Except of course that Facebook isn't just a random website, but a pretty big one and also one of these social nets ones, which means that not only you, but also all your friends have to move elsewhere, good luck trying that.
In modern day, that means all the pictures you've ever taken with your digital camera, every CD you've ever bought
A single 500GB drive can hold around 1 year of 24/7 non-stop good quality MP3, which means in the case of audio we are pretty much done, since the drives will grow faster then you can record new stuff. With photos it doesn't look much different. Now with video of course you can still fill those drives, hundred episodes of a TV show in HD quality and you might need a new drive soon. However none of that archival use is a good reason to have a spinning disk as your primary drive in a computer, it is a good reason why some users might want a secondary drive for archival use, but for doing their daily task I expect they want something that makes their computer work fast and is reliable and flash based stuff seems much better in that area. And one also has to keep in mind that the need for archival is drastically reducing, since when you can have stuff instantly accessible via the net, there simply is no need to have it all locally. Once upon a time I used to save all my downloads to CD-R, because modems where slow and net access was expenisve, today I simply download to/tmp/ and redownload when I need it, it is much easier and faster that way. I don't think that changes in the filesystem will lead to much growth of storage need, since as you said, people archive stuff, they save it once and never change it, which has little if any overhead with a versioned filesystem. The changing parts of a filesystem are very tiny.
For a lot of people a 100GB drive already provides more storage then they will ever need. Drives these days are simply big enough for most people, so it doesn't really matter if they will have 9900GB of free unused storage or just 900GB, since both of them will be 'big enough' and what matters when you already have 'big enough' is stuff like reliability, speed, noise, power use and such. I agree on the point that there will be still a gap in price/capacity, I just doubt that it will matter much in what people will buy a few years down the road.
And it bends and deforms and breaks realistically, in real-time, based on the user's inputs.
Thats 95% marketing speech and 5% fact. I have seen the Euphoria tech demos a long while ago and some of that stuff they showed was pretty impressive, but the Force Unleashed demo was pretty much a big disappointment. Sure you can throw some barrel into a Tie Fighter and it will explode, but after that it will just disappear, pop out into non-existance just like objects did back on the Atari2600. If you slice a robot into two pieces, it will fall apart at the exact same spots every time and will disappear just as well. I don't call that next-gen, even Doom had persistent dead monster when I remember correctly. And I really haven't seen much realistic bend and deform in the engine, bending the doors looked nice, but it always looked exactly the same, no different then prescripted stuff, in fact I have no reason to think that it wasn't prescripted stuff. The animation of the enemies was clearly Euphoria, but the rest of the game just looked like every other game out there and in many places even worse.
The PS2 is the only last-gen console that still gets games. the Xbox1 was dead the moment the Xbox360 got released and the Gamecube was pretty much dead a year before the Wii was even out.
The phrase "numerous Dragon's Lair-style reflex focused button presses" was all I needed to read about this game to know that the developers have no idea what makes for a satisfying control scheme.
How else do you propose to handle these scenes? Just plain old cutscene? Sorry, but those are crap, if the 'hero' does something, the player should control it and those QTEs are so far the best the game industry has come up with, they might not be perfect, but you will have a hard time figuring out a better way to do these sequences interactively. Not every game can be reduced to aim&shoot controls.
People seem to forget that this company seems to have made... one game.
Omikron: The Nomad Soul, Fahrenheit and Heavy Rain in the making, thats more then one.
I love well rendered characters and backgrounds but these guys are basically creating a very nice looking version of the old Gabriel Knight games and passing it off as paradigm-breaking innovation.
They are not, if you have played Indigo Prophecy you should know that it is a very difference gaming experience then a classic point&click adventures. There are certainly some similarities, but also plenty of completly new stuff.
How did Indigo Prophecy fail? It of course didn't do every detail perfectly, but it was hardly a failure. In fact I would call it the best thing that happened to the adventure genre since Maniac Mansion, because its gameplay simply was radically different from pretty much every other game.
Also David Cage has written a fantastic post mortem on Indigo Prophecy, analysing pretty much all the small mistakes the game had, but again nothing even close to 'failure'.
This has nothing to do with MotionPlus, which even if it was available, wouldn't be used in mouse situation, since thats something the IR sensor does mostly by itself. The issue is simply a result of the Wiimote design itself. Pointing at small objects is pretty annoying when you actually have to aim at them and try to keep your hand steady, with the mouse you simply move it into position and the cursor stays on spot. Its pretty much the same thing on the DS, sounds cool in theory and kind of works, but it doesn't feel half as cool as many people would expect it to be (can't properly hover without clicking, no right click). Games designed for a mouse simply don't work that great with devices that have different strength and weaknesses. In some situations one lower the annoyances by for example mapping dialog navigation to the dpad, but when it comes to pixel-hunting in an adventure game I doubt that the Wiimote will ever feel natural, it simply wasn't build to allow the user steady and pixel perfect aiming.
If it wasn't fun there wouldn't be a risk of addiction.
Depends on how one defines 'fun'. MMORPGs are kind of similar to the fun you can have sitting for hours in front of the TV just zapping around randomly, it sure makes the time pass, but its a very different kind of fun then playing a good single player game or watching a good movie.
Without any consequences when your hitpoints are reduced to 0, there's no point in paying attention to a character's health,
The characters health is important to succeed in combat, which is why one keeps it up, you don't keep it up to 'not die', because death is something that save/reload fixes. Save/reload however doesn't kill the monster, so the challenge remains the same even if death itself can be undone.
I don't think that a 'soft' death where you only lose items/money would change much, since even a very basic setback would give you enough reason to just save/reload instead of depending on the death mechanic or at least thats how it worked for me in all games that had a "soft death" (Strike Commander, Primal, Gothic2, etc.). A death like Gandalf would certainly be interesting, but its hard to imagine how that could properly be integrated into gameplay, since by far most death in games are random events and not big story turning points. Maybe it could work for a story branch, but as a general gameplay mechanic it could be pretty hard.
While on the surface this sounds plausible, I think it is actually the other way around. In a game like DeusEx or Gothic2, or basically most games I would call immersive, I did a ton of load/save cycles and by ton I really mean a plenty, like at least two orders of magnitude more then say in a Zelda:TP. However those load/save didn't break immersion, instead they allowed it to be created in the first place. While in a Zelda:TP game every enemy is a pussy and requires no skill to be killed, in Gothic2 every fight can mean instant death, the danger simply is very real in that game, so you really have to take care and know your environment very well. And this knowledge about the environment is what creates the immersion, while the load/save ensures that you never lose much play time. I think the reason why it doesn't break immersion is that it becomes a part of the game, going to the load/save menu becomes an automatic action that you do when you prepare for a fight, so it becomes a part of the fighting procedure, instead of a meta-game action. Giving the user the control about load/save instead of having reset points also frees the mind, since you don't have to worry where the last reset point was and you also get an easily understandable save mechanics. Something not to be ignored, since in GTAIV for example I was like 5-10 hours into the game and still had no clue how exactly the save mechanic would work, when it would save and what it would save, I had to out of the game and do some googling to find out if I was actually understanding it correctly.
That way, death will still have a consequence
Is that actually a good thing? Having to restart a level from scratch is what breaks me out of the immersion, having the ability to jump right back into the action and try again on the other side leaves me in the moment. Death simply is something that the user has very little control over, so I don't think it really should have any permanent consequences in a singleplayer game.
Not exactly, frustration for me means that you have to repeat the same pointless shit that you have already done dozens of times again. It doesn't really have that much to do with challenge, since even the hardest fight can always stay interesting, even when you fail. Look at games like Fallout, XCom:UFO, DeusEx or OperationFlashpoint, all those games can be extremely challenging at points, but they give you plenty of freedom and the ability to save everywhere, so even failing stays fun, because each failed attempt tells you a bit more about the enemy and how to overcome it and the saving ensures that you have never to repeat stuff you have already done. In contrast you have other games like Final Fantasy where failing means that you have to repeat half an hour of play and in this half hour repeat things that you have already done a hundred times anyway, those are the games where dieing really breaks the game, since there is nothing to be learned from failing, failing simply isn't fun there.
I think you can very well build a game with zero frustration and yet plenty of challenge, all you have to do to make that true is to make failing interesting and not annoying.
Exactly, the frustrating part is almost never the challenge itself, but the non-challenging parts that you have to repeat over and over again to reach the challenge. If one would either allow a everywhere-save or have non-braindead reset points most of the problem with challenge would automatically go away, since the challenge never was the problem to begin with. I don't mind cutscenes itself, sometimes they fit sometimes they don't, but non interruptible ones are really one of the worst things one can have before a boss fight.
So basically what you want is a game where you know everything in advance, where no random variables exist and where it's never possible to fail.
No, what I want is a game where there is a way to figure things out that doesn't involve dieing and load/save. Where facing an unbeatable enemy gives the option to run away. Where I am not teleported right into the enemy cave without a way to scout the situation first. And where randomness is limited to such a degree that it doesn't mean the difference between winning and dieing, without giving me the choice to intervene.
There's nothing wrong with the game, it's your attitude and expectations that are the problem.
Quite seriously, even when one enjoys the game, which I even do to some degree, there after all isn't much with a similar setting, its bloody obvious that there is a shitload of stuff that is wrong with the game.
I certainly like what the game is trying, but the implementation is flawed in quite numerous ways.
How good are you at H2H? How much strength and endurance do you have?
None of that tells me how strong I am in relation to the enemy. Are five points enough? Six? What about having seven? How am I supposed to know how strong is strong enough to fight a random person in the game? Since its all just points it is impossible to tell which means exactly what, unless you have some prior knowledge from already playing the game or doing the load/save trick. This simply isn't a Lost Vikings or whatever where each character has well defined properties that make it easy to tell who can do what. And then of course the whole dice rolling comes into play, even if I am being strong enough I might lose and even when being to weak I might win. Load/Save trickery of course makes it easy to shift the odds, since you can simply save/load till the dice comes out the way you like, which is how I just defeated a Deathclaw, but that feels certainly more like cheating the game then playing it. And then of course there still is the timelimit which of course makes it quite a bit tricker to level up, since you can't just run around randomly killing critters on the big map, thus encouraging load/save trickery instead of honest playing.
Your character is not supposed to be able to do everything (at least not well).
Thats all fine, but how do I find out what I can do other by trial&error? Take the hand to hand combat choice for example, how am I supposed to figure out that I won't stand a chance in that one? Is there anyway to query the enemy stats that I am missing?
Well, it is ten years old. Games age quickly and you'll never feel the magic we did when it was fresh and new and we'd never played anything quite like it before.
I got addicted to XCom:UFO pretty quickly and that is even older, same with RAMA, Gabriel Knight and quite few other older games that I played recently. I mean, sure, it might never feel like back in the day, but I don't care as long as it still plays well. Graphically I actually like Fallout quite a bit, sure 256 colors make it look a little grainy, but other then that it looks perfectly fine, sound is fine too. Its the gameplay part that gets annoying, since it seems to be based much more around just trying everything till you by chance find something that works, then exploring the world and acting intelligently and well this "How the heck am I supposed to know that?" feeling is just not exactly very motivating.
* Kill them all and break her out * Fight Garl in unarmed combat for her * Intimidate Garl for her release * Quietly kill the two guards in back and pick the lock on Tandi's cell. * This one doesn't work 100% of the time, but if you enter the Raiders area wearing a Leather Jacket, have 10 ST and 10 EN and are male, the raiders will think you are Garl's father who Garl apparently killed to take control of the Khans. You can try and bluff Garl with this ruse and demand Tandi's release.
The problem is that none of that will work if my character doesn't have the right stats and there isn't even a way to find out how good my character needs to be to even have the slimmest chance of success for any of that. So after getting killed trying the first, I got killed trying the second and I think the third one got me killed too, so I bought her ought which seems to be the only think that actually worked with my character, didn't feel very intelligent doing that, was just try&error finding something that actually works. And the last one sounds awfully random, how the hell I am supposed to find that out?
You don't have to steal things, it's just one option.
It works the same way with attacking people, with buying stuff and even with dialog options and when a dice roll decides if you will meet instant death or have a successful quest that is very annoying.
This isn't the norm.
It still happens often enough. Now of course my opinion might not be very objective, since I am currently stuck in the Hub with two quest that work exactly that way and because of that I don't stand a chance to completly any of that and well, thats the only quest I have currently, so I am in dire need for new quests, which is pretty frustrating.
You have to be careful and think about what you're doing.
Except of course that the game gives you no friggen hint as to how dangerous something is, so its down to just trying the options and dieing a lot. I don't even mind the dieing part, since that is not much different in many other games either (XCom:UFO, Gothic, etc.), but in those I always felt like I died because I was careless, in Fallout I always felt I died because I didn't stand a chance in the first place.
Well, I am currently a few hours into Fallout1 and I am still waiting for that one to reward intelligent actions. So far each and every quest (all three of them or so, quest seem to be incredible sparse in that game) has got me spawned right in front of the enemy with exactly zero choice to an intelligent approach, since the shooting starts instantly. Half the people and creatures I am supposed to fight are not even reachable via the worldmap, instead they exist in magical places that you can only reach when an NPC guides you there (aka. instantly teleports you there and when you exist you get teleported back). Reading through a few FAQs also left me rather puzzles, since most of their "tips" are based on pure try&error and abuse of the save system (save before you steal and if it doesn't work, load and try again..). And given how many times I died just because I tried to talk to the wrong person or asked a wrong question makes it clear that a save before pretty much every action is required for survival.
So far I am not exactly impressed by Fallout1 and quite close to ditching it, since the gameplay just doesn't make a hole lot of sense and the time limit and constant threat of death even on the tiniest misstep of course makes exploration a pain.
If genres have actually died out, you'd be able to name one. So name one.
Of course no genre will have ever completly died out, because you can always find a crappy unfinished homebrew game that rides the nostalgia train and tries to recreate the past. That still doesn't change the fact that a lot of genres are commercially pretty much dead.
Just look at The Longest Journey, that game got released a whole year late in the US. Why? Because they couldn't find a publisher for a game that was already 100% finished and already selling plenty in Europe. Today things are a little more relaxed, since with online sales there is less need for a publishers, but the adventure genre is still a long way away from the good old days.
With the flightsim genre you have a similar situation, sure you still have quality titles like Xplane and Microsoft Flightsimulator, but those are the same games as 10 years ago. The genre is dead, its only a handful of niche titles that continue to get updated. And when you look onto consoles its even worse, the genre simply doesn't exist there and well, never has.
The problem is that a lot of webpages break when you change the font, text boxes will overflow, menubars will no longer fit and all kind of misery will result. To bad that Firefox doesn't have a button to fix those issues, since overflowing textboxes really don't look like a thing that should ever happen, no matter how crappy a webpage might be.
How many have you played? Do you genuinely know that none of them are "LucasArts quality"?
Quite a few. When it comes to "LucasArts quality" it not just the quality of the game itself, but also the humor, most adventure games these days are rather serious, which by itself is not an issue, since there is nothing wrong with serious games, but it shows a lack in variety.
The last adventure I played was Syberia, which was excellent.
I considered Syberia incredible boring, never finished it, the story simply never really clicked for me. Now TLJ, thats different, I consider that to be one of the finest pieces of gaming every created, but that game is nearing its tenth(!) anniversary, so its not exactly a good representative for gaming today, in fact its quite the opposite, since I consider it to be released close to the end of when gaming was good. I actually liked Full Throttle, the action sequences where crappy and the game was rather short, but characters and story were great. Its pretty much exactly that quirkiness that I miss today.
Even ten years ago, many if not most games had no story whatsoever... or a story expressible in a single sentence.
A story expressed in a single sentence can still get your imagination running and the result of that might end up being quite a bit more interesting then the garbage some of todays game feature. Also if a game doesn't has a story to tell, it should simply stop trying, I certainly didn't complain about lack of story in SuperMarioBros, I liked the game the way it was and a story certainly couldn't have made the game better.
Remember, 90% of everything is crap.
Yep, but when I consider those titles that get rated more then 90% on metacritic crap (i.e. the 10% that shouldn't be crap), then I can only conclude that may gaming taste is really way out of alignment with what the mass considers a good game.
Games should primarily be played, and a story should be an added benefit
Story should be an integral part of gameplay, if you go the "added benefit" route you end up with games that have cutscenes on one side and gameplay on the other, which feels incredible disconnected and unsatisfying.
Either way, a game is meant to be played,
Sure, but that doesn't mean that they shouldn't have a story that gives your character motivation and a background.
I'm sure you and everyone else enjoyed games like; pong, asteroids, pac-man
I actually never enjoyed them, since they where just to simplistic. A SuperMarioBros might not have an interesting story, but it still has interesting environments to explore, Pong, Astroids and PacMan lacked that, since its always the same thing in an ever repeating loop.
Plenty, and I couldn't name one that has the unpredictable flashiness of a Call of Duty 4. Even a bullet hell shooter is pretty damn in that aspect, you have plenty of objects for sure, but they are moving in nice smooth patters. The only games that come close to the flashiness of a CoD4 are the new 2D shooter on XboxLive or PSN, which overdo it with particle effects a lot, kind of in the same way a CoD4 does. A lot of the problem is of course the camera too, in a top-down shooter its moving at constant speed in a single direction, in a FPS its bumping around rotating and all that stuff, motion sickness ensured.
Usually I find people complaining about the lack of Adventure games while ignoring the dozens of Adventure games that come out every single year
And how many of those games are actually good? Not much. How many of those go to LucasArts quality? None. The small adventure market is certainly still there, but in large parts it seems to be driven by adventure game players that buy that stuff because they simply don't have much choice, not because the stuff is especially good.
I think if you get past the nostalgia, you'll realize that the video games industry is healthier now than ever before, with a wider range of great products than ever before.
It might be "healthier" in that it sells more, but it also turned into an industry where the important part is that things sell, not that they are good or creative. When I play through a Uncharted, GTAIV or Gears of War and the shooting mechanics feel so much alike that I have a hard time to tell them apart I simply lose interest, since the stories are not really much good to begin with. I have a very hard time to actually find games that I care about these days, since most stuff simply is a forgettable time waster.
Todays games have certainly improved in some aspects a lot, the user interfaces for example are much more streamlined then back then. Playing a Dune2 certainly doesn't feel today, but games have lost a lot of the edginess that made them interesting. Today games just try a little to hard to appeal to the mass market, that might help their sales, but interesting games aren't created by market research.
Slashdot Mirror
Except of course that Facebook isn't just a random website, but a pretty big one and also one of these social nets ones, which means that not only you, but also all your friends have to move elsewhere, good luck trying that.
In modern day, that means all the pictures you've ever taken with your digital camera, every CD you've ever bought
A single 500GB drive can hold around 1 year of 24/7 non-stop good quality MP3, which means in the case of audio we are pretty much done, since the drives will grow faster then you can record new stuff. With photos it doesn't look much different. Now with video of course you can still fill those drives, hundred episodes of a TV show in HD quality and you might need a new drive soon. However none of that archival use is a good reason to have a spinning disk as your primary drive in a computer, it is a good reason why some users might want a secondary drive for archival use, but for doing their daily task I expect they want something that makes their computer work fast and is reliable and flash based stuff seems much better in that area. And one also has to keep in mind that the need for archival is drastically reducing, since when you can have stuff instantly accessible via the net, there simply is no need to have it all locally. Once upon a time I used to save all my downloads to CD-R, because modems where slow and net access was expenisve, today I simply download to /tmp/ and redownload when I need it, it is much easier and faster that way. I don't think that changes in the filesystem will lead to much growth of storage need, since as you said, people archive stuff, they save it once and never change it, which has little if any overhead with a versioned filesystem. The changing parts of a filesystem are very tiny.
For a lot of people a 100GB drive already provides more storage then they will ever need. Drives these days are simply big enough for most people, so it doesn't really matter if they will have 9900GB of free unused storage or just 900GB, since both of them will be 'big enough' and what matters when you already have 'big enough' is stuff like reliability, speed, noise, power use and such. I agree on the point that there will be still a gap in price/capacity, I just doubt that it will matter much in what people will buy a few years down the road.
And it bends and deforms and breaks realistically, in real-time, based on the user's inputs.
Thats 95% marketing speech and 5% fact. I have seen the Euphoria tech demos a long while ago and some of that stuff they showed was pretty impressive, but the Force Unleashed demo was pretty much a big disappointment. Sure you can throw some barrel into a Tie Fighter and it will explode, but after that it will just disappear, pop out into non-existance just like objects did back on the Atari2600. If you slice a robot into two pieces, it will fall apart at the exact same spots every time and will disappear just as well. I don't call that next-gen, even Doom had persistent dead monster when I remember correctly. And I really haven't seen much realistic bend and deform in the engine, bending the doors looked nice, but it always looked exactly the same, no different then prescripted stuff, in fact I have no reason to think that it wasn't prescripted stuff. The animation of the enemies was clearly Euphoria, but the rest of the game just looked like every other game out there and in many places even worse.
The PS2 is the only last-gen console that still gets games. the Xbox1 was dead the moment the Xbox360 got released and the Gamecube was pretty much dead a year before the Wii was even out.
The phrase "numerous Dragon's Lair-style reflex focused button presses" was all I needed to read about this game to know that the developers have no idea what makes for a satisfying control scheme.
How else do you propose to handle these scenes? Just plain old cutscene? Sorry, but those are crap, if the 'hero' does something, the player should control it and those QTEs are so far the best the game industry has come up with, they might not be perfect, but you will have a hard time figuring out a better way to do these sequences interactively. Not every game can be reduced to aim&shoot controls.
People seem to forget that this company seems to have made... one game.
Omikron: The Nomad Soul, Fahrenheit and Heavy Rain in the making, thats more then one.
I love well rendered characters and backgrounds but these guys are basically creating a very nice looking version of the old Gabriel Knight games and passing it off as paradigm-breaking innovation.
They are not, if you have played Indigo Prophecy you should know that it is a very difference gaming experience then a classic point&click adventures. There are certainly some similarities, but also plenty of completly new stuff.
How did Indigo Prophecy fail? It of course didn't do every detail perfectly, but it was hardly a failure. In fact I would call it the best thing that happened to the adventure genre since Maniac Mansion, because its gameplay simply was radically different from pretty much every other game.
Also David Cage has written a fantastic post mortem on Indigo Prophecy, analysing pretty much all the small mistakes the game had, but again nothing even close to 'failure'.
This has nothing to do with MotionPlus, which even if it was available, wouldn't be used in mouse situation, since thats something the IR sensor does mostly by itself. The issue is simply a result of the Wiimote design itself. Pointing at small objects is pretty annoying when you actually have to aim at them and try to keep your hand steady, with the mouse you simply move it into position and the cursor stays on spot. Its pretty much the same thing on the DS, sounds cool in theory and kind of works, but it doesn't feel half as cool as many people would expect it to be (can't properly hover without clicking, no right click). Games designed for a mouse simply don't work that great with devices that have different strength and weaknesses. In some situations one lower the annoyances by for example mapping dialog navigation to the dpad, but when it comes to pixel-hunting in an adventure game I doubt that the Wiimote will ever feel natural, it simply wasn't build to allow the user steady and pixel perfect aiming.
If it wasn't fun there wouldn't be a risk of addiction.
Depends on how one defines 'fun'. MMORPGs are kind of similar to the fun you can have sitting for hours in front of the TV just zapping around randomly, it sure makes the time pass, but its a very different kind of fun then playing a good single player game or watching a good movie.
Without any consequences when your hitpoints are reduced to 0, there's no point in paying attention to a character's health,
The characters health is important to succeed in combat, which is why one keeps it up, you don't keep it up to 'not die', because death is something that save/reload fixes. Save/reload however doesn't kill the monster, so the challenge remains the same even if death itself can be undone.
I don't think that a 'soft' death where you only lose items/money would change much, since even a very basic setback would give you enough reason to just save/reload instead of depending on the death mechanic or at least thats how it worked for me in all games that had a "soft death" (Strike Commander, Primal, Gothic2, etc.). A death like Gandalf would certainly be interesting, but its hard to imagine how that could properly be integrated into gameplay, since by far most death in games are random events and not big story turning points. Maybe it could work for a story branch, but as a general gameplay mechanic it could be pretty hard.
Press to reload blablabla" breaks immersion
While on the surface this sounds plausible, I think it is actually the other way around. In a game like DeusEx or Gothic2, or basically most games I would call immersive, I did a ton of load/save cycles and by ton I really mean a plenty, like at least two orders of magnitude more then say in a Zelda:TP. However those load/save didn't break immersion, instead they allowed it to be created in the first place. While in a Zelda:TP game every enemy is a pussy and requires no skill to be killed, in Gothic2 every fight can mean instant death, the danger simply is very real in that game, so you really have to take care and know your environment very well. And this knowledge about the environment is what creates the immersion, while the load/save ensures that you never lose much play time. I think the reason why it doesn't break immersion is that it becomes a part of the game, going to the load/save menu becomes an automatic action that you do when you prepare for a fight, so it becomes a part of the fighting procedure, instead of a meta-game action. Giving the user the control about load/save instead of having reset points also frees the mind, since you don't have to worry where the last reset point was and you also get an easily understandable save mechanics. Something not to be ignored, since in GTAIV for example I was like 5-10 hours into the game and still had no clue how exactly the save mechanic would work, when it would save and what it would save, I had to out of the game and do some googling to find out if I was actually understanding it correctly.
That way, death will still have a consequence
Is that actually a good thing? Having to restart a level from scratch is what breaks me out of the immersion, having the ability to jump right back into the action and try again on the other side leaves me in the moment. Death simply is something that the user has very little control over, so I don't think it really should have any permanent consequences in a singleplayer game.
Frustration means not having what you want NOW.
Not exactly, frustration for me means that you have to repeat the same pointless shit that you have already done dozens of times again. It doesn't really have that much to do with challenge, since even the hardest fight can always stay interesting, even when you fail. Look at games like Fallout, XCom:UFO, DeusEx or OperationFlashpoint, all those games can be extremely challenging at points, but they give you plenty of freedom and the ability to save everywhere, so even failing stays fun, because each failed attempt tells you a bit more about the enemy and how to overcome it and the saving ensures that you have never to repeat stuff you have already done. In contrast you have other games like Final Fantasy where failing means that you have to repeat half an hour of play and in this half hour repeat things that you have already done a hundred times anyway, those are the games where dieing really breaks the game, since there is nothing to be learned from failing, failing simply isn't fun there.
I think you can very well build a game with zero frustration and yet plenty of challenge, all you have to do to make that true is to make failing interesting and not annoying.
Exactly, the frustrating part is almost never the challenge itself, but the non-challenging parts that you have to repeat over and over again to reach the challenge. If one would either allow a everywhere-save or have non-braindead reset points most of the problem with challenge would automatically go away, since the challenge never was the problem to begin with. I don't mind cutscenes itself, sometimes they fit sometimes they don't, but non interruptible ones are really one of the worst things one can have before a boss fight.
So basically what you want is a game where you know everything in advance, where no random variables exist and where it's never possible to fail.
No, what I want is a game where there is a way to figure things out that doesn't involve dieing and load/save. Where facing an unbeatable enemy gives the option to run away. Where I am not teleported right into the enemy cave without a way to scout the situation first. And where randomness is limited to such a degree that it doesn't mean the difference between winning and dieing, without giving me the choice to intervene.
There's nothing wrong with the game, it's your attitude and expectations that are the problem.
Quite seriously, even when one enjoys the game, which I even do to some degree, there after all isn't much with a similar setting, its bloody obvious that there is a shitload of stuff that is wrong with the game.
I certainly like what the game is trying, but the implementation is flawed in quite numerous ways.
How good are you at H2H? How much strength and endurance do you have?
None of that tells me how strong I am in relation to the enemy. Are five points enough? Six? What about having seven? How am I supposed to know how strong is strong enough to fight a random person in the game? Since its all just points it is impossible to tell which means exactly what, unless you have some prior knowledge from already playing the game or doing the load/save trick. This simply isn't a Lost Vikings or whatever where each character has well defined properties that make it easy to tell who can do what. And then of course the whole dice rolling comes into play, even if I am being strong enough I might lose and even when being to weak I might win. Load/Save trickery of course makes it easy to shift the odds, since you can simply save/load till the dice comes out the way you like, which is how I just defeated a Deathclaw, but that feels certainly more like cheating the game then playing it. And then of course there still is the timelimit which of course makes it quite a bit tricker to level up, since you can't just run around randomly killing critters on the big map, thus encouraging load/save trickery instead of honest playing.
Your character is not supposed to be able to do everything (at least not well).
Thats all fine, but how do I find out what I can do other by trial&error? Take the hand to hand combat choice for example, how am I supposed to figure out that I won't stand a chance in that one? Is there anyway to query the enemy stats that I am missing?
Well, it is ten years old. Games age quickly and you'll never feel the magic we did when it was fresh and new and we'd never played anything quite like it before.
I got addicted to XCom:UFO pretty quickly and that is even older, same with RAMA, Gabriel Knight and quite few other older games that I played recently. I mean, sure, it might never feel like back in the day, but I don't care as long as it still plays well. Graphically I actually like Fallout quite a bit, sure 256 colors make it look a little grainy, but other then that it looks perfectly fine, sound is fine too. Its the gameplay part that gets annoying, since it seems to be based much more around just trying everything till you by chance find something that works, then exploring the world and acting intelligently and well this "How the heck am I supposed to know that?" feeling is just not exactly very motivating.
* Kill them all and break her out
* Fight Garl in unarmed combat for her
* Intimidate Garl for her release
* Quietly kill the two guards in back and pick the lock on Tandi's cell.
* This one doesn't work 100% of the time, but if you enter the Raiders area wearing a Leather Jacket, have 10 ST and 10 EN and are male, the raiders will think you are Garl's father who Garl apparently killed to take control of the Khans. You can try and bluff Garl with this ruse and demand Tandi's release.
The problem is that none of that will work if my character doesn't have the right stats and there isn't even a way to find out how good my character needs to be to even have the slimmest chance of success for any of that. So after getting killed trying the first, I got killed trying the second and I think the third one got me killed too, so I bought her ought which seems to be the only think that actually worked with my character, didn't feel very intelligent doing that, was just try&error finding something that actually works. And the last one sounds awfully random, how the hell I am supposed to find that out?
You don't have to steal things, it's just one option.
It works the same way with attacking people, with buying stuff and even with dialog options and when a dice roll decides if you will meet instant death or have a successful quest that is very annoying.
This isn't the norm.
It still happens often enough. Now of course my opinion might not be very objective, since I am currently stuck in the Hub with two quest that work exactly that way and because of that I don't stand a chance to completly any of that and well, thats the only quest I have currently, so I am in dire need for new quests, which is pretty frustrating.
You have to be careful and think about what you're doing.
Except of course that the game gives you no friggen hint as to how dangerous something is, so its down to just trying the options and dieing a lot. I don't even mind the dieing part, since that is not much different in many other games either (XCom:UFO, Gothic, etc.), but in those I always felt like I died because I was careless, in Fallout I always felt I died because I didn't stand a chance in the first place.
A game that also rewards intelligent actions?
Well, I am currently a few hours into Fallout1 and I am still waiting for that one to reward intelligent actions. So far each and every quest (all three of them or so, quest seem to be incredible sparse in that game) has got me spawned right in front of the enemy with exactly zero choice to an intelligent approach, since the shooting starts instantly. Half the people and creatures I am supposed to fight are not even reachable via the worldmap, instead they exist in magical places that you can only reach when an NPC guides you there (aka. instantly teleports you there and when you exist you get teleported back). Reading through a few FAQs also left me rather puzzles, since most of their "tips" are based on pure try&error and abuse of the save system (save before you steal and if it doesn't work, load and try again..). And given how many times I died just because I tried to talk to the wrong person or asked a wrong question makes it clear that a save before pretty much every action is required for survival.
So far I am not exactly impressed by Fallout1 and quite close to ditching it, since the gameplay just doesn't make a hole lot of sense and the time limit and constant threat of death even on the tiniest misstep of course makes exploration a pain.
Lets turn that question around: Unless a language is self hosting, i.e. written in itself, I wouldn't call it a 'full' language.
If genres have actually died out, you'd be able to name one. So name one.
Of course no genre will have ever completly died out, because you can always find a crappy unfinished homebrew game that rides the nostalgia train and tries to recreate the past. That still doesn't change the fact that a lot of genres are commercially pretty much dead.
Just look at The Longest Journey, that game got released a whole year late in the US. Why? Because they couldn't find a publisher for a game that was already 100% finished and already selling plenty in Europe. Today things are a little more relaxed, since with online sales there is less need for a publishers, but the adventure genre is still a long way away from the good old days.
With the flightsim genre you have a similar situation, sure you still have quality titles like Xplane and Microsoft Flightsimulator, but those are the same games as 10 years ago. The genre is dead, its only a handful of niche titles that continue to get updated. And when you look onto consoles its even worse, the genre simply doesn't exist there and well, never has.
The problem is that a lot of webpages break when you change the font, text boxes will overflow, menubars will no longer fit and all kind of misery will result. To bad that Firefox doesn't have a button to fix those issues, since overflowing textboxes really don't look like a thing that should ever happen, no matter how crappy a webpage might be.
How many have you played? Do you genuinely know that none of them are "LucasArts quality"?
Quite a few. When it comes to "LucasArts quality" it not just the quality of the game itself, but also the humor, most adventure games these days are rather serious, which by itself is not an issue, since there is nothing wrong with serious games, but it shows a lack in variety.
The last adventure I played was Syberia, which was excellent.
I considered Syberia incredible boring, never finished it, the story simply never really clicked for me. Now TLJ, thats different, I consider that to be one of the finest pieces of gaming every created, but that game is nearing its tenth(!) anniversary, so its not exactly a good representative for gaming today, in fact its quite the opposite, since I consider it to be released close to the end of when gaming was good. I actually liked Full Throttle, the action sequences where crappy and the game was rather short, but characters and story were great. Its pretty much exactly that quirkiness that I miss today.
Even ten years ago, many if not most games had no story whatsoever... or a story expressible in a single sentence.
A story expressed in a single sentence can still get your imagination running and the result of that might end up being quite a bit more interesting then the garbage some of todays game feature. Also if a game doesn't has a story to tell, it should simply stop trying, I certainly didn't complain about lack of story in SuperMarioBros, I liked the game the way it was and a story certainly couldn't have made the game better.
Remember, 90% of everything is crap.
Yep, but when I consider those titles that get rated more then 90% on metacritic crap (i.e. the 10% that shouldn't be crap), then I can only conclude that may gaming taste is really way out of alignment with what the mass considers a good game.
All games I vaguely heard of and never played.
Ignorance isn't an especially good argument.
Games should primarily be played, and a story should be an added benefit
Story should be an integral part of gameplay, if you go the "added benefit" route you end up with games that have cutscenes on one side and gameplay on the other, which feels incredible disconnected and unsatisfying.
Either way, a game is meant to be played,
Sure, but that doesn't mean that they shouldn't have a story that gives your character motivation and a background.
I'm sure you and everyone else enjoyed games like; pong, asteroids, pac-man
I actually never enjoyed them, since they where just to simplistic. A SuperMarioBros might not have an interesting story, but it still has interesting environments to explore, Pong, Astroids and PacMan lacked that, since its always the same thing in an ever repeating loop.
Which ones have you played?
Plenty, and I couldn't name one that has the unpredictable flashiness of a Call of Duty 4. Even a bullet hell shooter is pretty damn in that aspect, you have plenty of objects for sure, but they are moving in nice smooth patters. The only games that come close to the flashiness of a CoD4 are the new 2D shooter on XboxLive or PSN, which overdo it with particle effects a lot, kind of in the same way a CoD4 does. A lot of the problem is of course the camera too, in a top-down shooter its moving at constant speed in a single direction, in a FPS its bumping around rotating and all that stuff, motion sickness ensured.
Usually I find people complaining about the lack of Adventure games while ignoring the dozens of Adventure games that come out every single year
And how many of those games are actually good? Not much. How many of those go to LucasArts quality? None. The small adventure market is certainly still there, but in large parts it seems to be driven by adventure game players that buy that stuff because they simply don't have much choice, not because the stuff is especially good.
I think if you get past the nostalgia, you'll realize that the video games industry is healthier now than ever before, with a wider range of great products than ever before.
It might be "healthier" in that it sells more, but it also turned into an industry where the important part is that things sell, not that they are good or creative. When I play through a Uncharted, GTAIV or Gears of War and the shooting mechanics feel so much alike that I have a hard time to tell them apart I simply lose interest, since the stories are not really much good to begin with. I have a very hard time to actually find games that I care about these days, since most stuff simply is a forgettable time waster.
Todays games have certainly improved in some aspects a lot, the user interfaces for example are much more streamlined then back then. Playing a Dune2 certainly doesn't feel today, but games have lost a lot of the edginess that made them interesting. Today games just try a little to hard to appeal to the mass market, that might help their sales, but interesting games aren't created by market research.