Posts made by Chocobop

@dipset said in Vote for the forum's Game of the 2010s Decade!:

Without trying to compromise the integrity of our individual lists and what they mean to us, what can we do to avoid splitting the Yakuza vote 6 ways?

Like, let's say you were only going to choose ONE and only one Yakuza game to allow space for another 14 games on your list, which game would you choose?

For me it's very easily Yakuza 0 and that's the one I suggest we back up IF you're only going to choose one Yakuza game.

Tangent: as someone who put all games from multiple franchises in their list (i.e. not doing a "one per series" rule), I can't help but comment here. In the quest to solve one issue (caring about whether too many IPs are falling below the arbitrary threshold of "top 20"), I think people are creating another one by doing "one per series".

Or rather, there's always a trade off, with no way being best. Do you want your list to be an accurate personal ranking? Do you want your list to be a public form of self-expression ("here's the variety of games I felt were best")? Do you want your list to be a strategic vote in order to influence the final result? ("I know X is hugely popular and Y has no chance, so...")

Incidentally, the best theoretical solution to path you are taking is to have everyone submit some kind of list of Yakuza games, either ordered from best to worst or with their personal, subjective scores. Then you can choose a voting algorithm to find the best 1 or 2 candidates, and let everyone know.

An interesting question is: what's the best voting system that would decrease people's desire to do "one per series" in the first place?

@TokyoSlim To be fair, guessing an executive is going to wear a "pale blue or white collared shirt with the top button undone" is like guessing the Pope is going to wear a white robe. It didn't have to be a button down shirt without a jacket, but if it was then almost all of that probability is contained in these combinations.

I got 9 correct too, but way off on tie breaker.

1: Will there be any spoken or on-screen appearance of Master Chief's full name, "John-117" during the presentation?
No

2: The words "World Premiere" will appear on screen MORE than 9 times.
No

3: Will a new Fable be shown?
No

4: Will the word "Batman" be spoken?
No

5: There will be a celebrity presenter. (I will count any real life person that does not work for Microsoft that has a wikipedia page, Tim Schafer does not count)
No

6: Will the price be revealed?
No

7: There will be a self deprecating joke about "showing real gameplay this time". It has to be an attempt at a joke and not an apologetic statement. I will consult joke experts if necessary.
No

8: Will a demo for any of these games shown off in the 1st showcase be shadow dropped during the second showcase? Assassin's Creed Valhalla, Dirt 5, Yakuza: Like a Dragon, Madden NFL 21, Chorus, Scarlet Nexus, Bright Memory Infinite, Call of the Sea, Scorn, Second Extinction, The Ascent, The Medium, and Vampire: The Masquerade-Bloodlines 2.
MUST BE SHADOW DROPPED and not made available earlier in the week!!!
No

9: "Ray Tracing" will be said more than 4 times.
No

10: The game that The Initiative is working on will be announced.
Yes

11: Halo, Forza, AND Gears will all be present. (montages count)
Yes

12: The Xbox Games Showcase will be longer than 75 minutes.
Yes

Tie Breaker: Total number of times the phrase "Game Pass" is spoken aloud.
6

No Gods & Monsters bet?

Will there be a new Nintendo crossover game or partnership? (Mario + Rabbids, Star Fox in Starlink, etc.)
No.

Will Ubisoft acknowledge the recent sexual misconduct accusations in any way during the main show?
No.

Across all videos for Assassin's Creed Valhalla, which version of the main character will be featured the longest (male or female)?
Male character

Will Rayman reveal himself?
No.

Will there be MORE than 20 cannons be fired across all Skull & Bones videos? (so if 10 cannons fire, reload, and fire again, that's 20)
No.

Will a new Far Cry game taking place in Europe be shown?
No.

Will we hear Michael Ironside's voice?
No.

Will there be MORE than 4 separate Tom Clancy titles individually featured on the show? (recap montages don't count)
No.

Will there be MORE than 2 different planets shown across all Beyond Good & Evil 2 videos?
No.

Will a brand new IP be revealed?
Yes.

Will Trackmania be featured for MORE than 3 minutes? (gameplay, trailers, interviews all count)
No.

Will Yves Guillemot wear a shirt or a suit or neither?
Shirt.

Will a new game where you control a car (or any racing vehicle) be revealed?
Yes.

Tie-breaker: How many kills will be shown across all HyperScape videos?
7

I find Stealth Takedowns and Stealthy Alternatives to be increasingly unwelcome design additions. When I see a trailer and can identify a game that includes them, I involuntarily perceive this as a potential knock against the game. Their prevalence represents a (relatively) recent shift in design sensibilities, because the games I'm talking about are not in the "Stealth Genre" and they don't want to sell themselves that way either. Stealth actions have just become a verb to be thoughtlessly included in other types of games. (The stealth genre itself, however, is perfectly enjoyable and escapes my ire.)

Somewhat in jest, I would propose a universal rule: if a game nowadays includes a "stealth option" and a "guns blazing option", then they won't be created equal. The stealthy option is going to be encouraged more, both in terms of actual efficacy and the abstract satisfaction that the game can reward you with. So even though stealth may be optional, it is unwelcome because the game is designed with it in mind. First, all levels and mechanics have to be created so as to allow stealth to take place, perhaps, 50 to 100 percent of the time. Second, the designers have to draw your attention to necessarily details that a stealthy player needs to see/hear at various points. Finally, the combat foundation of the game has to be sufficiently hampered so it doesn't feel "too good" to play that way, where too many players might choose combat exclusively and forget about the stealth. (I'm just being cynical in that last part for my own amusement.)

I recommend people start by unscientifically picking the first 20 games (approx) that really catch your eye from the list, then start sorting those 20 for a while. You'll inevitably feel that some of those picks are iffy in comparison to the rest and/or you'll realize you picked fewer than 20. Then you go back to the big list and rope in a much smaller amount. Now you have 20ish games, and finish sorting them. You could repeat the process again to really make sure you don't want to make a few minor additions or removals, but each additional round is going to matter far less.

Don't get hung up over the games that fall below the arbitrary threshold of "20" or else you will think of yourself as dooming one game or another. Like, imagine as a thought experiment if you had access to your perfect, theoretical internal score for each game. That would make the ranking automatic, but if we also imagine that there were 10 games in your heart of hearts tied at 100/100, 10 that were tied at 99/100 (in the figurative, unknowable sense), and so on then of course the games that are "theoretically" ranked 21, 31, or 51 are going to be virtually no better or worse than the ones at ranks 9 or 19. That example was a bit extreme, but a version of this is just the reality If you are a fan of a lot of games. It's not slight against some especially revered game if you only had it at number 30. Nor is there a reason why you have to view your list as being a project that resolved detectable differences between all those games when the reality might be that many "spots" on your list could be tied between many games and that's just the way it is.

@shoulderguy The 2010s was a good decade for games with 'Odyssey' or 'Kingdom' in their title.

@dipset

Sometimes I almost think to myself that if a studio can't pull of voice acting, scene blocking, and animation to the extent that, say, TW3, TLOU2, GOW2018, Yakuza 6, and other games like those, then don't do VO in your RPG. However, I don't even know if I fully agree with myself on that statement so don't hold me to it.

Yep, I think that way too. There are obvious counter-examples though that I can self-undermine this assertion with, i.e. examples where I've really enjoyed voice acting with little to no associated animation:

• when the VO is coming into your character's ear like a walkie-talkie during normal gameplay (near ubiquitous in first person games nowadays)
• codec scenes like from Metal Gear Solid and RE4
• narration over a cinematic (often the opening cutscene of games)

Games like Star Fox and the flying sections of Kid Icarus: Uprising have both memorable and very frequent voice acting and it wouldn't make sense to add 3D modeled animation during on-rails gameplay even if they wanted it.

Another thought is that somehow Dark Souls pulls off VO very well without having almost any character movement during those interactions. I think it's because those games don't use dialogue very much to begin with, and it's basically just one person talking about something that is usually very disjointed from what the player has been doing recently. This lets the player settle into thinking "well, I guess the whole game world is just mysterious and lonely, and there isn't normalcy like the real world". The other JRPG examples we've been referring to use dialogue very frequently, and want to have much more normal interactions where characters are emoting back and forth and speaking about recent plot events.

@dipset (Didn't see your post when I replied initially). The pantomime'ing is related and almost inseparable, although technically I was referring to the character "cutouts". These cutouts appear as overlays on the screen, and don't exist in any perceivable space even though the regular game screen and its perceivable space is still visible in the center of the screen (it is the latter place would typically have pantomime'ing, although games with an even less detailed art style wouldn't of course).

I'm not a fan of pantomime'ing for the same reason: it has replaced more expressive animation and scripting the character sprites to move around dynamically (think FF6, Super Mario RPG, Chrono Trigger). But pantomimes alone (with no cutouts) don't split your attention at least. Usually they aren't rise-able to me even though they are obviously a knock against the quality. I think the main culprit behind pantomime'ing is voice acting (when the amount of production values can't reach something more like a voice acted cutscene), although since you are professionally involved with stuff like this you'd probably understand what is going on more.

@e_zed_eh_intern
Here are some examples I could come up with quickly: https://imgur.com/a/z3EhPEv

1:
I've never played a game with a "quest system" that I felt couldn't be improved by removing it entirely (or better yet: taking 10% of the quests and including them organically). This includes conventional RPGs/JRPGs, metroidvanias, and not just the open world genre. I'm referring to quest systems which are any conspicuous systems that are elevated to a constant part of the game (and not, say, a quest you do at that particular town or at that particular moment in the plot) and which present quests in a more predictable/more templated way than normal goals and gameplay.

2:
Dislike: Having character cutouts displayed above/inside dialogue boxes, or even overlaying a lightly animated 3D model during dialogue scenes (i.e., for games where such scenes don't have close camera work and motion capture like a AAA game). I dislike this and I think it is actually a step backwards from what came before. I feel it will occasionally be a confusing source of player attention, since the actual game screen is no longer the sole focus. It's a step backwards because it seems to have fully replaced having a diverse set of animations and expressions. It'd contend that 16 bit RPGs and a certain style of PS1 RPGs with highly detailed spritework still use more character animation and character posing than a staggering amount of comparable games that followed.

On a related note, something about the voting pool being constrained to a predetermined list makes me want to be looser in casting votes for games. For individual years I resisted voting for games that I was rooting for and I know I'll love way more than my bottom picks but just haven't gotten around to yet. Now, I feel willing to vote for these. Does anyone else feel that way?

I think the instinct about not making the lowest value a "1" is right on the money, but this seems like a weird solution to that end. I'm still happy with it, but I wouldn't mind seeing the points even further simplified into, say, 3 tiers (top 5, middle ranks 6-15, and then bottom 16-20), with the points being the same within a tier. The lack of finer distinctions won't shift the results too often when the end tally is the sum of so many people providing inputs. But it makes it easier to think about and acknowledges that for anyone's individual list, there won't be a precise pattern to how much each entry is liked above the next.

If we don't like tiers, I also like the idea of just having the points vary from 25 points down to 6 points, or even more compressed like 30 points down to 11 points.

Basically, I think one should be cautious about each additional formula embellishment that minimizes the impact of "number of votes" in order to emphasize "how high was it voted". The formula is going to be forgotten once results start rolling in, and at the margins more people are happier with the overall community list when the more popular games win.

A thread for examining the new games of July! Share your personal picks, interesting curios, and not quite there possibles...

.

Did you discover some small game that not everyone knows about?
Share that and let us know what it is about!

Already know a thing or two that interests you?
Make a list of your interests and/or possibles!

Don't know what's so great about an upcoming game you keep hearing about?
Ask here!

Don't follow gaming news that closely and just want to passively see what BigGames™ people care about?
This is the place!

~

Thread concept:

The basic idea is to list new games that you are interested in, as well as games you are potentially curious about or want to give wider attention to. You can briefly describe them or ask other people to help fill you in. The hope is that regular threads like these can act as a collective filter/discovery mechanism to help people decide what is worth checking out.

"New games" means any new title that is being released or ported this month in any capacity (not "backlogs/what you are playing this month"). The angle here is sharing your anticipation and promoting game discovery (as opposed to sharing comments about a first playthrough in progress - that belongs elsewhere).

.

• If you want a handy list that covers most of the major upcoming games of the month, here's a couple text lists of upcoming games:
  • Giant Bomb
  • Game Informer
  • Wikipedia

Feel free to post other lists or list videos of upcoming releases that you find useful.

• Final request: If you are the first person to mention a game please provide (at minimum) a short sentence description. (If it is a very big AAA release though, then don't worry about it.) This is a good convention that makes the thread more useful as a discovery mechanism, and especially helps out anyone who doesn't follow the news as closely as you.

How about Syndicate (2012). The fun FPS reboot with too much bloom. Still felt like a cool sci-fi shooter campaign and -- darn it -- I enjoyed that it was attached to the Syndicate IP! Also contains a legendary music remix by Skrillex. I never got to play the multiplayer (which was actually a quirky, 4 player class-based cooperative thing) but I've seen people get really into it.

Ghost in the Shell: SAC on the PS2 is another one that I really like but seems to get remembered as just a standard 3rd person shooter with unusual acrobatics. Heck, throw in the PS1 GITS game as long as we're at it, although I think that game's legacy has turned out to be quite favorable as an underrated gem.

Surprisingly, coming up with swimming-in-7 examples is giving me a lot of pause even though I've always enjoyed hearing the Allies talk about their personal Si7s. I think it is because the way I internally rate my games naturally makes these games higher than a "7" for me, and part of my brain doesn't want to climb down from that higher level of praise just so I can fit it into the thread.

It's like, for a game to be a "7" in the widely understood sense it has to meet and stay within some kind of middle-of-the-road level of expectations, but when that game is worth bringing up as a "swimming in 7s" that also means it was a favorite for you in particular, and that you still think about (if not still replay it). A game might be a legit 7, and you might have legitimately beat it and enjoyed it, but if it passes through you and gets largely forgotten then it isn't a Si7. That's kind of my problem: games where that enjoyment sticks with me are special enough that I can't call them sevens.

Star Wars: Squadrons was revealed recently and more was shown at EA's Summer 2020/E3 2020/EA Play-whatever presentation. It's a first person only star fighter game. It looks cooler and more involved than the space stuff in Battlefront 2. While the graphical look brings back fond memories of playing the Rogue Squadron games, expectations should probably be closer to X-Wing vs TIE fighter.

Youtube Video

Youtube Video

Reading coverage (and some podcast impressions), I've learned that Star Wars: Squadrons is focused on 5v5 multiplayer. There's a dog fighting mode and a "fleet battle" mode that is more longform and has a sense of battle progression. You can play fleet battles singleplayer against AIs and there is a single player campaign (of unknown depth or any other real details). The game doesn't involve locations on planetary surfaces, everything is all outer space all the time.

This game rewards your play with points to customize the interior and exterior of your ship (cosmetics), and various ship components (which matter in the game). But it will be a 40 dollar game with no microtransactions, no DLC, or any future content in general. What's in the box is the whole deal.

The part about not having terrestrial battles reminded of playing Strike Suit Zero many years back. While SSZ was a much more modest indie game -- and so would be expected to be lighter on content than, say, a Rogue Squadron game -- it was noticeable to me that the "always in space" design made that game feel repetitive more quickly. Star Wars: Squadrons does make me want to give it a shot if it looks as gorgeous as those trailers.

@scotty said in The PS5 News and Info Thread:

I want to share this:
[...Kena trailer...]

It was one of the best trailers of presentation and looks really awesome, feels like next gen. Hope it is great!

Yeah, I hope so too. I was getting Zelda/Horizon expectations from the short gameplay clips.

@scotty said in The PS5 News and Info Thread:

Hey, so I've been watching RE8 trailer again a question came to my mind: Can I go to RE8 with just finishing RE7? Or RE7's story so intricate with the series that I should play 4-5-6 too. I wasn't playing horror games until RE2 Remake demo impressed me so much(tried RE1 Remake after that but didn't finish, found it still old and annoying to play) and now I'm planning to play both RE3 Remake and RE7 hopefully but I was waiting to play 5-6 after RE4 Remake launched. What do you say?

I'm going to stake out the bold position (that isn't bold at all) and say you can play the RE games in any order if you find yourself only drawn to some of the entries and not all of them. I say this not because they aren't connected but because there isn't anything confusing that requires a dependence ordering.

The stories are connected in the sense that the games acknowledge that the characters are drawing on prior experience and Umbrella is building off of past experiments and set backs. (A notable exception is that the setup of RE1 is much more important than other games because it kicks off the franchise and serves as a very immediate setup for RE2+3, but you don't have to completely finish RE1 to understand this.)

Honestly, half the time the most important "background lore" for any given game was invented and introduced in that specific game. Like, there is new backstory you learn when playing RE4, but it wasn't communicated to you in RE1-3, RE:CV, etc even though those games took place earlier. The characters are continually redesigned and remolded as well (so they tend to have half new personalities, half new appearances, etc), just don't sweat it.

Here's my contrarian position that I want to put out there: the concept of a "Lost Legacy" type of sequel is poorly defined in general, and so it doesn't make sense to react or think of games in terms of how they fit into this binary category. Regular sequels have not necessarily had the same size and scope as the previous game. Regular sequels don't necessarily have the same "leaps" (e.g. graphical leaps, engine leaps, UI leaps) that would be typical for sequels of its era. Sequels have a very fuzzy spectrum.

@miserableperson said in The PS5 News and Info Thread:

I'm not sure what to say, but I'm a little let down by what was shown. Even things like Ghostwire and Resident Evil VIII didn't hit me like I was hoping they would. Outside of maybe Ratchet switching between worlds, I didn't see anything ultra impressive - a lot of it just felt like the same old stuff. I guess I was expecting the much talked about SSD to flex itself a little more obviously. There were some cooler indie type games, but nothing really blew me away.

I wasn't blown away either. I think the reason was that every trailer was 3 minutes at most, and gameplay only in fast cuts. There weren't any places where something could be demo'ed at a slower pace. Not doing a stage presentation (and just sequencing all trailers like they did) probably also meant they lost those moments where a few select trailers have extra special build up and anticipation to them.

(While I wasn't blown away, I don't feel the same disappointment that some people online have expressed. I'm glad all these games are coming and we know what to look forward to.)