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Post by 🧀Son of Suzy Creamcheese🧀 on Jun 10, 2016 17:29:37 GMT -5
what's wrong with complaining about random encounters in RPGs anyway? I love RPGs but random encounters are usually mindless filler Filler? If anything, it's the main gameplay, if a game happens to have random encounters.
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Post by Chronis on Jun 10, 2016 22:47:03 GMT -5
In any case, when people say a walking simulator "isn't a game" or is "devoid of gameplay", what they mean is that they player doesn't have meaningful interaction with the game world. A lot of walking simulators straddle the line between adventure games and early FMV games/interactive toys. Some have even less interaction than Cookie Clicker! I can easily understand the criticism in those cases, and it's not a reviewers job necessarily to nod and say "this walking sim has walking and thus lives up to its promise, 10/10". Might as well throw my 2 cents in on this. I pretty much completely agree with Snarboo here. I enjoyed Gone Home for what it was. I thought it had an engaging (if a little ham-fisted at times) story that progressed fluidly, even when branching out into other characters' side arcs. The pacing was excellent and it kept everything moving forward in a way that kept you from getting bored. That said, I don't consider it a game. I do not feel like I "played" Gone Home, merely experienced it. Watching someone else go through it would have given me the exact same feeling. Player input merely progresses the events, with a little variation depending on the order you visited rooms or if you searched enough things to find the few lock codes. Overall, Gone Home is more of an interactive story than a game and that seems to be where the divisiveness stems from. Reviewing it as a game is unfair to both the title and the consumers, but this hits a snag when another group are claiming it is a game in a very specific genre. I don't know if I ever made this comparison here, but this is how I feel about walking sims and VNs: If I asked for suggestions for a movie, and someone recommended a documentary, I would be upset even if I enjoyed it. While they may share the same media format, they are designed differently, for different audiences. In the same way, walking sims and VNs are designed for people who want to experience a story and not necessarily have direct "game play" interaction, despite being made as the same format of a traditional video game.
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Post by Snarboo on Jun 10, 2016 23:29:37 GMT -5
I definitely consider Gone Home to be a game! It's got an overarching goal (ie figure out what happened while you were gone), significant interaction, a strong flow to the narrative, and a conclusion. It's that first point that's most important: a video game, to me, is anything with a self contained goal, no matter how simple. It's when a game fails that qualifier that I'm hesitant to call it a game. Compare Gone Home with something like Proteus, another famous "walking sim". I hesitate to call Proteus a game, since it doesn't really have a goal or purpose for the player. You simply walk around, watch interesting events unfold on an island, and then an event triggers and it ends. An experience by itself isn't a game IMO, no matter how interesting or moving. It's amazing how many walking sims fail to give someone a reason to play them. I suspect that's where the confusion, anger, and cries of "it's not a game!" come from.
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Post by Maciej Miszczyk on Jun 11, 2016 8:18:57 GMT -5
what's wrong with complaining about random encounters in RPGs anyway? I love RPGs but random encounters are usually mindless filler Filler? If anything, it's the main gameplay, if a game happens to have random encounters. aside from dungeon crawlers, if a game has so many random encounters that getting rid of them would remove most of the gameplay then the game has little actual content. random encounters are rarely interesting and rarely challenging, most of the time they're there to pad out the time between more interesting boss fights and story progression. I said it before - games like Final Fantasy where most of the combat is in random encounters would be better if they had handcrafted encounters visible on the map (like in Chrono Trigger). in games that generally have handcrafted encounters with only occasional randomness (e.g. Baldur's Gate or Fallout where you could have random encounters while travelling between locations), the random fights are generally far worse than those that happen during quests (doubly so if a game is non-linear and allows you to play stealthily or diplomatically most of the time but drops this when someone attacks you in the wilderness).
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Post by ommadawnyawn2 on Jun 11, 2016 10:23:38 GMT -5
Shouldn't the walking sim honour maybe go to Dear Esther or Proteus?
I always thought the controversy was mostly manufactued by the gaming press.
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Post by JDarkside on Jun 11, 2016 10:34:29 GMT -5
Shouldn't the walking sim honour maybe go to Dear Esther or Proteus?
I always thought the controversy was mostly manufactued by the gaming press. No, people really were that mad and crazy over what was ultimately nothing. The addition of that reveal in this game got the bigots riled up, and that combined with normally mild discontent with these sorts of games made it blow up because bigots are really, really good at making people even angrier than they actually are. And I never said it was the first, just that this was the game that popularized the idea of a "walking simulator" for the general public and not just smaller crowds.
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Post by 🧀Son of Suzy Creamcheese🧀 on Jun 11, 2016 12:25:41 GMT -5
Maciej MiszczykIn an RPG with random encounters, you have to be prepared to take as many battles as the game throws at you. For me it's the same as any other genre that throws enemies at you. I think there's something to be said for both visible as well as random encounters. But maybe this isn't the thread for that.
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Post by Elvin Atombender on Jun 11, 2016 13:30:43 GMT -5
I definitely consider Gone Home to be a game! It's got an overarching goal (ie figure out what happened while you were gone), significant interaction, a strong flow to the narrative, and a conclusion. It's that first point that's most important: a video game, to me, is anything with a self contained goal, no matter how simple. It's when a game fails that qualifier that I'm hesitant to call it a game. Compare Gone Home with something like Proteus, another famous "walking sim". I hesitate to call Proteus a game, since it doesn't really have a goal or purpose for the player. You simply walk around, watch interesting events unfold on an island, and then an event triggers and it ends. An experience by itself isn't a game IMO, no matter how interesting or moving. It's amazing how many walking sims fail to give someone a reason to play them. I suspect that's where the confusion, anger, and cries of "it's not a game!" come from. I've never played Proteus, but its description reminds me of what I suppose is one of the earliest examples of a walking sim: The Graveyard by Tale Of Tales, released back in 2009, when such games were still referred to as "art games". The Graveyard consists in assuming the control of an old woman walking through a cemetery until she sits on a bench. Then a song starts to play and the woman leaves the graveyard. The Graveyard The only difference between the two was that in the latter there was a small chance of the elderly woman dying...and that's it. Now, despite being released back when walking sims weren't even a thing, I'd say that The Graveyard is a good example of how some times such projects fail to catch the interest of who is playing (interacting with?) them. I think you should give people a reason to go on and that minimalism is not an excuse for lacking anything resembling a meaning or a goal. That said, I like Gone Home a lot and I consider it being a game for the reasons Snarboo already gave even though I agree with those who remarked that it was a tad overpriced when it was first released. Of all the games to inspire rage in gamers, why is it a game with spooky house lesbians? A mob needs a target, and Gone Home happened to be a sufficiently big target at the time. After all it's the same reason "real music" fans, of all the legitimate things worth complaining about modern record industry, are always angrily lashing out at vapid teen pop bands we all know they are destined to disappear in a couple of years.
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Post by dskzero on Jun 12, 2016 4:15:53 GMT -5
Shouldn't the walking sim honour maybe go to Dear Esther or Proteus?
I always thought the controversy was mostly manufactued by the gaming press. The earliest i remember playing was Passage but memory is fuzzy and it isn't first person. As for thr controversy, there was a very vocal minority who downright hated the game and mostly didn't even try it. The vast majority of the gaming community just dismissed it. The press though gave that vocal sector a lot of attention, but the context it happened defined the, uhm, war over it. In my circle it was widely mocked for the (arguably) exagerrated love some felt it was getting from the press but was mostly ignored because nobody wanted to pay 20 bucks for a game about walking around for two hours. Personally, as I said, I thought it was pretty meh but it was nice to see a story so grounded in reality as a basis for a game like that. But that was it. I'd be an hypocrite not to call this a game, but I don't think even in its genre it's a very good one.
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Post by jellybones on Jun 12, 2016 9:28:28 GMT -5
Just played this last night since it was a PS+ game. I enjoyed my time during it well enough, I think my actual issue with it is that it ends up building to nothing. I went into it knowing someone was gay, and okay. That's totally fine, and I get it was less universally accepted in the 90s. However, there's a subplot (?) of sorts about the ghost of Oscar, their uncle, and it builds up a lot with these secret passageways and compartments all throughout the house. I really liked this, and at the very least I thought it would take on some horror tones. It did, venturing into the basement, dark paths, and the light going out in one of them when an object is inspected. It just amounts to the ghost apparently being exorcised and she ran away. I'm okay with endings that are anticlimactic, but it was a pretty decent build up to nothing. That's why my time felt wasted- not because this was some sort of walking simulator or there wasn't gameplay. I thought the mechanics worked super well and enjoyed what I found out about the family up until the end. Honestly the criticism about the genre itself is dumb. Nothing has to conform to anyone's expectations of what any given work in media should be, it just faltered when it came to an important moment in the story IMO. It doesn't deserve the amount of praise it got, nor the hate either... I don't think critics would have even cared for it if it didn't get so explosive. Seeing as how I got it 'free', it probably affects my opinion of it. I certainly wouldn't have liked to pay money for this and I never would have knowing the kind of game it is.
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Post by dskzero on Jun 13, 2016 9:50:40 GMT -5
Just played this last night since it was a PS+ game. I enjoyed my time during it well enough, I think my actual issue with it is that it ends up building to nothing. I went into it knowing someone was gay, and okay. That's totally fine, and I get it was less universally accepted in the 90s. However, there's a subplot (?) of sorts about the ghost of Oscar, their uncle, and it builds up a lot with these secret passageways and compartments all throughout the house. I really liked this, and at the very least I thought it would take on some horror tones. It did, venturing into the basement, dark paths, and the light going out in one of them when an object is inspected. It just amounts to the ghost apparently being exorcised and she ran away. I'm okay with endings that are anticlimactic, but it was a pretty decent build up to nothing. That's why my time felt wasted- not because this was some sort of walking simulator or there wasn't gameplay. I thought the mechanics worked super well and enjoyed what I found out about the family up until the end. Honestly the criticism about the genre itself is dumb. Nothing has to conform to anyone's expectations of what any given work in media should be, it just faltered when it came to an important moment in the story IMO. It doesn't deserve the amount of praise it got, nor the hate either... I don't think critics would have even cared for it if it didn't get so explosive. Seeing as how I got it 'free', it probably affects my opinion of it. I certainly wouldn't have liked to pay money for this and I never would have knowing the kind of game it is. I believe the critics were more responsible of the general reaction (positive or negative), instead of them noticing because of the controversy. Otherwise I agree.
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Post by JDarkside on Jun 13, 2016 10:48:53 GMT -5
Critics saying their opinion isn't what caused this, it was the gaming community being giant babies about opinions, as it usually is. Still kind of amazed by that Uncharted 4 storm.
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Post by Deleted on Jun 13, 2016 14:21:05 GMT -5
Critics saying their opinion isn't what caused this, it was the gaming community being giant babies about opinions, as it usually is. Still kind of amazed by that Uncharted 4 storm. There's always a new generation of children who can't accept differing viewpoints.
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Post by dskzero on Jun 13, 2016 16:32:22 GMT -5
Critics saying their opinion isn't what caused this, it was the gaming community being giant babies about opinions, as it usually is. Still kind of amazed by that Uncharted 4 storm. I don't really feel like arguing about this again. I'd rather talk about the values of the game, not the stupid controversy it caused, because the whole episode was embarrassing. (And I have no idea what happened with Uncharted 4. Everyone I've talked about it loved it,)
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Post by Deleted on Jun 13, 2016 16:51:07 GMT -5
Some critic gave it a low score, and his wife started getting death threats over it, I think? Pretty insane.
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