I love the worlds of Rockstar Games but i could not get myself to play GTA V and Red Dead 2 because of the bad and slow controls personally. Red Dead 1 was the last game i actually enjoyed and finished playing.

GTA 6 looks so good but i am incredibly worried about the controls. And there have been some criticism with red dead 2 about animations being way too realistic hence making the game too slow with input lag.

So maybe GTA 6 will have better/simpler and tight controls overall?

Progression of my realization as I played it

"I think this game is actually easier than the DKC series. Given the name I figured it would be at least as hard."
"Wait on top of the level design being far less intense. I just noticed I can recovery my health infinitely like in Yoshi's Island."
"Oh and I have infinite lives."
"And if I die 3 times on a checkpoint I get the option to skip that section."

I guarantee the name cost sales.

This is mostly a topic I'm writing for my school newspaper, and I've read many articles about cultural appropriation. I've focused on Genshin Impact because that's the video game with the most vocal criticism right now. There's a lot of discourse on the topic right now in general media, but I am not too involved with the video game sphere, as I do play a lot of video games, but my involvement with the community is limited because I think a lot of the discourse is really weird.

Especially with the Genshin stuff, but anyway, if you don't know, they have been using Indian, Arabic, African, and South American figures and cultures as their inspiration for their regions. It's very obvious that it takes direct inspiration, but almost all of the characters are pale despite the figures they derive from being very dark-skinned. Some are darker skinned, but you could honestly mistake them for just having a really good tan. Of course, the discourse is very weird as the development company miHoYo is a Chinese company and there's a lot of colorism there.

I've watched many, many videos and articles on this topic, and literally, none of them are useful or inciteful. Just repeating two different things, cultural appropriation is bad because they are staling and not paying respect (which is valid, but every article refuses to go beyond that), and the other side is yt gamers telling POC that their feelings are invalid and for some reason they all use Nordic examples as good representation?

Like I don't like Resident Evil 5 but its depiction of (African people), kinda made my ass itch, but the developers presented it in a way that could excuse it because it's a fucking apocalypse, but it still felt kinda weird. I know it got a lot of backlash at the time, but I wasn't there for it and also it was the early 2009 so I think people were more lenient with it.

Now as gamers who presumingly have lives, can you add a new perspective on this topic, I am tired of people trying to tell me Cultural appropriation doesn't exist (it does), but it's very complicated because I am unfamiliar with the process of making video games vs other types of media such as music, movies, etc. I do not specifically want to ask about your morals regarding this topic, but more so about the way it was depicted.

There is a very fine line between Cultural appreciation and appropriation and I appreciate when developers take the time and energy to not properly represent culture in their video games, but that they respect it and the people they are depicting.

And it doesn't have to be as blatantly obvious the way Genshin is, as it's not stealing culture, but more so just erasing it and saying that they like the aesthetics and culture of a group of people, but not their skin color or them and that in a world where anything is possible, they can't imagine creating a world where the people they take inspiration from are in their video games.

But yeah, I please if you have time discuss this topic and please answer these questions.

What responsibilities do game developers have when using real-life cultures as their inspirations?

Why do you think people resort to cultural appropriation, is it usually intentional or unintentional?

How do game developers ensure respectful representation?

Those are the main ones that I have played so if you can any criticism on depictions of culture, heck not even of other cultures, of representation of the U.S. as in overseas games please let me know. And don't call me a snowflake. Thank You.

I'm almost done playing through Metaphor ReFantazio and I just suddenly lost the urge to finish it. The game gives you a huge chunk of free time much longer than the normal times just before the final dungeon to wrap up everything and I just have not been able to get through it.

I started thinking about other games I didn't finish and noticed almost all of them suffered from really bad pacing issues towards the end. E.g. Chrono Trigger, FF7R, and Nine Sols of the games I played this year. This mainly seems to happen in JRPGs that like to give you a ludicrous amount of side quests just before the end to get the optional uber-gear, bosses, dungeons; as well as metroidvanias that give you an ability super late and force you to check the entire map again.

The game that had it really, really bad is definitely Hollow Knight. I tried playing it 3 times in 2017, 2019, and 2023 but always ended quitting just before the final boss, and I can think of several reasons

1. The game displays a "completion" percentage on your save file. Other games usually keep track of things like collectibles, recipes/ingredients, bestiaries, etc. that the player can easily ignore. But Hollow Knight's completion tracks almost everything and afaik there's no way to turn it off.

2. There are some MASSIVE difficulty spikes towards the end of the game that suddenly slows down progression to a halt like the dream bosses, trial of the fool, white palace, NKG, flower delivery, and the entire godmaster dlc. Most of these can take days to weeks to complete and by that point it's very difficult to justify opening the game again

3. Fractional upgrades. This game doesn't give excess materials like many games do so you're forced to scrounge the entire map to get the last fragment or you feel like you wasted time collecting the rest of the shards for nothing. The upgrades are also substantial and the optional content in late game demands it. Elden Ring got flak for not giving extra scadutree fragments but the power is specifically tuned to a S-curve make last few tiers not nearly as impactful. Hollow knight does not.

4. The completionist ending is supposedly the "good ending". I won't be spoiling but it's not really an open to interpretation kind of thing and most people would 100% prefer one kind of ending.

So do yall think games should handle this kind of issue and if so what's the best way of going about it? The main ones I can think of are to add quest lockouts (nier automata) and time limits (persona) as to prevent the player from being stuck a certain stage of progression for too long but these systems tend to have pretty mixed reception. Alternatively they could improve QoL to reduce the anxiety a bit with things like chapter select and more precise completion tracking (celeste).

I know there's the argument that "ok but the player can just ignore it and finish the game" but it feels more like an cop out than an actual solution

Hey, all!

In this thread, the rules are more relaxed. The idea is that this megathread will provide a space for otherwise rule-breaking content, as well as allowing for a slightly more conversational tone rather than every post and comment needing to be an essay.

Top-level comments on this post should aim to follow the rules for submitting threads. However, the following rules are relaxed:

• 3. Specificity, Clarity, and Detail
• 4. No Advice
• 5. No List Posts
• 8. No topics that belong in other subreddits
• 9. No Retired Topics
• 11. Reviews must follow these guidelines

So feel free to talk about what you've been playing lately or ask for suggestions. Feel free to discuss gaming fatigue, FOMO, backlogs, etc, from the retired topics list. Feel free to take your half-baked idea for a post to the subreddit and discuss it here (you can still post it as its own thread later on if you want). Just keep things civil!

Also, as a reminder, we have a Discord server where you can have much more casual, free-form conversations! https://discord.gg/truegaming

Spoilers for Deathloop and The Witcher 3 below, mainly Deathloop.

Not a super deep post or anything, just played Deathloop recently and it made me think about this because the game does address this through the MCs story progression where the Witcher 3 just ignores it.

Let me back up. The Witcher 3 is a game where you play as medieval fantasy superhuman Geralt. (It’s really good.) Geralt has a daughter Ciri who is a kid in the first act and you must later track down as an adult. Adult Ciri is hot. The player knows she’s hot. The game knows she’s hot. Geralt of course does not think she is hot because he’s her dad but we have his perspective for most of the game… except when we play as Ciri and can work up a shy guy with taking his virginity before he gets killed by the bad guys, but yeah, the game never acknowledges or comments on this which is fine, it’s telling a story POVs for people should treat them like their own people, not I just in relation to the MC. It has a tinge of weird playing as Geralt and realizing you’re checking your ‘daughter’ out with the Player POV. Not something that is possible without intent or from character POV in a book or movie.

Deathloop (2021) tackles this a bit more in the structure of the story, again, spoilers.

Juliana is the main antagonist in this FPS by the makers of Dishonored which is a fun pick up put down game where you play Cole, the protagonist who is trapped in a time loop with many others who mostly only remember the same day. Juliana is hot. The player knows this, the game knows this. Juliana is also Cole’s daughter of course. The critical difference being both you and Cole start the game not knowing that or anything about the past and since she’s trying to kill you with a grudge Cole assumes they probably dated which is reasonable at the time, I could believe it. So that dissonance of the main character having a hot family member we find attractive is acknowledged and played on since we the Player were in the same headspace hypothetically up until that point and it makes the reveal for the character have more impact because the player and character views were possibly aligned up until that point.

Anyways not super deep, just a topic that piqued my interest with the compare/contrast between the two games

Its as the title says, recently i feel like more and more games have shifted to using casual speech in their games, with speech as if 2 dudes hanging out in an apartment in NY, this is not the case with asian game devs mostly the western ones i have noticed. Reading some great literature like "No Longer Human", "Crime and Punishment", only make me feel even sadder, is good writing dying?

Recently i was playing a game, the dialogue went like this, "i stabbed you like 50 times" (if you recongnize the dialogue, i dont hate the game, its fantastic, just an example to discuss what i want to discuss please understand that), sometimes things like this put me off you could pretty much add a lol or rofl there and it wont change anything, especially when you compare it to dialogue of npcs or bosses in games like ER, Sekiro or even anime, the speech in Re Fantazio is another example. When the character said that, i was reminded of Emilia from Re:Zero and pondered on what would Emilia have said in a similar situation and i went back to watch some of her dialogues the difference was massive. The game in question isnt an issue as its an indie game from my understanding and it is actually really really well done, now a small team delivering such quality is already more than worthy of praise, my problem is with seeing these patterns from massive AAA titles or games with big budgets or big teams and this becoming the norm.

To me a lot of these dialogues seem like how i would have written when i was 16, being so casual and chill was the coolest shit ever in my eyes at that age. As i have grown i cringe at myself looking back and i feel like somehow people like that have found the jobs of writing without being great at it and i feel like this is harmful as this holds this writing as the standard. I can also write, am i as good as my college mates who were in literature? No shot. Sometimes when i talk to my literature teacher from middle school, yes i am still in contact with my teachers, most of us are, i am still surprised and cant help but smile, yeah i have an engineering degree but this guy knows his stuff and cant help but respect his knowledge and skill, i cant feel anything like this for these writers.

What are your thoughts?

I have a personal pet peeve in regards to numbers and games, especially in RPG's where they hold a large significance (I love RPG's and character building/optimization and work a lot with numbers)

Why is it that most modern games are inconsistent in the numbers they present to the player? And why are most developers afraid to treat me the player as competent enough to understand them?

Let me give you a recent example from the latest Dragon Age Veilguard. The game features a large passive tree with nodes ranging from increasing area of specific groups of spells to numeric increases in damage, penetration etc.

One example could be a small node (insignificant?) which provides heavy attack damage +20%. At the same time I defeated an endgame boss which rewarded me with a unique ring that gives 20% increased DMG with a heavy downside. I assume (based on a lot of experience with mainly path of exile) that these numbers are handled differently behind the scenes to justify the heavy downside. The ring probably provides a multiplicative 20% DMG increase while the small node is additive to others sources (leading to a smaller DMG increase in the end). But this is only an assumption, the reality is that I have a hard time gauging if the ring is worth it.

Another example is the defense stat in the same game. At the moment I have a value of 375. Is that good? Equipping an armor with lower value on defense but higher DMG increase, would it be worth it? Why can't I get this information in-game?

I notice a lot of situations like the example above in games. Is it just me? I feel like these problems are detrimental to great rpg experiences, do you agree? Any recommendations of great RPG's that handle this well? (My only good experience is Path of exile which handles this great)

I was thinking about this lately. So there's plenty of horror games where you have guns and it's still scary because of different tweaks. But I feel like I haven't seen a lot of horror games where the enemy shoots back at you. Every action-packed horror game I'm familiar with focuses more on overwhelming you with a horde of enemies that don't shoot. The only examples I can remember playing that have actual shootouts as opposed to special minibosses, Doom 3, Resident Evil 5, and Resident Evil 6, are arguably leaning more into the action side of the spectrum, and even then, in the case of RE5 and 6, the enemies with guns are by far the most disliked as far as I've seen. I've been meaning to play F.E.A.R. because I've heard it's also a horror shooter, but I also feel like I've heard conflicting reports on the scariness of the actual combat, so I'm not sure. Can shootouts work as a consistently tense and scary part of a horror game as a main aspect, or does the adrenaline of the action cancel out the fear?

Edit: To clarify, I mean more along the lines of survival horror dungeon crawling, not necessarily individual missions that, while tense, once you finish, the fear is over until you start up another mission. Less Ready or Not/SWAT/Rainbow Six tactical shooter, more Resident Evil tense horror.

The perfect game is an unattainable ideal that we can only try to get close to, and I think you’d agree with that. But what if I told you there’s not one perfect game ideal, but two?

When we talk about the idea of a perfect game, our instinct is to be objective, to try to identify "the best game of all time." Talk to someone about it, ask them what they think is the best video game ever made, and they'll likely say Minecraft. But then ask them what their favorite game is—it’s pretty unlikely they’ll say Minecraft.

As you know, Minecraft has been around for over ten years now, yet it still holds its place as the best-selling game of all time, and that’s no coincidence. My theory is that, as things stand, Minecraft is the greatest game ever—not because it’s everyone’s favorite but because it’s versatile and appeals to the broadest range of players, no matter their tastes. Maybe you see where I’m going with this: this is the first path. According to this line of thought, the perfect game is an ideal that appeals to literally every gamer on Earth. That’s usually where someone jumps in to say, "But the perfect game can’t exist. People have different tastes, and even if this game could appeal to the most people, by trying to please everyone, it would end up being loved by no one." And here we find the second path.

The second route to the perfect game is a game of a specific genre. Actually, it goes beyond genre. This ideal game doesn’t appeal to a "group" of people, no—it appeals to you, just one person. "You" quickly becomes "they," though, because if a developer focuses not on the first ideal but the second one, they’d end up creating a game only they would enjoy.

So, here we have the two paths: first, the ideal of a game that appeals to everyone; second, the ideal of a game that’s perfect for just one person. Remember, these are only ideals. In reality, no game could ever please everyone, nor would a game only appeal to a single person. Each game falls somewhere in between, and every game studio draws on elements of both ideals when designing a game. Think that’s complicated enough? Haha, just wait until I tell you that each gamer is actually a blend of multiple different “players” all in one...

I was playing a little bit of Dragon Age: Veilguard a few hours back, and one thing that jumped out at me during combat was the sheer density of particle effects on attacks, which led to a lot of visual confusion and noise, or just feeling like it was way harder to keep track of an enemy than it should've been.

This is an experience I've found to be more and more common through modern AAA action games in a fantasy setting, and goddamn, is it always irritating. (Spoilers for the following games) Final Fantasy XVI, God of War Ragnarok, Immortals of Aveum, and Shadow of the Erdtree come to mind as a few examples. I expect that I'll eventually adjust, and get used to seeing things through the chaos, but I would much rather this not be part of the learning curve of combat. And I also don't buy the idea that all of these just so happened to be cases where part of the challenge was how the player's view was obstructed.

Now yes, there are plenty of other factors that can lead to visual noise in gameplay that I'm sure are relevant in some of the examples, and I understand that particle effects often play an extensive role in telegraphing, and selling the impact, or intensity of an attack. But this is one of the more obvious causes of such noise, and I don't think a setting that could perhaps simplify effects, reduce the number of particles that are emitted, or the opacity, and size of each particle has to contradict any of what I just acknowledged.

The only time I've seen a setting like this was with Minecraft's particle settings being "Minimal, decreased, and full", but that felt more like a substitute for "particle quality" as so found in other games.

Hey, all!

In this thread, the rules are more relaxed. The idea is that this megathread will provide a space for otherwise rule-breaking content, as well as allowing for a slightly more conversational tone rather than every post and comment needing to be an essay.

Top-level comments on this post should aim to follow the rules for submitting threads. However, the following rules are relaxed:

• 3. Specificity, Clarity, and Detail
• 4. No Advice
• 5. No List Posts
• 8. No topics that belong in other subreddits
• 9. No Retired Topics
• 11. Reviews must follow these guidelines

So feel free to talk about what you've been playing lately or ask for suggestions. Feel free to discuss gaming fatigue, FOMO, backlogs, etc, from the retired topics list. Feel free to take your half-baked idea for a post to the subreddit and discuss it here (you can still post it as its own thread later on if you want). Just keep things civil!

Also, as a reminder, we have a Discord server where you can have much more casual, free-form conversations! https://discord.gg/truegaming

A while after my long journey, I started thinking about how there's a possibility that there are just certain games that are not meant to be made. I for one am a fan of sandbox games where it enables me to just live things out and stall things indefinitely. But I am also spoiled by graphic styles and design, leaning towards realism or just very well highly detailed styles. A well made story is surely a ride for me but even a simple story can lighten my mood. Fantasy stories are fun but I like modern and sci fi settings more, mostly due to gunplay instead of sword play. Problem is, it seems like these qualities are hard to mix and requires a lot of investment in time, money, and experience and so far none have come close to creating that holistic experience that i seek. Those who have made the games that have the quantity that i seek are lacking in quality while those who have quality are lacking in that quantity and they refuse to do so due to a lack of resources and different consumers. Thus why I think that maybe my dream game is an impossible, if not, close to impossible game to make, a sci-fi life sim rpg set in space or at least a high fantasy life sim rpg that's set in a whole planet, with a realistic/highly detailed style.

I guess now my only hope is hello games with "light no fire", but if only they'd add rpg elements to no man's sky and add more combat oriented content, that'd be dope. And yes, if you've read my post above, Starfield is close to that, but my God Bethesda's reluctance to go all out infuriates and saddens me. What do you guys think, are there certain game ideas that are just simply "impossible" to make due to either unrealistic expectations or unfathomable resource needed to make such games?

I played Doom 2016 and Doom Eternal on their respective release dates and loved both of them; they were my favorite titles in the years that they released. Of the two, Eternal was my favorite, but I wanted to return to these games to see if my opinions had changed at all. After replaying the original Doom 1 and 2 I decided to return to Doom 2016 and Doom Eternal a few weeks ago

So I started a brand new file on Doom 2016 on nightmare. I gotta say, I was surprised how thoroughly I was enjoying it. After completing DE in 2020, I looked back at Doom 2016 with what I would describe as the "opposite of rose colored glasses", remembering the game as more boring and simplistic than it really was, but in reality Doom 2016 is a triumph.

The gameplay truly feels like a modernization of classic Doom, albeit with a more vertical element. The movement, enemy variety, weapons, and level design synergize is such a perfect way, resulting in one of the most consistently enjoyable Doom experiences available. There is a strong inverse relationship between the game's difficulty and the strength progression of the Doomslayer, but even at my strongest, I never felt bored. It was extremely cathartic to enter a late game arena and absolutely destroy every enemy with my SSG and Gauss cannon, leaving no survivors. There wasn't a lot of strategy in those later levels, but even so, I was still enjoying myself.

Despite how fun the combat is, my greatest praise of Doom 2016 has to be its tone. From the moment the game starts, it hits you with this perfect balance of seriousness, malevolence, and just a bit of self-aware cheese. Samuel Hayden was a true standout, perfectly alluding to some unspoken sinister intensions. Despite this darker tone, the game also didn't shy away from taking itself too seriously, with some of the actions of the Doomslayer being particularly great.

After my amazing experience with replaying Doom 2016, I was very curious to see how my thoughts with Doom Eternal would change and if it would still be my favorite of the two. I didn't even make it through the end of the second level for me to be reminded why Doom Eternal was such a special game for me. Simply put, DE has one of the greatest combat loops in any FPS I have ever played and unlike Doom 2016, it just gets more intricate and engrossing the further you progress. The weapons, level design, player abilities, and enemies have been expanded with such intelligence in a way that is able to balance dexterous skill, intelligent consideration, and player creativity in a truly elegant way, I don't think I have ever played another FPS like it in my entire life. On this most recent replay, I decided to switch up most of the weapon mods I leaned on during my playthrough in 2016 and I found a completely different approach to encounters that was just as effective. I totally understand some criticisms saying it doesn't feel like a Doom game in the same way D2016 did, but in terms of an FPS experience, I really feel like it is unmatched.

Ironically, the biggest strength of Doom 2016 was one of my only criticisms of DE, that being the overall tone of the game. DE is a little too goofy and self aware when compared to its predecessor and loses a lot of those sinister undertones that used to work so well. None of the characters are as intriguing as Samuel Hayden in D2016, and his appearance in DE makes him feel like a totally different character. Despite these small short comings, the rest of the game is so perfectly balanced, that I can overlook an issues I have with the game's more whimsical tone.

After replaying these two gems, I walked away with a much bigger appreciation for both titles. Doom 2016 is such a perfect distillation of Doom in both gameplay and tone. Doom Eternal may be a different beast entirely, but I find it to be one of the greatest FPS experiences I have ever played. They both deserve heaps of praise and I am thankful for our current timeline where ID is knocking these games out of the park. I can't wait to see what Doom The Dark Ages has in store.

I recently, finally, finished Cyberpunk 2077's main quest after 65 hours of stop-and-start playtime. I would be lying if I said I didn't enjoy most of that time, but I could never escape the nagging feeling that something was missing. Something that kept me from playing more than an hour at a time. Something that would spark me to go all-in, sacrificing my sleep and sanity to become a legend in Night City.

After meditating on my dissatisfaction for a bit, here's what I've concluded:

Cyberpunk is just okay. Fine. It's not bad, and in a few ways it's actually pretty great, but it's not the masterpiece experience that gamers have hailed it as post its 2.0 update.

And why?

Cyberpunk is caught between two of the finest games ever released: Deus Ex and Grand Theft Auto. The former's inspiration is obvious in the very subject matter, and the latter is obvious in the manner in which it's presented (and was infamously hyped).

Cyberpunk offers more weapons and cyberware enhancements than the equivalent tools in Deus Ex, but to what end? Each augment in Deus Ex is designed with a specific purpose that meaningfully changes the gameplay, but in Cyberpunk, a lot of the abilities are redundant as the game doesn't have the same tightly-designed systems that deliver rewards and consequences unique to each player action. It's complexity for the sake of complexity; and this extends to many of the game's other sprawling systems such as upgrades, crafting, vehicles, and large sectors of the skill tree.

Level design, stealth, augments... all done better by Deus Ex: Human Revolution, which dropped 9 years before. Writing in Deus Ex (yes, all of them) is a far deeper exploration of the cyberpunk genre, although to CD Projekt Red's credit, Cyberpunk does show top shelf character-writing (minus the protagonist, ouch). Cyberpunk 2077 fails to match the other major cyberpunk gaming franchise on its own terms. So what about other open world games, specifically the kind of urban chaos found in Rockstar's portfolio?

It wasn't exactly subtle that CD Projekt Red had their eyes on Grand Theft Auto as a role model for how Cyberpunk should be received by gaming culture. The "cool street kid" persona that Rockstar is known for was being copied all over the marketing for Cyberpunk, and they were throwing everything they had toward it: licensed music, edgy sex appeal, raunchy advertisements, and Keanu Reeves, to name a few.

And yet three years' of drip-fed updates later, and the game never carries the kind of high-flying, watch-my-screen fun that's found in any of the Grand Theft Auto games. It may claim to have many of the equivalent systems, but none of them match Rockstar for quality nor implementation. The radio stations are sleep-inducing compared to Rockstar's celebrity round tables, Night City somehow manages to feel more lifeless than a game released on the PS3, and on its best behavior, the driving can only compete with Watch Dogs.

So it's not better than either of its primary influences, but what about on its own terms? What does the game have to offer that's unique?

I cannot deny that Cyberpunk is one of the best-looking games ever made. It is, at times, and said with zero irony, truly breathtaking in both fidelity and scope. But then again... many games can hold this title today. Horizon Forbidden West, The Last of Us Part II, Red Dead Redemption 2... these are all games with a similar level of jaw-dropping visuals, but at least they each offer unique benefits beyond their shiny presentation and occasional bloat of AAA checklist features.

The graphics arms race is slowing down. Gone are the days of being shocked in the way we were shocked the first time we saw the building fall in Battlefield 3. Even a franchise like Horizon, often (and rightly) criticized for its vanilla open-world spread, offers up some truly original systems and moments with its frantic combat and intriguing backstory. The best Cyberpunk can do is obey what William Gibson already thought of and wrote 40 years ago.

Strip away the presentation, and all Cyberpunk is a is pretty-good compilation of Ubisoft-level gameplay design. Compare that to its influences, and you wonder what the designers really wanted to do.

I opened Steam today and the first thing I saw in the "new and trending" list was a pirate-themed character DLC for The Finals, a game that is not even remotely pirate-themed. In recent memory: Diablo 4's first season pass of the new expansion includes pirate-themed cosmetics, a new Yakuza spin-off game is based entirely around the classic pirate theme, one of Fortnite's major crossovers this year was with Pirates of the Caribbean (in a season unrelated to pirates thematically), World of Warcraft's new battle royale mode is pirate-themed (I suppose this one makes slightly more sense), and of course Skull and Bones released early this year and was highly anticipated (successful, not so much).

These are not all the examples, I distinctly recall seeing pirate-themed cosmetics as microtransactions in multiple other games this year out of nowhere, usually unrelated to the game's theme. It's the strangest marketing trend I've seen this year by far.

So, what's the deal here? Do these companies all use the same "microtransaction consultation company"? Was everyone expecting Skull and Bones to be some kind of major success and were getting pirate stuff ready for market? Are developers becoming creatively bankrupt and pirates were one of the last themes on their checklists? This is just such a bizarre pattern to see all across multiple games that I can't believe it would be truly coincidental. I don't think I've seen cosmetic/DLC content so aligned across multiple genres like this before, ever.

I've been thinking about this since a discussion I had with a friend about the merits of Assassin's Creed, Hotline Miami, PES 6, Final Fantasy Tactics and another game I don't remember.

The funny thing is that he really hates "sweaty" or straight up skill-check games like Hotline Miami or Dark Souls, even PES6, and to me that's actually really, really important. But despite our differences in preferences, we both agreed on something: we regarded them as "Good Games" ^(tm) , even if we wouldn't play them more than once, or maybe even not finish the runs.

In fact, even if he didn't like it at all, this friend of mine went ahead and told me that, certainly, GG Strive was a good game, even though he 1) doesn't like pvp 2)doesn't like labbing 3)vastly vastly prefers turn based games.

And I was wondering: what makes a "Good game" a "Good game"? Certainly, there are games that I personally recommend even if they are not within that person's preferred genre.

Hell, there are a lot of games that non-gamers play and that may be "obscure" but if they have the mindset they enjoy it very much.

Now, the thing that confuses is "what do these games have in common?".

Because if you told me production values that would be one thing, but I don't think Cuphead has THAT much money behind it, specially compared to one of the early AC games.

I know FOR ME artistic direction is very big and can help carry a game, specially if it's well integrated, but I'm not really sure my boomer dad liked Return of the Obra Dinn for the graphics.

EDIT: I realized that while kind of synonymous, more than "Good game" I was thinking of a "Well made" game. Which I think is the same ballpark but not the same thing.

I recently got into JRPGs (For now played only Persona 5 but I'm getting the hang of it.) I was able to play through Persona 5 in around 3 weeks because of the holiday season and now I'm planning on picking up Metaphore Refantazio. But the funny thing is I can't pick up the game because of the long tutorial. When I played Persona 5 I had the time to play through it in one sitting and be immersed. I know that tutorials for these types of games are extremely long and sometimes a bit nagging, but at this point a part of the genre.

My question is, are long tutorials a "turn-off" for you when you decide to pick up a game? How does the tutorial affect the rest of the game? In my experience, most of the games I've played with long tutorials have become my favorite games of all time, despite the deep initial investment. I'd like to know your point of view on this topic.

This is probably obvious by now but yes this is a response to a previous post in here that irked me, inventory limits can definitively end up feeling unneeded in a lot of modern games where they feel tacked one, but saying thy are inherently bad and a leftover from archaic design is too extreme of a point I hope this post can balance more.

Enough of that tho, let's get to the actual gist of it, namely situations and games where inventory limits can add to a game.

Items are powerful and inventory limits are the main thing to balance this out.

Common in rogue(likes), let's take darkest dungeon as an example. In this game you can buy items for every dungeon run just before entering, they aren't too expensive and money isn't a super limiting factor. It's very possible to fill your entire inventory with a bunch of useful items that can be used to get a lot of loot and rewards from interactables, heal status effects without wasting a turn, restore a lot of HP to the party when resting mid dungeon... But the thing is, loot also takes up space in your inventory. A big part of the game is thus balancing useful items with loot that gets you more money for mostly permanent upgrades. You can risk taking less for more space, try to stack the same loot to minimize inventory slots needed for them, or even just try to plan to naturally deplete your resources so you make place for loot as you fight. This imo becomes a very big part of the game that can never be brute forced in any way, it'll always requires the player to plan ahead and make decisions on what they prioritize.

Weight limit is heavily impacted by your build and playstyle.

RPG's are all about making builds, doing one build you can do X things but not Y things, weight limit can easily become a part of this. Common in Bethesda RPG's but also games like Outward and Zomboid. If you want to be a loot goblin you can but you have to make your character suited for for it. Maybe you can invest in strength to greatly increase how much you can carry, use bags, enhance/mod your equipment to carry more, get yourself some companions o carry stuff for you or even a vehicle. All of this makes weight management it's own game where's there's a lot of options to handle it to the point it becomes a big part of the games RPG mechanics and can lad to a lot of unique situations.

In beth games this is mostly found in raw stats builds, in zomboid and outward it's mostly found in tools like backpacks and vehicles you need to manage. (like dropping a heavy backpack before you fight, or managing a car you put your stuff in)

Weight limit penalties are less extreme.

Another thing I feel can help is simply making the penalty less extreme, instead of not being able to move at all when you have too much, have incremental debuffs. For example the more you go over the limit, the more stamina you consume for walking around. A simple yet useful tweak that makes managing inventory, especially in non combat encounters, a lot less of a possible headache and open up more possibilities for a player to manage it. Have a spell that negates using stamina? Useful for combat but can also be used to avoid the weight penalties for a bit. STALKER is a game series that used this really well (and hopefully will continue to be)

TL;DR

Weight/inventory limits aren't just a relic, they can enhance games in a lot of ways, just like every other game mechanic the game has to be suited for it. A lot of modern games tend to get this wrong, but a lot of older or nicher games show how it can add so much.

Y’all mind if I gush for second? (This is gonna take longer than a second.)

...in fact, this is like a 3,000 word analysis. It should take you roughly 10-15 mins to read. If walls of text aren't your thing, feel free to skip this post! If you wanna see this writing with supporting images & visuals, skip to the bottom of this post.

Spoilers abound.

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I just can’t get over Sifu’s museum level. Years after completing the game, its sleek aesthetic and coloration still seep sporadically into my subconscious. I recently rebooted my game just to experience it all again.

With a sharper mind than I had when I previously played it, I realized all the things about The Museum that make it so great, and now, I must write about them.

The Museum is one of the single greatest video game levels of all-time.

Full stop, hands-down. I would debate that statement in a court of law. In fact, maybe I will… (minus the court of law).

The Museum’s Story

To understand why The Museum is so damn good, you must understand the story it is trying to tell. It takes at least two runs of the level to understand all its moving parts, so let’s lay the groundwork now so everything that follows makes sense.

The Museum tells the story of its curator and boss encounter, a woman named Kuroki. The game leaves some of her backstory muddied and up to interpretation, so we’ll break this down into what we do know and what we do not know.

By completing and fully exploring the level, we learn the following, of which we can say for certain:

• Kuroki is an exile from Japan living in China
• She had a twin sister, whom she loved dearly
• For reasons unknown, Kuroki dueled to the death with her sister and killed her
• As a result, Kuroki now lives in regret and grief
• For reasons unknown, Kuroki abhors her own father, whom we can see brutally scribbled out on the family portrait
• Due to her familial trauma from her father and sister, Kuroki has developed severe mental and emotional trauma, which manifests as a wrathful, rage-filled alter-ego embodying her sister
• She now searches for relief from that grief, and she turns towards the redemptive properties of water and artistic expression as mediums for healing and release
• Her beliefs about water’s redemptive properties coincide with her claiming of Yang’s Water Talisman

I’m going to propose that Kuroki’s mental trauma is actually Dissociative Identity Disorder (Multiple Personality Disorder). There is no supernatural, no illusions, no hallucinations to speak of in Sifu’s Museum. Kuroki just has two aspects of her being. Unfortunately, that can’t necessarily be said for certain, so I had to omit it from the above.

The Structure of the Museum

What we have from the above — and what The Museum is working with in its structure — are three narratives.

• Kuroki’s tangible, material story
• Kuroki’s mental and emotional reaction to the events of that story
• Kuroki’s search for healing and redemption

The Museum is such an exceptional piece of video game design because it mixes, swirls and spins together those three stories, exploring:

• The tragedy of Kuroki and her twin sister (tangible and material)
• Kuroki’s grief, anger and eventual personality disorder (mental and emotional reaction)
• Kuroki’s use of water to wash away her pain and sins (search for healing)

The Museum achieves this through gorgeous, cohesive use of presentation, color, symbolism, allusion, foreshadowing and both environmental and esoteric storytelling. The level weaves and manipulates aspects of each narrative thread through almost every ounce of its being — taking the form of art pieces, text, architecture, layout, visuals and more.

But we must look closer to truly appreciate. Now, we break down each piece of the triad.

Tangible and Material Storytelling — How We Learn the Tragedy of Kuroki and Her Twin Sister

Through physical décor, (the absence of) colors and implied revelations, the museum demonstrates the tangible and material aspects of Kuroki’s story; that she had a twin sister, that she fought and killed that twin sister, and that she took no pleasure in this — experiencing tremendous grief as a result.

Art pieces and quotes on exhibit walls allude to Kuroki’s duality both subtly and overtly.

• Matriochka figurines sit in duos
• Twin statues stand in stylized poses
• There is an entire exhibit called the Twin Exhibit
• The Kunai-Pendulum room hints at Kuroki’s sister’s weapon of choice
• The fourth and final Hidden Self Exhibit features multiple instances of dueling feminine statue art, even depicting the moment Kuroki stabs her sister
• The Submerged Emotion Hallway demonstrates a transition from Kuroki’s to her alter-ego’s state of mind

Textual quotes on the walls aren’t just there to fill up white space, but to fill blank spaces in Kuroki’s lore.

In the following quotations from around The Museum, note the bolded text, which indicates to us Kuroki’s duality and twin, her loss and pain, and her expression of those emotions through art.

A swirling set of pieces, each one tinged with splashes of anxiety, sadness, or pure absurdity. A chance to catch sight of conflicting artist’s personas*, to witness* juxtaposed but equivocal identities.

Twins are an unusual and intriguing subject to capture. They provide us with the challenge of capturing uncanny symmetry, sameness, yet also nuanced differences (a quote from real life)

A sister is a dearest friend, a closest enemy, and an angel at the time of need. — Debasish Mridha

LOSS: Expressing the pain a soul feels when facing down the darkness of loss is considered one of art’s never-ending quests for creativity through pain. Death transcends time, space and culture. It binds us as humans. Death is universal.

Crushed by sorrow*, half of me is drawn away / these hilts and those shafts / the noises and the slams / the make me forget your name / but never for too long*

PAIN: Birthing art requires an artist to give something of themselves to their creation. Their soul, their flesh, their blood is imprinted upon the canvas as a testimony of the pain an artist must endure to create

Trapped and deceived to slay my own flesh and blood / far beyond the clouds, far beyond my tears / a vast furor raises in the air / it fills my head, toys with my words / she has never — and will never — show any mercy

The factual reality of Kuroki’s siblinghood is, indeed, overt and obvious — but only if you engage with the level’s scenery and give it your attention. What’s satisfying about The Museum is how it delivers this information to you not through straightforward exposition, but through its environment.

In the level’s final stages, Sifu hands it to you off the backboard if it wasn’t already apparent — Kuroki’s hidden personal art room reveals an image of her holding her dead sister. At the level’s culmination, the second phase of the boss fight sees us challenge the actual manifestation of Kuroki’s dead sister, cementing the twin sides of our museum’s curator.

We can also look beyond the physical and towards the inferred, specifically at how The Museum approaches color — or the lack of said color.

Throughout The Museum, one can witness a light Yin & Yang influence taking shape — further alluding to Kuroki’s dual nature. Yin & Yang is a concept originating in Chinese philosophy, describing an opposite but interconnected, self-perpetuating cycle. Do note that Cycle is the name of The Museum’s second exhibit.

Yin & Yang play out in the form of Kuroki’s white depiction in both her art and her attire, versus her sister’s black depiction in each. We can also see Kuroki’s reflection underneath her sister in the Submerged Emotion Hallway and the boss fight’s second phase.

Yin & Yang is a paradox of simultaneous duality and unity — this implies to us that Kuroki has another half, but that her and her sister are also one-and-the-same.

Obviously, it is impossible for two separate humans to literally be one. Especially if one’s kicked the bucket. That is, until you explore Kuroki’s mental state…

Abstract and Symbolic Storytelling — How We Learn of Kuroki’s Mental and Emotional Reaction to Her Trauma

Through physical arrangements and the use of color, The Museum demonstrates Kuroki’s mental and emotional reactions to her familial trauma; that her breadth of mixed feelings following the ordeal were cyclical and inescapable, always leading her back to her acts against her sister’s life. Her emotions became so powerful, so varied and uncontrollable that she spiraled into a state of mental disorder, developing Dissociative Identity Disorder — which manifests as an enraged version of her late kin.

We have already mentioned the cyclical nature of Yin & Yang, as well as The Museum’s second Exhibit featuring the name Cycle. This idea of rotating and repetition is seen all over The Museum — the kunai exhibit circles perpetually, the “Mourning Whirlwind” statue at the beginning of the Identity Exhibit expresses grief in flowing, spinning fashion…

… and The Museum’s entire floorplan is a spiral, wrapping itself up, down and around the cascading waterfall at the center.

This notion of whirlpooling is also spun into Kuroki’s experience via quotations on the walls, specifically in the Cycle Exhibit. Here, they begin to illuminate for us what exactly is spiraling; Kuroki’s grief and emotion.

There are patterns in one’s life, circling and born again, endless variants of a theme. Follow them to take advantage. Stand in their way and you’ll get hurt.

When the storms of emotion begin to swirl and take hold, the artist seeks the brightness, the safe passageway to shelter.

Kuroki’s grief and emotion, in its endless swirl, takes the form of color in much of her art. Throughout every one of The Museum’s exhibits, we see the same shades of blue, purple, orange, yellow and red.

The Hidden Self Exhibit is naturally the best example of the level’s use of color. Contrasting the concreteness and realism of moving through a museum in the first three quarters of the level, the Hidden Self Exhibit takes players through a hallucinatory and surreal depiction of the mind and emotion.

There are no floors, walls, hallways or doors to discern in this section — only the vast emptiness of color. This blurring of reality reinforces the abstract nature of the exhibit’s contents, of Kuroki’s intangible emotion.

Harsh saturation flickers, dances and shifts as we progress through architectural representations of Kuroki’s duel with her sister. The ever-shifting lights and colors represent Kuroki’s shifting emotions in grief and her inability to control them.

The Museum then flips and inverts color into desaturation for dramatic and symbolic effect.

Following the Hidden Self Exhibit described above, we move from the saturated, hallucinatory rooms to the black and white snow and water rooms where we encounter Kuroki herself.

Additionally, much earlier on in the Cycle Exhibit, we move from the bright and vivid suspended lightbulb room to the dim and grayscale kunai room, physically representing the cyclical nature of Kuroki’s colorful emotions and the stages of grief she is experiencing — no matter what she does, they always bring her back to the moment she kills her sister.

Through all of this, we see notes on the walls suggesting that to fight these emotions is futile, we must allow them to flow through and wash beyond us (hold on to that idea of flowing and washing for later).

You may want to battle the riptide or to let the flow carry you through its cycle.

There are patterns in one’s life, circling and born again, endless variants of a theme. Follow them to take advantage. Stand in their way and you’ll get hurt*.*

Kuroki fails at this, however, and allows the strength of her emotion to cripple her to the point of developing an alternate personality.

I believe, as a result of her familial brokenness, Kuroki has Dissociative Identity Disorder (Multiple Personality Disorder), defined by Psychiatry.org as the existence of two or more distinct identities brought about by overwhelming experiences, traumatic events and/or abuse that occurred in childhood.

In the museum’s first exhibit, we watch this play out, again through paintings and wall quotations. Art pieces in the Identity Exhibit feature female portraits with their faces scribbled over, as well as wall text reading;

A swirling set of pieces, each one tinged with splashes of anxiety, sadness, or pure absurdity. A chance to catch sight of conflicting artist’s personas*, to witness* juxtaposed but equivocal identities.

Over time and through the experience of life events, our identities are reshaped and remolded*. These experiences allow us as humans to alter how we see ourselves.*

In The Museum’s rising action, taking place in the Hidden Self Exhibit, we literally “watch” this transformation of identities occur in the Submerged Emotion Hallway (more on this in a moment) as the white décor plunges underneath the surface into aquatic décor, with Kuroki’s image at the hallway’s beginning and her twin sister’s at the end, completing the transformation as we dip under water and into Kuroki’s subconscious.

And now, our attention must turn to Kuroki’s obsession with water.

Redemptive Storytelling — How Kuroki Blends Water with Her Work to Mend Mental Wounds

Through The Museum’s art, layout, architecture, and immersive exhibits, the location demonstrates Kuroki’s ideological belief in water as a mechanism for healing and redemption of the subconscious.

As soon as we enter The Museum, we’re greeted with its namesake and physical representation of it. “Flood” reads the banner hanging overhead of the front door, with a large, cascading waterfall pouring down from four floors above.

The Museum’s and Kuroki’s obsession with water becomes more apparent as you move through each exhibit, with wave imagery a constant, as well as art pieces depicting water droplets, fish, bubbles and more.

It’s all reinforced by copy written upon the walls:

Color always moves, always changing its own state, going from one container to another, liquid to solid, or evaporating to pure abstraction. You may want to battle the riptide or to let the flow carry you through its cycle

But it becomes overtly apparent as we traverse up, down, left and right through the fourth and final Hidden Self Exhibit.

In one of the early rooms there, we’re dropped into a dark locale, standing in water up to our ankles as more drips in from overhead.

A voice speaks through the darkness as we’re assailed by Kuroki’s henchmen:

“Water has the power to cleanse us and set us free. It represents birth and the cleansing of a darkened soul. Water is the key to being reborn*. It is considered* redemptive in nature. And like the darkness itself, you must first embrace it.

The mind is like an iceberg. It floats with 1/7th of its bulk above water. Our consciousness is merely the tip of the iceberg. We must dive beneath the waters to explore the subconscious — to face the past*”*

We don’t have to do any analysis, interpretation or guesswork here — Kuroki hands us her thesis statement, drenched in literality.

In order to address the pain and suffering she experiences, Kuroki has set out to face her past by exploring and examining her subconscious — which she physically depicts in her art as a sort of submerging, an idea built upon Kuroki’s belief in the healing properties of water.

Indeed, this is what is happening in the Hidden Self Exhibit — we are exploring Kuroki’s subconscious state of varied and overpowering emotions that lead to a rift in her personality.

We soon pass through what I have dubbed the Submerged Emotion Hallway, and we watch on the walls as an image of Kuroki is displayed alongside large text reading LOSS and PAIN. As we transition down the hall, we see Kuroki’s image from before mirrored - yet different - reflected from the blue, split-creating paint on the wall.

As we’ve established, Kuroki’s emotions are too strong for her, she resists their riptide and descends into the next paragraphs of text on the wall; ANGER, RAGE. It is then, at the end of the hallway, we see Kuroki’s completed transition into her alternate personality, a wrath-filled reimagining of her own dead sister.

After this, the exhibit asks that you plunge deeper into Kuroki’s self and mind — a final “underwater” room ensues as we reach the depths of Kuroki’s pain and emotion.

After our “submerging” is complete, we see the fateful duel of sisters play out under Kuroki’s colorful, emotional lighting, which we have already discussed.

We then arrive at Kuroki’s space. A calming, quiet, snow-draped courtyard. Water is present here, too, but it’s frozen. Kuroki, as she speaks to us upon approach, is fighting to control her anger. She snaps a wooden doll in her hands.

My reading of the scene is that the still snow is meant to portray Kuroki’s attempt to stop the rushing, flowing waters of her emotion. She freezes it in place, holding the violent waters of rage back through force of will.

But as we see when we push her to her limits — and as has been depicted and suggested in her art all along — she is unable to hold these waters back.

In Kuroki’s heightened emotional state following the first phase of our duel with her, the floodgates quite literally open, and we submerge again into Kuroki’s subconscious. The courtyard shifts to a raging seascape and Kuroki’s secondary personality, her vehement twin sister, emerges to face us in battle.

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Everything in Sifu’s museum level is Chekhov’s Gun. No art, architecture, or verbiage was spared in the curation of Kuroki’s physically manifested history or mental and emotional disorder.

Making deft use of presentation, color, symbolism, allusion, foreshadowing, and environmental & esoteric storytelling, The Museum weaves the life narrative of its curator in a way that absolutely must be described as one thing and one thing only;

Art.

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Writer's note: Thank you for reading. This article is much easier to understand and follow when you can actually see the shit I'm talking about lol. To that end, here is a link where you can read a full, uncut rendition of this piece with supporting images and links. I don't add this here as self-promo, just as a more robust way to experience the analysis.

There has been a lot of discussion about remakes lately. Studios have increasingly been remaking previous works from well-known, recognizable IPs. Many people are reacting to this trend by expressing frustration with the very concept of remakes. I often see arguments that remakes are less artistically valid and indicate a lack of creativity. While I can empathize with the desire for more original ideas, I disagree with the notion that remakes are inherently bad. I want to narrow this discussion down to video games, specifically focusing on the Silent Hill 2 remake, which has sparked some debate.

First, I want to clarify that I don't believe remakes replace the original work. Instead, I believe that remakes are entirely separate products, often created by different artists, using different technology, teams, techniques, and intentions. They use the original work as a vehicle for artists to explore their own creative interests, themes, or aesthetics. In video games, this can extend to exploring new gameplay loops and mechanics or reinterpreting old ones into a modern context. This process results in a new game, even if it’s a variation on the same theme. For example, the Resident Evil 2 remake is not the same game as Resident Evil 2 (1998), Metroid Zero Mission differs from Metroid, and Final Fantasy 7 Remake hardly resembles the original. Some titles blur the line by keeping much of the content the same but enhancing the visuals, yet even these create a new aesthetic experience, making them distinct from the original works, such as the remakes of Link's Awakening or Demon's Souls.

Turning back to the Silent Hill 2 remake, it’s valid to compare it to the original; however, I don't think it's fair or productive to criticize the change in camera perspective. The remake was never intended to be a semi-fixed camera game—it was always going to reinterpret the original through the lens of an over-the-shoulder perspective. This change required new level design, combat mechanics, enemy behaviors, and gameplay loops. It also fundamentally alters the emotional connection between the player and the game. The original’s distant semi-fixed camera created more dynamic and striking visuals, effectively building suspense and setting the tone of scenes, it also had the effect of creating intentional distance between the player and the character, enhancing the game's mystery and themes. This is part of the original’s brilliance, but the remake has different intentions.

In the remake, the over-the-shoulder angle creates a greater sense of intimacy between the player and the game world. It makes combat more visceral, the environments more oppressive, and the player’s connection to the character more empathetic. Some argue that we shouldn’t feel this closer connection to James, as it wasn’t the case in the original game. However, I believe that Bloober Team intentionally used the remake to delve deeper into James's character and draw the player closer into his psyche. The voice acting is all around more conventionally good. Luke Roberts delivered a particularly great performance as James, portraying him more realistically and with greater depth. The motion capture work, with its detailed facial expressions, further immerses the player in the character’s mind in ways the original never could. By combining the new camera angle with this improved performance, Bloober Team has successfully re-examined James’s character and the plight of the supporting cast with great sensitivity.

I’m not saying the remake is better than the original—it has its own issues with pacing, repetition, and variety. I’m simply arguing that it’s a different work. It uses the original as a launchpad to explore the setting and themes in a different, more revealing way. It also recontextualizes survival horror gameplay in a more standardized manner without losing the essence that defined the genre. There is room to appreciate both versions, and I encourage people to play them both. The original is a shorter, less mechanically complex game and remains a masterpiece of video game storytelling, albeit with some rough edges. The remake is a bit padded out and more labored, but it is also more polished and it provides Bloober team’s respectful take on the material. It reinterprets the original aesthetic with incredible graphics and it explores the themes more personally, even expanding on some of them in a tasteful way.

I would like to draw a comparison to film remakes such as Nosferatu and its 1979 remake by Herzog. The original silent film is a classic, and the existence of Herzog’s version doesn’t invalidate it. Instead, Herzog used his remake to explore the same material in color, with spoken dialogue, and took the opportunity to offer a more revealing portrayal of the vampire and the characters’ inner conflicts.

There are certainly bad remakes. Some fail to create a compelling reinterpretation, some struggle to integrate new elements with the original material without causing major conflicts, and others adopt a new aesthetic that doesn't suit the source material. These are inherent challenges that remakes must overcome, requiring a certain level of talent to achieve successfully. In the case of Silent Hill 2, I believe Bloober Team did an excellent job. While the remake has its own shortcomings, they are not due to it being a remake or to the change in perspective. Even if there were no original Silent Hill 2 and Bloober's game was released as a standalone title, I would still consider it a solid 8/10 game

Hey, all!

In this thread, the rules are more relaxed. The idea is that this megathread will provide a space for otherwise rule-breaking content, as well as allowing for a slightly more conversational tone rather than every post and comment needing to be an essay.

Top-level comments on this post should aim to follow the rules for submitting threads. However, the following rules are relaxed:

• 3. Specificity, Clarity, and Detail
• 4. No Advice
• 5. No List Posts
• 8. No topics that belong in other subreddits
• 9. No Retired Topics
• 11. Reviews must follow these guidelines

So feel free to talk about what you've been playing lately or ask for suggestions. Feel free to discuss gaming fatigue, FOMO, backlogs, etc, from the retired topics list. Feel free to take your half-baked idea for a post to the subreddit and discuss it here (you can still post it as its own thread later on if you want). Just keep things civil!

Also, as a reminder, we have a Discord server where you can have much more casual, free-form conversations! https://discord.gg/truegaming

Dracula’s iconic confrontation with Richter in Castlevania: Symphony of the Night transcends a simple battle between good and evil. Dracula questions human nature, challenging the notions of honesty and power, and delving into the hypocrisy that humans often display. He suggests that humanity, by perpetuating lies and hiding behind facades, may be more monstrous than the creatures they fear.

This theme resonates with Psycho Mantis’s perspective in Metal Gear Solid, where he states, “The only thing that matters in life is the legacy you leave behind,” highlighting that humans are driven to propagate their genes, often resorting to betrayal to achieve this end. Both characters compel us to examine the idea that the true enemy may lie within ourselves.

What do you think about these reflections on humanity in these games? Do you believe these narratives present a compelling critique of human nature?

The world would probably have to be smaller but who would mind less pointless walking? It's annyoing the devs these days consider it so important for the world to be huge. They sacrifice gameplay for the sake of realism.

The basic rule would be there's always something within your sight around you like a landmark or geographical feature that's unique and lets you know where you are.

I think a good idea would also be that there are paths/roads leading everywhere. it would make places easier to find. and at every crossroads there's something unique – a monument, a shrine, a rock, a tree, a bush, so it's recognizable, easy to remember and refer to by NPCs.

Literally the vegetation around an area might indicate what region you're in. I was playing around with the Unity engine a bit and placed a few trees that were one and the same model, only resized and made taller or shorter, and it didn't bother me – they don't look samey enough to notice it, so imagine putting a different kind/genus of tree/bush around a certain area – it's easy to do and it makes the area feel unique.

Accordingly, the quest givers would tell you the directions instead of getting a quest marker. You wouldn't even need to know the cardinal directions (north, south, west, east) so no compass needed – you'd get descriptions like "leave the town near the statue of [some god], go down the road until you see [a monument], turn right, follow the river XYZ to your left."

There could also be huge landmarks like a tower or mountain in the middle of the map that is visible from every place on the map. Some games did this like Oblivion, or Outward i think.

I was also thinking about the sky and the position of the sun. the sky could look unique at different times of day (e.g. orange on sunrise, pinkish near sunset) to let you know better where to find east and west. If it's noon you could literally wait a few hours to figure out which way the sun goes.

you'd also have road signs. Every thing in the game should have a name, like regions, forests, rivers, ruins, like in Morrowind, and NPCs should refer to them as such.

For alchemy ingredients i'd make them rarer and stand out more as opposed to regular vegetation, e.g. normal bushes are shades of green but ingredients are colorful so you notice them at a distance. The thing i don't like about modern games is how cluttered everything looks so they literally add a 'search' feature to highlight collectibles like in the Witcher 3 or Dragon Age Inquisition. Quest items and important things should be recognizable at first glance.

Wouldn't that be immersive? It would make you enjoy looking at the world while being useful at the same time, instead of staring at a compass or minimap more often than not..

This is something that's been on my mind for awhile, and I can't figure out if it's mainly just a problem with me and my reading/story comprehension abilities, or whether most stories are genuinely convoluted and uninteresting/hard to follow.

The most glaring example I can give of this is the JRPG genre. I'll start with a recent example: Final Fantasy XVI. I played the demo, and was drawn in by the beautiful visuals, and the suggestion that it would be a darker, more mature story ala Game of Thrones. I bought the game, and the further it went on, I realized I just... didn't really know or care what was going on. At times, cool things were happening on the screen (Titan battles), but most of the story was just a bunch of people talking, and none of it made sense or mattered to me. It got to the point to where I would skip most of the dialogue, definitely the side quests which were horrendously boring, but even the main quest dialogue just seemed to drone on without there being any hook to keep me interested. I beat the game, and I look back on it and can barely tell you anything about it story-wise, other than who some of the main character's names were.

Kingdom Hearts is probably the most egregious examples of this. Fortunately for me, I don't play or follow the series, but I'm aware of how many games there are and just how convoluted the stories get, requiring several hour long youtube videos just to make sense of it all. But it doesn't make sense. Not to me. None of it does. It's just nonsense.

No video does my point justice more than this Dunkey video trying to explain the plot of final fantasy games. I know he intentionally edited the video to make it incoherent, but to me, most stories are this way. Just a bunch of random names and words and things happenings for the sake of things happening.

Nier Automata is an example where I liked the design of the world and the characters a lot, but I couldn't tell you a single thing about the story. Maybe it's because I didn't love the game (just some aspects of the game), so it just seemed like a blur.

So can you like the concept, setting, and characters of a game without really following or caring about the story? From Software does this well for my tastes. The "story" is mostly optional, and like Kingdom Hearts, most people only figure out the story by watching videos of people who have dug deep and figured it out. Not for me. I just like the tone and vibe of the atmosphere, and that's enough for me.

I can think of some more examples, but I just wanted to get this off my head and get some other people's opinions. I realized my examples were all Japanese games. I think Western games can have this problem to, but maybe to a lesser extent a lot of the time. A good example would be the first The Last of Us, where even though I have a problem with ludonarrative dissonance, the core story of Elle and Joel is easy to follow and impactful.

But what do you think? What kind of storytelling do you like or dislike in games? Or do I just have some undiagnosed form of dyslexia that makes it hard for me to follow complex stories?

Every time I replayed Witcher 3, Cyberpunk 2077 or Baldurs Gate 3, I got reminded on how much I hate these things. Picked up one shortsword on top of your backpack that is already carrying 200kgs of armor, and you are suddenly weightbeared and cannot run. And now you need to spend time going to the nearest merchant to sell your most useless items. You have to take a complete halt in your gameplay and do the most mundane thing possible. Given how popular infinite weight mods are for these games, I think most people agree that these are sluggish game design.

Argument 1: They offer strategic gameplay and force you to plan your game.

99% of the time, the thinking process behind weight management is just sell/put away your most useless item. Carrying 20 different guns/swords very rarely make your game easier in any way. And the actual useful consumables like healing potions are usually the lightest one that can be still be comfortably spammed.

Powderkeg in Baldurs Gate 3 is a good point against this. But that can be easily solved by setting a carrying limit for individual items. And people find ways to exploit it anyway. You just need to spent 5 more minutes juggling between loading screens in your camp.

Argument 2: Immersion

You are already carrying weights that are beyond realism, like 10 heavy armours and 20 different swords. Why is it so important to make your character stop whatever you are doing and make time for opening the inventory menu? There are way too many examples of how having realistic features only adds annoyance to games.

Argument 3: They are the natural way to guide players to interact with game features, like going back to the hub area or merchants.

This is the most convincing one so far. But players should be smart enough to figure out that selling the items with multiple copies is an easy way to make money in-game. Using annoyance as a reminder seems to be excessive.

And every time I got annoyed by the weight limit in these games, I was also immediately reminded of how much I love the Souls games like Dark Souls and Elden Ring that don't have a carrying limit. Instead, you have equipment weight limit that arguably offers way more strategic gameplay thinking. You need to think about min-maxing the equipment you take to a fight. But don't have to worry about looting items. And I think that weight limit do have a place if inventory management really is that integral to the game, like games that heavily emphasize on the survival aspect. But most of the games I listed are focus on either story or/and combat. The life sim aspect is arguably not the main selling point.

I am convinced that the weight limit is just some leftover designs from devs with an RPG purist mindset.

Edit: Since a lot of people are misunderstanding me, I specifically stated non-intrusive physics and visual effects. I also specifically stated that I am talking about design choices that merely impact the visual and audio-visual quality of games. When I talk about enemies visibly recoiling I am not talking about stun-locking them and when I'm talking about more realistic and varied particle effect hits, I am not talking about actual destruction physics. Just a bit more love and polish. The replies to this thread kind of confirm what I stated about gamers excusing subpar quality. There is games that implement all of these design choices, even non triple A ones. These things are really not that hard to implement as they are mostly visual and audio-visual with minimal physics implementation. Bullet casings bouncing off objects is not hard to implement but adds a lot. Insurgency, a game made by a small team of developers, has it.

I’ve noticed that gamers have a tendency to excuse subpar world-building, sound, and environmental design by saying that a game is "supposed to be arcadey" or "isn’t meant to be realistic." However, I firmly believe that even games in the sci-fi and fantasy genres could benefit immensely from incorporating realism to an extent.

Immersive sound design—whether it’s the ambience of a location, the sound of a weapon, the hum of machinery, footsteps, or the impact of a fall—elevates even the most outlandish plots and worlds into something more believable and engaging. This is ultimately what gaming should be about: creating immersive experiences. For instance, games like Call of Duty: Black Ops - Cold War or DOOM, while undeniably arcadey in nature, have no excuse for their guns sounding like tin cans or explosions resembling the muffled thud of someone punching mud. Imagine how much more chaotic and satisfying DOOM would feel with loud, snappy guns whose bjullets echo with a sharp crack, amplifying the impact considerably imo.

Even a game as cartoonish as The Legend of Zelda, often hailed as a magnum opus of video game design, falls short in these aspects, in my opinion. Adding more variation in lighting, ambient sound, impact effects, and footstep sounds (and I’m not just referring to different sounds for different materials, but rather less repetitive ones) wouldn’t take away from the classic Nintendo feel. Instead, it would add an extra layer of immersion, making each area feel much more distinct and alive rather than static (controversial, I know).

Games like The Witcher 3, Destiny, God of War, and Bioshock—while undeniably great—often feature repetitive play animations, impact effects, and destruction mechanics. When you strike an enemy with a sword, shoot one with a gun, or hit them with a heavy attack, there’s often little sense of impact. Bullets create the same particle effects repeatedly, enemies don’t visibly recoil or react, and your sword doesn’t convincingly bounce off surfaces. Crates or loot boxes break apart in the exact same manner every time, and character animations are often misaligned with the objects they interact with, like door handles, crates, or food items.

In contrast, games like The Last of Us Part II, Red Dead Redemption 2, Modern Warfare (2019), Metal Gear Solid, and many milsim titles excel in some of these areas. For instance, Red Dead Redemption 2 captures the weight and impact of weapons, the environment reacts to the weather, and NPCs respond dynamically to the player’s actions, making the world feel alive. The Last of Us Part II shows how proper sound design and realistic animations can enhance immersion even in a narrative-heavy, linear game.

To be clear, I don’t think every game needs to implement realism in its core gameplay mechanics. That’s not my point at all. I simply believe that every game, no matter how outlandish, cartoonish, or fantastical, could benefit from a more realistic approach in areas like animations, non-intrusive physics, sound design, and environmental detail. These elements, when done thoughtfully, don’t disrupt the gameplay or art direction while at the same time making the game much more believable and immersive.

Well don't get me wrong. I do know that silent hill 2 is the best in the series with all the psychological horror and stuff. Personally I played the game before and enjoy it very much.

What makes me think this way is because it's so disconnected with the rest of the series (especially the old games created by team silent). If you straight jump into this game you will have no problem at all to know the story. This happen to Biohazard (Resident Evil) 4 as well.

This makes me to think that if the game is publish separately with another name instead of making it part of the franchise, do they still be this good or even spawn a whole new franchise?

At first I was just thinking these are old west themes and they're not pulling punches while depicting a harsh life, even if we know that harsh life is mostly made up. Then there's an Irish guy I met they just named "Irish" who plays up every stereotype possible building his entire character from the negative ones cuz he's just a drunken fool. And like beyond that every time dude speaks to him he's talking down to him while yelling.

Then Mexico it's like... man. Everyone you meet in Mexico just a violent rapist senselessly murdering men while kidnapping their wives... or more accurately whores since almost all the women in Mexico are prostitutes.

The government is portrayed as some evil entity by nearly everyone in the game while your own character either agrees with this stuff or says nothing at all. If a prostitute is being murdered/abused by a man in the white town you're rewarded for saving her. But in Mexico dude doesn't even make a peep with this "welp. this is what Mexicans are like so I won't intrude" vibe. Meanwhile the white cowboy is just the most dutiful guy ever not once considering cheating on his wife and son.

There's lots more moments as well. Beyond those issues I know the game is dated but people made such a big deal about it 'n generally it feels really repetitive to me. Is RDR2 at least more playable/immersive? I'm getting these ubisoft feels playing the same go somewhere/kill everyone quest over and over.

Hey, all!

In this thread, the rules are more relaxed. The idea is that this megathread will provide a space for otherwise rule-breaking content, as well as allowing for a slightly more conversational tone rather than every post and comment needing to be an essay.

Top-level comments on this post should aim to follow the rules for submitting threads. However, the following rules are relaxed:

• 3. Specificity, Clarity, and Detail
• 4. No Advice
• 5. No List Posts
• 8. No topics that belong in other subreddits
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• 11. Reviews must follow these guidelines

So feel free to talk about what you've been playing lately or ask for suggestions. Feel free to discuss gaming fatigue, FOMO, backlogs, etc, from the retired topics list. Feel free to take your half-baked idea for a post to the subreddit and discuss it here (you can still post it as its own thread later on if you want). Just keep things civil!

Also, as a reminder, we have a Discord server where you can have much more casual, free-form conversations! https://discord.gg/truegaming