Fenixp

At first I thought the item on the first screen said "Short automatic pipe"

It doesn't, you should have just bought the original. The sequels are not as good, which is a shame, because it seems like Painkiller was more of a lucky accident. Altho, People can Fly did move on to develop Bulletstorm, which is ... Noteworthy at least. If you want an oldschool FPS which is chock-full of honest fun, get the new Shadow Warrior. It's exceptional, tightly designed, fast and just all around good fun. Also, it's got a quad-barreled shotgun.

It's not a bad design in a game which is designed around party play as opposed to solo play. Paralysis of some party members introduces new challenges you need to overcome. You're right that it would be bad design in a character action game, but Pillars of Eternity is not that.

ARE YOU NOT ENTERTAINED!?

The main issue is that the debate didn't actually have a unified ideology. For a while I've been watching how the 'manifesto' or whatever developed - I was waiting when will quality of grocery lists in the gaming industry be added. *sigh*, I'm sorry for digressing, I don't want to turn this into GG/Anti-GG debate, personally I want to stay as far away as possible from both sides of the conflict, it's quite frankly ridiculous.

Oh please, the whole 'gamergate' ordeal which popularized the term so much was entirely based around being outraged about outrage - what else could you expect of a 'movement' which rose out of an ex-boyfriend of a chick saying she cheated on him with reporters, oh no! And it's a shame too, because if the whole thing was actually focused on journalism as opposed to raging on the internet, it could actually tackle the real issues we have in a meaningful and intelligent fashion. As it stands, journalists will disclose more information for a while, people will calm down, forget, and everything will be back to how it's always been. 'Gamergate' my ass...

So... democracy gave Iraq a sepia tone effect? Democracy's insufferable ever since it found instagram.

They're adding a lot of stuff and changing a lot about the game. The 3.0 release is going to be a disaster again, isn't it?

Oh, so in other words, you have not noticed any of the nuance with which the tutorial area has been made. Oh and if you're trying to say that level design in Dark Souls is primitive by comparing it to Doom, you obviously have absolutely no clue about quality of level design in Doom either, but I digress. All right then, let's take a crack on how well do I remember the game: - You start out in prison and the game sets the tone of desperate survival straight off the bat. The first thing you get is a corpse which you have to Pillage (dunno if it's just bad translation or deliberate choice on the word, but it works damn well as 'pillage' suggests a violent act) for a key to open prison. Here you get basic controls down: How to move, how to pick things up, how to use environmental objects. We're in the first room which has just a few objects in it and all of those objects already serve a purpose and work towards some sort of end, either in teaching player to play the game or in setting the game's tone. - After leaving the cell, you are released into a narrow passage with some undead creatures who don't defend themselves. Using notes which are thrown randomly on the ground, the game is teaching you 2 things: 1) How to play itself since they contain tutorial messages, in this case, how to attack the undead 2) To notice the notes. These messages could have easily been displayed on the screen, but they're not. Why? Because the notes are an important part of communication between players, which plays an important role in all Souls games. In the very same hallway, you are able to see the creature you are going to fight later on behind bars where it can't harm you, with a corpse thrown trough the bars to suggest the monster is powerful. Dark Souls is big on this whole foreshadowing thing, and it'll constantly remind you that there's somewhere you have not been yet (room with the monster), challenges you have not managed to overcome (monster itself) All of that information, and even more, is tightly packed into a single hallway. - At the end of the hallway, you are presented with a pond that you need to go trough, which the game uses to showcase how is movement of your character changed by passing trough liquid, and then there's a ladder which... Well, shows you how to climb ladders, obviously. One of the most important aspects of Dark Souls is that it's trying to be as fair as humanly possible - by showcasing you how does your character move in water, you are ensuring that later on, player doesn't run into a situation in which he'd need to fight a monster in water without knowing how does it function. Many of these tools used to teach player how to play are created in order for player to not even notice them, which is why *some* people will have trouble identifying them - When you climb up the ladder, you are very clearly presented with your goal - you see a massive door framed by sunlight above it, two statues to the sides and bonfire in front of it. This area serves the purpose of showing you that you may interact with bonfires (and when you inevitably die, how do bonfires actually function) and to lure you into trying to find out what's behind the bloody door. You can notice more than just that while you're at it - desolate state of the place you're in and it's the first time player comes 'outside'. - After opening the door and going forward for a bit, the monster which has been promised to you a few moments ago makes an appearance. For players who were not prepared for the encounter, this inevitably means the second part of bonfire tutorial - after you're killed and appear next to it. This is probably the only moment of Dark Souls which is deliberately unfair, designers want to kill you to show you how do checkpoints and respawning work in this game. Second time you enter the area, knowing you won't beat the boss (you actually can by the way, but most new players don't), you look around the place. What's the second most apparent thing you see? A torch, which is glowing and has a different color to most other things you can see in this room. And videogame players are like moths - they will immediately run towards the light when they're unsure. And notice an opening and run from the boss. I believe that here, the game teaches you that retreating is (almost) always an option, and that analyzing situation beyond just "baddie, kill" will inevitably help you. - Passing trough the door, you encounter another hallway, and the hallway again has a point. It's a narrow hallway and at the end of it is an archer - dodging his arrows in such a narrow environment is difficult, so he will hit you a few times before you notice an opening to the left. In the opening, there's a shield on corpse. The game lets you do quick maths and tells you "Oh yeah, you can block using left button" Organically you figure out "Oh, arrows I can't avoid and a shield, I know what I'm supposed to do here!" and do it. In this text, I've been trough the first 5 or so relatively small rooms in the game. All of them have a point, all of them serve a purpose, all of them work far beyond "Go and kill". And while From software is this efficient at tutoring the player without player even knowing about it, they're even better at designing the 'proper' game. The entire experience of Dark Souls is about learning, about patience and smart approach to situations. If you honestly believe that it's all about: "i put in monsters, big monsters, here and there, put in some stuff...there you go, a game..." Well, I'm glad my post served to show you how incredibly wrong you are ;-) (and yes, I do realize I'm probably just wasting time with a troll here, but I enjoy writing up long blocks of texts) Actually, here, have some bits in an easy to digest form on Mario, it's used as a good example on quite a few occasions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZH2wGpEZVgE&ab_channel=ExtraCredits (yeah, I'm just running aroud the boards, shilling for extra credits. What can I say, they have a lot of material in an easy to digest format good for use on public boards.)

Oh my god how can you even compare fairly open, maze-like Doom level design to intricate web of linear paths of Dark Souls? One is cut into individual levels while the other one ... Well, isn't for starters. One's using free saving system, the other one isn't. One's about reflexes and resource management, the other one is about patience and risk and reward. All of these things heavily influence level design. Don't get me wrong, I'm not attacking your personality here, but with every sentence you write, it's more and more clear you have absolutely no idea what are you talking about. Please, just... Study up on the subject. Have you even played Dark Souls? And if so, what can you tell me about level design of the tutorial if you feel like you're competent enough to speak on the subject?

Well you're a game design expert again. First of all, it's not the same "Since Dark Souls" - Dark Souls is predated by Demon's Souls, and From software worked on a bunch of similar games before, a niché nobody else can quite develop. Second, you forget about the incredibly complex net of level design that Dark Souls is so widely praised for. You obviously don't understand the complexities of level and encounter design, of how to reward player, how to lure him and how to keep him tense. There's been pages upon pages written on the subject and yet, the moment lead designer of Dark Souls went on to work on Bloodborne, they ****ed a lot of this up in Dark Souls 2. Designing a game like this is an art. There's quite a clever quote applicable on you, Qistina - "The more I learn, the more I realize how much I don't know." You have not even learned basics of game design so you're under the impression you know everything so I'd suggest actually going out of your way to at least learn those basics if you want to appreciate just how incredibly complex the issue is. Every ledge, every bridge, every enemy, weapon, piece of armor, every single object needs to be placed into the game world with a purpose and it took From software dozens of games to learn the level of game design they're at now to get all of these more or less right (*cough* Blighttown *Cough* Altho I would not put it past them to just want to troll players)

Yeah I hated Gothic games, the amount of gating there was ridiculous - it sort of kind of worked in the first game as it was a prison colony, but Gothic 2 fell apart due to presenting a living world completely under siege by critters. Don't get me wrong, I also dislike the way Oblivion did things, scaling the entire world to your level. Morrowind's worldbuilding is probably my favorite, followed by Skyrim - they initially allow you to go wherever you want when it comes to main towns and cities, but sticking your nose into a difficult dungeons will get you killed quite easily. I find this way of building a world to give me a lot more reasons to actually replay a game. And yes, modern game studios indeed do need to stop with the bloody open world craze in general, it's insane.

Well I didn't like combat in Baldur's Gate either, but at least it didn't take ages whilst trying to show off all the fancy animations and sound effects.

I played Dragon Age: Origins on medium on PC! ... And it was bad. Click Wizard no.1, summon devastating AoE spell. Click Wizard no.2, summon devastating AoE spell. Take chokepoint in order for enemies not escaping devastating AoE spells. Go to the next room. Oh look, precisely the same enemies for 100th time in a dungeon which keeps giving you the same encounter over and over! Cool, click Wizard no.1 ... I hated the combat in DaO: O so badly that eventually I lowered difficulty to easy in order to get it over with.

It is crap, but it's also a tiny portion of the map. Look at this picture, it actually says a lot. The disjointed bits are only present in DC. It also quite nicely shows how different are the two maps in 'scale' and how badly New Vegas maps railroads you, one of my big complaints about it (might as well draw a red line between starting location and Vegas as well, it requires serious metagaming to get trough. I'm a sucker for freedom of movement.)

You're right, I'd have to elaborate to actually get my point across. It's just for a bit more writing/reading than I was willing to do up to this point, so if you want, I can write a small essay here - and it'll be fun and relatively well written, I promise! But for that somebody would be willing to listen, so if any of you want me to put in the effort, I gladly will. Otherwise, well, let's agree to disagree :D Let's just say that Extra Credits are not the only people in the field of game design theory who consider world design of F3 superior, and there's a list of good reasons for that, but at the end of the day, there's no accounting for taste.

Malcador, do you know of Lethis?

They try to shovel stuff into your face because, from world design perspective, it's the superior way of doing things when developing a game for wide audience, which is precisely what Bethesda does - and that would bring us back to Extra Credits video which is made by people who concern themselves by design decisions which work universally as opposed to those that work on niche audiences. Now I'm not necessarily trying to prove that 'everything you say is wrong', I absolutely believe that you prefer the way New Vegas handles its world design. Thing is... Let's put it this way, I can not visualize a single location from New Vegas. I remember them by their factions, I remember them by their function, I have no clue how did they even look like. I played F3 on release, and when I close my eyes I can still see what you saw after leaving the vault, I can see the bomb-based city, the city inside the crashed ship, the ruins of Washington. I have played New Vegas about 2 years ago and I played it for a lot longer than F3 and come out empty. In Fallout 3, the art style was a lot more profiled, locations a lot more interesting and fun to explore, the world was, quite simply, designed better to engage the player and keep him entertained. Since that's sort of what I'm looking for in most of my games, I'm absolutely going to call that 'better world design'. The world just worked, all by itself, whereas world in New Vegas was purely utilitarian, designed to convey the general message that you're walking the wasteland and here's where people live and that's about it. And there's nothing wrong with that per se - but when you tear it from context of the game's writing, it falls apart. World from Fallout 3 does not. Also, I hate fast travel :-P

Yeah I know the map in F3 is smaller, but that hardly matters in imaginary game units of distance. As I said, it's an approach which is weird to anybody not familiar with Bethesda's way of doing things, and the reason they have designed the map in this fashion is because otherwise, vast majority of the map would be empty desert, which New Vegas just proves. And... Well, empty desert is not particularly engaging.

Thing is that the world in New Vegas is not connected and coherent trough world design itself, it does so via writing, which is so infinitely superior to Fallout 3 that yes, at the end of the day, game world as presented in New Vegas feels more real and alive. There's also a difference in how Fallout 3 and New Vegas present themselves - New Vegas is a very localized map, it's basically New Vegas and near surroundings. Fallout 3 is trying to present a much larger area, but with typically Bethesdaistic compression - they always create massive worlds where everything is strangely far too close together, and if you're not used to this design approach, it can feel extremely weird.

I don't even know such an episode of Extra Credits exists :-P Still, I absolutely believe F3 has much better world building than New Vegas. Fallout 3 manages to construct an amazing world in spite of its writing - you know, directly trough gameplay, exploration, environmental storytelling. Take away the friendly NPCs and quests from both F3 and NV. What you are left with in NV is a bunch of disjointed locations which might be cool by themselves, but aren't all that much fun to find and explore. The game's world is sadly not very coherent. Fallout 3, on the other hand, remains a functional game. In fact that was the first thing I criticized about New Vegas, and that's the reason why there are quite a few people who do prefer F3 to NV (I should probably say that I'm not one of them, I vastly prefer New Vegas). Bethesda has over 20 years of experience with games which are pretty much exclusively concerned with world building, they're kind of good at it. Still, saying "You disagree with me, you have no credibility any longer!" is just a tiny bit juvenile :-P

Incidentally, that was the time they started releasing crapload of paid DLC. Nah, I'm just making up conspiracies I'm sure!

If you haven't played the original Icewind Dale, I would suggest starting with that, it even has an Enhanced Edition out (which I personally wouldn't recommend playing, but I'm also a crazy evil purist). I feel like it's a bit better title overall. Nonetheless, you can't really go wrong with the second game either.

That's the point, Extra Credits is trying to give people a superficial starting point from which they can start researching a topic - my biggest beef with their videos is that they don't provide a list of sources in spite of those being fairly easy to find. I'm derailing tho.

Can I randomly switch between being an arrogant **** and a nice guy to spice things up instead? Keeping to the same profile pic is quite practical, it makes identifying a user a lot easier. Right, Cant?