/games/ - Games

>>33621
well old games were usually a lot simpler in terms of where to go, you come from the left of the screen and go to the right to finish the level. sometimes you go up and right.

>>33622
>most old games were easy because (describes a platformer)
lmao rpgs and the sort were hard as shit back then, stop being disingenuous

>>33623
I didn't say 'easy' I said 'simpler'. And yes you can probably pick out some example of a super complicated and obscure game but you get the point I'm making.

>>33624
not really, youre saying most games were simpler and then focus entirely on the single most simple genre

>>33625
Well yes that's what most games were 'back then'. Not only platformers but beatemups and shooters and shootemups too.

I'm not gonna say there's absolutely been no 'casualisation' but I don't get why people would be mad at something totally innocuous like marked ledges and not the million other worse things like bad generic plots characters and dialog, lack of gameplay variety, and so on

>>33626
>beatemups and shooters
Don't be silly, all the posts complaining about location markers are clearly meant to be specific to games that promise to players an element of exploration. And what players want is environmental hints or hints by NPCs that make sense within the game world, nudges instead of being lead by the nose. Even the word nudge might be too strong here for some.

As for myself, I'm not that nostalgic about getting lost in old games and knocking on walls for hours, I just want something a bit less crude than some of the "modern solutions" shown ITT.

>>33626
>and not the million other worse things like bad generic plots characters and dialog, lack of gameplay variety, and so on
But people do complain about these too.

>>33641
The levels in Left 4 Dead are 90% purely linear though. And they don't have any climbing up stuff.

>>33628
>Don't be silly, all the posts complaining about location markers are clearly meant to be specific to games that promise to players an element of exploration. And what players want is environmental hints or hints by NPCs that make sense within the game world, nudges instead of being lead by the nose. Even the word nudge might be too strong here for some.

I don't want any of my games to be Morrowind. People talk about how cool that game was but have you ever really tried to play it? I play games for fun not to be constantly just lost and having to look things up anyway.

I will say though that I enjoyed Star Control II where I had to physically make notes about stuff. Maybe if games tried to reintroduce those kind of skills it wouldn't be so bad. But nowadays the game would have to literally tell the player at the start 'hey you need a notepad and pen to play this game'.

>>33645
Yikes can't you number the panels

>>33643
Any trick that works for a linear path would also work for multiple linear paths in the same environment (which is generally what non-linear actually means).

You are not a true gamer if you first sexual experience was not humping the walls in Doom, looking for the secret passage.

>>33644
I played Morrowind for years and never had too much of an issue with its directions. The rest of the series on the other hand treats the player as an ADD child with early onset dementia to the point that they do not even give you proper directions.

I only play games made for drooling troglodytes where every object I need to interact with glows and flashes bright yellow. This is literally good game design btw

>>33645
not even similar

>capitalism has dumbed down books, shows, films, music… to appeal to the lowest common denominator
<so true!
>capitalism has dumbed down video games to appeal to the lowest common denominator
<ableist chinlet!
I'm all for more people playing games but it also does not mean I want every player to play every game just like every movie doesn't have to appeal to every viewer.

>>33652
I just think we should be worried about dumbed down plots, gameplay, etc, not yellow ledges

>>33654
It is dumbed down gameplay though. It removes the aspect of the game where you have to pay attention to figure out the cues.

>>33654
"yellow paint" in games isn't really about yellow paint, it's a metonym for decades of frustration from people who feel less engaged with many mainstream games because they tend to treat the player like a baby - the actual paint is a proxy and sorta beside the point

>>33656
Stop talking about the fucking yellow paint then.

>>33655
In my opinion, just being lost and wondering around areas you've already been trying to find where to go isn't 'gameplay' in a meaningful sense.

>>33657
im sorry your feeble mind is incapable of abstraction

>>33654
>>33657
>post talks about exactly what you want people to talk about
<um why are you hyperfocusing on le paint
>handholding is part of gameplay too
<um it isnt because i dont like it
Love the discourse, bay-bee.

>>33659
This topic has an OP of the yellow paint and people are continuing to talk about the yellow paint.

>>33657
>In my opinion, just being lost and wondering around areas you've already been trying to find where to go isn't 'gameplay' in a meaningful sense.
In fact, this is one of the most unpopular opinions you could possibly have considering the overwhelming popularity of open world games where 90% of the time is spent wandering around finding the way.

Even kenny's getting in on it

>>33657
>just being lost and wondering around areas you've already been trying to find where to go isn't 'gameplay' in a meaningful sense.
Slander misrepresenting the APF (anti-paint faction). We don't ask for totally hidden things to be found only by headbutting all the walls, we ask for subtle cues in environment and storytelling.

The cues can even be painting, it just should not be something ruining the vibes of the game world. Some gang in the game's world might use invisible ink and UV light to signal things to each other. You just can't put me into a jungle where I'm the only human and then there is paint bukkake everywhere (did the snakes do that?) and expect me to not roll my eyes.

So they just want yellow paint, but not yellow?

>>33665
Yellow paint is just an example.
Of course this is about some broader pattern.
Universal design principles are not so universal…

After all, industrial UI design is for speed and simplicity on the job.
Real world matters.
Environments in games are supposed to offer challenge.

Design that simplifies takes away challenge.
Ultimate simplification would be turning the game into a movie.
Make it possible to fail or you don't have a game.
But of course we want hints, they have to be subtle though (more subtle than this post).

>>33666
What I personally want from games are:
>no untraversible waist-high fences or boxes
>no pointers
>no paint

If you need me to feel confined, I want to feel REALLY confined. Not just feel confined because my character is on a wheelchair apparently. Invisible walls are also sus but you can just make it so every time you want to exit an open location the character will be like "Where tbe fuck am I going?"

>>33667
Yeah I wish more games would just be like 'I don't need to go that way' instead of contriving blockages.

>>33668
>instead of contriving blockages
It's not just blockages. It's """blockages."""

At least doors in Stanley Parable are unopenable because they're locked. At least there's a logical explanation.

>>33668
What's more unimmersive: the character not being able to go that way or all environments being completely blocked except for the route(s) that are there for the player character. With the latter, the fiction surrounding the NPCs makes no sense. Why are these people distributed evenly along a winding corridor with no way in or out except the end points?

lole

>>33612
The thing with that example (FF7) is that you also have a non-world marker already telling you you can climb the cliff.

In fact, I'm going to say it, the best markers and so on are, indeed, those that just sign you that there's a thing there in a non-world way. As in, a literal translucent arrow pointing towards a place, to put an example, there's: >>32633 . That's a non world sign, it's clearly obvious that that sign isn't there on the world of the game, but put there by the devs in order to communicate with the player, if you have problems with such non-world communication, the HUD in of itself is also a non-world communicator, like the minimap is as well; text-boxes are also non-world communicators, in reality there shouldn't be any text-boxes (or subtitles) and you would only listen and attend whatever the NPC is telling you verbally in their own language (english, japanese, spanish…); your HP and MP are also non-world communicators, people don't say "I'm low on health points, -5 points and I'm dead", they might say "I'm feeling weak right now" but that isn't a direct reference to the HP, how many HP points do YOU have right now?
You don't know, and the character you're playing doesn't know either. Do objects that matter to you/MC shine brightly like a lightbulb? No, and in that world they do not as well, but the devs let that object shine in order for you to get it. It isn't part of the world.

Non-world communicators are communicators that display only for the player and not for the characters of the game, and thus are probably the best non-world communicators, easy to understand, and completely realistic because the player inherently knows that that sign isn't in the world itself, but a non-world communicator left by the devs to make the players life easier.

This is, in part, the problem I have with the games that apply the yellow (or any colour) treatment to important objects. In games like Mirror's Edge they're important because the game is, exactly, about going fast as fuck. The game's plot doesn't matter, gameplay does, and it benefits a lot thanks to the treatment of the red paint which also contributes to the art department of the game, in games like Uncharted, which try to go for maximum realism, I can somewhat understand it, and the devs also try to hide the fact they're using yellow, but in FF7 you have the yellow paint in a cliff, which also has a non-world marker, in a game which is really fucking blunt about where you have to go, and this cliff looks like it's on a habitated place, on the moment they're going to the lab and shit during the flashback. Are you telling me that the goverment has set up a lab in order to make weird mutants and shit in secrecy, and the scientist, in order to get there, have to go through a cliff everyday, so much that they have actually painted yellow the cliff? Or better yet, the scientist live in the lab, and thus they have actually gave away their location by unsubtlelly painting the parts of the cliff necessary to reach it? Wouldn't have it been better to just get some string ladder there that you can withdraw so people don't go climbing the cliff towards your secret lab (wasn't the lab also the energy plant of the town?)

Once you implement a "subtle" in-world communicator, such as the yellow paint, in an absolutely lazy and brute way, people start to ask questions about why is that in the world. If the answer isn't found in the game, then it takes the person out of the experience. Meanwhile, non-world communicators don't take the player out of the world because it's honest, it's just a help from the dev.

That's about it. In-world communicators depend on lying to the player meanwhile non-world communicators do not, and of course, if in-world communicators actually work if it is actually able to convince the player that it's part of the scenery and not put there by the developers. When it doesn't work because there's no actual reason for that to be painted yellow, the player will feel either cheated because the devs think they can deceive him and thus the devs think he's a fucking imbecile, or amused because the devs ridiculed themselves in their puny attempt at trickery.

It's all about the devs being honest or not, really.

>>33830
Yeah using UI is less annoying than trying to convey the game mechanics diegetically if they can't do better than yellow paint. I mean, not everything has to be diegetic. I think this comes from the attempt to be "cinematic" in AAA games, which they think means diegetic. But one of the hallmarks of cinema is the orchestral score, which is non-diegetic. The camera and lighting aren't usually diegetic either. Cinema frequently uses special lights on an actor's face to get the desired effect for a scene, and obviously the camera and everything associated with it isn't meant to actually be there in the world (unless it's a stylistic choice).

Tbh I feel like this is just growing pains for the medium figuring out what's too much or too little of something to work best.

>>33845
Growing pains in a medium that is over 50 years old and that didn't have this 20 years ago?

>>33847
Yeah, just like how cinema had growing pains when CGI was introduced despite being like 100 years old as a medium. Sometimes things change and it takes a while to adapt.

>>33843
jfc you're so close. 99% of commeercial games are this to a greater or lesser degree. They're designed to
>be as sticky as possible
>give a sense of achievement
>waste your most productive and energetic years
>maintain studio or designer credibility to encourage future purchases
You sound like you're expecting porky to include training, education or a challenge in the slop.

>>33830
I think having an arrow is justified if your character knows the road very well, it wouldn't make sense for the character to just fumble around in search of a specific house.

>>33857
The thing is that the arrow isn't a manifestation of the character knowing where to go (although I can see that being a cool idea tbh) in of itself, but the devs telling you where to go.
The arrow in of itself is not in-game, it's not "real". It is a tool used by the developer to talk to the player.

What I can see, tho, is these arrows and non-world communicator (or non-diegetic) being taken out in a harder difficulty, meanwhile an easier difficulty featuring more signs and so on.

>>33858
Honestly, I hate the non-immersive UI design and gameplay mechanics like all those insta-kills in Splinter Cell Conviction and Splinter Cell Blacklist (in the case of Red Dead Redemption this is justified ON CONSOLES since the camera controls on a gamepad are dogshit). I even hate the minimap (except for GTA where it is somewhat justified). The things I do not object to are the inventory (because implementing bag exteriors is a waste of time), HP and MP (because we can't really "feel" heavy injuries or tiredness) and other simplifications of regular things such as the map (duh), the objectives (notepad) and spells (memory/reading). The reason all of them are a part of the UI is that they're either a part of your character's mind or are simply too hard to implement with 3D objects.

Same with a third-person camera: it's not that it's third-person to make the game easier (in beat 'em ups/slashers and action-RPGs at least). It's to prevent your from having a vertigo due to all the camera spinning. Plus close-quarter fighters and battle mages turn their body and head seperately, they aren't cars. Plus the animations look cool.

Misunderstanding this is missing the point. Which the AAA game designers constantly do nowadays.

>>33859 (me)
Also, the insta-kills can be forgiven to Conviction since it's more of a third-person shooter like RDR than a stealth game. You can't feel like a pro marksman if you can't kill anyone with one bullet.

>>33860 (me)
Then again, not on PC. Not on PC.

Wow, the state of modern gaming. I feel like I'm blessed to have a shitty pc and can't play anything made after 2013.

>>33888
>the state of modern gaming
What a cringe overdone stock phrase with zero validity other than AAA publishers producing slop and bad PC ports because they don't give a crap.

>>33889
> AAA publishers producing slop and bad PC ports because they don't give a crap
Its what I'm referring to. I can't wrap my head around the idea of paying 70 dollars to play chore simulators.

>>33901
That's not "modern gaming" though. "Modern gaming" is too broad of a term to use here, it's misleading. AAA gaming becoming white is merely the natural consequence of gaming becoming mainstream, it happens to all media in capitalism. It happened to electronic music too, just look at the fucking Tomorrowland, European minimal "techno" producers, Skrillex and Angerfist, I hate this crap. I. Hate. This. Tasteless. "Music."