unskippable dialogue that you have to go through to do ANY sort of quest in that game. It's not even interesting dialogue, it's just overly detailed explanations about what you have to do to finish whatever quest. Reminds me of the ssethtzeentach quote; "it was at that point I realized the saddest job you can have is not being a games journalist, it's being an RPG dialogue writer."
having smashed my head against Mohg for as long as I did I can say that the arena fog gate work around needs to stay. and I beat Milania without coop or npc ashes so it's not even about the boss hitting hard, he just never stops attacking.
You can find an item called Mohg's shackle in Leyndell sewers that trivializes his first phase.
regarding the spiel at the start - golly, it's almost like the games are aimed at two separate and distinct audiences or something! what a concept!
An important thing to note is the actual completion rate, sure being told what to do each second sucks but people are very very very very dumb and will forget what they’re doing or what to even do. So moving to make things more relaxed only decreases completion rate
It doesn't even have to be people being dumb. If you only have a handful of hours to sit down and play on weekends, with five day periods between each session it can be easy to forget what you were doing the last time.
@FrozenOver0 so write a note? You literally have a phone, if you have the memory of a gold fish that's a you problem and sounds kinda like you're dumb
I like how the segment about other games just comes back to Elden Ring
Two of the most popular and renowned AAA games of all time are GTA V and Skyrim which both have really minimalistic HUDs in game. You get a radar, the health bars, the objective flashes a couple times, and the other elements pop out as needed.
They don't crowd the fucking screen with bullshit.
Now I might get lambasted for saying this, but as much as I love elden rings open ended, figure it out yourself nature, I do ever so slightly wish we got just a little bit more when it comes to where we should go with quests.
I’m not saying it should be marked on the map for every single one, but there are so many npc’s that just give you nothing in terms of where to go or what to do to trigger the next part.
Some are great, I met a guy once that said, “hey there’s a castle to the south can you go kill the big guy there” but then there’s the big wolf man with the badass sword who says, “I hate this guy, you should kill him.” And I have no idea where to even start looking for that person, even though I REALLY want to continue his quest and I don’t want to resort to looking stuff up online.
Like, I’m not asking for a marker on a map or for the game to just railroad me towards the exact location, but just gimme a starting point.
Definitely agree on that. I did a quest today where the only direction I was given was to go "up the way" while in the middle of a foggy swamp with no roads around. I appreciate having to figure it out for myself, but I wish I could have at least gotten a cardinal direction to go off of instead of wandering around in the swamp in all directions for half an hour before I found what I was looking for. Fromsoft's vague quest design worked well in their other games since their worlds were far more constrained, but it doesn't work quite so well in a massive open world.
I also agree. Another thing i don't like is that if you forgot what they said, or didn't understand them first time, sometimes you can't talk to them again.
The most absurd one I've encountered so far is a quest guy said "Hey meet me in [This Zone]" and I went there and they were nowhere to be seen.
Turns out they were just in a completely different area and I was supposed to talk to another NPC entirely to learn that.
The anxiety factor is up cause they added in Illusory Floors
The funniest part is that they are shitting on designs that western games have done in the past and was praised. But for some reason they just dont want to do it
Its easy to copy the ubisoft UI and call it a day
DOOM is way too hard, just copy&paste COD lmao
@@joebin3106 CoD is too hard, let's make Literally Every Enemy a QTE
Kinda love how Red Dead Revolver just doesn't exist in Pat's brain as a part of that franchise
The fuck is Revolver
@@joebin3106 the first game. Red Dead Redemption is an almost spiritual sequel, not the first game in the series.
They're basically different games entirely in different genres. Revolver is the Max Payne to redemptions gta
good to see Pat acknowledging the NakeyJakey
I don't think pat is in the wrong for not liking and dropping rdr2, but it is a massive game and if you make it as far into it as he did in his streams without figuring out that when you're in a mission you need to be completely focused on the mission, then some of you running into a wall with the game is on you too, not just the restrictive design.
Seems like Woolie will eventually have to play a modern Rockstar game to at least get a better understanding of these grievances.
Pat isn't the best person when it comes to explaining these grievances clearly, which I'm elated to hear him recommend NakeyJake's video on RDR2. That video beautifully sums up the major flaws that game unfortunately suffers from.
The way Pat explained it, and the way Woolie seemed to interpret it, makes RDR2 sound like literally everything was gated off/restricted unless you did it one way. In reality it was just Pat being salty that he can't sequence break main story missions.
Looking back on it, I've found myself kind of soured to the little side stories that a lot of games, open world ones especially, give their side quests. I like Pat's example of how monster hunter gives you a text crawl of stuff to justify it, some of which are actually pretty entertaining, but most people don't pay attention to because they only care about what monster(s) are on it.
I appreciate a game having stories to tell, i appreciate games wanting a more natural means of pushing players into cool side areas, but I rarely care about the games' "why?"
Edit because i just thought of an addendum: Games that are better at encouraging exploration via gameplay actually get hit by this worse. If the story is taking time away from me doing the fun part then the less it's presence matters, regardless of the actual quality.
So hearing Pat talk about the scions is similar to how I got fed up with all those dragons on that one part of the map, so I said fuck it and systematically exterminated them, only for them to give like 1000 runes each, even though the big sleepy one in the same area that everybody cheeses using bleed will drop at least 70000.
That shit boils my blood into sludge.
Wools .. i’m 34 And you and Pat are my favorite people to listen to talk I can listen to you guys for days talk about our culture
I didn't think that watching this particular thing would tip me off to two areas i was still thinking about in Elden Ring and the fact there is more there. for the brigde I beat the bois and didn't htink to roll off the bridge it's brutal lol... now i need to go back x.x for the record barricade shield and guard counters work very well 1v1 for them imo.
"Why are you gonna go in that swamp shithole?"
"I dunno, maybe there's something cool in it."
Patches: "Hey! Lookit that down there! I think I see something shiny!... how about you go check it out?"
I find it funny that the most consistent complaints for protagonists that I have seen come up is "This character is too silent and boring" and "This character will not fucking shut up I hate them"
It's a hard balance to strike and it has peaks and valleys the more fantastical/unrelatable the prognostic gets. Joel from the Last of Us was a normal dude who quipped a lot and had Ellie as a good soundboard. Aloy from Horizon is some wierd clone with advanced tech who talks a lot and explains almost nothing to the other characters because she's the chosen one. In Final Fantasy 14 the chosen one (Warrior of Light / WoL) doesn't talk untill the expansions and for the most part is treated as the muscle. The WoL ends wars, kills gods, time travels, and visits other dimensions while giving a curt nod and fist bump to anyone in trouble. By the time you get to put words in the WoL's mouth despite how extreme and alien they are as a character you know the character so well you don't feel any dissonance between dialogue and action. In this respect FF14 achieved the best of both worlds by simultaneously having a silent protag you can ascribe your own thoughts and motivations to while also dishing out solid one liners as the situation warranted.
Man, even if I agreed with those devs’ criticism, I’d be uncomfortable with the unprofessionalism on display
Me, personally. I feel that Alloy does the "Open world protagonist" dialogue the best (of games I've played anyway). Its better than constant text popups reminding you to do shit over and over again. Like every game ever will constantly pop up with shit like "Hey you still have skill points to spend" and I keep screaming "I KNOW! IM SAVING UP FOR A SKILL!" Also, in Horizon Zero Dawn in particular (haven't played Forbidden West yet) subqests are done particularly well in that like, 80% of the time after you go do what the quest giver told you to do, you can just move on to the next thing without having to break up the gameplay by returning to town. You get your quest reward and XP without having to go back and talk to anyone. Alloy is just like "Whelp, that's done. Moving on." I can't tell you how much better the game is for not having to go back to the quest giver for every gat dang quest you finish.
I don't even know what that guy was talking about when he said she chimes in about quests a lot that Pat somehow turned into a negative after praising it last week. I think early on there was some of that but I've gotten way further into the game and barely hear any of the commentary like that anymore. Heck they even patched it to lower the amount of ambient dialogue she has about items you gather getting put into storage (it was annoying, and is way better now).
@@Madman6884 haven’t played the new one yet so I wouldn’t know but I didn’t mind her being a bit chatty in the first one. Not just because it makes sense seeing as how she’s literally a nutter mountain woman with zero social skills who makes sense to talk to themselves, but because I like having the feedback.
20:41 this is great, however I’ve seen entire videos about alternate mission solutions in 4
The UX designer from a game where you have to unequip weapons from a weapon wheel instead of just making a bigger weapon wheel when the game only has like 10 weapons isn't exactly someone whose opinion should carry much weight.
Kinda like being lectured on character progression by a modern warcraft dev.
Two reasons. First, later weapons have up to three ammo types. Ergo 18 slots. And two, not all of those weapon types are what everyone is gonna want to use. I'd rather have two regular bows with different ammo types to them than bother with, say, a precision bow. I'd call variety and customization a pretty solid reason.
@@Madman6884 And what about the people who want to use more than 4 weapons? There were 7 weapons that I liked and I was constantly pausing mid-fight to fuck with the weapon wheel. You know what would've solved that? Bigger weapon wheel (or Ratchet & Clank style layered weapon wheel)
Well the bad UX design comment cam from a Ubisoft dev which makes it worst
@@zaneseibert literally no weapon wheel should be bad in modern times. Ratchet and Clank nearly perfected in the course of like 4 games.
5:06 I remember when I was on Twitter and I came across a guy who was getting dunked on because, basically, "tactical turned based games are a lost cause and irrelevant", ie. Fire Emblem, Advance Wars, XCOM. The guy had also put out a pissed off tweet saying "I won't respond to anyone who isn't asking a genuine question".
And I remember thinking (naively) to myself, "Gee, Twitter only has so many characters. Maybe there's some important context missing here? Perhaps I WILL ask this guy genuinely to explain himself." So I tweeted back at the guy and asked "What's the context behind this? I enjoy this genre, but I want to understand. What flaws do you see and why do you not think it can't ever be improved upon, ever, unlike literally every other genre?" and he was just like "Read my article" with a link.
And I paused.
And I thought to myself "This guy is advertising at me instead of explaining himself genuinely like he promised. His opinion that an entire genre can't evolve and should be scrapped because of that literally makes no sense-- Wait a minute, an opinion!? That doesn't matter to me or how I enjoy things!"
And then I simply LEFT.
I feel like this Eastern vs Western is only going to get worst going foward now
since China and Korea are now known parts of the game industry
like Chinese games are often mobile so theyve been invisible until Genshin blew up (granted they're seen as the best mobile games)
but its there
Like comics and manga, the west cannot keep up. They won't learn.
@@Gaia_Gaistar they could but they're too racist to bother
To be fair on horizon I've seen to a lot people take this UX discourse discussion and just turn it into a Horizon VS Elden Ring thing or like it was all Horizon devs being salty in that tweet which is wrong.
That lunchroom dev got Arcana Heart'd
I love that I understood the reference.
I think a great way to tell if an open world game is good is to ask yourself “is my game good without the open world?” Elden ring without the open world is dark souls, which is a good game. The Ubisoft formula game without the open world is a series of menial tasks with a few potentially interesting story quests interspersed. That doesn’t sound fun to me.
For about 10 hours or more of elden ring i was way too strong for the area i was in. I was basically going back and scraping the land for anything i missed and i was just wiping out everything, even bosses, without much challenge. It felt like i earned it, cus i wandered off and got a bunch of materials and cool weapons to make me super strong. I DESERVED to smack down some bosses in only a couple of hits. That feeling just feels great
Im going through my first plythrough of a souls game and its dark souls prepare to die edition. And I adore the game. That being said it reminds me of a more elaborate Maximo ps2 which gave me almost the same sense of adventuring and figure things out on your own and be careful with every step you take kind of wonder.
Maximo was amazing, but a very divisive game at the time. Journalists HATED it except for a handful of people who "got it"
What's funny is that one of the devs that is criticizing Elden Ring for bad UX previously worked on Battlefield 2042.
To be fair, Both Sony and FromSoft fucked Guerilla. If Elden wasn't getting pushed Guerilla should've backed out and forced a delay no matter what Sony says. You're losing more money having your sales taken by Elden than not selling at all.
Pat should play Book of Travels. It's a tiny MORPG that consists entirely of wandering around and finding things
I think ultimately it comes down to the balancing act of games being a work of art and a product to be consumed.
Pats take on Red Dead is so interesting for me because I have experiences the opposite of everything he’s describing about the game.
I tried the DS1 games a couple times and it didn't clique for me but Elden ring was just perfectly designed for me personally and contextualized everything plus getting into that side of Woolie's content and after putting 180 hours into my first playthrough I went back and have now beaten bloodborne and gotten to sen's castle in ds1. Once you find the rythem the game wants you to play its very similar to playing music