RE: We chat about videogames and videogame accessories.
11-22-2013, 05:23 AM
(This post was last modified: 11-22-2013, 06:39 AM by BRPXQZME.)
(11-22-2013, 02:41 AM)Stij Wrote: »Examples?Of games? Well, not much I could share, I’m just saying it’s good marketing copy, really. They try to say factual things, spun so that it’s exciting when you take it at face value. Regardless of whether the game is genuinely unique or entertaining, there are certain ways of making statements that have this tendency to be extrapolated in the reader’s mind into something awesome. With no videos and no other tabs open to do research, browsing the GOG catalog is a bit like going through the store in the 90s without being a magazine reader: you have only a handful of screenshots, some blurbs, and comments from regular yahoos to go on. I’m not sure someone without some nostalgia for this experience would feel the same way, where you know you’ll miss out on a lot of them because it’s practically guaranteed that a good number of these games would not be in the store next year. Maybe I can try to convey a few examples:
Ultima VII is often touted as one of the closest things to Richard “Lord British” Gariott’s dream of a highly simulated world (Ultima Online would be another one). Haven’t played it myself, but it features such things as the ability to bake bread from scratch. If they had fleshed these sorts of systems out even more and stripped it of the RPG, it could have been something like a prototypical Animal Crossing or The Sims, probably. By nearly a decade, mind you.
Wing Commander - If it were me and not Chris Roberts at the tail end of the 80s, the elevator pitch would have been “You basically fight in a X-Wing” (never minding that there would later be an official Star Wars series in the same genre where you do this). There really doesn’t have to be much more said!
Submarine TITANS (not on GOG): This is a game I got as a birthday present (in 6th grade), and the guy who gave it to me said was that they were saying it was better than StarCraft. And surely he’d know because he played StarCraft. It was incompatible with my PC, though, so I never played it. Here’s what playing it or seeing a video probably would have ruined:
Here’s a video that’s primarily about choices in RPGs and the like, but it details a little bit about what developers were going for, especially in and around the 90s but sometimes still try today, that made them wicked awesome (primarily that they tried really hard to simulate, rather than be “pick the next part of the movie”).
And tangent-ing again, it is key to modern narrative for some kind of logic to string events together. It can come from without or within the audience, but in games (in contrast with film) you want most of that to come from within. Giving the player a good sense of “being there” doesn’t come from feeling like you’re there, manipulating emotions and events, stripping UIs down to near invisibility, making the graphics better, or whatever (this sense is called “immersion”; I’m sure a lot of you have seen a lot of game marketing claim the game has this, which is pretty good evidence it doesn’t). It’s when this sort of driving logic really just works, where the player has accepted the game logic as a facet or reflection of reality even when it’s not on a Star Trek holodeck kind of level. You kind of expect this out of a good RPG or action-adventure, but perhaps it would be appropriate (if not APA-approved?) to extend this to when Tetris has you totally hooked.
This sort of intrinsic logic comes less from cutscenes than it does from levels and mechanics in games. In some ways, this is what is meant by “worldview” (sekaikan) in Japanese designs.
Okay, I am done procrastinating on schoolwork now. Time to boot up Steam
edit:
Hey, someone is working on yet another solution to the “silver bullet combat” problem in Skyrim’s combat. Using (drumroll) better AI.
sea had swallowed all. A lazy curtain of dust was wafting out to sea