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| Glenn Magus Harvey | Comment 1: 2014-02-09 03:56 |
| > Zelda Between Worlds Definitely on my to-get list. > FTL That's darn good stuff there. Tiddles, I can attest to it being good. (Though you may not necessarily want to pull out your hair getting the super-hidden ship.) > FTL as "Oregon Trail in space" Y'know, that's a very apt description, which I hadn't thought of before. I like that. That said, I've never actually played Oregon Trail myself. I've only played Organ Trail. Embarrassing fact. > I need to spend some time grinding in XIII-2 ...desire to get game, falling. > giant mutant tomato Attack of the Killer Tomato > GTA on horseback I can do you one better: GTA as a horse. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rt4p9A-U4Ko http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QpgJcgMA_UM ---- Thoughts on the main point of the podcast: 1. I, too, have noticed the large amount of interest in open-world or sandbox games or games with player "freedom" in recent years. But sometimes I'm not exactly sure I want that. It probably depends on my mood, but y'know, some days, I just want a satisfyingly epic story, and I want to be part of that story. Yeah, badly-designed linear games make me feel like I'm pushing buttons to advance the story. But well-designed ones put me in the driver's seat and can give me a really satisfying "I did it!" feeling when I succeed. 2. What "open world" means depends on what you define as "open world". as was pointed out, you can have huge explorable worlds but still have only one basic story, you can have sandbox games that basically have no story (even if they have a rough narrative structure baesd on sequence of events) or basically have a "create your own story based on the way you play", or you can have many different plot branches or mini-plots. This may help create a way to subcategorize open-world games. 3. I wonder how much the open-world vs. plot-heavy debate has to do with replay (or extensive play) value. It seems that the games people usually cite as being open-world -- such as GTA, Minecraft, or Infamous -- seem to have [A] multiple paths to take, [B] a responsive virtual world that one can dick around in, or [C] so much little stuff that can be done using "first principles" that can be combined to create greater things. That first category is clearly based in multiple playthroughs, and the second and third categories are basically about creating a virtual world where the player can just do all sorts of stuff and basically act as a complex virtual toy. If you're aiming to just do a single playthrough, categories B and C are kinda inapplicable (you can set goals, such as beating all the bosses in Terraria, but these are somewhat "artificial"), but category A shows a prominent difference: if you're playing something for the first time, you don't actually know what choices you have anyway. (Unless you apply genre savviness and meta-knowledge and all that, which ideally shouldn't happen.) 4. Something that might be related may be the idea of sequence-breaking. This probably has to do with whether players feel that something they've done was purposefully designed to exist. I know that some people who speedrun Metroid games expressed a sense of disappointment that Zero Mission had intentionally-designed sequence-breaking routes and secret, rather than ones that people gradually discovered (and are occasionally still discovering) by stretching the game's engine to its limit, as they have with Super Metroid. This is a design issue, but from the player's meta-perspective, it seems similarly relevant to the idea of player agency -- as in, the player's perception of their ability to do stuff freely, such as tinkering with the game (or the gameworld). 4'. In fact, the "open world" idea is definitely related to the issue of linearity and sequence in metroidvania games. Metroid Fusion has the strongest explicitly scripted plot of all the Metroid games, but it is disliked by the speedrunning community because it lacked the flexibility to ask "what about an alternate route that collected the items in a different order?" or "what about not picking up this or that item?". Clearly, there's an extracontextual enjoyment of having options, and similarly being able to "tinker" with something about the game. > MMOs I definitely found that jarring about MMORPGs. There's like this huge disconnect between "there's so many people playing at once" and "what you do is only relevant to your own mission advancement". And because there are just so many people out there (and too few to see over and over again unless you and they both play on a consistent schedule by chance). So all it becomes is basically you doing your own thing. Not much different from a single-player game, with minor co-op gameplay thrown in. > other Squenix things Come to think of it, and come to think of Einhänder because it's the poster-child of "and now for something completely different from Squenix" in my mind...could it be remade to be multi-pathed like Star Fox 64 is? Just wondering, not saying this is a good or bad idea. > western Squenix-owned studios, in a collab with Squenix art assets So you basically mean > Final Fantasy / Mega Man game FF x Mighty No. 9 too? | |
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