Almost finished the last mission, Pillar of Autumn on Legendary in Halo: Reach from the Master Chief Collection. Man, this game really delivers the 'feels'. It is by a very, very long far the best Halo campaign I ever played (And I always thought Halo 3's campaign was a great benchmark..)

The only modern game with a comparable campaign in recent history is Titanfall 2.

If you haven't played Halo: Reach or Titanfall 2 you really ought to. And now, obligatory screenshot dump time..

RandomStranger wrote on 2023-01-19, 06:57:

For me the playthrought of the Director's Cut was close to 90 hours, so that ~40hrs is probably just the main quest line.

Yeah, this is just for the main questline according to howlongtobeat. I usually don't complete much side content in RPGs. You're right about me still being in Arizona (I know this is only the first part of the game 😀 ).

RandomStranger wrote on 2023-01-19, 06:57:

clueless1 wrote on 2023-01-14, 12:40:

Tomb Raider (2013)
Slowly working my way through Shanty Town now. This is a huge section with tons to explore with only a few combat sections. These are my favorite parts of this game. And oh, it looks so good especially for a 2013 game.
Shanty Town 1.jpg

Uh... I hate that game with passion.

What do you hate about it? I hate the platforming, key-combo-mashing elements, but the rest of it is pretty decent.

The shaky cam is pretty jarring for me that's why I never managed to get into it.. It's on my backlog though.

appiah4 wrote on 2023-01-19, 11:49:

The shaky cam is pretty jarring for me that's why I never managed to get into it.. It's on my backlog though.

Assuming you are responding to my post, Tomb Raider 2013 had been on my backlog for almost 3 years before I decided to try it. And now that I looked it up, it was a temporary giveaway when I got it. 😀

Yeah I was talking about TR 2013 sorry for the confusion.

clueless1 wrote on 2023-01-19, 11:43:

RandomStranger wrote on 2023-01-19, 06:57:

clueless1 wrote on 2023-01-14, 12:40:

Tomb Raider (2013)
Slowly working my way through Shanty Town now. This is a huge section with tons to explore with only a few combat sections. These are my favorite parts of this game. And oh, it looks so good especially for a 2013 game.
Shanty Town 1.jpg

Uh... I hate that game with passion.

What do you hate about it? I hate the platforming, key-combo-mashing elements, but the rest of it is pretty decent.

QTE on top of QTE on top of QTE, and the worst kind. Aside of that, the game keep limiting or ripping away the controls from the player to tell its story, being more of a semi interactive movie rather than a game. Combat is also a huge step in the wrong direction with that stealth based cover shooting crap over the more acrobatic and open combat of previous entries. The controls in general, even if they aren't hijacked for story purposes are weird, the game doesn't control like a Tomb Raider game. And Lara doesn't resemble Lara. I think back in 2013 it was intended as a soft reboot, to cover how Lara became the way we know from the earlier games, but it didn't work.

I absolutely can not name a single thing about the game I like. Even when I think of that I got it for free, it sours that I lost 6 hours before I dropped it I could have spent on better games. An amalgamation of the worst gaming trends from the early 2010s.

RandomStranger wrote on 2023-01-19, 13:37:

clueless1 wrote on 2023-01-19, 11:43:

RandomStranger wrote on 2023-01-19, 06:57:

Uh... I hate that game with passion.

What do you hate about it? I hate the platforming, key-combo-mashing elements, but the rest of it is pretty decent.

QTE on top of QTE on top of QTE, and the worst kind. Aside of that, the game keep limiting or ripping away the controls from the player to tell its story, being more of a semi interactive movie rather than a game. Combat is also a huge step in the wrong direction with that stealth based cover shooting crap over the more acrobatic and open combat of previous entries. The controls in general, even if they aren't hijacked for story purposes are weird, the game doesn't control like a Tomb Raider game. And Lara doesn't resemble Lara. I think back in 2013 it was intended as a soft reboot, to cover how Lara became the way we know from the earlier games, but it didn't work.

I absolutely can not name a single thing about the game I like. Even when I think of that I got it for free, it sours that I lost 6 hours before I dropped it I could have spent on better games. An amalgamation of the worst gaming trends from the early 2010s.

You know, God of War from 2018 was on sale, so I grabbed it. I'm beginning to feel much the same way about it, as you do about Tomb Raider. It just feels like it missed the memo on all the reasons people loved the first God of War.

The first God of War immediately threw you into the game with full controls. The new one takes an hour to drip feed you movement, interacting with objects, throwing your axe, and then finally some basic combat.

The original God of War had short and sweet cutscenes that moved the game along. The new God of War continually puts you in these excruciatingly slow transition scenes (crouching through a cave, sailing across a largely non-interactive fjord, etc) where laborious, and frequently repetitive, exposition is heaped upon you.

The power scaling in God of War 2018 feels totally and completely off from the original. You powered up slightly in the original God of War. By the end of the game you might have been 2 to 3 times as powerful numerically. A boss from earlier in the game never felt more powerful than a mob in the late game. You mostly got more skilled, and you unlocked new combos and abilities. The new God of War starts you off beating a god, and then you can randomly bump into normal mobs that are too high level for you and one shot you. I'm maybe 10 or 15 hours into the game, and I already feel exponentially more powerful, to the point where the earlier game doesn't even make sense. I just have to slip into "Don't think about it, that's just how RPGs are" mode. Because I guess it's an RPG now.

I'm assuming some method of fast travel will unlock for me, and hopefully soon. Because I'm getting all these sidequest that require significant backtracking. But because of the aforementioned painfully slow transition scenes, I simply cannot be bothered to actually perform the backtracking required of me. Right now I can fast travel back to a shop and that's it. This game makes backtracking way to painful to be stingy about the fast travel.

All that said I'm still enjoying the story, and combat is fun enough. But there are clearly people on that team that didn't seem too interested in making a game.

That's why I never picked up the new God of War, nor do I intend to. It was clear from the teasers and trailers it's not a game worth having form me. And that's where we circle back to the gate keeping topic of this other thread. Those (of us) who liked Tomb Raider and God of War for what they were got f***ed in the ass dry to favor people who were never really interested in them.

RandomStranger wrote on 2023-01-19, 15:29:

That's why I never picked up the new God of War, nor do I intend to. It was clear from the teasers and trailers it's not a game worth having form me. And that's where we circle back to the gate keeping topic of this other thread. Those (of us) who liked Tomb Raider and God of War for what they were got f***ed in the ass dry to favor people who were never really interested in them.

Yeah, it's not fun watching every franchise I used to enjoy mutate into something repellant to me. To steer in the exact opposite direction of why anyone liked them in the first place.

I don't know what to do about it, except stick to old games I know I'll enjoy. At some point video games became for "everyone", which usually means they are no longer for me. Not because I'm some hipster and only like things that aren't cool. But because apparently "everyone" wants shit that makes me wonder how this game even got made. Like hour long tutorials and extensive non-interactive sequences. I guess "everyone" wants a marginally interactive movie with no challenge that makes them feel awesome through no agency of their own.

Reminds me of that tweet I think that went viral? Something about when you cheat your way through a game, you only cheat yourself, and you don't even realize what you are missing. "Real gamers" rallied around it, and game journo's almost universally scorned it and heaped all the -ism's in their vast arsenal at it. And I can think of no more succinct dividing line between my tastes and the tastes of "everyone".

I played God of War in the hardest difficulty setting, and after struggling with some spongy enemies at the beginning it soon became really manageable but grindy, aside from some optional encounters. I don't like when games constantly throw wave after wave of enemies that come out of nowhere (e.g. new DOOM, although this is also true for the original GOW series), I much prefer careful placement that integrates with the level design. The valkyrie fights are really cool though, they are challenging and I like how they progressively teach you how to learn their moveset.

But yeah, when it comes to modern AAA games there is a feeling of being on rails a lot of the time, and the amount of "non-interactive" cutscenes that take control of the playable character becomes annoying. Or worse, what I would call the "pseudo-interactive" parts, where you need to quickly tap a button to open a door, or move the controller/mouse to perform some kind of basic action, like eating some food. What's the point of that??? And if I was a game director, QTEs would be banned, it was maybe OK during the "interactive movie" era of the mid-90's when the CD format was still in its infancy, but in 2023 it seems ridiculous to have such basic ways to interact with a game.

I guess a lot of this comes down to the "everybody gets a prize" attitude, but what is the point of a game without some sort of challenge? Be it pure motor skill like in action games, tactical/strategical in RPG/RTS, intellectual in puzzle/adventures or a combination of them. But take that out and what remains is just "content" that would usually be of worse quality than watching a movie or reading a book, so in that sense I think being able to move the challenging aspect of a game to the background reduces its quality. Imagine what would happen if you went to play basketball with your friends and someone decided "yeah story mode is on so you can totally miss the basket, but we'll still award you points for it". Take away the challenge, and you end up with an empty shell.

I used to love videogame cut-scenes when I was much younger, in the early 90s, e.g. Tie Fighter and Dune II style. That was in the days when you had to bicycle to a video rental store and pay $2 if you wanted a choice of video productions to watch.

These days, access to endless high-value video production is instant and ubiquitous, the novelty worn quite thin. And inversely, as I get older I'm less interested in sitting down to a limited gaming-time window, and finding that half the time is spent idle watching movie scenes.

Or, just as invasive in modern times, the "long, flashy move/tiktok animation sequence/dance" that accompanies every spellcast or mechanism invoked. The thing which looks cool the first time, and the fifth, and is still quite cool by the thirtieth time, but somewhere around the 93rd time you see it, you realise that you're in the process of dedicating a collective 3 hours of your lifetime to watching 3d-sprite-boy do the same little 10-second dance routine, to accompany every special move, over and over and over....

liqmat wrote on 2023-01-15, 01:06:

Playing through Timeshift.

What do you think of it? Most people who played it (and then comment on it, and I find their comments) seem to see it as disappointing and acceptable at best, but I really like it. Well, I really like a lot of it. Unfortunately, I feel that some sections of the game are boring, there aren't enough enemies in many parts of the game, the story is very badly told (seriously, I must have completed the game half a dozen times now, and I still seem to have missed most of the story), the most fun enemies to fight (the ones who can slow down time for themselves) occurrtoo late in the game and too infrequently, I wish there wasn't a weapon carrying limit (still, at least it's three weapons, and not the far more annoying two weapons as in many other games), and even though some of the areas are quite big there is little incentive to explore because you don't find hidden rewards (such as unique or at least rare weapons, or friendly NPCs who you can optionally save).

On the plus side, many of the levels are really fun, the weapons are great, graphics-wise I really like the alternative time-line style building and the fantastic weather effects, and the time-based puzzles were short enough to not get repetitive. When the game is good, it can be really good.

And the time powers were at times great! Being able to rewind time, whilst not really useful, looks great, at least for the first two or three times you try it), but being able to slow down time at will is great, and being able to stop time, then shoot some enemies, then restart time and watch the enemies then get hit and die is fantastic.

But the problem with the time mechanics is that they are too short. You can rewind time for about seven seconds, which, aside for a few in-game puzzles and one quick dash to safety near the beginning of the game, is over to quickly for you to do anything productive. You can rewind time and bring back anyone who has just died, but then you don't have enough time to save them from dying again if they are facing more than one enemy. The time-pause and time-fast-forward functions are less limited, because they last for about twice as long as time-rewind, but they are still too short to try anything really non-conventional when fighting a group of enemies.

What this game really, REALLY needed was an upgrade system, so you could upgrade how much time-energy your suit could store, how efficient your time-pause power is (more efficient would make it use less time-energy, so basically it increases the time you can stay paused), how efficient time-rewind is, how efficient time-slowdown is, how much damage your shield can take before it stops working, and so on. A good upgrade system could have really transformed this game.

And, like so many good first person shooters before it, Timeshift has the obligatory unenjoyable level. I hate the tedious turret section when you're travelling in the flying zepplin thing.

I wish more games had copied Timeshift's time mechanics. You could make some really great first and third person shooters that utilized time control.

Shreddoc wrote on 2023-01-19, 21:54:

I used to love videogame cut-scenes when I was much younger, in the early 90s, e.g. Tie Fighter and Dune II style. That was in the days when you had to bicycle to a video rental store and pay $2 if you wanted a choice of video productions to watch.

These days, access to endless high-value video production is instant and ubiquitous, the novelty worn quite thin. And inversely, as I get older I'm less interested in sitting down to a limited gaming-time window, and finding that half the time is spent idle watching movie scenes.

Or, just as invasive in modern times, the "long, flashy move/tiktok animation sequence/dance" that accompanies every spellcast or mechanism invoked. The thing which looks cool the first time, and the fifth, and is still quite cool by the thirtieth time, but somewhere around the 93rd time you see it, you realise that you're in the process of dedicating a collective 3 hours of your lifetime to watching 3d-sprite-boy do the same little 10-second dance routine, to accompany every special move, over and over and over....

Yeah, older games had a very "less is more" approach to cutscenes. Largely due to technical constraints. But still, those cutscenes gave you a much higher fidelity look into the game world than the actual gameplay most often. The 30 seconds they lasted were tantalizing and fascinating. These days it feels like the game world is actually of a higher fidelity than most cutscenes. Or the cutscenes just take place in the game world by stripping away your control. it doesn't add anything to the verisimilitude of the game the way they used to. Partially because the game world feels so fleshed out already, cutscenes almost always only detract from it by damaging your agency.

RandomStranger wrote on 2023-01-19, 15:29:

That's why I never picked up the new God of War, nor do I intend to. It was clear from the teasers and trailers it's not a game worth having form me. And that's where we circle back to the gate keeping topic of this other thread. Those (of us) who liked Tomb Raider and God of War for what they were got f***ed in the ass dry to favor people who were never really interested in them.

Well, I'm not sure I agree with this stance. I mean, I also find a lot of modern games diverge from my liking and habits, and old series I was pretty invested in devolve into things I despise, but I have come to accept this as a necessary evil. As an entertainment product, games have to conform to the demands of the target audience, and as a Gen-X gamer I acknowledge that I am now only a niche in the big market that is Gaming, mostly dominated by Millenials and Gen-Z'ers. I don't agree with their tastes, I even look down on their choices in many cases, but I realize I am in no position to be elitist about anything. More importantly, there is no gate to keep. That door leads to nowhere sacred - it's just a roomful of old men circlejerking about how everything was so much better..

appiah4 wrote on 2023-01-20, 06:13:

Well, I'm not sure I agree with this stance. I mean, I also find a lot of modern games diverge from my liking and habits, and old series I was pretty invested in devolve into things I despise, but I have come to accept this as a necessary evil. As an entertainment product, games have to conform to the demands of the target audience, and as a Gen-X gamer I acknowledge that I am now only a niche in the big market that is Gaming, mostly dominated by Millenials and Gen-Z'ers.

I wholeheartedly disagree. To make me accept those games all they have to do is simply change the title and launch as a new franchise. They do it for brand recognition while millennials (broad brush, being born in 1990, I'm also a millennial and most of us on Vogons are) and Gen-Z'ers aren't really interested in those franchises anyway, at best vaguely curious about them. They alienate part of their core audience for another audience who would be just as happy if the game and the protagonist would be called differently.

appiah4 wrote on 2023-01-20, 06:13:

RandomStranger wrote on 2023-01-19, 15:29:

That's why I never picked up the new God of War, nor do I intend to. It was clear from the teasers and trailers it's not a game worth having form me. And that's where we circle back to the gate keeping topic of this other thread. Those (of us) who liked Tomb Raider and God of War for what they were got f***ed in the ass dry to favor people who were never really interested in them.

Well, I'm not sure I agree with this stance. I mean, I also find a lot of modern games diverge from my liking and habits, and old series I was pretty invested in devolve into things I despise, but I have come to accept this as a necessary evil. As an entertainment product, games have to conform to the demands of the target audience, and as a Gen-X gamer I acknowledge that I am now only a niche in the big market that is Gaming, mostly dominated by Millenials and Gen-Z'ers. I don't agree with their tastes, I even look down on their choices in many cases, but I realize I am in no position to be elitist about anything. More importantly, there is no gate to keep. That door leads to nowhere sacred - it's just a roomful of old men circlejerking about how everything was so much better..

I don't see the issue with us talking about how old games were better. We're allowed an opinion just like anyone else. If I don't like a direction that a game took, I just won't but it. That doesn't mean we can't discuss here why we don't like it either. If someone else shares my taste, they might save a bit of money by knowing what I didn't like about it.

I also think that younger generations can benefit from knowing what older generations preferred. That certainly has benefited my music collection, as most albums I listen to were made decades before I was born. While things like music or games are highly subjective, I still think that some stuff stands the test of time better than others. For example the classic 70s rock bands are still fairly popular today, even with younger audiences. I'd bet that they have more listeners than a lot of 80s and 90s rock bands have right now.

I never said let's not discuss it; I just wanted to point out that it was not done to butthurt anyone specifically, just to capture a bigger market..

Here's a hot take for y'all: old games and new games are, on average, similar levels of quality. They're just good in different ways.
And sometimes a series formula can start to get old after several installments and they need to shake things up to make them fresh again. Also not inherently a bad thing!

New games on average are more competently made than old games. The gap between playability was much larger in the old times. This is mainly due to shared engines and design conformity. Personally I like the old days where everyone wrote their own engine, it was more interesting.

Also I don't give a crap if someone is butthurt, that's a YP not an MP.