Fenixp

*sigh* As per usual, God forbid people like things you dislike. Anyway, The Witcher 3 is an excellent example of fantastic visual design of an open world - not only placement of individual structures made sense, what really got me were walls of various huts and structures adorned by drawings or illustrations, it looked so ... Life-like. And then the darn game went and ruined it by monster/enemy placement which made next to no sense and minimal interactions between factions or wildlife. For such a life-like world, seeing encounter placement so remote from anything close to life was just sad. I actually rather liked the one with the ... Umm ... Dead Money was it? Execution was a bit lacking, but concept and atmosphere was great. Otherwise yeah, the DLC was quite lacking.

Yup, that actually serves rather nicely to illustrate my point - in most games, containers with lootable items and lootable items placed around the world exist solely for the player to take them. That's the whole point of them existing. In Elder Scrolls games, they exist to sell you the idea of being in an actual world, where NPCs also have personal items and storage containers to store them, and player can interact with all of this.

All in all, there's a reason why I didn't namely mention Oblivion :-P It goes further than just that tho. In Gothic games, world existed for the sole purpose of giving player stuff to do. Admittedly I played a lot more of Gothic 2 than I did of the original and yes, given the original's setting, a lot of what I'm about to say might not apply (I could never stomach the controls), still: The wildlife extermination game sounds as about the correct way to sum up my issues with it. In Gothic games, the world is there, waiting for the player to exploit it. NPCs won't go out of their way to clear roads and allow for trade or just free movement of people living in the world. Everything is static and awaits for the player to deal with it, one way or another. In Elder Scrolls games, up from Morrowind (and since Oblivion there are even patrolling guards), guards have a tendency of actively attacking dangerous wildlife and dangerous wildlife does the same to other actors roaming the world than just the player. And not just that - they also interact with each other. Sure, it's a simple AI script assigning factions to actors, but what it ends up looking like is NPCs trying to clear territory in order for merchants to get trough, it looks like animals are fighting for territory or just hunting. Even their placement is essential, like Kwama worms only defending kwama colonies and not being found anywhere else (even tho Morrowind was definitely a lot more rudimentary in these aspects.) And without freedom of movement between major cities and colonies, this illusion would fall apart. There's a ton more to it than that, fact that there aren't random roadside chests with loot is a part of it indeed, even that Elder Scrolls games are notorious for letting player pick up whatever the heck he wants to and often having NPCs manipulate these same objects. There's lore and generally writing reinforcing worldbuilding. There are quests which do so much to make the world feel like an actual place full of people with motivations (well... Okay, this mostly applies to Morrowind, but Morrowind was pretty damn brilliant at doing this.) And... ... Just stop it, brain! I'm terrible at constructing concise arguments. TLDR: I really like Elder Scrolls. Sue me! Seriously, I have many words I can say on the subject and nobody's going to have time to really refute my arguments or even read them all so it's rather pointless to write more walls, but at the end of the day neither Gothic's nor Morrowind's approach is really superior - they're just ... Very different at attempting to achieve the same goal.

I think the important distinction to make is what you're looking for in a game world. If it's series of challenges to overcome in order to progress, then yes, Gothic games were far superior in that respect. As a virtual world tho, Elder Scrolls games just have no equal. Sure, there are still massive logical inconsistencies and sadly, Skyrim made some steps away from the concept, but they just make far more sense as an actual, living world as opposed to a level that you need to beat. (and yes, a lot of content is similar to each other - which sucks from game design perspective but again works well for world building. For instance, naturally, all burial sites are going to look very similar to each other.) Isn't calling Baldur's Gate 2 an open world kinda stretching it? BG1, sure, I could see that, but 2?

It's how *a* game works at any rate. Gothic games are the reason why I dislike too strong use of gating as its world always felt so unnatural to me. Anyway, I strongly prefer Morrowind's and Skyrim's approach which are games I'd put on a pedestal of open world design (mandatory link to compass remover) - all the main roads are more or less safe. It makes sense, they would be. But the further you get from them and stick your head into unknown territory, the more dangerous it becomes. So while you can go everywhere right from the beginning, it's hardly without challenges - admittedly, I've had to up the difficulty slider so that the game would contain more of these challenging areas, but it works rather well and feels so much more natural. That's not to say I don't like games which make clever use of gating, I loved New Vegas and think it hits the sweet spot between openness and gating that I don't mind the gated parts.

Mad Max? I still think the only reason it has such a positive rating on Steam is because there's nothing wrong with it in particular. Combat is good, driving is good, vehicular combat is fun, the game's pretty. You get collectibles and a bunch of activities... It's all by the numbers. It contains all of the things an Open World game is expected to contain these days. Recommended. I guess. There's no reason not to, right? Anyway, my recommendation would be to play it in small bursts when you feel like freeing another territory or just not playing it at all. So weird to see a movie which had the balls to go completely against what modern blockbusters consider "safe" and then see a game made for the movie which does nothing but all of the safe decisions. Not a fan of open-world games, eh? I'd say the reason your favorite was New Vegas would probably be that the game wasn't really designed to be particularly open-world - it pretended, sure, but the beginning was mostly linear, taking the "long way" around a mountain, and when the open world actually managed to open itself, you usually had like half of it explored by being gently nudged in the right direction. It was rather clever about it, really - most of the game it pretended to give you all of these options when you've only really had like 2 or 3 major places where the game would realistically allow you to go and a bunch more locations hanging at the end of the stick, telling you "Play me for a bit more and you'll be able to go over here too!"

Well, that's another month of my life down the drain.

Oh. I feel sorry for you. I'll just leave this here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i2LCSzmjPj8

Dear Lord, the bank in Prague has to be one of the least secure places in history. I have to be actively trying not to be robbing it when just exploring the city. I'm also playing Deus Ex.

I kinda feel like it also depends on how old you are when playing it. The game's very clearly targeted towards younger teenage demographic and I think it works for it, but the moment you start caring about such nonsense as fleshed-out worldbuilding, well... It falls apart. I think Final Fantasy IX aged a lot better, throwing a lot of the angst away and trying to be much more of a fairy tale, which happens to work significantly better for the fantastical worlds Square Enix creates.

Let's not pretend "Good guy turned bad" was invented by Blizzard :-P All of their stories are filled with tropes. Clinging to tired cliches was always Blizzard's MO.

... Damn. ... ... Damn. ... ... ... Damn. That metallic thing over there is a proximity mine I've left on her wall. I'll just... Close the door and leave it hanging. Anyway - Eidos Montreal, you're not even trying to be subtle here.

I suppose Prague's administration is trying to solve the issues with cleanliness the same way I did in Cities: Skylines - throw money at it and hope it'll get better. Anyway, at least the trash bins go well with the game's theme, there's a clear divide between the smaller, blue trash bin and the African European trash bin. Edit: Wait a minute, isn't calling it "Blue" racist? Should that be "Asphyxiated European" instead?

All right, I got a good deal on Mankind Divided so I thought "The heck not?" and I'm getting into the bloody thing. Writing is... I would like to see a making of video because I'd swear dialogues were written by monkeys running up and down across keyboard with occasional intersection of an actual writer who really didn't care about his job and just wanted to go home - you know, whoever wrote dialogue lines for Adam. The best moments are from the train station bombing where my thoughts essentially went along the lines of "Adam, don't help the yelling kid, he's probably fine. Adam, don't... Ah, whatever, there's actually a woman buried there. Oh look, she lost consciousness, you should probably use your superhuman strength to get her out of... No? Oh okay, you won't. You'll just ... Put on your sunglasses. Right, moving swiftly on." On the flipside, various e-books, emails and generally stuff that's not dialogue is really cool and adds a lot to the world, if you're willing to buy into the whole "Augumented people are the suppressed minority" theme, which is rather weird in and of itself (the whole racism analogy is so in your face it's crazy, it's quite apparent that it's there to try and raise controversy as opposed to advancing narrative in any meaningful manner.) Speaking of worldbuilding - Prague is gorgeous. One of the most beautiful, if not the most beautiful, quest hub I've ever seen in a game, and the amount of stuff you can explore in there is unreal. Some of it are reused rooms or even entire flats with different furnishings, but that's actually how many of these flats were built so that's fine I suppose. One thing I found tho is that people in Prague are obsessed with two things: booze and trash bins. We already covered the sheer variety of booze in the game, but the trash bins... Adam's apartment alone contains 3 of them, and it's like 4 rooms large. Every single apartment has at least 2-3 trash bins in it for some bizarre reason, and some office desks come as an asset bundle with a desk that has a regular trash bin and a recycling trash bin beneath itself. I mean... Look at it, they don't even have space for legs down there, but at least offices are clean, right? More like trash... Bin... Ity Divided, am I right? Am I ... Nevermind. Oh right, UI - what made me really happy is that I can either disable entire UI or make it contextual. Bye-bye irritating cheat-o-map, I'm not gonna miss you. Well aside from the crouch indicator. It's essential for the crouch indicator to always be there when I stand up or crouch.

This came out fairly recently, English version of it anyway. Can't vouch for English writing as I'm playing it in Czech (and even that's not too great) but it's finally a big chunk of Fallout after Fallout 2 released. Masochistic tendencies are the best kinds of tendencies.

Indeed. In Dishonored, I froze time with a power which allows me to do so and moved behind a guard who stood at the edge of a small cliff. I have cut his throat, placed a mine on his back and nudged his body to fall off. When his friends beneath the cliff approach his body to find out what happened, they got sliced in pieces with said mine. It's true that Dishonored came out quite a bit after Thief, and it certainly shows. This example is also why do I prefer more, less polished mechanics to overabundance of focus - they let you come up with a lot more creative solutions to individual problems than tightly focused games, often in ways that developers didn't even quite intend. I would definitely say that Human Revolution has a lot more problems, gameplay-wise, than Dishonored ever did. The cover-based stealth mechanics are especially jarring, true, and I would also agree that at times, it doesn't feel particularly convincing - for more reasons than just gameplay. It's also often lacking in department of mechanical interactions I've been praising in Dishonored just a few paragraphs above. You should probably take my points with a grain of salt tho - for me, Dishonored is a game I've been waiting for ... Basically ever since I played Thief and Deus Ex. With that said, and this also touches upon your other points somewhat, if a game is specifically designed to gratify player and make him feel "cool" as it were, then I'd say that bending its design in such a way that player does feel gratified would be achieving the goals it has set out and is pretty good design as a consequence. You're describing how empowerment works, but it's really a description of how it works for you, specifically.

You also have to suspend your disbelief fairly significantly to get immersed in stealth play when it comes to Thief games. It's very apparent that they were as much tech demonstrations as they were games, with their individual aspects overblown way out of proportion to showcase the engine - shadows being these black holes which captured all light and sight of guards, bizarre footwear of the protagonist which made certain floors explode with sound regardless of how carefully he was moving. Add to that guard AI which was not really stellar because you were supposed to avoid them, not get sighted and ... Well, you get Thief. Don't get me wrong, the games are excellent, but let's not pretend they were perfect. Yes, Dishonored definitely does empower the player, there's no doubt about it. It's worth keeping in mind that this is a design goal so it's pretty difficult to list it as an objective disadvantage - as I said, these games are not Thief because they're not attempting to be Thief in the first place. As for the rest of your post - I disagree strongly that this means design of these games is inconsistent. Gunplay/Swordplay transitions smoothly into stealth into calmer sections without really seeing any seams and given the fact they're designed to empower player, these options also make sense. However, it definitely muddies up design, there's no doubt about it. As a rule of thumb, the more features you stuff into a game, the less complex the individual features are going to get. If all you want out of a game is sneaking around levels and not doing anything else, Thief is very likely going to be the game for you as that is its sole focus. That's just not quite enough for me tho, I want more options at my disposal, even if those individual options are slightly less fleshed out, mostly because they lead to some great mechanical interactions (read: Emergent gameplay). I do love Elder Scrolls games after all, and those are a prime example of games with extreme lack of focus.

To be fair, neither of those two games really tried to do Thief-like gameplay per se - Dishonored removes emphasis on shadows and instead focuses on line of sight, which in turn means a lot brighter levels (and system which actually makes sense as opposed to Thief's "That guard won't notice me crouching in this shadow right in front of him"). Both Dishonored and Deus Ex also seek to empower the player as opposed to make him feel helpless, while also adding a lot more feasible options to any given situation outside of 'merely' sneaking past everybody. These decisions significantly affect level design and pace of these games while not necessarily reducing complexity (well I'd say level design in Human Revolution is a fair bit weaker than what we can see in Thief games, but not in Dishonored. Dishonored has some amazing level design at display.) So no, neither Dishonored nor new Deus Ex games are particularly good at being Thief, but that's mostly because they don't really intend to. When it comes to recapturing Thief not being rocket science, you might want to take a look at The Dark Mod (which is standalone and no longer really a mod) which mechanically recaptures Thief games perfectly while offering a healthy community of mapmakers producing some excellent levels, albeit most don't even come close to quality of Thief's levels. It's two very different stealth games emphasizing very different elements. Hitman is mostly focused on infiltration and blending in to achieve a singular goal whereas Thief games focus on exploring large levels, giving player goals which are relatively unfocused and just letting him do whatever in order to achieve them (there's a big difference between "Kill X" in Hitman and "Find X money" in Thief.) So... Don't go in expecting Hitman - in fact, you can get a fair idea about what to expect if you do play Dark Mod I have linked above. The games are slow and very elaborate while also being extremely atmospheric. Oh and they have extremely intriguing worlds, especially Thief 2, which is the game I'd suggest you get as it is, in my opinion, the peak of the series.

Frank Klepacki's still got it. Both 8-bit Armies and 8-bit Hordes are a ton of fun, going back to relatively simple RTS games like Red Alert and Command and Conquer, condensed into a package of bite-sized fun. I'm enjoying campaigns of these games far more than I thought I would (especially for the Guardians faction of Armies and both factions of Hordes where mission design got somewhat improved.) Thank G... Eidos Enix for that.

Wouldn't it be significantly more expensive for people to do that regularly? One of the arguments my console-playing friends have over PC is that they don't have money to drop on regular system upgrades, but most of my PC is like 6 years old now, I just upgraded RAM and got a new GPU and HDD (admittedly, I spent way more money on that GPU than I should have, but hey. Thankfully, Intel CPUs last bloody ages, even when OCd) and the system is still reasonably relevant.

Does it still do the thing where you'd get more XP for hacking a terminal than for finding a password for it?

I would click the "like" button, aluminiumtrioxid, but there's an extremely slim chance a person working at EA might see that like and even slimmer chance still that said person would interpret it as me liking the trailer, so uh... I won't.

6 months after DA: I release I know, but I still believe Witcher 3 pretty much killed any longevity that game had. Personally, I find those games very similar in just about every aspect, except for W3 actually being ... Well, good.

All right, bought Halcion 6 and after playing it for 1,5 hours, I have subsequently refunded Halcion 6. It might get seriously brilliant later down the line, but I spent most of the time in combat which feels somewhat limited to me. It's not a bad game by any means and still intrigues me to some extent, but it just doesn't feel worth 17 EUR. That said, I'll probably grab it again on sale.

I actually liked Origins a bit more than City - I suppose that's mostly because I'm a sucker for Origin stories and it used some less popular Batbaddies. Knight remains my favourite of the series tho.