Video Games: The General Discussion & Community Thread

[Hey Im Jordan]

i uninstalled d3 over the immortal announcement

it was super deflating

[Fabricant451]

@GingerBoi123 If Diablo 3's disaster of a launch six years ago didn't kill anticipation for a sequel, a mobile game won't either.

[Dolerman]

20 Hours in and Red Dead is boring as shit.

'Slow and deliberate' is good for setting tone but its not a fun gameplay mechanic. I'm literally just playing for the story now which is pretty interesting but barely a motivation to keep one with these story missions. I'm also not crazy about becoming public enemy number 1 because I accidentally stepped on someone's dog and have a 5 dollar bounty on my head.

The characters have interesting interactions but there are too damn many of them, I cant care about 15 people enough to keep hunting deer for them so they stop bitching. I'm also getting sick of returning to a town 4 times to shoot up the damn place because a story mission forced me to, and now the place is too hot with law for me to get a fucking haircut.

This game is a very pretty visual novel where for 70% of the game I'm staring at a horse's ass for too long with a pointlessly cumbersome 'pull the hammer back' shooting mechanic to break it up.

The train stuff is good, the brawling is good, and things involving animals tends to be good.

But, a piece of wood isn't going to sparkle no matter how much you polish it.

[Fabricant451]

I'm not gonna try and discuss this on a point by point basis or anything since that would be needlessly hostile for someone voicing their opinion but:

'Slow and deliberate' is good for setting tone but its not a fun gameplay mechanic.

@Dynamo Frokane

I disagree with this. I disagree with some other points made, like the shooting mechanic being cumbersome and personally never running into a situation where I needed to keep hunting in order to feed the camp (especially since fishing takes less time and if you upgrade the camp fully food basically handles itself), and I think the brawling is bad, but the slow pace is kind of the most fascinating aspect of the game to me. Fascinating is a word I keep coming back to with Red Dead Redemption 2 because so many of its design decisions seem so deliberately obtuse, archaic, or otherwise a matter of respecting 'realism' over concepts like 'moment to moment fun'. Whereas most open world games have fast travel unlocked almost by default, here you have to unlock it deep in a menu and you still have to manually travel back to a central location just to travel elsewhere which makes you wonder why you bothered going back to camp and not just taken the journey to the town or wherever yourself.

I've barely interacted with the story, I'm only shortly into chapter three and already find the narrative of the feuding families far too familiar to care - there is almost no way to make a Hatfield/McCoy or Capulet/Montague type story interesting and from what I've played so far I don't think Rockstar will change that - and most of the gang members are one note that's been plucked to death. The game, to me, is at its best when it's just that frontier survival simulator of going out, tracking animals and looking for that perfect three star animal and getting the clean kill, taking the pelt to camp while selling the crappier pelts, then going after a legendary animal and taking a trip to the trapper. The problem with that is far too often the other part of the game gets in the way, with the random events popping up and all of them falling into basically four categories of dull.

One of the best times I had with the game was treasure hunting simply because it fell in line with how I was already playing the game. The serial killer mission was fun as well from an exploration aspect - and then it glitched out on me once it was resolved and the culprit fell through the geometry and I was reminded I was playing a video game again.

RDR2 is a game I think people will get out of it what they put into it. It's often chunky to control and it does a terrible job explaining its systems and I honestly think people who just wanted GTA but with horses are going to come away upset with how much it isn't that and how much it is a survival game down to weight management and needing to change your clothes or hide your face or remembering to take weapons off your horse.

The game seems like it was designed around trying to take the Mexico moment from the first game and making an entire game to feel like that, and it is full of those kind of moments. Those personal, immersive moments like when I had a particularly lengthy ride back to town after a hunt and as I slowly trotted along up a hill, the sun was setting at just the right moment to bathe the nearby town in its glow as a perfectly timed musical cue played. It was terrific in a way many games try to emulate in their narrative moments to ill effect.

I don't know if I'm having fun with it. But I'm constantly fascinated by it and this weekend I played it for about five hours and all I actually accomplished was killing an alligator, a beaver, and a deer. And even still I was enthralled for the entire time.

[Dolerman]

@Fabricant451 A lot of what you enjoyed about the game I also enjoyed in small doses at the beginning but it's beginning to wear on me. The animal hunting system is well done, but I find no incentive for doing it. Killing a deer cooking and eating it is cool. But you don't need to eat deer, you can just stock up on canned peaches and live off those. The price you can sell even good quality pelts and carcasses is pitiful and hardly worth the journey.

I can appreciate what the game is going for, and most of the 'realism' is done fairly well. It's certainly a fully thought out experience but its a boring one. The game is excellent at creating 'those special moments' but unlike other open world action games, there isnt enough of a fun consistent gameplay loop to string those together for an overall fun experience. GTA 4 had this same problem, too much attention to atmosphere and immersion but once you were immersed you werent having much fun. Which is fine for a bit, it's novel and charming to have to complete a taxi ride around liberty city or go to an internet cafe to respond to an email. But I need a reason to be doing it, I need a pay off.

RDR2 boasts having 59 weapons but a quarter of them are tomohawks and axes. The very limited weapon customization is only available on about 3 weapons per class and everything else is a 'bouns' weapon you have to pick up. The shooting is functional but still clunky. I'm playing a very pretty game where I'm not looking forward to anything besides the pretty good story.

I do think the overreaching story is interesting, exploring the 'end of the west' on a more personal level than the first game. But the individual story beats just seem meaningless. Everyone in dutch's camp seems to realise that pinballing from camp to camp trying to rob everyone and everything blind isn't a very sensible long term strategy. Which is great on a narractive level but crappy on a gameplay one because I still have to go through the motions and follow along with it anyway.

And so far, apart from the train missions, I've found none of them 'exciting' like I have with other rockstar games. And I really am getting sick of just 'shooting up towns' when things go sideways. Especially because I know this is a long game.

I feel like I sort of 'owe' rockstar games enough of my time to see a good story to the end, but I'm fighting to give myself reasons to play it and that's never a good sign. Though far less polished, I never had to find a reason to play Far Cry 5, GTA 5 or Spider-Man because those games maintained excitement to a high enough level to keep me engaged.

But maybe this will change when online launches. I can already think of ways to have fun with that.

[Fabricant451]

Red Dead Redemption 2 fucked me out of my really good white Albino horse and caused me to reload about four hours of progress and Molly is magically despawned out of camp after I got her a mirror so really fuck this game I hate it now.

[POOHEAD189]

@Fabricant451 That sucks hard.

[Gelatinous Cube]

Most of the games I'm looking forward to don't even have release dates yet

[Fabricant451]

I really hope Fallout 76 does poorly.

That is all.

[Gelatinous Cube]

So do I, but there are too many Bethesda devotees that will sing it's praises no matter how much they get burned by the dumpster fire.

[Dolerman]

I really hope Fallout 76 does poorly.

That is all.

@Fabricant451

You purchasing it would seem to work against that hope.

[Hey Im Jordan]

<Snipped quote by Fabricant451>

You purchasing it would seem to work against that hope.

@Dynamo Frokane

She didn't purchase it.

[Fabricant451]

<Snipped quote by Fabricant451>

You purchasing it would seem to work against that hope.

@Dynamo Frokane

I wasn't aware you had access to my purchasing history. I have not nor will I ever purchase Fallout: 76.

[Dolerman]

Is there an echo in here?

I have not nor will I ever purchase Fallout: 76.

@Fabricant451

So you're going to pirate it? Or watch loads of let's plays of it?

[Fabricant451]

Is there an echo in here?

<Snipped quote by Fabricant451>

So you're going to pirate it? Or watch loads of let's plays of it?

@Dynamo Frokane

Sometimes it takes two to make a point around here.

No, I'm not going to pirate it. I'm not going to play it. I'm not going to buy the inevitable version with all the DLC. I won't even Redbox it or rent it from the last holdout video rental stores dotting the landscape. I'm not going to watch streams of it apart from the few clips and impressions I've already seen. I know enough about the game and its design, plus my dislike of most Bethesda developed games, to know that nothing about it will be an enjoyable experience for me.

It's this weird concept of not paying money for a game I'm not interested in just so I can reaffirm to myself that yes, it's a game I don't like.

[Bee]

i hope fallout 76 flops too

there is no reason for it to do well... it's literally just a stripped out online fallout 4 with a new map

it's a mile wide and an inch deep.

[Fabricant451]

there is no reason for it to do well...

@Bee

Bethesda stans reeeing in the distance

[PrinceAlexus]

Personally I'm not hoping it flops as we may not see another game.

However adding a multi or Co op mode to fallout so you can play with freinds would be more fun.

Add a few mechanics to balence and maintain difficulty, player levels etc as standard.

Would be fun to explore the wasteland, some adaptions to make some quests truelt Co op etx.

[Hey Im Jordan]

<Snipped quote by Bee>

Bethesda stans reeeing in the distance

@Fabricant451

All the Bethesda stans I know aren't even getting it

[Carlyle]

I was going to ask how does one pirate a MMO but then I remembered that private servers were a thing.

I'd have to agree about with Fallout: 76 being meh. While I'm not the most knowledgeable or experienced person with Fallout, a large amount of my video game playtime comes directly from MMOs, and Fallout: 76 just doesn't seem like an interesting MMO. As Bee said, it feels like Fallout 4 but online. There's hardly anything that gives me the "MMO feeling" that I've experienced in the past.