fa0b89 No.16438399
>Those glimpses of the kind of depth games could have that blow your mind
For example, in Witcher 3's starting area there's a bridge. On the bridge are blood pools, clear signs of a fight. Next to the bridge you see monsters, and around them some corpses. Floating in the water next to the corpses is cargo, you dive in and find some coins, and a note. The note alludes to these men carrying very important cargo, but it's not there. So you go back to the bridge, to the left is the village, to the right a run down windmill on a hill. My money's on the direction of the windmill. So you go check it out, lo and behold there's some bandits. You kill them, explore the buildings and find the treasure hidden in the basement. Turns out the bandits ambushed the other guys, stole their treasure and chased the stragglers as far as the bridge before killing them to make sure they couldn't blab to anyone.
All of this could be deduced without ever looking at a minimap, quest log or detective vision. Now imagine if every quest in the game was that well designed. We'll never get that though, it takes too long, costs too much and the millions of morons who prop up AAA games don't care/are too fucking dumb to play such a game.
21efbe No.16438416
>>16438399
Lol what a waste of resources to make that! Now hiring another 17 artists on the other hand… now we're talking.
b8037c No.16438417
>>16438416
Only 17? Pretty sure there are more shades of brown than that, bigot.
83b1c8 No.16438419
>>16438399
This just made me depressed as all hell.
238283 No.16438422
So what you're saying is the shitty detective vision was added as a post game testing sessions for idiots who probably couldn't figure anything on their own?
Really makes you think.
21efbe No.16438424
>>16438417
>shades of brown
That's what we employ a diversity committee for, they work directly with our marketing division that's 4 times bigger than the development team.
a4a7d0 No.16438425
>>16438399
>it takes too long, costs too much
You can either have this kind of depth, and be willing to pay for it, or not. It takes real people doing a very large number of hours of work to make these games. Really they should be paid much more than they are, considering how many of these companies (all of them) force their employees to do insane shit like work 100 hour weeks for 6 months to a year with no overtime pay.
6b6921 No.16438435
>>16438399
<guys steal shit from other guys you find them,kil them steal shit back for yourself
deepest lore
2d2b79 No.16438453
Fallout 3 and NV have lots of this. I assume the more recent TES games and Fallout 4 do, too. I'm pretty sure that this is a significant part of why so many people said that F3 has good exploration. Another thing that these games have is extremely good looting. In most games you get shit like treasure chests randomly scattered over the world for no reason. If you're lucky, items will actually exist in the world but all looting boils down to is pressing the interact key near an item. In NV, there's a ridiculous amount of hidden items to find, and often they require that the player actually looks for them. These are the only games I've played that actually make use of physics for most objects that you should be able to move around. It's very satisfying when you grab a small crate and turn it upside down and find a rare cap or whatever. I wish more games would have in-depth looting like that and the secrets to go along with it, because the effect it has on immersion can't be overstated. What I'm trying to say is that interacting with loot like this makes it much easier to have stuff like what OP talked about, quests that aren't just "walk to X and press a key".
It's a huge shame that the only ones that seem to be doing it is fucking Bethesda of all companies. Some games like Legend of Grimrock share the ability to physically grab and move items, but don't make use of physics beyond that.
2d2b79 No.16438456
>>16438425
>You can either have this kind of depth, and be willing to pay for it, or not.
Tell me, where can I pay for this? Because it seems to me that AAA garbage, which coincidentally also tends to be the most expensive, are the ones that are the most simplified.
820cfc No.16438474
nuDoom had a boss fight who would make walls of earth rise to your left and right to prevent you from circlestrafing, and then fire a very wide projectile at you you had to jump over
you didn't strafe around it, you didn't hide behind cover, but an actual projectile that forced you to jump
and then it goes even further beyond, because after that it fires the same projectile at a higher elevation, so if you jump over the first one you're fine, but if you doublejump like a tard you'll eat it for breakfast
this is like the only instance in first-person shooter games short of the Metroid Prime games where you're actually forced to jump over a projectile
you could jump over projectiles in older shooters like with the firedogs in Blood or death knights in Quake, but it wasn't outright forced, so you could still circlestrafe everything like a mong where possible
actually think about this, it took until 2016 for a FPS, a genre which loves to fellate itself so much about muh verticality, the possibilities of being able to jump OVER attacks, something which 2D games had figured out as early as fucking Donkey Kong, and even then within nuDoom this was an isolated instance to be almost never applied in the rest of the game
fucking imagine the kind of attack variety you can derive by having jumping actually be a part of dodging attacks, and then consider how Dusk actually let you slide under attacks so you could even vary up projectile elevations by having some projectiles you're forced to jump over or slide under if you don't want to get hit
fec7b6 No.16438484
>>16438399
It doesn't cost too much time or money, it costs space in the game. Look at all that space in the game world used up just for one shitty quest.
a26ef8 No.16438488
>>16438422
Reminder that Half-Life 2 ended up as linear as it did because playtesters kept getting lost. The beta shows it was originally going to play like the first game.
fec7b6 No.16438491
>>16438488
The first game was linear. Stop pretending to be some old skool gaymer.
821a67 No.16438494
>>16438491
HL1 was linear, HL2 was a straight line.
a26ef8 No.16438500
>>16438491
You know what I meant, HL1 was much more linear than Doom or Quake, sure, but HL2 takes the fucking cake.
fec7b6 No.16438502
>>16438500
No, I don't. The only part that wasn't linear was the tentacle alien boss silo.
99ba8f No.16438504
>>16438491
He's referring to the puzzle elements that HL1 had which required you to go back and fourth between a few areas, HL2 got rid of those completely. They were going to bring them back in Episode 2 but a playtester got lost again.
Do AAA studios hire the most retarded people possible to test their games?
5d295e No.16438505
>>16438484
Open worlds are massive and empty as fuck, the fuck do you mean it's a waste of space?
520582 No.16438508
>>16438453
Oblivion and Skyrim has some of this too, but for better experience disable the quest marks. The game gets so many better.
Skyrim has less than Oblivion, in Skyrim some side-quests are boring and predictable, but it's fun anyway.
fec7b6 No.16438525
>>16438504
And HL2 puzzles were focused around physics because that was the new hot shit. There is nothing wrong in a game being linear, that complaint is a /v/ meme.
234150 No.16438530
>>16438500
Any pic with the whole HL1 map system?
That seems to be just the sector f lambda complex.
4733ad No.16438534
>>16438504
>Do AAA studios hire the most retarded people possible to test their games?
Yes. They want their "games" to be so mindless and simple that a retarded carrot at the end stages of terminal cancer could still complete them, since that is the skill level of the average "gamer". Normalfag cattle can't handle having to think for 1 second or maybe having to actually read something.
f3f647 No.16438564
>>16438488
>>16438500
Both Half-Life 1 and 2 were marketed on the false premise of an immersive-simulation-based design that neither of them truly had.
There are traces of that design that can be seen in different areas of both games, though, which given the troubled development of both games speaks to all that which was either deliberately cut from each game or else simply lost by the wayside in all the time Valve had spent not actually developing each game.
a26ef8 No.16438574
>>16438564
>Both Half-Life 1 and 2 were marketed on the false premise of an immersive-simulation-based design that neither of them truly had.
Can't speak for HL2, but that isn't how HL1 was marketed.
fec7b6 No.16438602
>>16438564
Define marketing. HL1 is a 90s game that came out at a time when it was original enough in the industry to be popular due to its freshness and quality. The whole "the player never loses control and is always in first person" was new, and that makes the game immersive, so how is it in any way false? Consider the following, go die in a fire, furfag.
8315d1 No.16438607
>>16438602
Except you're clearly wrong based on what the marketing said.
fec7b6 No.16438622
>>16438607
What's wrong with the marketing? How is it false in any way? It's hyping a game.
f3f647 No.16438623
YouTube embed. Click thumbnail to play.
Furthermore:
>>16438488
>because playtesters kept getting lost
You're referring to a piece of developer commentary for Episode 2 specifically. It's a piece of developer commentary describing the design of one level, specifically, but it figures how it reflects the design at least of Episode 2.
There's no particularly concrete statement I'm making here, but barring how that piece of developer commentary might have reflected the broader creative environment in which Half-Life as a series was developed it's really only applicable to Episode 2, the very last game to have been developed in the series (so far).
>The beta shows it was originally going to play like the first game.
You're talking about the Traptown demo, right? Because all of the NPC behaviour shown in it was pre-scripted - and the alleyway that the Overwatch patrol appears to track you down from cuts off at a dead-end right past the turning point they appear from. Very, very little of what the demo seemed to showcase was actually something that had been implemented into the game's design. Nor, we can surmise, was there really much game design going on in general until the final year of the game's development when all the disorganised assets they'd made over the last six years were finally cobbled together over the course of the stretch of rushed-out crunch time that gave us the Half-Life 2 we have today.
8315d1 No.16438626
>>16438622
>I can't read
>no seriously i am incapable of parsing English
Get out.
8315d1 No.16438631
>>16438623
>totally could not possibly be applicable to any other part of any other game, ever
>ignore the entire state of the fucking industry for the last decade and a half
fec7b6 No.16438636
>>16438626
You're not answering the question.
f3f647 No.16438655
YouTube embed. Click thumbnail to play.
>>16438631
What I'm getting at is:
The development of Half-Life 1 was a disorganised, directionless clusterfuck, and that clusterfuck can be pinned as a cause for a lot of the ideas the game had promised over the course of its development, especially those which would have been its most innovative (and hardest to concretely define), getting lost somewhere along the wayside.
The development of Half-Life 2 was a disorganised, directionless clusterfuck, and that clusterfuck can be pinned as a cause for a lot of the ideas the game had promised over the course of its development, especially those which would have been its most innovative (and hardest to concretely define), getting lost somewhere along the wayside.
As for the Episodes, I've gotta ask: When did the exoduses of Valve's talent first start happening? Because the Episodes just seem creatively bankrupt to me.
But, yeah, I don't think the piece of developer commentary we're talking about really does reflect the broad issues of the industry that much - but I do think that Valve as a whole do. Especially in where they, specifically, have gone in the last decade and a half. Embed related.
There's a Pastebin I meant to link that actually goes in-depth about exactly how deeply unhealthy and unproductive Valve along with every other major videogame company really is. I can't actually find that Pastebin, so embed related instead.
f3f647 No.16438675
>>16438655
>I can't actually find that Pastebin
Scratch that, I found the Pastebin:
http://archive.is/FHeVw
https://archive.fo/EM3Is
(Links found via this archived thread: https://8ch.net/v/res/15169564.html )
15e0ca No.16438679
Half Life 2 and Counterstrike 1.6 and Day of Defeat 1.3 were the greatest games ever to to come out of western civilization. They were nerfed and commercialized to make less realistic so children wouldn't be able to lol outshoot "special" forces of the military lol
Not sorry
f3f647 No.16438707
One more thing while I'm just showing off all the shit that I know about Valve and about Half-Life. If you know about Raising the Bar, but don't know about its leaked uncorrected proof - there was a leaked uncorrected proof of it. "Uncorrected" meaning among other things that it does less to downplay what a gigantic mess each game's development was: https://www.reddit.com/r/HalfLife/comments/4fu7xn/release_halflife_2_raising_the_bar_uncorrected/
3ae17d No.16438777
Half-Shit was never good. Halo, on the other hand…
837f19 No.16438805
>>16438504
>Do AAA studios hire the most retarded people possible to test their games?
Yes, they do this on purpose. They specifically look for people that have never played video games before because in their retarded view if they make the game "accessible" enough for those kind of people they will buy the game.
5d295e No.16438962
Jesus Christ shut the fuck up about Half Life.
It's a mediocre FPS series, nothing more.
3c5425 No.16438973
>>16438777
>wasting perfectly fine trips like this on a post like that
Shit should be bannable
cdd4f1 No.16439037
Not exactly the same, but when I played through the first dungeon in Skyrim and got to the dragon claw puzzle at the end, I thought that the solution to the puzzle was to look at the order of the pictographs on the wall nearby to get the solution. The walls had the same animals as the puzzle, so it made sense. I thought this was the coolest fucking thing ever. Then I got to later dungeons and the solution didn't work at all. I finally googled it and realized what I thought was an amazingly neat and fun way to solve the puzzle had worked on pure chance in that one dungeon.
5f84ab No.16439250
>>16438707
>direct linking redit
fa0b89 No.16442255
5bcb15 No.16442629
>>16438474
You never played Serious Sam, right? You constantly jump in that game, especially when Kleers, Wherebulls, and those green lizards that throw homing green burning rocks ar you attack you.
f5f744 No.16442948
I've spent days on the Vergil fight alone just trying out new shit.
532a82 No.16442996
>>16442277
>What makes a quest good is the challenge. Because quests are supposed to be challenging
Hold your fucking horses, quests are neither memorable nor necessarily fun by being difficult. There's plenty of quests in games that are difficult yet nobody cares enough to remember them for whatever reason. Why? Because while a challenge to the gamer they offer nothing that couldn't be found in an action game.
A good quest is like a joke. It needs good setup, some tension/apprehension or buildup, and a payoff that made the effort put in worth it.
A quest that just gives loot without an interesting backstory or difficulty becomes a vehicle for grinding.
A quest with a great setup but little tension or a shit payoff feels like wasted potential.
A quest that starts off generically but builds up tremendously only to end with neither reward of loot nor a satisfying conclusion is the adventuring equivalent of blue balls.
f52d73 No.16443006
>>16438508
>>16438453
Morrowind is built fairly heavily on quests like this. The only real difference is that you have a journal; even with that journal, though, there's no quest markers for shit.
532a82 No.16443055
>>16443006
The journal was perfect as not only did it tell you everything you need but it also recorded previous conversations so that even if the quest entry didn't give enough info you didn't have to backtrack just for directions.
9b29dd No.16443090
>>16438456
>Because it seems to me that AAA garbage, which coincidentally also tends to be the most expensive, are the ones that are the most simplified.
Are AAA games just money laundering factories? There's no way the yearly installment of Call of Duty or sportsball should cost as much as they do, when they're just built on the same foundation as the previous games.
74effd No.16443098
>Finally wander into some dark cloud in breath of the wild
>Lighting
>Using wood to create trails to explore
>Lighting is literally only ever used here and for about 12 seconds in the goron divine beast
>Day but blue night time and no dark spooky caves
9b29dd No.16443105
>>16443098
I wish more games had nighttime like Dragon's Dogma.
346042 No.16443162
>>16438399
I forgot the name of it but there's a tomb in dragon's dogma full of female zombies, and ONLY female zombies until you get to the lower levels at least, where skeleton knights and an ogre spawns, moaning about their babies, later on you find out this is where a cult gathers, but they never explain if they're connected to the deaths or if they just chose said place because their leader is an edgy old man.
949eeb No.16443167
>>16438675
>this archived thread
how does that work anyway
08026e No.16443244
>>16443090
The majority of AAA development isn't on gameplay. It's all about graphic whoring with the latest "facial recognition technology" and "most realistic appearances yet" and whatnot. You'd be surprised how much that eats into AAA budgets just generating those assets.
000000 No.16443410
>>16438425
There is nothing wrong in enslaving and torturing leftists. That is what they are for. all those devs are nothing more than virtue signaling genetic wastes.
>>16443090
>Are AAA games just money laundering factories?
Yes. No joke. Just look at all subhumans/jews involved, the number of employees + low payment vs the amount of declared expenses and where the money is "officially" spent.
It is literally a money laundering industry.
5e06f6 No.16444190
>>16443167
Threads go into it automatically when they get pruned, and it can be accessed here in pic related. You can't search it, though, nor can posts in it be linked via normal post links. So, when?
5e06f6 No.16444481
YouTube embed. Click thumbnail to play.
Someone wanted me to stop talking about Half-Life?
>Gabe Newell in 2002: [There] was a concept I had for time-based entities that I was sure was going to enable a lot of interesting gameplay. The rest of the company tortures me and reduces it to "so you want moss that shows up over time, right?" So it was challenging enough that it never got implemented (or stupid enough, as someone looking over my shoulder just interjected.)
795f93 No.16444551
DayZ mod. It was the greatest thing for all of three months.
Also competitive FPS gaming in self-run competitions for fun with other competent players in a finely-crafted game engine. Something as balanced as chess or poker. I find it perplexing how competitive FPS has been dead for so long. These games support hundreds if not thousands of hours of extremely good gameplay that no half-baked AI could ever come close to matching. It's fun on a whole other level.
I'd blame popularity for their downfall but really games just aren't robust enough to stand up to large numbers of players. Between endless bitching and cheaters there's not much that can be done. Make a good competitive FPS game? It will be inundated with cheaters that require extreme anti-cheat measures, the players will try to nerf the game in their favor any way they can, and then it will be ripped off as derivative titles appear that are far worse but easier and more accessible, which will inevitably become more popular than the now forgotten original.
1997a2 No.16444562
>>16438399
haven't played witcher 3 yet, is it possible and viable to turn off minimap questmarks and all that question mark bullshit, and go blind?
9b29dd No.16444566
>>16444562
Yeah I'm pretty sure you can.
1997a2 No.16444573
>>16444566
cool, I know it's a fool's errand but I'd rather have fun on my own exploring rather than doing another checklist type minimal wage job minmaxing the character
9ffa74 No.16444578
>>16444562
I highly recommend turning off the minimap. The game still looks great despite the downgrade and the music creates a great atmosphere. Having the minimap in the corner MASSIVELY detracts from the game because its just needless handholding and your eyes are on it instead of focusing and enjoying the world around you. People shit on the handholding rightfully but the quest in Witcher 3 narrative wise are really good. Even the most generic monster hunt contracts have twists 90% or more of the time.
18b806 No.16444600
>>16443090
>all run on the same engine using the exact same groundwork as each other, only with slight alterations for gameplay
>frequently reuse weapon models, sounds and animations
>enemy ai has never changed since the dawn of the ip, all of them play exactly the same as each other
>over time they've started to have less and less content, not even any new dlc, cutting out chunks of the game presumably to save on money and development time
>three studios constantly working on new games in the series so there's a steady stream of new releases every year, which can't possibly be cheap or profitable long-term unless you're pulling some strings
>company money isn't going to the developers to get a bigger budget to evolve the series, it's instead going to fattening the wallets of ceos
>they're increasingly testing the limits with how little a 'game' a game can be over just merely a virtual shop for pretty cosmetics
>quantity before quality in general
Maybe, just maybe, you're onto something.
2d2b79 No.16444642
>>16444562
Haven't played it but I'm going to make a safe guess and say that it's like Skyrim. You can turn off quest markers, but the game was entirely designed around them so without them there's nothing. In a good game the NPC will tell you to head southwest and then straight south once you reach the large waterfall to reach location X, or possibly mark something on your map if they are capable of doing so in a way that makes sense. In modern games you only get "Commander Witcherborn, please stop the draugr attacks" and then iphone UI updates to tell you where the draugr tomb is. Without the quest marker you have no indication of where to go.
be7044 No.16444783
>>16442629
He said projectiles that you are FORCED to jump over.
Brilliant games are really becoming more and more rare. There's less initiative for there to be compelling puzzles, content, or advanced AI in games when over 90% of the consumer base has to be told not to drink paint.
d71931 No.16444899
>>16438525
>There is nothing wrong in a game being linear, that complaint is a /v/ meme.
There is when it has no depth and bad replayability. Which describes HL2 and other content munchers to a tee.
d71931 No.16444916
Air dashing should have become a default ability after Mega Man X2 in the same manner that the original dash upgrade became default after X1. You can see glimmers of brilliance in some of the later secrets in X2 and X3 and when tackling really hard sections of X6 with the Blade Armor. Imagine if they had made it a default ability and from then forward designed all the levels and bosses in games around air dashing. Could have been amazing.
b0677a No.16444937
>>16438584
Most of the things said here are Mostly tries if exaggerated. The AI in HL1 is bretty Good.
ce010f No.16445502
>>16443090
Mostly goes to the marketing and promotion.
Though, if it is true what you're saying, where would the money be going towards?
86d689 No.16445838
>>16444562
I'm about 50% through the main story, having done plenty of side quests.
Yes it's more than playable. I recommend turning off everything except your life/stamina bar and the Quest Log. The quest log saves you from opening the menu and looking at the quest every time it updates with a new step, which can happen 10-15 times per quest and some of them can be really anally specific about what the next step is to progress the quest, so it's just a time saver for when the game is being a cunt. Most of the time you won't need it and it's easy to ignore.
You'll occasionally have to open your world map to be in the specific spot the game wants you to be but 95% of the time I've been able to just listen to dialogue and use my own brain to figure out what I'm supposed to do, where it is and how to get there. I never look at my map for navigation, I've made an effort to visually memorise towns and landmarks to help me navigate the world and it gets really rewarding. When someone says "Go to Downwarren", I know where that is and I know how to get there because I've gone out riding there before. I'm blind, if I stumble upon something I don't know what the fuck it is or what's waiting there for me.
Eventually you'll get a feel for the world, "oh if I go due east of Hangman's Tree I'll reach that town on the hill next to the river. Or if I go North there's the city Novigrad across the border, passing through a Redanian encampment".
TL;DR For exploration you can go blind, for quests you can go almost completely blind depending on your tolerance for finickity bullshit
86d689 No.16445840
>>16445838
And yes 90% of the time NPC's give you good enough directions to not need to ever look at your map