Chatterbox: Video Games

I'm on everything. I play both the indie & triple AAA blockbusters. I don't mind if a game uses an Excuse Plot so long its fun to play primarily. I would play all the hyped titles on the indie end & triple A end if I could(except the JRPG's. Not a fan. )

edited 3rd Apr '14 9:41:00 AM by kingluey

I'm fine with an Excuse Plot also. I'm not complaining about that. I'm complaining about mood-killing stuff.

"Save the world, blah blah" or "..." don't kill the mood of a fantasy platformer, a space shooter, or whatever. "Someone stole your teddy bear" would. See what I mean?

Hell, I think if anything, games have too damn many cutscenes and too much story. I'd rather they just have atmosphere instead of cutscenes. Steel Diver: Sub Wars has no story, and instead has all it needs - great atmosphere, and the feeling that you're controlling a submarine in underwater combat.

Story heavy games have their place. Even back in the times of the arcades, there were attempts at it, despite limited hardware at the time.

They and Just for fun games have their place.

I'm not really talking about that, though. What I'm talking about is more when something that seems serious at first glance turns out to have inappropriate silliness thrown in. THAT is what frustrates me.

I still find it odd that you can perceive the premise of Octodad as anything remotely serious, but YMMV I guess.

What seems to be the bigger difference between these games is how relevant that premise motivation is to the game itself. It's an Excuse Plot in Ultionus while it's the entire point of the game in Octodad.

And if it makes you feel any better, the original "version" of Ultionus — in other words, the game Phantis — doesn't have petty revenge as a motive.

edited 3rd Apr '14 3:20:08 PM by GlennMagusHarvey

Ultonius should have kept Phantis's plot. It just feels like they tossed it in to be silly.

I never said or implied Octodad was serious. I meant that it's internally consistent. It takes its premise and makes an internally consistent world that's funny within its consistency.

I think I'm starting to get what you mean; you prefer something be taken seriously (even if hard-to-believe) rather than be written off as a joke.

Exactly!

Thing is, the plot shows up for an intro cutscene that you can skip, and one little scene before the final stage. Does it REALLY matter that much to you that you can't just ignore it and play the game anyway? I mean, I could think of a lot of games with terrible stories of the top of my head, but they're games I enjoy, anyway.

(Metal Gear Rising, for example...)

edited 3rd Apr '14 6:26:12 PM by Bobinator

If the plot is barely there, fine. I'm saying that in a huge number of games made today, there's cutscenes all over the place, and unless I'm invested in the story, I skip them. When I was a kid, you pushed Start, you started the game. Now, there's tons of stuff in the way.

I think a better form of storytelling would be Dialog During Gameplay, some mild scripted events in the background (like in Sonic and Knuckles, you can witness Dr. Robotnik's Death Egg taking off in the background while in an underground cave level), and maybe some intro-y stuff during the title screen. Unobtrusive stuff.

edited 4th Apr '14 5:28:21 AM by BonsaiForest

I'm interested in playing a multiplayer game where you can have multiple players or teams with varying amounts of resources (such as military strength) opposing each other and taking advantages of locale-specific conditions — such as geography, or alliances with would-be opponents — to get stuff done.

This might sound like Risk, but with Risk (at least classic Risk) the battles themselves are kinda a little repetitive after a while, and the endgame is always boring for all the players who have been or are about to be defeated, and tedious even for the winner.

Maybe this is best represented by some sort of territory control multiplayer computer game where territory is more formally abstracted (such as Risk, as opposed to, say, a Pv P FPS, where territory control is de facto and not much formalized), and where there is some objective other than "defeat all other player". Basically, there needs to be incentives to keep other players alive — especially those whom you're allied with.

Are there games like this?

edited 5th Apr '14 4:54:09 AM by GlennMagusHarvey

If I may ask, how do you feel about games that feature significant amounts of gameplay-relevant, non-background dialogue—as in some adventure games, for example?

Inspired by (but, I'll confess, not actually answering ^^; ) your post, I wonder whether Risk would likely be more fun if, instead of combatting other players throughout the game, the body of the game were taken up with diplomacy and resource gathering (including the build-up of an army), culminating in a final few rounds played via separate mechanics in which the players use their resources and connections to each other to annihilate each other and determine the last player standing.

^ Actually, what you're describing sounds a little bit like DEFCON.

edited 7th Apr '14 3:35:17 PM by GlennMagusHarvey

Ahh, fair enough—I'll confess that I haven't seen or played overmuch of that game. ^^; On the plus side, it affirms the idea!

No, it's okay. I just wish it were easier to get into that game — it's interesting conceptually but I just never really seem to feel like I wanna play it.

So is the Chatterbox thread the Whether Games Should Take Themselves Seriously thread now?

Well, that and the "thinking up game designs that have already been implemented" thread, apparently. :P

"significant amounts of gameplay-relevant, non-background dialogue"

You mean, stopping the gameplay so we can read what characters say? Or the ability to talk to townspeople and read what they say? And also, the dialog is relevant to how to play the game, or things that are in it? I'd have to understand the question before I can answer it. But I don't mind talking to townspeople in games, and frequently seek them out in games like Castlevania 2, Deadly Premonition, Skyrim, and others.

I decided to buy Strider, in the mood for a 2D platformer. Pretty decent so far, only beat the first level. I'm glad to see 2D platformers making a comeback. There's even a 2D Castlevania with HD graphics out now. Haven't played it yet, but bought it off Steam.

I'll be more glad when 3D platformers that aren't Sonic or Mario make a comeback.

More along the lines of "talking to people is part of the gameplay": I'm thinking of games like the Gabriel Knight series, for example—adventure games, rather than more action-based games such as the ones that you described.

To illustrate by example:

The player is charged with finding a murderer. As step one, they talk to a witness; in that dialogue the witness mentions seeing a white van. The player continues on through various other conversations, interspersed with puzzles, and eventually meets someone with a white van. They question this person, but this new suspect is cautious. The player questions a few more people, gaining additional information that puts a crack in the suspect's story; returning to the suspect, they now have a new dialogue option that allows them to goad out a confession. (And so on.)

edited 8th Apr '14 6:54:03 AM by ArsThaumaturgis

I love story-heavy games, but there is a point at which it becomes more like a movie that you interact with occasionally, and that can be annoying. The line is different for different people, of course. Getting a bit old school, I'm reminded of the Wing Commander series, where Chris Roberts kept upping the ante on the cinematic portions and reducing the gameplay-to-story ratio with each installment. To be fair, you did get to pick your character's actions in the cinematics ^note except for Prophecy, which wasn't produced by Roberts anyway, which helped the feel of a "choose your own adventure" style plot, but at times the gameplay seemed incidental to the story.

Regardless of the mandatory dialog in the game, I'm the kind of player who will stop to chat with everyone, partly to see what they have to say and partly because developers love to throw in bonus quests and Easter eggs for such players as myself.

edited 8th Apr '14 6:56:31 AM by Fighteer

I too would like to see more 3D platformers. I'm noticing that 3D platformers are going fixed-camera, since it makes aiming jumps a lot easier, and allows multiplayer to work better. Super Mario 3D World (I really need to rewrite my review of that game, as my opinion of it is now glowingly positive) wouldn't have multiplayer if it had to use a Super Mario 64 type of camera.

Anyway, games where talking to people is part of the gameplay is fine as long as I'm interested in what they have to say. I don't talk to everyone in Skyrim, but I do talk to a lot of people. I talk to everyone in Deadly Premonition, which is easier as the game has a smaller cast of "story" characters compared to "extras" in the background. Plus their dialog changes depending on weather, time of day, location, and what chapter you're in. I discover new things with every playthrough, which is impressive.

I do very much agree; for myself, I think that one threshold that I have regarding that is—roughly—how often I get to actually choose something in the dialogue, as opposed to simply clicking to advance it. Even then I've spent some time thinking about other ways in which dialogue interactivity might be implemented.

Ah, fair enough—from previous posts I had thought that you might have been opposed to dialogue-centric gameplay elements.

Does Bunny from Bunny Must Die count as The Unchosen One? Because she doesn't exactly choose herself...but she does, later in the game.

EA is a riot. I want to see them crash and burn. Really sucks considering that I actually grew up with them since the days of Atari, but let's take a look at only their most recent history:

• SimCity: Crashed the servers, people couldn't log on, forced you to play online when the game worked just fine offline (as pirates/hackers proved). Had to issue a public apology.
• NBA Live 14: Sucked compared to the competition, with humiliating graphics and complicated controls. Had to issue a public apology.
• Mass Effect 3: Okay, this one I think is petty. People complained that the ending rendered the choices made in the previous 2 games meaningless. Issued a public apology. A patch was added changing the ending.
• Battlefield 4: Lots of glitches and broken netcode, missing features. Had to issue a public apology. Is being sued by shareholders.
• Dungeon Keeper (mobile): Utterly destroys gameplay to rip people off with microtransactions practically upfront, to the point where paying $100 gives you barely anything, and the only alternative is to wait absurd amounts of time. Also inferior to the original game even without the microtranscation-filled paywalls. Refused to apologize, but instead tried to justify this nonsense.

All of that happened within the past year.

edited 9th Apr '14 7:07:47 AM by BonsaiForest