What are you playing?

I simply dont like this kind of modern formula concept where they make the world look like
it will have so much variety in content because its so big
but then you notice that you already saw 99% of the different types of content
in the very first region (of 4, 8, 16 whatever regions in total)

Its exactly the same thing with games like Assassins Creed Odyssey.
You are playing for lets say 4, 5, 6 hours and it looks like
it will offer endless content and you didnt see anything yet.
But its not true at all, you pretty much already saw everything,
you are going to do the exact same things in all of the other regions.

Bandit hideouts, hidden caves, some kind of get me that thing mission,
some kind of kill that thing mission, some tower or whatever to uncover parts of the map ...
you know, these typical 3-5 type of missions and its just the same task again and again and again
just in different regions of the map. There are no surprises, you know what you will get.
Even the cities all have the same layout with the same merchants and so on.
Theres nothing really unique. It all just looks different on the surface.

Its such a waste of potential. I remember how i imagined Ghost of Tsushima
with whole unique villages in some mountain area and some unique fisherman villages down by the river ...
all with different shops and flags and colors and so on ...
turns out all of the villages have the exact same type of house model which they simply mirrored or rotated,
same for the things inside the houses. Even the loot inside is always in the same two spots
and the layout for merchants is always the same too.
I dont like that about modern open world games.
Don’t get me wrong, I hate the whole open world sandbox framework more than most, but the two games that you’ve singled out (HFW and Ghost of Tsushima) at least try to mix things up a little.

Rather than just loading the game with collectibles that players need to find and pick up, Horizon has players solve puzzles (ornaments and vista points) and practice their climbing (Tallnecks, Signal Lenses, and Survey Drones). Most of the collectible sets have ten items or fewer, and players don’t even need to find all of them to “complete” the game. Likewise, the Haikus, Hotsprings, Shrines, and Wood Chopping in GoT made for a nice change from the standard “go to spot A and press button B to pick up item” formula that seems to be common place in most modern sandbox games. The fox shrines, not so much.

I agree that these games could have done more to set themselves apart and add a bit more internal variety, but compared to most other modern games, they’re far from the worst offenders. In fact, I think I’d go as far as saying they’re among the genre’s best examples. I’d certainly take either over Far Cry or Assassin’s Creed any day of the week!
 
Don’t get me wrong, I hate the whole open world sandbox framework more than most, but the two games that you’ve singled out (HFW and Ghost of Tsushima) at least try to mix things up a little.

Rather than just loading the game with collectibles that players need to find and pick up, Horizon has players solve puzzles (ornaments and vista points) and practice their climbing (Tallnecks, Signal Lenses, and Survey Drones). Most of the collectible sets have ten items or fewer, and players don’t even need to find all of them to “complete” the game. Likewise, the Haikus, Hotsprings, Shrines, and Wood Chopping in GoT made for a nice change from the standard “go to spot A and press button B to pick up item” formula that seems to be common place in most modern sandbox games. The fox shrines, not so much.

I agree that these games could have done more to set themselves apart and add a bit more internal variety, but compared to most other modern games, they’re far from the worst offenders. In fact, I think I’d go as far as saying they’re among the genre’s best examples. I’d certainly take either over Far Cry or Assassin’s Creed any day of the week!

Sure, in terms of all the modern world copy paste tasks, Tsushima and the Horizon games
are not the worst examples.
But i still think its such a waste of map space and game world.

Like imagine Ghost of Tsushima but every single village is 100% unique
so that you remember the names and areas simply because they are so unique.
With different shops, different kind of buildings (a very new village, or a very old village),
some are full with dozens of NPCs, some of them are almost empty and so on.
You ride your horse up the mountains around a corner and suddenly there
is a 100% unique looking village built into the mountain. No copy paste preset house models,
no copy paste merchants. Instead of the chopping bamboo minigame theres something completely new
that you never saw in any of the hours before. Then there is a cave with some kind of riddle
with mechanics that you never saw in any of the hours before.
No symbol on the map that clearly tells you 'if you come here, you will find this type of mission / collectible'.

Thats what i want to see. Instead pretty much all of these games are =
here is region 1 of 8 of this map and all of the tasks, mission designs, merchants, layouts, 'secrets'
in this area are also all of the tasks, mission designs, merchants, layouts, 'secrets'
in region 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8. Thats a pointless open world if you ask me.
All of this has so much more potential. This streamlined calculated game / world design is boring.

Some open world games from the 90's and early 2000 actually had better game world design choices,
like Gothic 1 & 2 with completely unique towns and you never knew
what kind of cave you are entering, what the loot is, how dangerous that area on the mountain is,
or what type of story mission this is going to be. Nothing told you that.
You as the player had to find that out yourself. Why cant we have more of that?
 
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Sure, in terms of all the modern world copy paste tasks, Tsushima and the Horizon games
are not the worst examples.
But i still think its such a waste of map space and game world.

Like imagine Ghost of Tsushima but every single village is 100% unique
so that you remember the names and areas simply because they are so unique.
With different shops, different kind of buildings (a very new village, or a very old village),
some are full with dozens of NPCs, some of them are almost empty and so on.
You ride your horse up the mountains around a corner and suddenly there
is a 100% unique looking village built into the mountain. No copy paste preset house models,
no copy paste merchants. Instead of the chopping bamboo minigame theres something completely new
that you never saw in any of the hours before. Then there is a cave with some kind of riddle
with mechanics that you never saw in any of the hours before.
No symbol on the map that clearly tells you 'if you come here, you will find this type of mission / collectible'.

Thats what i want to see. Instead pretty much all of these games are =
here is region 1 of 8 of this map and all of the tasks, mission designs, merchants, layouts, 'secrets'
in this area are also all of the tasks, mission designs, merchants, layouts, 'secrets'
in region 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8. Thats a pointless open world if you ask me.
All of this has so much more potential. This streamlined calculated game / world design is boring.

Some open world games from the 90's and early 2000 actually had better game world design choices,
like Gothic 1 & 2 with completely unique towns and you never knew
what kind of cave you are entering, what the loot is, how dangerous that area on the mountain is,
or what type of story mission this is going to be. Nothing told you that.
You as the player had to find that out yourself. Why cant we have more of that?
I think the real issue is a misguided belief that bigger is always better. Since the turn of the century, devs have been creating bigger and bigger open worlds in an attempt to impress players. Unfortunately, filling these worlds with worthwhile content is a lot more challenging than simply expanding the borders of the playable area, which is what leads to these lazy copy paste mechanics and ideas that are used to flesh them out.

Personally, I’d like to see more developers going back to basics and targeting much smaller, more densely populated maps without all of the collectibles and watchtower nonsense. Say why you will about Shenmue 3, but its world was full of character making it very easy to distinguish every part of it from the others. Seriously, you could put me down anywhere in Shenmue 3 (or Shenmue 1 and 2, for that matter) and I’d know exactly where I was. In most other games, there are only a handful of locations that I would be able to recognize, and fewer still that I could point to on the map.
 
I think the real issue is a misguided belief that bigger is always better. Since the turn of the century, devs have been creating bigger and bigger open worlds in an attempt to impress players. Unfortunately, filling these worlds with worthwhile content is a lot more challenging than simply expanding the borders of the playable area, which is what leads to these lazy copy paste mechanics and ideas that are used to flesh them out.

Personally, I’d like to see more developers going back to basics and targeting much smaller, more densely populated maps without all of the collectibles and watchtower nonsense. Say why you will about Shenmue 3, but its world was full of character making it very easy to distinguish every part of it from the others. Seriously, you could put me down anywhere in Shenmue 3 (or Shenmue 1 and 2, for that matter) and I’d know exactly where I was. In most other games, there are only a handful of locations that I would be able to recognize, and fewer still that I could point to on the map.
Yep, the more unique open world games that i remember are just like 2/4, 1/3 the size of Forbidden West.
Its nowhere near close to the size of lets say AC Odyssey. That size is ridiculous.

But i mean ... whats the point of creating a 100 x 100 KM² world,
if the whole gameplay and mission design structure on top is all the same within these kilometers.
In long terms its way more impressive if you have a 40-60% smaller world
but all of the towns are completely unique, no copy paste exploration spots and the NPC tasks in the north
have nothing to do with the NPC tasks in the south.

This modern everything has to be the biggest game world ever approach
is simply a glare of impressive graphics in the hope that the player wont notice the 'cheap'
game design structure within this world.
'Wow look, its in 4K 60 fps and the map is the size of Texas' ...
thats considered to be normal / minimum nowadays.
But actually the important factor for me is what can you do in that world?
The size and some random question marks on the map dont mean anything in terms of quality.

I dont know why we are stuck in this super size approach for so long now.
 
Hope you like it. To be fair, I’ve sunk another 3 or 4 hours into it since my post a few days ago and am enjoying the game quite a bit more now. The horror elements remain underwhelming, but some of the otherworldly distortion stuff is really cool and more than a little trippy.
Thanks! I played about 2 hours so far and don't know how to feel about it yet. I enjoy the detail put into the artistry of the environment, and some of the trippy stuff (like when you clear the apartment and the rooms are all lopsided) is cool, but so far it's fairly mild in terms of game play. I'm not going to rate it without putting more time into it but the base premise is both very interesting and at the same time it feels a bit disjointed as a first impression.
 
I've been playing Dusk Diver lately and I think it's wonderful. It's mostly like a (relatively) budget anime Yakuza, but the pic below really reminded me of Shenmue in particular. Especially with the way it makes you wait and watch the character spin the capsule machine lever every time.

20220320165116_1.jpg

The devs themselves are Taiwanese which is also pretty neat. I've played a couple mainland China games and Hong Kong games that were all pretty good too, but this is the first game around that general region that I found to have really enjoyable characterization. Not really the reason I play games, but just something I found kind of noteworthy. The hyper-capitalist-old-lady-ceramic-bear-pot god character (yes, really) is my favorite character I've seen in a game in a long time. Probably just me being an idiot, but I thought she was hilarious.
 
Alright, I played Guardians of the galaxy. Gotta say its amazing. Great stuff, very funny characters and good story. Loved the 80s music.

I didnt watch any Marvel's movies. The only ones i was kinda interested was this guy's, so this is the lil' push I needed to watch them. If they are like the game, I'm gonna enjoy them.
 
I've been playing Dusk Diver lately and I think it's wonderful. It's mostly like a (relatively) budget anime Yakuza, but the pic below really reminded me of Shenmue in particular. Especially with the way it makes you wait and watch the character spin the capsule machine lever every time.

View attachment 14620

The devs themselves are Taiwanese which is also pretty neat. I've played a couple mainland China games and Hong Kong games that were all pretty good too, but this is the first game around that general region that I found to have really enjoyable characterization. Not really the reason I play games, but just something I found kind of noteworthy. The hyper-capitalist-old-lady-ceramic-bear-pot god character (yes, really) is my favorite character I've seen in a game in a long time. Probably just me being an idiot, but I thought she was hilarious.
Woah woah woah hold on mate.

Whats that

I like what you're saying and it kinda reminds me Persona.

Is this a Shenmue/Yakuza with Persona graphics style???

1648354853000.png
 
Oh and I finished Persona 5 strikers. Loved it! But just fucking port to pc P5 please :crying:

And Judgement too :crying::crying::crying:
 
Woah woah woah hold on mate.

Whats that

I like what you're saying and it kinda reminds me Persona.

Is this a Shenmue/Yakuza with Persona graphics style???

View attachment 14622
I've seen people say it's Personakuza with a dash of musou and I think that's spot on. Specifically like Persona 4 with the yellow pop aesthetics and the semi-focus on a quaint local retail store (June's in P4, Tumaz Mart in Dusk Diver).

Also yes, seconded on Judgement. :crying:
 
Far Cry 6 and Lost Judgment were free this weekend on Xbox. Tried them both briefly.

Far Cry 6 has really pretty environmental graphics and seems as good as any other Far Cry game for better and worse. Not my cup of tea anymore, but it was decent from what I experienced.

Lost Judgment was more Judgment/Yakuza type of gameplay though I found it to be better than any of the previous titles from these franchises.

Paid $1 for King of Fighters 15, 14, 13, 2002, 98 and 97. Only played 15, 14, 13. Not really worth the money if youre paying more than a buck or two. They have the stuttering framerate type of gameplay that Street Fighter has, granted KoF 15 and 14 are better than SF 4 and 5, but it's all the same more or less.


Back to Ghostwire Tokyo..
 
I've seen people say it's Personakuza with a dash of musou and I think that's spot on. Specifically like Persona 4 with the yellow pop aesthetics and the semi-focus on a quaint local retail store (June's in P4, Tumaz Mart in Dusk Diver).

Also yes, seconded on Judgement. :crying:
So this is Personakuza 4 Strikers! I'm in!!
 
Been meaning to post in here, wanting to share clips but haven’t had much time to actually edit much together so I’ll likely do that some other time.

Mostly been playing Elden Ring but have kind of taken a bit of a break on it, especially now I’ve spoiled myself on later fights and tend to agree with some who don’t have a lot to like about it…it really feels to me that all the really good stuff or most of the base content in general you’ll likely see within the first few hours. Beyond that, I feel like Sekiro, Bloodborne, even DS3 had more or better stuff going on without having to rely on recycled content for so long. I’ve only just about half explored the lakes and much of Caelid but from what I’ve seen, sadly I’m not very motivated to waste my time.

In sharp contrast, the new Kirby has finally come out and it’s been a blast. Of course it’s going to be easier, even compared to Star Allies honestly, but I feel it’s far more tightly designed. There might be a few enemies or abilities, but it feels like they’re constantly doing new challenges with each throughout the game. The bosses can still feel skillful even without having to take away more than half your health per mistake. Don’t want to spoil anything but two fights in particular felt just as exciting as any Fromsoft boss imo. Also love the art direction and music, and surprisingly a lot of the hub stuff. Think I have one more world and supposedly a “post game” to go but I can see myself replaying it regularly.

Been playing a lot of games on pc with mods now. Both the RE2 and 3 remakes run really well, and for 2 it seems someone managed to get models for Ryu and Alan Di for Leon and Mr. X, not to mention Thomas the tank engine for Nemesis. Granted I also used cheats, but maybe one day I’ll try and beat these games for real. For Nier Automata, there’s some really out there stuff like Shrek over Engels, Big Smoke for Pascal, a variety of others for 2B and A2 like Alice Twilight or Okayu, but my favorites being Travis and Jeane for 9S and his pod. It all kinda looks jank(except Okayu seems to work really well) but it’s fun.

Wanted to replay both the Sonic Adventure games before the new movie, but unfortunately they don’t seem like great ports…the first one ran ok but the second refused to even load in full screen and I had to jump through some bizarre hoops to even start it properly.
 
im playing mario odyssey on the switch. im about half way through. its fun game. it kinda reminds me of super mario sunshine on the gamecube.

my only complaint about mario games, is that the boss fights are too easy.
 
Finished the new Kirby on Switch…at 91%. Not sure whether I want to go back for the collectibles I missed, maybe if there’s DLC at some point, but I’m all Kirby’d out. I don’t understand the complaints that it’s short if you get everything…seems to be about regular length for these games.

Previously, both Adventure and 64 have been my favorites. I don’t like to jump the gun, but I’ve had a couple days now to think it over and I think this may take their place. It’s got the really cinematic camera angles and shots I missed from 64 but now with more freedom of movement and the tight control of Adventure mixed in, not to mention really good boss design, and the music and art direction are always good. I’d give it an 8/10 just because much of the later stuff is heavily recycled. Better than how most other games do it, but still.
 
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