The Glade 4.0

Dude kind of has a point...

P.S. Youtube is starting to make it a serious pain in the *** to get to the original URL, we might need a new tag for the share format code.

Indeed.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

As games get prettier, the rails you get placed on get tighter and the more hand holding you get. It irks me to no end.

And there are people that prefer the rails and hand-holding. I don't get it. Why not just watch a movie or somebody else play, at that point?

The whole "I'm an adult and my gaming time is limited" argument is B.S. My time is just as limited as everyone else, and yet I'm not in that camp. And I can bet lots of money that if they miraculously received tons of free gaming time, they would still cling tightly to their rails and hand-holding. I'd really like to understand why.

My hunch: ADD and OCD paralyzes them in place without said rails and hands. It's too scary without them. Too daunting.

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Les Zombis et les Loups-Garous!

There are a ton of games that stand contrary to this, though. Skyrim (I assume), Dark Souls, GTA games, Fallouts, RDR etc.

I also think it's important to note that in the beginning, all games had only one way to play or one goal, or one path to take. Gaming is an interesting medium, one that I think we haven't fully figured out yet. It has the ability to transform year after year, and we don't know what we "want" until some developer shows us the next big idea. Not every game needs to be open, and likewise not every game needs to be on rails. The only requirement a game should have is: is it fun?

I like to think that most of the time, game developers do things for a reason. Some stories are better-told within some confines.

True some games are a bit more open. Some are very well done, some are not. I am not convinced that Arkham City benefited from being more open than the previous game.

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Les Zombis et les Loups-Garous!

Games cater to the more casual crowd nowadays, so for the most part they make them easier to set up, easier to win, and so forth. In fact the gaming industry is centered on iOS currently...

I think the problem is game production companies having a greater say over developers, and doing what they think will appeal to the greatest number of customers, which means blurring lines between console and computer, and different gaming styles; trying to find the path of least resistance, where you can put out a product that will appeal to the youngest and the oldest, the new gamer and the veteran gamer. Unfortunately that invariably means sliding to the lowest common denominator.

I wonder why most games now have 'quest markers' to point the player in the exact direction they need to go. Do you think it's because a lot of the people who played, say Morrowind - which was just the first game that came to mind - complained because they felt lost? Maybe it was, I don't know. Or was it because there were a lot of younger gamers, more children, who playtested the game felt lost? Or maybe we just have lazier developers who instead of taking the time to provide clearer exposition and trusting that, take the easy way out.

Tell you what, then: you play your games, and I'll play fun ones.

Watching the Quake video gave me that delightful feeling of being an old crotchety bastard talking about how games were in my day. The next thing that came to mind upon watching all of the rocket jumping was that it looks a lot like a gay jump puzzle. I realize that will upset quite a few people, but I want to make something abundantly clear: When I hear the word gay used as a pejorative, I always think of falling off cliffs in Ninja Gaiden rather than Taly. Especially the jumps where that **** bird appears on the edge of the screen and flies directly into your jump path. Search your feelings, you know it to be true.

Gay jump puzzles are the reason why, starting midway through the SNES era, I pretty much stopped playing everything that wasn't an RPG, and also why I pretty much stopped playing console games when "action RPGs" became the standard role-playing game.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

Rocket jumping wasn't exactly a feature of Quake; it was an unintended exploit discovered by speedrunners. It was a fairly late discovery, for that matter. If memory serves, that was what prompted Quake Done Quicker -- rocket/grenade jumping hadn't been discovered when the original Quake Done Quick run was made. The footage in that video was from Quake Done Quicker with a Vengeance, I think. See it for what it was: the video gaming equivalent of trick pool shots -- they're neat and amazing to watch, but they aren't really representative of what the game was like for 99.99% of people.

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Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

Quake was about aimlessly running around shooting things, and happening to go the right way to advance. It is a dated concept but lots of fun at the time.

Are you saying that games like Baldur's Gate weren't fun?

If so, then I am glad that whatever you're eating and drinking that I am not partaking of the same and we can just agree to be happy separately.

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Les Zombis et les Loups-Garous!

I would imagine it is because people couldn't find their way from work to home without their GPS anymore. Seriously, find me someone who could confidently read a map nowadays and I will show you someone who is ex-military or over the age of 50.

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Or me, since I'm neither.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

I think it's a way to provide cryptic-sounding guidance from NPCs that makes it seem as if they don't have all the information, or as if the characters are talking like people actually in the world without confusing the player, just like a DM occasionally has to explain things to a player that his character would know but he doesn't.

It does tend to come across as rather crude and ham-handed, however, and to be fair some quests in sandbox games are a lot easier to figure out than others; Morrowwind was definitely like that. It's also nice that it alleviates the need to buy the hintbook (which can run easily $25 or more), and although it generally tells you where to go, it doesn't say what to do when you get there.

I think it would be better if they didn't guide you quite so exactly; for example if they just got you to he dungeon entrance so you're not spending 2 hours trying to find a door you can't see if you don't look at it from a certian angle because the detail (and therefore the grass) is all the way up, or just got you to the right city and then left you on your own, just in case the programmer was more obtuse with his quest description than he meant to be. I think a lot of quests tend to be frusterating because the quest writer knows what he meant but it isn't as clear if you aren't the one writing it.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Yeah, that one was a little far. I would say over the age of 25.

Also, regarding the game thing, I feel like the thread got a little contradictory. ALL GAMES SHOULD HAVE MORE FREEDOM! Except arkham city, which wasn't as good because it had too much freedom.

So we fall back on the Simpsons Halloween episode standard:
MORE FREEDOM FOR SOME, TINY AMERICAN FLAGS FOR OTHERS!

Personally, I feel like they have to do what the game requires. There have been many, many attempts to make "Open World" wandering games since GTA blew up. Most of them have failed, in that they were either just boring, not well designed, and not fun. Then you've got something like Uncharted 2, which was definitely on a very controlled set of rails, but an entertaining experience from end to end, it's highly controlled nature adding to the experience.

In general, I'm not a huge fan of extremely open games. I have to be in the mood to just wander. Fortunately, my mood has synced up with the release of skyrim and I can't wait to waste a hundred hours just wandering around. In general though, I will play the game until I feel like I've spent a couple hours accomplishing nothing, and move on to something else. Haven't finished Red Dead or GTA4 because of it.

You do grow accustomed to certain advancements (waypoints, gps type information) that you miss it when you're not there, but I prefer that the dev's allow you to disable it for people that want a more "old school gaming experience".

None of that invalidates Coro's points about Ninja Gaiden and birds.

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I prefer to think of them as "Fighting evil in another dimension"

Hyperbole fail...

Next time someone wants to come over to your house email them a map with your house address circled and see how many make it there.

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Hehe. Actually, it probably wouldn't be too bad; I live like 2 turns off the Interstate.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

I'm aware that rocket jumping wasn't the default method for getting around Quake maps. However, the video attempts to portray it as such. Frankly, there are people who play the modern FPS games that come prepackaged with helper UI tools that have all of the 1337 skillz required for rocket jumping.

I played Quake with just a keyboard. I never attempted to play a FPS game with a mouse until the demo for Quake 3 came out and my brother whooped the **** out of me. It probably goes without saying that I never played any FPS games between them, either.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

I never played an FPS with a mouse until Unreal Tournament. ..and even then, I resisted as hard as I could until I got used to it.

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Grenade 3 Sports Drink. It's fire in the hole.. Your hole!

sadness...

Yeah, rocket jumping was an unintended side effect. And I believe the vast majority of players weren't made fully aware of it until Memorial Day of 1997. During a sponsored tournament, a guy named Honus was wiping the floor with lots of folks emlpoying this tactic and his exploits were recorded and put into a demo-reel with music (another thing not seen too often before this day). House of Pain's "Jump Around" played during his scenes. Honus surprised even the guys at id who made the maps, getting into places they didn't ever dream people could get into.

[youtube]R9l4QeTRGk4[/youtube]

That is the original video, but because of Copyright reasons the author had to disable the audio track. The three songs were the Mortal Kombat theme at the beginning, "Hey Man, Nice Shot" during the middle with some decent kills, and then it switched to House of Pain for Honus.

After that demo file hit the internet, rocket jumping took off in a big way.

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Les Zombis et les Loups-Garous!

The switch between just keyboard and mouse+keyboard for me came between Dark Forces and Jedi Knight- JK was the first FPS I played with a mouse, and it took me a long time to get used to it.

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Darksiege: You are not a god damned vulcan homie.

Wow... I think I remember that level in the video.