/v/ - Video Games

You should seek to make your taste become godlike before your performance ingame.

>>14547810

It is already such.

>>14547814

>godlike taste

>plays fucking BoI and Nier Automata

Found your problem, chief.

>>14547846

Cuckchan is two blocks down.

>Why are devs obsessed with the feeling of control so much these days?

Because they want to control the rate you blow through the game. They don't want you to realize its a shitty short game held back by arbitrary methods such as "balance". They hide their design ineptitude behind the player's own abilities, making them feel like they are being challenged.

>>14547878

Why make video games if you don't want to give people fun?

Just for money?

The answer is simple: Marrowang

You're basically an immortal god in 99% of big budget games simply because of how easy they are. You can't die and regen in a second. Boring as fuck and the reason why I don't play new games. I honestly wish games were more "balanced". Hell even multiplayer games stopped being balanced a long time ago and these days you can even get a maphack in a lootbox. Who wastes most money can get high on being a god. Who the fuck enjoys that shit?

>>14547893

That's not really gaming the game though, that's just being a spectator, basically.

>>14547893

It's fun when games hard at first but then you learn and conquer it and became immortal.

If you're god from get go like in asscreed or cod then yeah, it's worth nothing.

if the game lets you become invincible, the game is too easy

they can increase the difficulty by "balancing" the single-player game

of course, the way that JRPGs typically do it by letting you reach level 99 when the endgame calls for level 70 or 40 or so isn't nearly as bad, because you gotta put a whole lot of work into reaching level 99 if you wanna actually do that, but the game design would be better if you were actually intended by be level 99 by the final boss without grinding, but then in that case they could implement a difficulty setting

but if something as simple as a character build makes you invincible or something, then thats something else

>>14547878

This.

And it is overwhelmingly prevalent in western companies. They jst want to hide the fact that the game is shit and badly programmed.

>>14547954

The equipment system in T:D exists only to pad out the fact that the game is like 3 hours long.

>>14547806

FF8 and Morrowind, basically. Also the Disgaea series lets you get silly powerful. Other than that, games that allow you to become OP are pretty rare.

What I'd like to see more of, tbh, is the exact opposite in games. Games where you're so completely outclassed by even the most basic enemy that you have to exploit every aspect of the game just to stand a chance. The meme is that Dark Souls does this, but not really, you can beat any game in the series with just the junky starter gear if you wanted.

>>14547890

this

>the crab merchant

>enchanting

>spellmaking

you can become pretty much invincible

Creating imbalance and making it fun requires intelligence and imagination. Which most western devs are lacking. Especially once you get onto big budget games. Its easy and simple as fuck to make something imbalanced. Make a fighter and give one character 10x the health bar. But to make if fun you need to actually work on design and implementation of the game systems. Most modern games are copy paste shit with a new gimmick. Third person shooter with… erm… Time mechanics? First person shooter but.. umm… basebuilding? Modern games are built on an elevator pitch design philosophy. For much the same reason as movies are I imagine: Suits are too stupid and ignorant of the medium to understand anything beyond "like X but with Y"

Also, big budget games are terrified of taking any risks. Balance is safe. Imbalance is risky. Will the player like the imbalance? Will they feel too weak or too powerful? What if they're too stupid to see how to work the system? Better make it bland and boring just to be safe.

>>14547960

Nigger, please. Shit's rampant everywhere, the nips just have fan service as a value add.

Because, despite them being single player, devs see the games as community experiences. They nerf exploits like that, because, otherwise, it's "cheating" to easily attain the same achievements, unlocks, and general goals that other plays are trying to legitimately get.

>>14548033

>And then the faggots behind Darkest Dungeon.

The stories of constant rebalancing keep me from even touching this game, despite pirating it on vita. I want a finished product, not something that will shift rules every few days.

>>14548033

I cant wait for red dead redemption 2

>Your horse is tired and you're out of horse food. BUY A SHARK CARD!

>You're at the cathouse and you're out of hooker food. BUY A SHARK CARD!"

>You're shooting someone and you're out of gun food. BUY A SHARK CARD!"

All I want is more western games. I already know they're going to ruin it.

>>14548033

>And then the faggots behind Darkest Dungeon.

They would make the Jester a class that can do absolutely nothing if they could get away with it, the fuckers.

>>14548065

Modern games trigger something in me. Not depression, just a severe lack of fucks. It's like the developers know enough people will mindlessly scream " YOU DON'T HAVE TO BUY IT" while filling in their credit card numbers. If I had a time machine and I told my younger self what gaming would become in 30 years, I'd laugh in my own face.

>>14548094

>The Jester Nerf

>Another byproduct of Crimson Court nerfs.

>Finale might as well auto-kill the entire party, because then at least it would do something.

And that's why I tell people to either pirate Darkest Dungeon or buy the GOG version, simply because you can control which version of the game you're playing, unlike Steam. I could rant all fucking day at all the bullshit they pulled with Crimson Court. That alone should have completely killed off the fanbase of the game. Imagine if EA did some shit like this.

>Mass Effect 2 new DLC includes amazing weapons and abilities! in order to balance this out ,we have to reduce the damage of all abilities and weapons already in the game by 50%.

>>14548065

>out of gun food.

HANK! Don't say crumbbumb in front of company.

Since you brought up Nier Automata - the problem there isn't that you can become an immortal and unstoppable killing machine, it's that you do that without any effort just by playing normally.

>>14547806

>Binding of Isaac

Edmund McMillen lacks both the intelligence and work ethic to make a balanced game as well as anticipate what the meta strategy of his own game would be

>>14548049

i bought it when it was at its meme zenith on here and regret every cent of it. it was fun for about a week, then the devs nerfed the only strategy i had found to actually survive and had buffed the enemies, and added weird new rules to combat like having to hack your way through enemy corpses to get to their back row - taking up time and giving the enemy more turns to fuck you up. i've never seen a team that dedicated to stamping out fun in my life and i'm never, ever going to pay for anything they make again

>>14548234

I don't disagree with you on any point, I just want to say this:

It's Platinum. The only truly difficult game they've ever made was Bayonetta. I know I'll catch flack for this but fuck it. Metal Gear Rising and 101 were shitshows, fun shitshows but mechanically they was a step backwards from Bayonetta. It's like they were one hit wonders.

Bayonetta was their best hit hands down, nothing they've released since has compared to it.

Nier 2, Wonderful 101 , Madworld and Anarchy Reigns were alright, could have been far better. Especially Anarchy Reigns, dead on arrival.

Bayonetta 2, Metal Gear Rising and Transformers were iffy as hell if you compared them to Bayonetta.

Vanquish was meh. Some people swear by it, but people who played it before the PC release hype team arrived will warn you to never play it simply because of how buggy and mindlessly repetitive the game is.

Korra and Ninja Turtles were absolute shit to the point where you shouldn't even pirate them.

>>14548239

Darkest was the ultimate result of the "IT'S FUN BECAUSE IT'S HARD" meme that people perpetuate. Personally, it has a new challenger with Labotomy Corp.

<Here are a bunch of things that will instantly ruin your current run.

<There's fuck all you can do about it, enjoy losing because of some random event beyond your control.

>People praise a game that has randomly generated situations where you simply cannot win as difficult.

>>14548297

Game was too popular, now is in it's refractory period when people don't want to talk about it. By this time next year people will be back to "it was above average mechanically and had good music/aesthetics."

>>14548311

>Anarchy Reigns dead on arrival

It just isn't fair. I bought the game like 2 months after it released, managed to find one full game because the stars aligned, and holy shit it was a fucking blast. Played like 3 or 4 rounds before people had to leave, but the game deserved better than what it got.

>>14548317

That kinda sucks but hell, it was a pretty great game. Not 10/10 by any stretch and had its flaws. Not to mention, it's not like many good games even come out nowadays.

I remember back when OOT had a sudden popularity spike on /v/, mainly theories about the temples and shit like that and it was honestly one of the best threads I've ever lurked in. Shitposting was kept to a minimum at first and what was being said was interesting to anyone that cared.

I did love the N:A threads when they first came after the game released. The good ones anyway.

>>14547806

Patching games frequently has become common place and in order to sell DLC the devs push out patches whilst they're at it.

Part of the patches is balancing the game. Sometimes things are just plain broken and make the game trivial. This is especially important if the game is multiplayer and the majority of the population is using the exact same customization and strategies. Anything that flatout breaks the game in a player versus player setup should be fixed.

That said, games these days are often overbalancing things. And I hate it too.

For customization to have any meaning, some setups need to be flatout better at some things than other setups, but modern balancing insists on making everything good at everything, or something exclusively good at one thing. As a result, any time spent customizing equipment is time that feels completely wasted.

It's even worse with games like Diablo/PathOfExile/Torchlight; items don't have any significant meaning in those games, they're just stats that the treadmill feeds you that you require to do anything at all.

I think most of this is better attributed to developers that have absolutely no idea what the fuck they're doing though. Time and time again I see games get balanced in ways that make absolutely no sense and just suck all the fun out of it. And I don't mean the "devs nerfed thing that was good", I mean "dev changed mechanic X completely breaking the innate rock-paper-scissors balance that made the game actually function".

>>14547954

You're*

>>14548359

once the PC port hit the game became really hard to talk about.

>>14548606

I never experimented much with tricksters or seeq. I tried doing every possible sidequest before advancing the plot and that kind of ruined my recruiting. I didn't understand why I had no grias or seeq in the team until much later in the game where I didn't want to go through the trouble of raising another unit. That and the game gives you so many OCs you HAVE to deploy on every story mission you get basically no free slots. Magic Frenzy was the shit and the game let you know that very early with the 5 colors clan's Blue Mage fight.

FF5. Blue mages can kill pretty much every boss in a single hit.

>>14548359

>That kinda sucks but hell, it was a pretty great game.

Happens with all any game that gets too much buzz/shilling.

>>14548647

>when playing the game seriously

That's the thing. Games shouldn't be made with autistic speedrunners and pro MLG gaymers in mind, they should be made so that your regular non-braindead person who plays the game has fun in his first playthrough, ideally even for more playthroughs after the first.

>>14548699

I didn't mean playing seriously as speedrunning or anything similar, just that those alternative builds wouldn't matter unless making a joke or "for fun" playtrough, either fully realising you're crippling yourself and doing it for laughs or extra challenge or being retarded and not realising it's an unviable build compared to the other ones on your first playtrough or simply unlucky for choosing the bad build/class on your first playtrough.

By playing seriously, I meant trying to clear the game and using all your tools at your disposal, that's what most people should do when first playing the game.

Then there's a balance between what classe's and build's fun and efficiency. You'll try to play with the one you find more fun, but if it's not objectively as useful as others then you may have to drop it to play as other ones, unless you want to cripple yourself.

I've played too many games where melee classes were just much worse than any sort of ranged classes for the simple fact that they deal about the same if not less damage, tank just a bit more, yet need to be at point blank at all times to be as effective as the other ones. It's not fun to play those in these games.

Been looking for games like this. Risk of Rain is pretty great for having a bum phase in the beginning and you being a god in late game.

>>14548857

Just get so much barbed wire the visual effect break into a white translucent square over the screen. Always a blast to hear things popping off screen.

>>14548734

In tactics games where things try to be balanced, you have a balance of Damage/Range/Durability/Utility

Classes will generally be built like this

+Damage ++Range -Durability –Utility = Archer

+Damage +Range –Durability ++Utility = Mage

++Damage –Range +Durability -Utility = Warrior

So when you get down to it, the balance is pretty shallow unless you decide to go nuts. FF Tactics Advance 2 went fucking nuts, made classes based off of concepts, tested them and then locked them off based on usefulness so you couldn't steamroll the early game.

When you're designing, it's all about making cool shit, then testing to see how well it works and nerfing it if it breaks the game too much or locking it off first behind requirements, if you're going by constrained design you'll suffer for it.

A good example of constrained design that DOES work is Tactics Ogre PSP, each class has a useful role that needs others to cover for them, and so on.

In Tactics ogre, you have four unit types and classes that fit two types at once while having their own gimmicks, and Monster classes which act as certain roles, usually tanks.

You have Warrior, Berserker, Lizardman's Juggernaut and such, which act as tank classes and have little utility, but have passive abilities that stop units from passing their territory without stopping in front of them. this necessitates Archers, which do little but snipe mages and other archers from long distances, but generally struggle against Tank types and Monsters, so your Tanks will mostly be contending with other Tanks.

Then you have Mages, and while they do have magic bolts and such, will hardly do much damage unless they cast the absolute highest level of attack spell, so they're relegated to support and disturbance, being able to accurately and to a terrifying extent completely shut down any type of unit and open them up to a mauling, which is why they're usually targeted first, since they can do this to Dragons, an effective tank unit.

Then you have Clerics, who heal. This is more game changing then you think, since they can give a tank or mage a speed buff to take more turns or just give them more survivability.

And that's not even getting into the Mage Knight classes, who generally do less damage all around, but have unique abilities or affinities that make them exceedingly useful. A Terror Knight can Frighten enemies for example and effectively ruin any defence a Tank type has, or put enemies to sleep or stone like a Mage can, while still having a decent amount of attack, and can also wield Crossbows, which are less effective then bows but can still attack at range, a character like that has no strength, but cannot be blindsided by any type of unit is still useful as hell, especially in a tactics game that is heavily restricted in the amount of damage you can do.

However, because of this, it suffers from very long fights, and it still makes you grind for some godawful reason, both easily fixable in a new game by changing how it's weird class levels work into character levels, or having some sort of catch up mechanic for new classes.

It's not hard to design a tactics game, it's literally all about balance.

What is the point of playing a game that becomes too easy?

>>14548647

> it's unfair to the people that prefer or just chose to play the other ones.

No it isn't

How could it possibly be?

>>14548914

If anything it's unfair to the people that pick the overpowered method by accident and play a sleepwalking simulator instead of a fun video game without even realising it.

>>14548925

If you're obsessed with everyone having an identical experience then don't have character progression

If you have character progression then make it interesting

If it's interesting then there will be wildly differing levels of power

>>14548914

>smart build for ranged combat

>bosses are slow as fuck and only has a handful ranged moves, the game is a breeze and not fun

>smart build for melee fighter

>every enemy you fight takes away some of your health and on top of that the boss fucking wrecks you if you want to deal damage as well as the ranged fighters, you feel crippled and it's not fun

It's just bad design

>>14548930

It's not about having an identical experience, but having each class or build excel in some or other areas in a balanced way.

Every build, unless retarded shit like full int full melee warriors, should be able to pull their own weight equally despite having their advantages and advantages.

No fun trying to make a berserker build with top damage if you know you could just go for a standard mage build and do much more damage without all the drawbacks.

>>14548125

I stopped playing a while ago, what happened with crimson court ?

>>14549045

They nerfed the entire base game basicly cause shit that wasn't viable became actually useful for once in the DLC AFAIK.

Are you not playing DD with sex mods for luls.?

>>14549123

I haven't touched it for a year now, how much lewd are we talking about ?

>>14548234

What game is this? Looks cool af

>>14549169

Death Stranding

>>14548478

I think this is a big part of it. Patching games is so easy now since everything is connected to the internet, and devs can communicate with players super easy. Plus with how hard multiplayer is pushed even in mainly single player games, the devs have greater incentive to nerf anything someone bitches about to keep people playing.

>>14548334

This is why I wish they'd hurry up with that PS3 emulator. I've got disc versions of some of the hottest PS3 games that PC-Only faggots missed out on and I'm ready to rip them and upload them so they can experience some real quality.

Can you imagine?

/v/ game weekend.

>Anarchy Reigns.

<No Bayonetta mains allowed.

>Chromehounds

>Carnage Heart filled with Meme-bots.

>Def Jam

>Aquaplazza

The list just goes fucking on and on.

>>14548647

A game should be fun enough that you want to play through it in as many ways as possible.

Have you ever run though a game with a joke weapon, not because you could unlock something, not because of a trophy or achivement, not for streaming, but because you wanted to?

Have you ever used a cheat device like a gameshark or cheat engine and just utterly break a game until it crashes? Like enabling infinite ammo on the Mardi Gras level in Hitman Blood Money and just killing people until you reach the murder threshold and exiting the level.

>>14547806

>Why are devs obsessed with the feeling of control so much these days?

The players demand it now. They will leave bad reviews and shit on your game if it isn't balanced. Players don't complain about a balanced game. Well, they do, but developers cannot read between the lines. When a game is balanced, people will often complain about it being boring.

>>14549468

>save scumming

Punishment isn't fun, but the fear of punishment creates tension, which improves immersion. Save scumming and games that allow respawning at no cost will fail to create that feeling.

>>14548234

Your Symphony of the Night example doesn't work too well because the game is a piss easy pile of garbage no matter how many restrictions you impose. I know, I've beaten the game armorless with fists.

>>14547991

Terraria is quite an impressive challenge on Expert mode with a Hardcore character. I still haven't managed to figure out how to consistently survive Mothron during eclipses.

>>14547878

>>14547960

Yeah, there's a Youtube channel that's supposed to be about analysing successful game design concepts, then there's a video on it that's literally just Firaxis admitting that this is how they make their games.

>>14548311

>it's fun because it's hard

I don't get this bizarre meme especially because it was mostly perpetuated by normalfags who suddenly became hardcore vidya gaym nerds after playing babby's 1st complex titles like the Souls entries. The e-peen stroking by obnoxious YouTubers didn't help. It's one thing to enjoy a game that is hard and yet is also fun once you get used to the mechanics, while it's an entirely different thing to say games like Souls are fun because they are hard, when they're not even that hard in the first place.