Jim Sterling (The Jimquisition)

Yeah, I really gotta play Stanley Parable sometime. Everything I've seen of it makes it look like appealing. I bought it during a steam sale but haven't gotten around to playing it.

I'm looking forward to Jim's worst list (I always do) though I imagine it's probably pretty easy to guess what stuff will be on there.

Also Del Toro said Fuck Konami on twitter again. I've got nothing to add to that.

Oh boy the Star Fox Zero entry is going to get him a lot of flames I'm sure.

Funnily enough, it's actually the second time this week I've seen Star Fox Zero show up on a "worst games of 2016" list. Can't say I was expecting to see it show up even once considering the reception was mixed and uncomfortable instead of, like, outright disappointment.

I have yet to see Federation Force on anything, meanwhile. It's kind of amusing to me.

I feel like complaining about a free game that I don't think that anyone was even hyping up, regardless of quality, is really kind of something that you should avoid doing.

I think Star Fox Zero got a lot of nega-points because it was a remake of a remake and an on-rails shooter. It's the sort of bread-and-butter game design that, with the sort of talent at both Platinum and Nintendo, should be really difficult to mess up.

And then they messed it up, and put yet another blemish on a beloved franchise. That's the kind of thing that makes you want to yell at people.

Anyway, glad that Jim went with a shared second place for all the Steam Store bullshit.

His assessment of the first Nie R was pretty fair for someone who seemed to be lukewarm on it (I disagree about the text segments just being a "gag" and feel like that's sort of missing the point, but whatever). I think he'll probably like this one a lot more since the gameplay will be a lot better and they won't have to take the same kind of cheap shortcuts the original did.

2017 opens with...vintage Power Rangers footage.

The Tactical Shootybangbang dudes are still sore up their dicks .

Oh my god I so agree with that last video. I've not been able to stomach an asscreed game for along time because of how the game devolved into Random Task Creed. Watch_Dogs had the same issue of course.

A game that suffered from this empty Sandbox issue was Dragon Age Inquisition, where you get huge sprawling maps who are not interesting and filled with boring side quests that have no impact on the main plot, even when they aren't 20 Bear Asses collections. And yet the fact DAI was so well received and sold so well makes me worried as fuck for Mass Effect Andromeda. Especially when they've announced the return of the Mako for gameplay. The entire premise of the game lends itself to being a shitastic sandbox with meaningless filler.

edited 2nd Jan '17 2:42:26 PM by Ghilz

AAA gaming in general is in the position Bethesda was in years ago with Oblivion. Oblivion had a TON of square footage, way more than Morrowind, but it was widely agreed that Morrowind had the superior map. Because Morrowind's hand-crafted map was much more densely packed with interesting scenery, fun terrain, and stuff to do than Oblivion's wide open swaths of boring.

So far as the map is concerned most fans agree that Morrowind > Oblivion because Morrowind has more gameplay per square footage and that's much more important than simple map size.

And many games don't f*cking need to be a sandbox at all. More often than not, it's just empty filler. Eight amazing hours of gameplay will always be better than thirty obnoxious hours that make half the players give up in disgust after the fourth.

edited 2nd Jan '17 3:25:40 PM by TobiasDrake

Morrowind's map had also a lot of issues though, for one thing, it was almost too densely pack, where you leave as town and there's bandits / monsters / whatever mere feet out the gates, which sometimes breaks the immersion. The map was labyrinthine, with huge cliffs and canyons to make it feel bigger than it is which made travel fucking akward coz there's no fast travel, and going in a straight line is almost never possible. The Ghostfence locking up the middle of the island made it worst since you have a giant circle you constantly need to walk around. Plus people are quick to forget that there's parts of Morrowind that are really empty too.

I think Skyrim manages a good balance of scale vs Density, as do the two Fallout Games Bethesda did.

For example, the Zelda overworlds. Those are often very nice and detailed and populated with things that are, like, interesting. I think it figures that Twilight Princess had one of the biggest overworlds (not counting Wind Waker on account of, well, water) and it's also the overworld I found the least interesting. I mean, look at how detailed the overworlds in Ocarina of Time or Majora's Mask were.

FFXV, whatever you think of it, has a very nice overworld as well.

Note that Jim Sterling didn't bring it up at all under the negative examples of Wide open sandbxes.

The Incredible Hulk Ultimate Destruction and the Prototype games are pretty good examples too.

Well the Hulk game is more straightforward about what you do which helps. Smash = Good.

LA Noire, I think was hit with the open world problem, long before it became obvious. It had a really good plot...but the open world was essentially useless. You could have turned it into a straight linear game and you would lose nothing beyond being able to explore 1940's LA which was, to be honest, mostly boring with a few interesting bits.

Hell, the game actually made its own open world irrelevant by introducing the ability to make your partner drive.

edited 2nd Jan '17 6:12:14 PM by Zendervai

Didn't Final Fantasy XIV also suffer from the same problem back in 1.0?

It's an MMO though, so by default more grindy, pointless sandquests to pad out the game world is acceptable. FF 14's issues were more design issues, balance issues and a fuck ton of bugs that rendered it unplayable as an MMO

edited 2nd Jan '17 9:13:53 PM by Ghilz

The recreation of L.A. was boring, because the developers tried to go by real-world scale, which meant the game world was actually just a small patch of the actual city, with large avenues of samey buildings, and very few landmarks (which, even worse, were partially just shoehorned in) as a result. The reason why Grand Theft Auto works so well is because the games manage to emulate the architectural diversity of a metropolis, but on the scale of a tiny town. GTA V was the first time the series actually created a real-world-sized city; reaching half the expanses of Boston, MA at best, but still realistically dimensioned.

edited 3rd Jan '17 3:58:29 AM by TAPETRVE

Just Cause 2 is probably the original sin here, with its huge map. That game made it work by having fun ways to get around it- vehicle surfing, parachute-grappling-hook maneuvers, and hijacking EVERYTHING. Other sandbox games only took the huge map aspect and thought that was enough.

There's plenty older than Just Cause who did that, I mean, I think all the way back to the original Crackdown. You have a few gang HQ that form the story missions, but most of the game is climbing for orbs, races, and various challenge segment. Like Just Cause, the fun is how you can get around the map.

edited 3rd Jan '17 12:12:58 PM by Ghilz

No More Heroes did the same thing, but that was a parody of open-world games.

At least the world in XIV: A Realm Reborn is pretty good.

I mean, I'm admittedly not having much reason to return to specific areas in the Shroud that the main story took me to before I had access to the other regions, but the maps they're contained in as a whole, yeah, I've had reason to run all around them even at L60.