Posts by Tag / Thought (330)

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Further Early Thoughts on Google Stadia

It’s a few months later and Google has done nothing to position Stadia as streamer- or esports-focused, which seems to kill my previous speculation. Also, they’ve revealed pricing details and as explained by Shamus Young, they are nonsensical.

My view of Google Stadia has shifted from “it might be a reasonable service for which I am simply not the target audience” to “probably a bad idea that will fail unless it pivots significantly.”

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Healer games?

A while back I wrote that I wanted a single-player game where you play as a healer.

Some of the most fun I’ve ever had in a game was playing as a healer in City of Heroes. (Oh, how I miss that game.) Running around in hectic fights, dropping AoE and targeted heals and juggling my cooldowns for maximum efficiency, avoiding aggro and damage myself, popping the Absorb Pain panic button when necessary, keeping my allies standing and reviving them when they fell. It was a game of frantic and reactive resource allocation with clear stakes and feedback. I loved it. I was also good at it - many players told me I was the best healer they’d ever teamed with.

But there are some problems with MMOs and I stopped playing them. After which I was never able to find a game that recreated that experience I’d so enjoyed.

There are games that are about healers on the story level, but this doesn’t generally show up in the mechanics. Dr. Mario is fundamentally a match-3 puzzler. Princess Remedy is a shoot ‘em up. Trauma Center is a surgical sim. About the closest I’ve seen is A Healer Only Lives Twice, but that’s an unwinnable roguelike without a lot of depth or polish.

And of course there are restoration games where the experience and mechanics are actually about healing, though you’re generally healing objects or landscapes rather than people and there’s none of the hectic resource management.

These games are all worthwhile, but none of them provide the experience I was looking for - reading a constantly-changing situation to see where I am needed most and rushing there to avert disaster and enable my team to succeed. In a sense, the games I’ve found that come closest to providing this are actually Musou games like Dynasty Warriors and their spinoffs!

Several years ago, I made a proof of concept of a healer game which I called Triage. It’s extremely rough, unwinnable, and not fun for more than a minute or so, but it did prove to me that there is a fun core here and I would in theory like to return to it and flesh it out some time.

Meanwhile, please let me know if you know of any good healer games.

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Three Things about Dragon Quest Heroes II

One good, one bad, one silly.

1. The Good

I previously theorized that the key to a good Musou crossover game is deep integration of the iconic aspects of the crossed-with franchise, and opined that the first Dragon Quest Heroes had shallow integration of important JRPG elements and suffered for it.

Well, Dragon Quest Heroes II has much deeper integration of these elements, to the point where it’s not even really a Musou game anymore. You can still see the Musou DNA if you squint, but I’d call it an action RPG and the experience of playing it reminds me more of Kingdoms of Amalur than Dynasty Warriors.

I’ll write more about this later, but for now I’ll just say that while I’m still a fan of Musou, this approach really suits Dragon Quest and I’m enjoying this game a lot.

2. The Bad

Fast travel is provided via the series-standard spell Zoom. As in other Dragon Quest games, this spell shoots your characters up into the sky and then back down at their destination. Thus, it can only be used outdoors - cast it in a building and your characters just hit their heads on the ceiling.

This is cute in concept, and the first time you bump your head in Dragon Quest Heroes II you get a trophy/achievement for it - like you’ve fallen for the game’s little prank but it’s showing you it was all in good fun. You learn not to cast the spell indoors and move on.

But certain outdoor areas also have obstacles above your head - rocky outcroppings, half-collapsed ceilings in ancient ruins, forest canopies, etc. - and these also block Zoom. It’s not so funny after the first time - the joke gets old fast and you can only get the achievement once. It’s just a delay - instead of warping to your destination, the spell fails and you must reposition yourself, go back into the menu, pick Zoom again, and pick your destination again.

This could be leveraged for tactical depth - there could be areas that are dangerous because you can’t Zoom out of them. In practice, I saw no such pattern, and it seemed to just be based on the visual world design that I doubt was created with this mechanical effect in mind. Even if that were the intent, they could just gray out the menu option when you’re under an obstruction rather than letting you attempt the spell and pick a destination when it’s just going to fail.

And the cherry on top of all of this? You can’t look straight up. You can’t confirm for sure whether the spell will work where you are currently standing. Multiple times, I’ve angled the camera as far up as it will go, seen what looked like clear skies, cast Zoom, failed, moved, tried to look up again, cast Zoom again, failed again. This no longer feels like it’s all in good fun.

Zoom should just always work outdoors. Failing that, it should gray out in the menu when it can’t be used. And failing that, the player should be able to look straight up and see whether the spell will work. The current arrangement wastes the player’s time in a frustrating way for no benefit.

3. The Silly

Several times in the game’s story, you prepare for an audience with the king. Each time, one of your party members tells you you’ve got some time so you might as well do some shopping or whatever, and the next time you talk to her you can go see the king.

At one point, the story pretends it’s the end of the game. You’ve won and it’s time to go see the king again for a big celebration. A couple of things give away that the story can’t be over yet, like unexplored map regions and huge dangling plot threads, but my favorite clue is the way the party member talks to you before the celebration. Her tone is less, “We have some time to kill, so do some shopping,” and more, “No, really. Do all your shopping. If there’s any shopping you think you’ll want to do, do it now. And save your game. Then we’ll go to the castle and I’M SURE EVERYTHING WILL BE FINE BUT JUST DO ALL YOUR SHOPPING FIRST ALL OF IT.”

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Another bit of trivia, the bulldog moblins of...

vezouta asked:

Another bit of trivia, the bulldog moblins of Spirit tracks showed up in Hyrule Warriors definitive, a Koei developed crossover between Zelda and Dynasty Warriors released 2018.

(In regards to this post.)

Ironically, that is one of the spinoff Zelda games that I have played - and written a few things about too! But I admit I wasn’t looking closely at the moblins’ faces.

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Well its dumb because the Ocarina of Time remake...

vezouta asked:

Well its dumb because the Ocarina of Time remake for 3DS kept the Bulldog moblins. Spirit tracks for DS featured Bulldog moblins as well. Also outside of color, the only difference between moblins and Pig warriors in the switch version now is their ears, lame! Also it comes off as a retcon.

(In regards to this post.)

Ah, I didn’t realize there was more recent precedent for bulldog moblins. That’s what I get for basing my answer off a quick scan of the wiki, I guess :) I have to admit I haven’t played a mainline Zelda game since the original Link’s Awakening, so I’m very fuzzy on the details.

Given that, I agree this is a bizarre and frustrating decision on Nintendo’s part, inconsistent with their own precedent and with the attention to detail the remake otherwise seems to be receiving. Now it bugs me too. :)

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What also bugs me about the Link's Awakening...

vezouta asked:

What also bugs me about the Link’s Awakening switch graphics is the original game had Bulldog Moblins AND Pig Moblins, the remake removed the bulldog moblins so now we just have Pig Moblins, lame Nintendo.

(In regards to this post.)

I didn’t know about that - that is disappointing!

I was ready to get all huffy about how rising costs of graphical fidelity often mean we lose artistic variety along the way, but after looking into this it seems like a much more interesting problem. Maybe you knew all this, but it was news to me - apparently moblins were originally bulldog-like but after a few games became more pig-like. The original Link’s Awakening is one of the few games on the cusp of the transition and so features both the bulldog moblins and pig moblins.

I’d assumed the remake dropped the bulldog moblins to save costs, but it looks like they still get their own model, it just also looks pig-like. You can see on the Zelda wiki - the formerly-bulldog moblins are the current default page image for the Moblin article, while the pig ones are the page image for Pig Warrior.

So this isn’t about costs or laziness - it’s about artistic direction. When Link’s Awakening was first made, moblins could look like either bulldogs or pigs - but for a long time now, they’ve only looked like pigs. I can understand why Nintendo would decide to update the design to bring it in line with what most people today know moblins to be, but I get why it bugs you and I do find myself wishing they’d taken a different approach.

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One Metaphor Is Enough

I don’t understand the appeal of the toy/diorama/tilt-shift aesthetic for the Link’s Awakening remake. To me it’s an incorrect nesting of metaphor, similar to adding lens flares and related effects to video games.

Like, when you’re playing a game and it’s raining and some water droplets get rendered on the screen like it’s being filmed with a camera with a wet lens - unless you’re playing a game where the conceit actually is that you’re looking through a camera, this is immersion-breaking, not immersion-reinforcing. Like, I was driving around the city rocking out to the radio and looking for trouble, now I’m apparently… watching a video feed of that happening instead? I’m trying to pretend I’m actually in the world of the game - why shove this additional camera metaphor in the middle and distance me from that world?

With the toys - it’s been a couple of decades since I played with my Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles action figures, but the way I remember it, the fantasy wasn’t “Oh man, what if this molded plastic could move by itself?" It was “Oh man, what if the turtles had these crazy adventures I am making up?” The toys were a gateway, a jumping-off point for the imagination. They stood in for the turtles the way they looked and sounded in the cartoon.

When I played the original Link’s Awakening, it was the same thing. In my head, I was on an adventure on Koholint Island. I was getting to know its inhabitants, bravely exploring dangerous dungeons, and prevailing against monsters in combat. The low resolution monochrome graphics, the tinny chiptune music, it was all a gateway.

Updating the graphics to look like plastic toys makes no sense to me. (I didn’t much care for this approach in Disney Infinity either, though there they at least had the excuse of trying to make it look like your actual figures had come to life in a stylistically-consistent world.) Now the fantasy isn’t being on an adventure, it’s… playing with toys and imagining an adventure? It’s pretending to pretend? Again, why shove this additional metaphor in the middle and distance the player from the world?

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Restoration Games

In Ratchet & Clank Future: A Crack in Time, Clank receives an artifact called the Chronoscepter. It does several things, but to me the most interesting is that when it hits objects like broken pipes and shattered viewscreens, it reverses their timeline and repairs them. Throughout the entire Ratchet & Clank series I’d been smashing up the scenery; I found it surprisingly satisfying to suddenly have a chance to restore it instead.

Since then, I’ve played a few of what I think of as “restoration games” based around this sort of mechanic. Rather than running around causing destruction, Flower, Refunct, and Dawn all have you exploring landscapes to restore life and color. I found them all to be uplifting experiences and I’ve been thinking about why I enjoy this kind of gameplay so much.

Thematically, it’s adjacent to what you might call “rebuilding games” that give you ruined farms (Harvest Moon, Stardew Valley, etc.) or towns (Dragon Quest Builders, etc.) and task you with building them back up. I like that a lot too, but I think it’s a different niche - those games are about imposing your own will and design on nature, same as normal “building games” like Minecraft and Terraria. The ruination is just there to provide an excuse for why you have to start the farm (or town) over and build it the way you want to - your first task is to clear it out, not restore it.

Restoration games aren’t about your will and design. They aren’t about construction - they’re about undoing destruction. In a sense they are still power fantasies, but ones where you have the power to reverse entropy. You can wipe away the ravages of time and prevent inevitable loss and decay. You can give death the middle finger.

That’s real power.

It’s an appealing fantasy. I’d like to see more such games.

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No Cloud Saves for Animal Crossing: New Horizons

It’s being reported that the upcoming Animal Crossing: New Horizons will not support cloud backups for its save files “to avoid manipulating time, which remains one of the founding concepts of the series.” (Source, translation.)

It’s bad enough that Nintendo doesn’t allow you to back up your own save files manually and makes a paid subscription the only way to protect your data from hardware failures, damage, loss, or theft. That’s already anti-consumer.

But if they’re going to do that, then once you’re paying money for the privilege of backing up your data from playing your game on your console, no game should be able to opt out. It’s ludicrous to charge you for a service and then tell you “Nope, this particular developer didn’t feel like you should get to use the service you’re paying for on the product they sold you.”

Supposedly, developers need “a good reason” to opt out of cloud backups, but in practice the reasons we’ve seen so far usually aren’t good at all. But what I find interesting about this one is how paternalistic it is.

It feels similar to the argument you sometimes hear against the inclusion of easy modes, that somewhere a player might play on easy even though they’d enjoy the game more on hard, and preventing this possibility is somehow worth blocking other people from enjoying the game at all. I don’t care if some player out there uses save backups to finish their insect collection faster or whatever - why on earth is preventing that worth blocking all players from backing up their save in a game that’s intended to be played for months or years?

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Why do game developers crunch? The market demands it.

With all the bad press surrounding mandatory crunch lately, it’s easy to wonder - why in the world do developers keep doing it when it’s such an obviously-bad idea and it makes people hate you?

Because when they don’t, the market punishes them. Hard.

At E3, Nintendo announced that the upcoming Animal Crossing: New Horizons is delayed to March 20, 2020 to “ensure the game is the best it can be”.

This is in line with Nintendo’s philosophy - Shigeru Miyamoto has famously said that “A delayed game is eventually good, but a rushed game is forever bad.” (Or words to that effect. Maybe.).

Furthermore, the delay is specifically to avoid crunch and to take good care of Nintendo employees. This is very much the Right Thing to Do.

So naturally, after this announcement Nintendo shared closed 3.53% lower than the previous day, taking more than a billion dollars off their stock market value.

The short-termism the market demands is devastating. Nintendo is one of the oldest and most established developers with plenty of IPs and revenue streams. They can afford to stick to the long view and weather the market’s tantrums in the meantime. Smaller developers without that luxury? It’s no surprise they turn to crunch.

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#gaming #video games #crunch #nintendo #shareholders

Tags: Thought