GERALTITUDE

If there's one thing that makes me throw up in my mouth it's when a game gets too easy. Power fantasy makes me sick!

Level scaling is one of many ways to try to deal with that.

Ok, I may have taken a slightly extreme angle on this topic :D, but I hope it makes my feelings clear! And I say this 100% serious: I do not like power fantasy. When I played the Witcher 3, I wanted it to stay brutally hard the entire time through. I want new tools to deal with combat (approach options) as I progress, not tools to make combat easier.

And now, if I've said this once, I've said this a million times:

PLEASE, PLEASE (I am adressing the entire internet here) STOP: looking for binary answers to game design as if there is a Right/Wrong fork for every design decision! You want to talk about what you like/don't & why - GREAT! - but why does every stance have to be about how X should only be built THIS way? Hurts my head.

I'd like to see you post about devs with more respect.

I'm repeating myself a little, and I think you agree with this anyway, but - every player will react to this differently. There's not a most-likely scenario here. The potential for all the above to happen is true, but there is also the potential that the player enjoys, for example, how consistently hard everything is, or, the reverse, how easy it may be.

To really talk about level scaling, I think we have to talk in detail about the basic gameplay difficulty approach of the game. The two work together very tightly, and the more I think about games where I liked scaling (The Witcher 3) vs those I did not (FF8) the more I want to say that difficulty, and moreso, the entire set of mechanical options, are really what matters. Scaling is a detail that lives around all that I think, it is not the core reason we are enjoying these games or not.

I don't understand how anyone could break into a run in this game and not instantly realize they are playing a masterpiece!

The basic feeling of moving, sneaking, attacking, fighting as snake is incredible. Along with Max Payne in MP3, he is among the weightiest characters ever made. It's.... incredible. When you slam a soldier down on the ground, the fact that the guy isn't getting up anytime soon is so obvious, so well communicated. When you run, the feeling of speed and your feet hitting the ground is so natural... I can't compare it to many games.

Have you played Peace Walker? It is remarkably similar to MGSV in a lot of ways. But most especially in the brevity of narrative. I came to PW very late (PS3 HD remaster) but I think it really prepared me for MGSV. Almost all the complaints I heard about V sounded to me like "My First Peace Walker" which is very far from previous Metal Gears. And you're not crazy either way, I agree about the narrative in V.

Long tangent:

TL;DR - To sort of answer your question, while I would say that big changes in resolution are what I can notice most, resolution is also at the absolute bottom of my list of needs. For example, I am playing the original XCOM on this piece of shit mac laptop, and as such must run it at 1152x720. I'd rather run it at Medium settings at this resolution than bump res for more detail. I suppose I should mention I still happily play Diablo II at 800x600 so whatever, resolution shemosultion. If I had to pick the reverse, that which I care about most? Stable framerate. Whatever it is, just make it stable.

Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on perspective) if you lumped together every known population of (and I'm throwing up in my mouth as I write this) "core gamers" who are "plugged in" to the industry you really only get a fraction of the major population, especially when you consider the entire core presents a mishmash of game fans / players. So, the idea that one group could organize a boycott large enough to affect the sales of AAA game is, I dunno, unlikely? I'm scratching my head thinking of a time that happened. This is not to say that the volume generated from such a boycott might not affect sales / outside perception of the game, but that seems like a long-tail sort of thing.

Hmm I always thought it was *the* game for casuals? The game that replaced Madden as "one of 5 games every [insert mainstream label thing] gamer owns".

All the guys I know who have a console under a tv but barely play it have CoD. The zombies / co-op modes seem to be very appealing to them. I very literally just had this conversation two days ago with a guy who told me him and bud stayed up all night playing the new CoD.

As for the hivemind issue, I don't think it's that that pervasive, but people can reflect it without subscribing to it entirely. Potentially anyone could fall into that trap, why not. It's basically the same as when people say X movie/tv show sucks, but have never seen it, but just absorbed the loudest feelings. This is clearly what happened to SFV, the best game of all time that everyone shits on, for example.

:D :D :D :D :D

This kind of simple, judgemental attitude has absolutely no place here.

Impossible to say if Frostbite is problematic based on what I know about the engine. I'm in a very typey mood today though so here are some longform thoughts.

I think it's fair to say attempting to float a universal engine internally has been extremely challenging and has contributed to (at least some of) the failure of projects, and the lower-than-expected quality of others.

That said, it's hard to say what an acceptable timeline is for this sort of struggle. Unreal Engine is effectively sold as a universal game engine, but it took a long, loooooooooong time and many changes, literally 100s of games for it to get where it is now. And now is still very far from a universal game engine. I remember clearly reading about how BioWare almost broke their heads open trying to get UE to work for them. Forstbite was also very hard for the ME:A team. Unity, GameMaker, all engines are literally still in this place. It's not as straightforward as we think to use these engines when you are making games at a scale / particularity of these big companies.

Ultimately engines are exceptionally difficult to make work for many different types of games. There is nothing but proof of this.

We know that until this generation many Japanese developers still built custom engines for each game / type of game (makes sense based on the above right?), and this too was exceptionally difficulty for them, namely Square Enix and Capcom, who had real public struggles with their engines, "Luminous" and the deadly "Pantha Ray". Konami was so disgusted by the cost of the Fox Engine they basically burned down their games department.

Some important items I think are worth considering

• let's say there are X commonalities between all games. They use textures for example. And lighting physics. Great. Any single difference in your approach to software, versus what is already in the box, can create a cascade of changes that is incredible hard to surmount. This becomes more true the more important each of these "differences" is.
• the idea of building an engine that suits all teams is almost antithetical to the concept of an engine, which is a rather specific workflow. There is a line you cross where the more generic you make it, the more custom requirements will be required. This is why custom databases exist for businesses and why developers exist for open platforms. This may or may not be where I work currently :D
• your custom requirements tend to weigh very heavily. Either it is integral to your game, your skill set, budget, or other reason. It may just be the only way you know how to work. As such, being able to use the "generic" elements is sometimes a moot point because your custom elements - what built your game around, doesn't work, or can't be done the way you want / can. Case in point is ME:A. They had to cut the single biggest feature they had been working on the entire team: procedurally generated systems. It just wasn't working properly with Frostbite. Sure, time squashes all bugs, but the time wasn't given.

I don't understand! But, I will try to say what I think on this topic. Rather long, sorry, but this is a very interesting thing to think about.

In the world of written text, between poems, plays, short stories & books, it has been too large a medium for any 1 person to be an authority or even a generalist for well over 100 years. There are a lot of games in the world, but not as many as there are texts to study.

This is partially why things like "the canon" exist, so that institutions can make up a list of what they think is important, and build their study around it. This was how they justified giving you a piece of paper that said "hey you know about this." But it does not reflect reality. The canon doesn't exist. It's subjective. But it's how they limited study. Makes senseish. The canon being thrown out of most institutions has caused a lot of chaos, but it was the right way to go.

There's no actual value that comes from experiencing all of a medium, so far as we know, but it's hard to prove because no human has ever done this, in any medium. There's no example. Specialization is valuable. There is a lot of proof to this. This is why you have scholars for extremely specific branches, such as post-modern, American literature, written by upper-class women. 9th century old english texts *after* a first translation. 19th century, post-colonial, civil war texts by authors foreign to their culture. I spent four years effectively studying subtle & overt violence in Hemingway & Carver. You can dedicate your life to any subset of any medium because that medium is enormous, and to derive real detail from even the smallest pocket takes time. Lots of time. Playing a game once is not a real equivalent to criticism. Play that game 12 times, every year for 5 years and you are starting to get near to real critical approaches. Games (often) being long doesn't change the value of repeated reflection over time, and pursuing that repetition from varying angles & perspectives. So I'm not sure why it would matter that it's too hard for us to play "every game" once. That's not even necessarily valuable at all. As such, it seems odd to me that you think it's an issue game audiences are fractured. It's entirely a non-issue I think because all mediums are fractured.

I think there is an illusion, and there always has been, of general knowledge when it comes to music, movies or books. But it is definitely an illusion.

Steam is far, far more wide-reaching and international than most central services. As such, Steam makes it much more clear how impossible it is to grasp everything.

For example, every year the Oscars are on, people make this attempt at "having seen the important films of the year". But that's BS. Some of the best films of the year don't release in theatres. Or in your country. Same goes for TV. Award shows & coverage make all these mediums seem tiny, because they are so laser focused on, usually, America, or Western Europe big hits. You'd think in the last 10 years that only Breaking Bad and Game of Thrones + 5 random shows came out and mattered. But this isn't close to true. It's just marketing & access playing a role. They convince you about what matters. You think you know what matters and so pursue it to "see it all" not realizing you aren't in spitting distance of doing so.

I have 1 gb cap on my phone.

Break it almost every month.

No cap at home.

Make sure you watch the Purple Rain movie.

sorry for the double post I am ashamed..

Hit you up with one of them "pms" as they say ;) about the backlog crew

I can see *exactly* what you mean about the end boss. It's... some bullshit. You have some, very limited ability to backtrack and level up, but it's not a very rough setup. Having played PE1 & PE2 in the last two years, I'm not sure anymore which one I like most. Before replaying them, PE1 stood tall in my mind. Thinking about it now, there's a lot of the setup of the first I like more (feels more procedural / cop story, it's "spookier" and has a more mysterious atmosphere) but the 2nd one is a funner game to play I think, though both are generally far too easy to make use of their own systems.