Fenixp

Yeah, most of that video is spot-on. What's even the point of creating an open world if you then don't bother with making sure it feels like an actual place?

US only, apparently

I had the same worries about replaying TW3, but then I kinda figured that I wanted to replay it at some point anyway, and the content TW3 does offer tends to generally be of higher quality than most other stuff I could play, so I ended up opting going for it regardless. I mean, I could spend those 100 hours with something inferior - but why? There is a whole bunch of quests I'd like to see resoved differently, so that's quite a bit of another drive for me.

Story sucks, but at least when it comes to Dishonored 2 itself, it contains some of the best level design I've ever seen in a videogame. That has to account for something, eh?

There, finished the Keira quest chain. After running about a whole lot and doing a bunch of side-quests, I'm starting the Bloody Baron one. It's quite insane how much content there is in TW3, and most of it's good as well. Itemization and levelling in TW3 are both horrible, so I can't say I blame you. Personally, I think the game would be worse without them, as poor as they are - but it's quite apparent why would one want to skip all of that stuff.

Alien: Isolation is like 20 hours long, and excellent. I'd argue that it's a lot longer than it should be, but hey, that stuff's subjective Edit: I mean, I third Prey as an excellent game, but it's not much of a horror

Well, duh. The whole point of genre labels is to provide a superficial description of intent. Where genre labels actually matter is for marketing, stores, databases, those kinds of things. At the point of you actually playing or discussing a game, as you have pointed out yourself, genres are entirely meaningless as, at that point, you've made up your mind on whether you're interested or not based on a much wider spectrum of qualifiers than just a label slapped on the box. We can do a pissing contest on whether RDR2 is an RPG or not, but nobody else will really give a rat's arse about it and they'll just classify it as whatever Rockstar classifies it as. Of course, when a massive shift in a formula happens, genres get changed or new ones get created - but neither TW3 nor RDR2 is that.

It's not exactly rocket science, the difference is that TW3 has been built and marketed from the grounds up as an RPG, where even small side quests get multiple, diametrically different resolutions. RDR2 has not. With sufficient mental gymnastics, you can make anything into RPG really - important thing is whether the game was designed as one or not.

Carrying on with Witchering Threeing. I bloody love the world design at display here. Passing through villages which have their own fields, orchards or producing goods for nearby area. Big, stone castle in the middle of all of this, with a man of power seated there. Even the big, individual areas being divided into nice chunks that all have their own look and feel - be it thick forests, a ship graveyard showing us where a rather sizable naval battle happened fairly recently (and coast occupied by pirate outposts), that kind of stuff. Majority of that not really connected to any major quest lines, it's all just ... There for the player to explore. I even find myself enjoying the combat system - it no longer feels like Dark Souls wannabe like TW2 and it seems to try and do its own thing. You have to react quickly, choose appropriate potions and bombs to maximize your efficiency against bosses (and oils I guess, but the oils may as well get auto-applied). It's suspenseful, it's lively, and it's varied and various monster types tend to get their own unique behaviors and twists to vary things up.

Yeah, the conver system in Deus Ex was pretty terrible. Constantly switching from FPP to TPP is just... Jarring and immersion-breaking. There is a cover systems I want all FPS games to have tho, the one contained in Crysis 2 or Far Cry 3 - when you look at a corner you're standing next to or and edge you're ducked below and hold down aim down sights button, the character would peek from behind the cover - you'd then be able to control how much you want to peek (thus how voulnerable you become). It's rather difficult to describe to a person who's not seen it in action. ... Oh, there's a video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jiusboSJgUc

4 was cool, for entirely different set of reasons than 1 was cool. 7 was excellent, for many similar reasons that 1 was cool (and yes, it shifted quite a bit from 'just shooting stuff' as well)

I played Resi 0 after going through Resi 1 (because release order and all) and found Resi 1 to be this tightly designed, tense and exceptionally fun game that I could replay quite a few times. Then I played Resi 0 and thought... Meh.

It's difficult to ignore something that constantly takes up a percentage of screen estate, which is the whole point of a customizeable UI. ... Which, in turn, is half the point of this discussion. Not to mention the initial screenshot also contains in-world quest marker, which are literally impossible to not see. I mean, I'm all for player-driven gameplay and difficulty, it's part of the reason why I enjoyed camping supplies in Pillars of Eternity. But arguing with "You can ignore it" for an in-game element that's literally designed to be as un-ignoreable as humanly possible is ... A bit silly? Edit: And if the point of the argument is "Nobody forces you to follow the compass", well... That's only true when your game is designed in such a way that you don't need it, isn't it? Because the moment it's not, you do have to follow it to find objectives.

Right? Rockstar found their monetization model, so now they're gonna run it 'till there's a single dime left in their consumers. I mean, Lexx, you think it'll kill the MP player-base - I think the opposite. GTA Online was one of those games which was capable of snatching a massive player base of people who are not core gamers. People like that don't tend to actually know what kind of monetization's standard in games - so they'll either ignore it, or spend cash. And Rockstar'll get rich. It's exploitative af, but I'm not gonna lie - I sure would like to be on the receiving end of just a tiny share of that cash.

Obviously, if devs come up with a novel way of doing navigation, kudos to them! I'm all for that. Thing is, Obsidian never was particularly innovative, and if 'lazy world design' is part of your creative vision, then... Oh boy. So do rebindable keys, graphical options, difficulty options and any other configuration. Out of all of that, UI customization's one of the cheapest points. If you're forced to skimp on that kind of stuff due to financial constraints, your game isn't exactly in a great place either.

The GPS comparison is actually a fairly apt one for me. While I don't drag paper maps around on me, I only use GPS navigation when my goal is to get from point A to point B as efficiently as possible - in other words, when the road is the inconvenient bit which takes time and energy away from me between my current position and my goal. On the other hand, when I go hiking, I try not use navigation - and when I do, it's when I'm feeling utterly lost, just so that I have a fast way of seeing where exactly am I. And precisely, that's because I'm hiking much more for the road than for the destination. When designers feel like they positively have to force a navigation-like tool on the player to get from point A to point B, it's very much forcing the former mindset. It's the point where I have to ask whether opting for an open world was a good choice since the game's clearly trying to persuade the player that the destination's much more important than the road to it - and if it is so, opting for a semi-linear hub-based structure would probably have been a better idea than offering an open world without sufficient amount of thought put into it, just because it's the thing to do nowadays. On the other hand, when designers create an interesting open world that's fun to explore, I'd dare to say most players won't even mind being lost every now and again, because that just feeds into the sense of exploration and adventure. And navigating through a well-thought out world where you always know where you are by landmarks and general feel of the area is such a joy and can give a game so much sense of place. And the best part is - if players want to take out their phones, follow a dot and fall into a river every now and again, it's just so easy to implement. But even those will look up from the phone at some point and appreciate the additional design which went into the open world.

I'm not sure it bears repeating since it got said like twenty times throughout the thread, but the request is not to remove quest markers. They're trivial to implement and there's no reason not have them in the game. Problem is, quest markers are trivial to implement like god mode to get through tough challenges would be trivial to implement - it's easy, it's convenient, but that doesn't make it a particularly good or engaging mechanic and if your game is based around it, it'll suffer as a consequence.

Let me preface the reply by saying that, in ideal world, having NPCs and quest descriptions detailed enough to be able to play the game with compass/minimap disabled is the ideal solution. It lends more credibility to the writing (usually, when somebody wants you to go somewhere, he'll actuyally tell you where that is) and makes the world building more consistent. In fact, in ideal world, an in-game mechanic replacing need for a compass entirely would be implemented - sadly, I've only ever seen something like that in Outcast, where you could ask NPCs "Where is {name of location/person}" and they would get up and point in the direction you needed to go. Then there's Far Cry 2 which would merely highlight road signs which lead in the direction of your objective. Both solutions were damned clever and I'm sure they could be expanded upon with modern tech, instead of the lazy "slap a marker on the screen" solution. However... The main difference between emergent gameplay and writing which doesn't facilitate play without quest markers is the parts of development process which need to be coordinated well. If you're building a systems-driven game, glaring bugs will become obvious fairly quickly and development of mechanics tends to be interconnected enough to make that possible (albeit still damned difficult) However, to make NPCs describe quests properly for player to be able to navigate by their descriptions means coordinating: - Level designers - Quest designers - Writers and, in case of last minute changes, you can add voice actors to the list. And, sadly, writing and level design aren't married in the same way as mechanics are, so if writer writes a thing and level designer then changes everything around and forgets to inform the writers / writers don't care anymore, you'll be informing player of things that are no longer true. God forbid that dialogue is already voiced. Now, I still think that when you do something, you should do it properly and all the reasoning I gave isn't much more than excuses from proper planning and work ethic. Sadly, we do live in the real world, and software development projects with insane milestones are especially prone to failures in the whole 'planning' bit. In other words, I want to play another game like Morrowind where navigation was a big part of the appeal, but I can definitely see why would development companies want to avoid this. Edit: Just to re-iterate, I also think that the lazy clutch of quest markers needs to be obliterated, sooner than later. Nintendo has realized this with their Zelda and designed it without a need for quest markers (they can be turned off and the game comfortably played without them). Assassin's Creed Oddyssey apparently allows to play with only having vague directions as opposed to knowing precisely where an objective is. Red Dead Redemption 2 is supposed to compensate for disabled minimap by more detailed descriptions etc. Prey's entirely designed to be playable without quest markers - and then makes disabling them cumbersome, but ... Eh. It seems that developers are slowly realizing how intrinsically detrimental compasses / minimaps are to gameplay. It seems designers are sick of creating these vast, detailed open worlds which will then be reduced to mere tunnels by slapping a direction arrow in. Let's hope development continues in this direction and Obsidian surprises us with their own, clever and novel, solution.

Well, there's quest compass/minimap and then there's map markers. I think the former is much more evil than the latter. Personally, my biggest gripe with objective markers on a compass/minimap are with creating a situation where your attention gets drawn to a UI element on your screen, which is, unsurprisingly, not particularly interesting - but you feel the urge to watch it purely so that you don't get lost on the way. Make that optional, but still use markers on the in-game "big screen" map and suddenly, your attention doesn't get drawn by something that's constantly present on the screen. You look about more. You're more incentivized to get off the beaten path and explore. In fact, in Witcher 3 where I absolutely had the issue where I felt like I've constantly had to watch the minimap in order to not miss some obscure side-path, all that was needed to achieve this effect was downloading a mod which would display HUD based on context. I made minimap with objective markers only display when I was using Witcher Senses and suddenly... Exploration! Beautiful world! No tunnel vision! I get lost, I press a button. Minimap fades away after a few seconds and I'm again delegated to watching environment and navigating from memory. Game suddenly feels a lot more natural.

You don't have to be, Switch managed to grow into something of an Indie machine. Off the top of my head, there's Switch version of Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime, Biding of Isaac (yes, with local coop), both Overcooked games, Shovel Knight (... with local co-op, I think) - whole bunch of stuff, really. If you pay the online sub, there's also a bunch of NES classics with local co-op availible to you (and cloud saves - which is a big WTF, but ... Yeah.) Of course, I also realize you're not much of a fan of subscription services or DRM in general, so your argumentation against getting one of those makes a lot of sense.

Taken a look at MTA: Software Development Fundamentals (this right?) and good, you're doing the 'Learn' step correctly. I can't really recommend any books at this point as I don't really remember the stuff I've read myself on the subject (and I imagine a bunch of that stuff'll be outdated at this point), but to answer your questions, you'll want to look into software architecture as a general topic. Again, not something you can easily sum up in a forum post. And yes, I wouldn't know where to start nowadays either, so if you do any software development courses, ask your lecturers - they'll probably have a better idea than I do. However, before you begin doing anything, my general advice is: Take a piece of paper or open a word document and start writing. Use full sentences. Good, ol' fashioned prose never harmed anyone, unless it fell on their heads. First of all, write down your goals. What exactly is it that you want to achieve. Then break it down into individual components. Then break that down. Get down and dirty with any concept you're working on - like, there's ghosts in that Pacman game, how do I get them to move about? That sort of thing. You can even start drawing flowcharts if that helps you in this stage, for anything that seems just a wee bit more complex. Answer even questions that you'd wave away as "trivial". This sort of approach will force you to sit down and think about every individual aspect of your game while also keeping the big picture in mind. While doing this, feel free to take notes how exactly is it that you'll achieve these little things technologically. Once you start coding, make sure you have a general gist of what is it that you want to do prepared. When you hit an unknown, don't start trying random solutions - stop, take a break, sit down and re-analyze. And the last advice: If you can, do the hard thing. If you can't get a piece of code to work, delete it entirely and re-write it, try to look at the problem from a different angle (funny story: when I started learning to program videogames, in C++ back then, I wrote dozens of lines of code that I couldn't get to work properly when I realized what I'm writing is are sine and cosine functions, which naturally already existed in math libraries). Shortcuts only lead to headaches later down the line. Divide your code up. When you're using copy-paste to duplicate your own code, you're doing it wrong. Those kinds of things. I do realize that I didn't exactly answer your questions, but your questions come from a person who can't swim and jumped into the water to learn. Forget about scripts and landscape for the moment, write everything down and solutions / necessary order will start surfacing on their own.

Just get a Switch. Or connect your PC to your TV with an HDMI cable and get a bunch of wireless controllers. I don't drink beer so that may be the killing factor, but it usually takes us a grand total of 15 minutes to find, download and start playing a couch co-op/competitive game with no preparation.

Hello, you're using simple questions, but an answer to those questions is rather complex and it's going to very much vary from company to company. See... Company A) Harry & Greg Games Harry just managed to finish writing a piece of code which allows for 10 000 AI actors to navigate without slowing the game to a crawl. Harry: "Yo, Greg, I did the thing with the AI. Pull the newest version of the code an run those insane prototypes of yours against it, see if it all works properly." Greg: "Thank you, Harry, you're brilliant!" Company B) Awesome Games Incorporated The AI department manager has received an e-mail that the ticket for allowing up to 10 000 AI actors to function simultaneously has just been marked as resolved by Pawn Coder 156, his code reviewed by Senior Pawn 5. He therefore passes the ticket on to his superior, who will give it to QA to see if previously unsatisfactory tests run properly now. Company A) Harry & Greg Games Harry: "Yo, I uploaded more awesome code to git!" Greg: "And I uploaded the assets we talked about to google drive!" *And there was much rejoicing* Company B) Awesome Games Incorporated The networking department manager gives a satisfied smile as he sees all the work hosted on company's private servers. The solid company's back-up policy gives him the assurance he needs to know that the licensed work will keep on making money for the years to come. The rack holding a git server winks at him merrily. Company A) Harry & Greg Games Greg: "Yo, harry, your engine's broken, can you fix it?" Harry: "God damnit Greg, why do I do ALL the programming around here!?" Greg: "I'm an artist man, I don't even know how to write letters!" Company B) Awesome Games Incorporated Manager Sally: "Hello, Martin. Could we borrow Senior Pawn 7? I hear he has a lot of experience in C++ optimization and we could use some tweaks to our engine, the C++ programmers who have the task assigned can't figure anything out anymore so we need a fresh outlook." Manager Martin: "Of course, Sally. Would you be so kind as to fill out the Senior Pawn Leasing Form and run it past accounting so that his work is all in order?" None. Start learning, start coding, see where it takes you. Don't worry about organizational structure until you actually start having an organization to be structured. And if your organization starts having more than a few people and you notice issues with organizing, you may either approach someone who has experience leading larger organizations in general or - just start learning. There are management schools and courses, both around you (probably) and online. Because when you are at a point of having people to manage, there are no easy answers you could simply find on discussion boards. Edit: Incidentally, do start by creating a simple game like space invaders from start to finish, intro to end credits. Don't skimp on anything - do your menu, do your leaderboards (bonus points if they're hosted online), create your settings menu with resolution options and rebindable keys, make the credits roll and appropriate music play while they do so. Draw your invaders and your tanks, get them into the game and manipulate them through the game world. Make the appropriate sounds play at the appropriate times. When you get stuck and don't know how to solve an issue, do partake in online development communities like Unity forums or Game Development Stack Exchange. Communicate. Search. Learn. When you successfully finish all of these things and your space invaders game does everything one would expect it to do, you'll suddenly understand how all the pieces fit together so much better than any amount of words could explain.

Well, TW3 is effectively a collection of short stories framed in a larger narrative, so I'd assume most people are going to remember the stories as opposed to the locations they took place in. But yeah, Skellige Isles are certainly memorable for doing the Nordic Legends damn right. Still, ironically, the tipping point that drove me to replaying the long-ass TW3 weren't the stories, altho I wanted to replay it for those for the longest time, but remembering riding along mountaintops into a small village at the mountain's base, built into the ascending slope. And of an old ruin built next to a twin waterfall, guarding some old Witcher schematics or some such, so I'm paying extra attention to the world design this time around (having a MOD which semi-permanently disables majority of HUD really helps there) Blood and Wine actually really reminded me of White Orchard in its design, polishing up and perfecting the 'small chunk of land' thing quite neatly. It was a well-rounded expansion, essentially more of the same when it came to the base game - but yeah, the ending sequence was ... Eh. Everything else to it was great tho.