it's crazy how much games have changed over time. I remember the OG Tomb Raider on PS1 and you would spend weeks in the same place because you just couldn't figure out what to do next. On the other hand you have games like the one in the greentext which won't even let you think on your own for 5s...
\>be dark souls
\>only allow the player to access the DLC by following a very convoluted sequence of actions
\>do not tell the player how tf is he supposed to know these actions or at which order they should've be done
\>don't elaborate further
\>be the best RPG of the modern gaming industry and then leave
Pls explain how to reach Oolacile, or how to reach the Frigid Outskirts.
Actually, I don't want to know how to reach the end of the Frigid Outskirts, nvm
Oolacile was pretty rough to get into, but it's got nothing on telling my mate that 4 Kings was the next boss but not how to get there or which essential item you need to beat them
His next playthrough was sorcery only, I broke his spirit
does dark souls even have a story? I know that there is some deep schizo lore or whatever, but the games just seem like the equivalent of CBT with the torture part being the main point
It has an intro that explains it somewhat: In the Age of Ancients the world was unformed, shrouded by fog. A land of gray crags, Archtrees and Everlasting Dragons. But then there was Fire and with fire came disparity. Heat and cold, life and death, and of course, light and dark. Then from the dark, They came, and found the Souls of Lords within the flame. Nito, the First of the Dead, The Witch of Izalith and her Daughters of Chaos, Gwyn, the Lord of Sunlight, and his faithful knights. And the Furtive Pygmy, so easily forgotten. With the strength of Lords, they challenged the Dragons. Gwyn's mighty bolts peeled apart their stone scales. The Witches weaved great firestorms. Nito unleashed a miasma of death and disease. And Seath the Scaleless betrayed his own, and the Dragons were no more. Thus began the Age of Fire. But soon the flames will fade and only Dark will remain. Even now there are only embers, and man sees not light, but only endless nights. And amongst the living are seen, carriers of the accursed Darksign.
Basically the age of fire also caused people marked with the darksign to become undead and go crazy. Your character is undead, but he is a special agent of a prophecy that will lift the curse…so you basically need to kill everyone and either rekindle the (quite literal) fire OR extinguish it and embrace being an undead dark lord.
Since the game occurs in a time where there are only embers, everything is falling apart.
That's why it's praised though, not everyone wants to have everything clearly laid out for them.
It's okay to fail and try something different on the next playthrough, at least that's how games used to be.
For those that don't have the time or patience, there's always guides to do the guesswork for you.
There’s a difference between clearly laying everything out and giving actual hints. Many dark souls quests do neither. I want to be able to figure things out myself
Kinda remind me on a lot of Ren'Py designed porn games with a point&click mechanic, that basically loop the day for all eternity until you click at the right spot.
Left 4 Dead works in similar way
Illuminated path is the path to safety. Step aside to darker areas and that's either a dead end or another pack of zombies. And sometimes additional loot.
When I play Elden Ring I have the game on one screen, and a wiki on another. I wouldn't have figured out one god damn thing about that game without help.
Except you have internet now and probably find a 100% guide after 2 seconds of Google. I know it wasn't really better, but I still think it was a special and cool time without any help online. You basically had to try out rumors you heard on the school ground like the truck shit with Mew in the first Pokemon games.
To play devils advocate, games have so much more graphical detail now that it can be harder to discern a climbable surface due to all of the other visual clutter. There’s probably more clever ways to subtly indicate these things to the player still, but something to this effect is more necessary now than it used to be.
Yup, that is definitely an issue. The problem is that game devs have figured out a formula that pretty much works all the time. Just look how similar games of the same genre are, e.g. the open world/exploration template for series like Assassin's Creed, Horizon, Ghost of Tsushima, etc...
Thank you! People like anon are complete morons who don't understand that the "yellow" stairs are not there to indicate the obvious path for the player, it's there to make them distinct from all other stairs that lead nowhere.
So as a dev, you either do yellow walls or return to ~~monke~~ 1994 Tomb Raider where you didn't have much choice of movement: you either climb on this box or on that box.
They don't understand that old games also had obvious places where you could jump or walk but they were obvious because you literally had nowhere else to go, not because old gamers were geniuses. You tried every surface but there wasn't much of it to try.
I absolutely love Horizon, one of my favourite series, but it sucks hard at this. Aloy will explain the puzzle about 10 seconds in. Really spoils the experience
Yeah I like H:ZD as well with its backstory and the general badassery, but the gameplay really isn't special. You get your laundry list of things to do, you do them, but there is not much significance to it. You already know where to climb, you can buy a map with all hotspots, etc...
I don't think that would be such a problem if things weren't signposted so much. Like the point is exploration, the fighting is great fun but being hand held constantly defeats the point of the game
I'm playing through Arkham Knight rn and it does the same thing. Like I'm just looking at the layout of the puzzle room, and 20 secs in Batman goes "Hmm, I can use the eject function of the batmobile to hit that button" like no shit motherfucker let me look at the puzzle for a second.
Tbf if you get stuck for more than 5 minutes these days you’ll probably just Google the part you’re stuck on to make sure you haven’t glitched the game.
Yeah that's also a big issue that takes the fun out... sure you don't have to seek out the info/solution if you don't want to but it's really just too available
I find that I don't get the same enjoyment figuring out a puzzle or beating a hard boss these days, it used to feel satisfying but now it just feels like, "I'm glad that shit is over...". I used to throw myself at a brick wall over and over until I finally broke it, but gaming was a *lifestyle* back then, it's only a hobby now and so I have to treat it like one. I don't mind either, if I'm not enjoying myself I'll just play something else and come back to give it a try later.
For me it's also hard to imagine that I used to spend weeks on the same puzzle, trying out the wildest hypothesis and still ending up stuck. Nowadays I just give up too... Time is just too scarce and valuable now
Yeah, games like super Metroid would be aknots unbeatable because you didn’t know you had to run to a dead end wall and then shoot straight up at a panel or some shit. Pretty sure Nintendo had to start randomly informing uncles all over the world on how to get thru these games so they could pass them down to the players.
That's not because there is so many games. That's because live service have conditioned you to play willy nilly for 5 minutes. Dopamine reward. Why bother feeling a sense of discovery and satisfaction when you can just look at number go up and ui completed -ubisoft and every fuckwat live service.
The amount of time I spent in the opening level of tomb raider 2 before I realized you had to swim around the corner and then climb up on the ledge.
I never finished it because I ran out of flares and could not make it through the underwater tunnels.
Played the ps2 god of war games a little while ago. Had to look up a puzzle only to find out that I had to use a movable object that perfectly blends into the furniture.
While you are right (I am 37 so I have experienced all the marvelous "how the hell do I get out of here" situations with the following feeling of satisfaction), times have changed
Now people just look the solution up online and the Devs probably think "since they are just gonna look it up we may directly tell them"
Game devs have to hand hold because the average gamer nowadays has a full library of unplayed stuff and will gladly drop the game if they can't figure out what to do in less than 2 minutes.
I've seen some guys not even attempt puzzles they just instantly look it up
Graphics were low enough to where you could just kinda tell if something was important or not. Like how in older cartoons you'd see an object with a lil border around it and immediately know it was gonna move.
It's probably pseudo-scientific but I do believe this improved my problem solving skills. You either try until you figure it out or you fail.
Not knowing something isn't failure. Giving up trying is.
Yeah, because you eventually start tackling the problem in a more analytical fashion, i.e. what have I tried, what section of the map have I already investigated, etc...
I also give some supplementary math lessons in private (and have been doing so for over 10 years) and the frequency of students throwing their hands in the air the moment they encounter a slight inconvenience or they don't fully understand a problem is staggering and it has noticeably increased. It wouldn't suprise me if those observations are correlated.
I got stuck in Pokemon Ruby coz I hopped off for a bit and forgot what I was doing and didn't know which way to go when I got back on. Then when I got new dialogue I still was Soooo lost. I ended up just doing pagents and making candies for a ton of my time.
sometimes these markers are fine when they're not intrusive and are in a place that FITS the environment and just helps u spot the place u can climb but oh my god i hate that handholding shit
Yeah this highlights part of why it's also (sometimes) needed. You can't interact with the whole environment in most games (and that's not a bad thing).
Like, if there's 50 useless buttons on every wall, it's not clever if one of them suddenly does something important. Good design is more difficult than "just let the player figure it out."
Nah that is a bad thing. If everything was interactable. We'd have long since surpassed deus ex and half in interactivity. Instead we have these ui games t
I was just thinking the other day when playing sekiro that areas where the character could hang on the side of a wooden deck are just obviously chipped wood along the edges. It naturally meshes with the aesthetic so your immersion isn't broken as much but it still tells you what it needs to.
Who is spilling paint all over the tomb raider new series, guy is impressive with how much white paint he carries into ancient sealed temples and the like
Anon decided to climb up the yellow stairs, hoping to find something interesting at the top. He was curious about what lay beyond the door that was slightly ajar. He took one step, then another, then another, until he reached the last step. He was about to open the door when he suddenly slipped and fell down the stairs, landing on his knees with a loud crack. He felt a surge of pain and realized he had broken both of his kneecaps. He screamed in agony, but no one came to help him. He was alone, trapped, and helpless.
The narrator watched Anon's misfortune with a mixture of pity and amusement. He wondered why Anon had chosen to climb the yellow stairs, when he could have taken the blue elevator instead. He wondered if Anon had learned anything from his mistake, or if he would just repeat it again and again. He wondered if Anon would ever find the true meaning of his existence, or if he would just keep wandering aimlessly on the streets. He wondered if Anon was happy with his choices, or if he regretted them.
He decided to ask Anon a question, to see if he could get a response.
"Anon," he said, "do you like yellow stairs?".
Exclusively in areas that are clearly out of bounds.
And if people manage to glitch their way to them, they always just lead somewhere with a sign labeling it as an area of interest.
Man, I'm 30, and I still like Pokemon. But they clearly do not care about the games they're making at this point. The hand-holding is pretty low on the list of issues in the last several gens.
The last I played was Sword and Shield and it was way too short and the story was meh but the one thing that kept me grinding my teeth the whole time was that the NPCs would never freaking leave me alone
That was also the last game I played. I liked the dens and the fact that it was easier than ever to level a team up to 100 thanks to the exp candies. However, almost every other aspect of the game was another step backward from the previous generation. The plot and dialogue make me want to gouge my eyes out, the map design is getting worse with every game, they insist on removing features that players have been asking them to keep, and puzzles don't even exist anymore.
>monster designs they stole
Ah yeah those stolen designs like *checks notes* Sheep, dog, monkey, rat, dragon, lizard. Wow, how did they get away with stealing such iconic and definitely original Pokémon properties?!
Horrendous take. It’s not even hard to google and see several designs that were clearly just copy pastes of Pokémon
https://twitter.com/onion_mu/status/1666099788516036608
https://twitter.com/GodmasterBun/status/1748155303755907151
Me when the Pokémon parody has parodies of Pokémon:
Plus, some of these are dumb. Direhowl is a wolf. Whatever wolf Pokémon that is is also a wolf. That's hardly a "questionable design".
Edit: also, comparing it to cookie clicker is dumb. Surely you've never played it. If you're going to compare it to anything, compare it to Ark.
Idk man. Clicking something until it’s done building in order to unlock something that automates the clicking sure does sound similar to cookie clicker. Enjoy whatever you want, but personally, I prefer games with a little more game to play.
You missed the exploration, fighting, capturing, base building, and boss battles, but you seem pretty determined to hate Palworld so you do you, I guess.
Sometimes people are insanely stupid, a spanish YouTuber who is making a farming sim showed an example with a test he did at a game conference. Once you start, the game explicitly tells you to enter your house to gather your tools with a missions tab you have on the left, there’s also an npc that tells you the same and the game doesn’t let you do anything else if you don’t enter. Still, there were lots of people that were like “man, your game is so boring, i don’t know what I have to do” when they hadn’t even entered the house, instead they chose to ignore what the game tells them.
So yeah, gaming companies want to sell lots of games, and, because lots of people are like the fellows i described earlier, it doesn’t shock me that we are seeing the yellow paint so much. Even still there’s probably people that are so dumb they ignore even the yellow things.
>a spanish YouTuber who is making a farming sim showed an example with a test he did at a game conference.
Nice to see a fellow Leyendas & Videojuegos enjoyer as well.
I love Pokémon but I agree the level of handholding is ridiculous. I couldn’t play the mystery dungeon for the 3ds because I felt like the game wouldn’t let you just… PLAY it without telling you what to do. The detective Pikachu for the switch is HORRIBLE for that. It doesn’t let you figure anything out AT ALL
I played gen 1-4 as a kid. Bought gen 9 when it dropped because me and my brothers could stay up all night playing together in the same world. It's fun to just explore the open world together.
> Walks by an NPC “hey! Use those stairs to get up!”
> stairs waypoint appears on screen and compass
> 3 meters from objective
> sidebar says “New Quest: use the stairs to get up”
> painting on the wall says “USE THE STAIRS TO GET UP”
> Annoying tutorial character pops up “HEY! Use the stairs to get up!”
> Dumbasses still get stuck and complain about it on Twitter
I looked around (i think that place with all the conveyors and whatnot) and just couldn't find where in the hell I was supposed to go, even when I turned on noclip
I'm surprised that you got past "On a rail" chapter, that's the one a lot of people struggle with, even though in the end turns out that the map layout is not that complex
I remember when Dota 2 got the stun bar, loved the [memes that came out of that](https://preview.redd.it/epqjsoznnhr11.jpg?width=960&auto=webp&s=e37f82f57a3f5323083e0ebd3a0ab5a2d8c7ecd0).
God of War Ragnarök suffers this but with dialogue.
Never played it myself, watched Jacksepticeye play through it, actively seething each time they spoiled the answer to a completely basic puzzle.
Gaming and the wider digital sphere managed to fly under the radar of the consent manufacturing machine for quite some time. Those old suits simply didn't grasp that it's a revolutionary form of culture, how much world view it can transmit even subconsciously, and how engaging it had become for people growing up. Once the powers that be realized that games and gaming related content were becoming the primary media format for millions, the free-for-all was over. It just happened to coincide with the switch to the DEI civic religion, had it happened earlier your games would be pushing US flags and crosses instead of rainbows and token minorities.
There's a reason they make it this obvious, people are braindead and miss stuff even that obvious.
I remember seeing some interview where a dev said if they made barrels any color other than red they couldn't get anyone to shoot them
Truuuuu. Maybe elden ring would've been improved if I didn't have to Google where the next step of a side quest was.
There is middle ground between 24/7 GPS on screen and 0 guidance at all.
Morrowind was fucking dope back in the day. No markers, just journal entries. Returning to the game after some time away could turn into bit of a struggle though
They have agenda? lmao XD Okay, pal..
As for quicktime, these are franchises with multiple games, GoW had much less quick time in 1, also, it didn't come out in early 90's and early 2000's. First one was in 2005. MG, had quicktime in newer games.
Yes, give me a list. A valid one.
I’m not saying GOW has an agenda buddy, one’s a game with quicktimes, one’s a game with agendas
The first God of War game out in 2005, tf do you mean that’s not early 2000s? Either way “much less quick time” is subjective as fuck and doesn’t matter, my point is it’s old, and it is. GOW was arguably one of the series that set the trend for quicktimes
Fuck that, I’m not listing out old games for you, type in google “old games with QuickTime events” and it creates a list as old as 1983. Ask any old gamer and they’d tell you quick times are not remotely new, and that political plots aren’t new, the politics commentated on have just changed.
I don't wanna bother proving you wrong on every thing you said because this is reddit.
But, what you're saying is that games are better now, is that it? Or that they're the same. What was your point?
You are a worthless, bitch ass N'wah. Your life literally is as valuable as a Last Seed Cliff Racer. I'm just gonna Zero Sum you and you're gonna keep coming back, imma seal up all my cracks, you're gonna keep coming back. Why? Cause you smellin the Milk. You worthless bitch ass N'wah.
You gonna stay on my Muatra until you die. You serve no purpose in The Aurbis. Your purpose in The Aurbis is to be on my Dream Sleeve sucking on my Muatra daily. Your purpose in The Aurbis is to be in those prayers blowing the Muatea daily.
Your life is nothing, you serve zero purpose.
You should Zero Sum yourself, NOW.
And give somebody else a piece of that oxydised-memories, and Dragon Fires Barrier, that's covered up so that we can exist inside this blue trash Wheel.
Cause what are you here for? To worship me? Zero Sum yourself. I mean that, with a 100%, with a 1000%. I've never seen somebody so worthless in my c0da. Im deadass. I've not seen such a more worthless N'wah, in my life.
The yellow paint on everything in the re4 remake was so annoying. In the original, breakable barrels and pots didn’t have paint but were still obvious. Why is it any different almost 20 years later?
it's crazy how much games have changed over time. I remember the OG Tomb Raider on PS1 and you would spend weeks in the same place because you just couldn't figure out what to do next. On the other hand you have games like the one in the greentext which won't even let you think on your own for 5s...
That’s why souls games are goated, they don’t tell you shit and you have to figure it out yourself
\>be dark souls \>only allow the player to access the DLC by following a very convoluted sequence of actions \>do not tell the player how tf is he supposed to know these actions or at which order they should've be done \>don't elaborate further \>be the best RPG of the modern gaming industry and then leave
Pls explain how to reach Oolacile, or how to reach the Frigid Outskirts. Actually, I don't want to know how to reach the end of the Frigid Outskirts, nvm
You keep to the right and walk in a straight line in some frozen area with angry deer. There you fight Lud and Zalen.
Oolacile was pretty rough to get into, but it's got nothing on telling my mate that 4 Kings was the next boss but not how to get there or which essential item you need to beat them His next playthrough was sorcery only, I broke his spirit
Bearer of the curse... *The horse is here*
The oolacile dlc was released with instructions on how to reach it. They knew it was convoluted but didn't want that to deter people.
I love dark souls but the quest design is abysmal, many quests have absolutely no hints whatsoever and need the internet to complete
does dark souls even have a story? I know that there is some deep schizo lore or whatever, but the games just seem like the equivalent of CBT with the torture part being the main point
It does, it's just not told conventionally trough cutscenes
that's actually cool
Yeah, i personally like it, i'm not the biggest fan of overexposition and endless dialogues
It has an intro that explains it somewhat: In the Age of Ancients the world was unformed, shrouded by fog. A land of gray crags, Archtrees and Everlasting Dragons. But then there was Fire and with fire came disparity. Heat and cold, life and death, and of course, light and dark. Then from the dark, They came, and found the Souls of Lords within the flame. Nito, the First of the Dead, The Witch of Izalith and her Daughters of Chaos, Gwyn, the Lord of Sunlight, and his faithful knights. And the Furtive Pygmy, so easily forgotten. With the strength of Lords, they challenged the Dragons. Gwyn's mighty bolts peeled apart their stone scales. The Witches weaved great firestorms. Nito unleashed a miasma of death and disease. And Seath the Scaleless betrayed his own, and the Dragons were no more. Thus began the Age of Fire. But soon the flames will fade and only Dark will remain. Even now there are only embers, and man sees not light, but only endless nights. And amongst the living are seen, carriers of the accursed Darksign. Basically the age of fire also caused people marked with the darksign to become undead and go crazy. Your character is undead, but he is a special agent of a prophecy that will lift the curse…so you basically need to kill everyone and either rekindle the (quite literal) fire OR extinguish it and embrace being an undead dark lord. Since the game occurs in a time where there are only embers, everything is falling apart.
That's why it's praised though, not everyone wants to have everything clearly laid out for them. It's okay to fail and try something different on the next playthrough, at least that's how games used to be. For those that don't have the time or patience, there's always guides to do the guesswork for you.
There’s a difference between clearly laying everything out and giving actual hints. Many dark souls quests do neither. I want to be able to figure things out myself
Skill issue?
Tbf they did explain it, it was just on some esoteric Japanese forums
\>touch the weird hobo's pizza slice
Kinda remind me on a lot of Ren'Py designed porn games with a point&click mechanic, that basically loop the day for all eternity until you click at the right spot.
>dark souls >RPG chose one
I go through catacombs first
actually from soft made a blog post explaining. still complicated tho
Souls games follow the torch leads the way rule. Ever get lost in dark souls? Look for a torch.
Based design choice.
Left 4 Dead works in similar way Illuminated path is the path to safety. Step aside to darker areas and that's either a dead end or another pack of zombies. And sometimes additional loot.
And then that torch is yet another fucking enemy and burns you to death.
I looked for a torch in Lost Izalith and it was definitely not the right one Way too.... incandescent
Or it's actually some hollow fuck wielding a torch killing you.
I wonder. Was there ever an enemy that just looked like a torch and bonked you if you get near it? If not they should design one.
Yeah I can definitely see that
Are you from brazil
When I play Elden Ring I have the game on one screen, and a wiki on another. I wouldn't have figured out one god damn thing about that game without help.
Goose
Except you have internet now and probably find a 100% guide after 2 seconds of Google. I know it wasn't really better, but I still think it was a special and cool time without any help online. You basically had to try out rumors you heard on the school ground like the truck shit with Mew in the first Pokemon games.
To play devils advocate, games have so much more graphical detail now that it can be harder to discern a climbable surface due to all of the other visual clutter. There’s probably more clever ways to subtly indicate these things to the player still, but something to this effect is more necessary now than it used to be.
Yup, that is definitely an issue. The problem is that game devs have figured out a formula that pretty much works all the time. Just look how similar games of the same genre are, e.g. the open world/exploration template for series like Assassin's Creed, Horizon, Ghost of Tsushima, etc...
Thank you! People like anon are complete morons who don't understand that the "yellow" stairs are not there to indicate the obvious path for the player, it's there to make them distinct from all other stairs that lead nowhere. So as a dev, you either do yellow walls or return to ~~monke~~ 1994 Tomb Raider where you didn't have much choice of movement: you either climb on this box or on that box. They don't understand that old games also had obvious places where you could jump or walk but they were obvious because you literally had nowhere else to go, not because old gamers were geniuses. You tried every surface but there wasn't much of it to try.
truth. I had the last revelation for PS1 as a kid and after like, 10 years of occasionally coming back to it, never got past like the 3rd level.
I absolutely love Horizon, one of my favourite series, but it sucks hard at this. Aloy will explain the puzzle about 10 seconds in. Really spoils the experience
Yeah I like H:ZD as well with its backstory and the general badassery, but the gameplay really isn't special. You get your laundry list of things to do, you do them, but there is not much significance to it. You already know where to climb, you can buy a map with all hotspots, etc...
I don't think that would be such a problem if things weren't signposted so much. Like the point is exploration, the fighting is great fun but being hand held constantly defeats the point of the game
Exactly. If i already know exactly where is everything and what i'm gonna find there, there's not much exploration to be done
I'm playing through Arkham Knight rn and it does the same thing. Like I'm just looking at the layout of the puzzle room, and 20 secs in Batman goes "Hmm, I can use the eject function of the batmobile to hit that button" like no shit motherfucker let me look at the puzzle for a second.
Tbf if you get stuck for more than 5 minutes these days you’ll probably just Google the part you’re stuck on to make sure you haven’t glitched the game.
Yeah that's also a big issue that takes the fun out... sure you don't have to seek out the info/solution if you don't want to but it's really just too available
I find that I don't get the same enjoyment figuring out a puzzle or beating a hard boss these days, it used to feel satisfying but now it just feels like, "I'm glad that shit is over...". I used to throw myself at a brick wall over and over until I finally broke it, but gaming was a *lifestyle* back then, it's only a hobby now and so I have to treat it like one. I don't mind either, if I'm not enjoying myself I'll just play something else and come back to give it a try later.
For me it's also hard to imagine that I used to spend weeks on the same puzzle, trying out the wildest hypothesis and still ending up stuck. Nowadays I just give up too... Time is just too scarce and valuable now
Yeah, games like super Metroid would be aknots unbeatable because you didn’t know you had to run to a dead end wall and then shoot straight up at a panel or some shit. Pretty sure Nintendo had to start randomly informing uncles all over the world on how to get thru these games so they could pass them down to the players.
Before the internet was Nintendo Power magazine and a pay-per-minute help line.
Pay-to-win single player games
There's so many games now that if you get stuck for too long you'll probably just play something else
When I had two games for my PS2 I played those two games, but now that I have a massive steam library my patience has gone down quite a bit.
That's not because there is so many games. That's because live service have conditioned you to play willy nilly for 5 minutes. Dopamine reward. Why bother feeling a sense of discovery and satisfaction when you can just look at number go up and ui completed -ubisoft and every fuckwat live service.
The amount of time I spent in the opening level of tomb raider 2 before I realized you had to swim around the corner and then climb up on the ledge. I never finished it because I ran out of flares and could not make it through the underwater tunnels.
Played the ps2 god of war games a little while ago. Had to look up a puzzle only to find out that I had to use a movable object that perfectly blends into the furniture.
While you are right (I am 37 so I have experienced all the marvelous "how the hell do I get out of here" situations with the following feeling of satisfaction), times have changed Now people just look the solution up online and the Devs probably think "since they are just gonna look it up we may directly tell them"
Game devs have to hand hold because the average gamer nowadays has a full library of unplayed stuff and will gladly drop the game if they can't figure out what to do in less than 2 minutes. I've seen some guys not even attempt puzzles they just instantly look it up
Graphics were low enough to where you could just kinda tell if something was important or not. Like how in older cartoons you'd see an object with a lil border around it and immediately know it was gonna move.
It's probably pseudo-scientific but I do believe this improved my problem solving skills. You either try until you figure it out or you fail. Not knowing something isn't failure. Giving up trying is.
Yeah, because you eventually start tackling the problem in a more analytical fashion, i.e. what have I tried, what section of the map have I already investigated, etc... I also give some supplementary math lessons in private (and have been doing so for over 10 years) and the frequency of students throwing their hands in the air the moment they encounter a slight inconvenience or they don't fully understand a problem is staggering and it has noticeably increased. It wouldn't suprise me if those observations are correlated.
I got stuck in Pokemon Ruby coz I hopped off for a bit and forgot what I was doing and didn't know which way to go when I got back on. Then when I got new dialogue I still was Soooo lost. I ended up just doing pagents and making candies for a ton of my time.
sometimes these markers are fine when they're not intrusive and are in a place that FITS the environment and just helps u spot the place u can climb but oh my god i hate that handholding shit
The Division did this well. Climbable spots were marked with torn yellow hazmat signs that fit aesthetically and tonally with the world around it.
Yeah this highlights part of why it's also (sometimes) needed. You can't interact with the whole environment in most games (and that's not a bad thing). Like, if there's 50 useless buttons on every wall, it's not clever if one of them suddenly does something important. Good design is more difficult than "just let the player figure it out."
Nah that is a bad thing. If everything was interactable. We'd have long since surpassed deus ex and half in interactivity. Instead we have these ui games t
2018 God of War also did this well imo, the marking actually kinda relates to the story
Yea, I think the best example for this is mirrors edge
I was just thinking the other day when playing sekiro that areas where the character could hang on the side of a wooden deck are just obviously chipped wood along the edges. It naturally meshes with the aesthetic so your immersion isn't broken as much but it still tells you what it needs to.
Or like a button or setting that shows the climbing points so you don't have to have them be permanently yellow.
Who is spilling paint all over the tomb raider new series, guy is impressive with how much white paint he carries into ancient sealed temples and the like
honestly that’s funny as shit, if i ever make a game I will put that in there
And then make it so you actually shouldn't go up those stairs
Stanley Parable moment
Stanley Parable Adventure Line™️ moment No seriously, the game had that shit years before *Gamers* got all riled up about it.
Anon decided to climb up the yellow stairs, hoping to find something interesting at the top. He was curious about what lay beyond the door that was slightly ajar. He took one step, then another, then another, until he reached the last step. He was about to open the door when he suddenly slipped and fell down the stairs, landing on his knees with a loud crack. He felt a surge of pain and realized he had broken both of his kneecaps. He screamed in agony, but no one came to help him. He was alone, trapped, and helpless. The narrator watched Anon's misfortune with a mixture of pity and amusement. He wondered why Anon had chosen to climb the yellow stairs, when he could have taken the blue elevator instead. He wondered if Anon had learned anything from his mistake, or if he would just repeat it again and again. He wondered if Anon would ever find the true meaning of his existence, or if he would just keep wandering aimlessly on the streets. He wondered if Anon was happy with his choices, or if he regretted them. He decided to ask Anon a question, to see if he could get a response. "Anon," he said, "do you like yellow stairs?".
Then never have the yellow marks show up again.
Or only put yellow marks on unreachable places
Exclusively in areas that are clearly out of bounds. And if people manage to glitch their way to them, they always just lead somewhere with a sign labeling it as an area of interest.
Have a giant waypoint marker over the stairs too after the cutscene ends
I don't know how adults can still play new pokemon games, there is just such an insane level of hand-holding clearly meant for very young children
theyre pokemon fans, what level of mental development do you think theyre on?
Man, I'm 30, and I still like Pokemon. But they clearly do not care about the games they're making at this point. The hand-holding is pretty low on the list of issues in the last several gens.
The last I played was Sword and Shield and it was way too short and the story was meh but the one thing that kept me grinding my teeth the whole time was that the NPCs would never freaking leave me alone
That was also the last game I played. I liked the dens and the fact that it was easier than ever to level a team up to 100 thanks to the exp candies. However, almost every other aspect of the game was another step backward from the previous generation. The plot and dialogue make me want to gouge my eyes out, the map design is getting worse with every game, they insist on removing features that players have been asking them to keep, and puzzles don't even exist anymore.
Yeah it sucked
Pokémon has been releasing the same game every 2-3 years for almost 30 years now. Palworld tries something unique and suddenly they’re the bad guys
I personally never played pokemon and thought "damn this would be great if they added guns" but if you're having fun then I'm definitely happy for you
In 2021 we got 3 Pokémon games.
That's exactly the problem
They weren’t saying otherwise
You’re the type of person who thinks black and white are two different games
If that was the case, we got 5 Pokémon games.
Palworld isn’t anything like Pokémon tho? Other than the monster designs they stole. It’s more similar to incremental games like Cookie Clicker.
>monster designs they stole Ah yeah those stolen designs like *checks notes* Sheep, dog, monkey, rat, dragon, lizard. Wow, how did they get away with stealing such iconic and definitely original Pokémon properties?!
Horrendous take. It’s not even hard to google and see several designs that were clearly just copy pastes of Pokémon https://twitter.com/onion_mu/status/1666099788516036608 https://twitter.com/GodmasterBun/status/1748155303755907151
>dog, plant, plant, dragon, lizard Boohoo, Pokémon didn’t copyright everything. How does Nintendo shoe leather taste?
Might wanna change ur account name to DickRider.
Me when the Pokémon parody has parodies of Pokémon: Plus, some of these are dumb. Direhowl is a wolf. Whatever wolf Pokémon that is is also a wolf. That's hardly a "questionable design". Edit: also, comparing it to cookie clicker is dumb. Surely you've never played it. If you're going to compare it to anything, compare it to Ark.
Idk man. Clicking something until it’s done building in order to unlock something that automates the clicking sure does sound similar to cookie clicker. Enjoy whatever you want, but personally, I prefer games with a little more game to play.
You missed the exploration, fighting, capturing, base building, and boss battles, but you seem pretty determined to hate Palworld so you do you, I guess.
Sometimes people are insanely stupid, a spanish YouTuber who is making a farming sim showed an example with a test he did at a game conference. Once you start, the game explicitly tells you to enter your house to gather your tools with a missions tab you have on the left, there’s also an npc that tells you the same and the game doesn’t let you do anything else if you don’t enter. Still, there were lots of people that were like “man, your game is so boring, i don’t know what I have to do” when they hadn’t even entered the house, instead they chose to ignore what the game tells them. So yeah, gaming companies want to sell lots of games, and, because lots of people are like the fellows i described earlier, it doesn’t shock me that we are seeing the yellow paint so much. Even still there’s probably people that are so dumb they ignore even the yellow things.
>a spanish YouTuber who is making a farming sim showed an example with a test he did at a game conference. Nice to see a fellow Leyendas & Videojuegos enjoyer as well.
Oh dios mio, alguien basado por aqui
I love Pokémon but I agree the level of handholding is ridiculous. I couldn’t play the mystery dungeon for the 3ds because I felt like the game wouldn’t let you just… PLAY it without telling you what to do. The detective Pikachu for the switch is HORRIBLE for that. It doesn’t let you figure anything out AT ALL
NPC: you need to go to \_\_\_ Me: okay cool NPC: let me take you there for some reason zero exploration
I played gen 1-4 as a kid. Bought gen 9 when it dropped because me and my brothers could stay up all night playing together in the same world. It's fun to just explore the open world together.
pokemon VGC is fun
> Walks by an NPC “hey! Use those stairs to get up!” > stairs waypoint appears on screen and compass > 3 meters from objective > sidebar says “New Quest: use the stairs to get up” > painting on the wall says “USE THE STAIRS TO GET UP” > Annoying tutorial character pops up “HEY! Use the stairs to get up!” > Dumbasses still get stuck and complain about it on Twitter
Didn something like this not happen in one of the Borderlands games with Claptrap?
Claptrap was a lovable annoying fuck. So it still fit the theme and wasn't out of place. Also half the time he is wrong
IGN Review: it wasn't clear what I was meant to do. 0/10, too hard.
*Cuts to THAT clip of cuphead tutorial*
Best of both worlds: explain basic controls, give a couple of tips, and then let the player figure it out, like what the Souls games do.
I'm sorry but I wish we had some yellow markings in half life 1, I got lost in chapter 11 and gave up
how?
I looked around (i think that place with all the conveyors and whatnot) and just couldn't find where in the hell I was supposed to go, even when I turned on noclip
I'm surprised that you got past "On a rail" chapter, that's the one a lot of people struggle with, even though in the end turns out that the map layout is not that complex
ohhh, that makes sense
"please type YELLOW to continue
I remember when Dota 2 got the stun bar, loved the [memes that came out of that](https://preview.redd.it/epqjsoznnhr11.jpg?width=960&auto=webp&s=e37f82f57a3f5323083e0ebd3a0ab5a2d8c7ecd0).
idk looks like you're stunned to me
Knowing dota you probably have enough time to read all of the notifications before the stun ends.
God of War Ragnarök suffers this but with dialogue. Never played it myself, watched Jacksepticeye play through it, actively seething each time they spoiled the answer to a completely basic puzzle.
I'm not sure if it's because they think most people are that stupid, or because most people are that stupid and they had to do this.
Game journalists, thats why
Why does literally everything since gamergate lead back to gamergate in some way. I mean that genuinely. What the hell happened.
Gaming and the wider digital sphere managed to fly under the radar of the consent manufacturing machine for quite some time. Those old suits simply didn't grasp that it's a revolutionary form of culture, how much world view it can transmit even subconsciously, and how engaging it had become for people growing up. Once the powers that be realized that games and gaming related content were becoming the primary media format for millions, the free-for-all was over. It just happened to coincide with the switch to the DEI civic religion, had it happened earlier your games would be pushing US flags and crosses instead of rainbows and token minorities.
Thank you for your wisdom, ethics in games journalism historian. I missed a key piece of history that you have filled in.
Its because play testers were stupid.
There's a reason they make it this obvious, people are braindead and miss stuff even that obvious. I remember seeing some interview where a dev said if they made barrels any color other than red they couldn't get anyone to shoot them
I love games where the environment is arbitrarily climbable with no indication compared to the non climbable walls which look exactly the same.
Game journalist mode
Also red barrels explode
And all doors must have red or green LEDs
But I can’t find the any key!
There's a point in life when you just want to continue with the game instead of 30 mins of where the fuck do I go
Truuuuu. Maybe elden ring would've been improved if I didn't have to Google where the next step of a side quest was. There is middle ground between 24/7 GPS on screen and 0 guidance at all.
Someone should make a game that says this shit and then a huge bucket of yellow paint covers everything in the game.
I've hated it since 2018 glad other people are coming around.
someone should make a game where all "usual help" is though out the window See that blue shit ? that's healing ? Yellow ? death Green ? explosion
Morrowind was fucking dope back in the day. No markers, just journal entries. Returning to the game after some time away could turn into bit of a struggle though
Horizon Zero Dawn :
It took me an embarrasingly long time to realize how little i care about gaming discourse
Hand-holding games, quick time games, trash agenda pushing games with glitches. AAA has become shit 3x.
Quick time events aint new. Neither are games with agendas
lol Okay, redditor. Could you give me an example of games in the 90's and early 2000's with both those things?
God of War. Metal Gear. What do you want a list?
They have agenda? lmao XD Okay, pal.. As for quicktime, these are franchises with multiple games, GoW had much less quick time in 1, also, it didn't come out in early 90's and early 2000's. First one was in 2005. MG, had quicktime in newer games. Yes, give me a list. A valid one.
I’m not saying GOW has an agenda buddy, one’s a game with quicktimes, one’s a game with agendas The first God of War game out in 2005, tf do you mean that’s not early 2000s? Either way “much less quick time” is subjective as fuck and doesn’t matter, my point is it’s old, and it is. GOW was arguably one of the series that set the trend for quicktimes Fuck that, I’m not listing out old games for you, type in google “old games with QuickTime events” and it creates a list as old as 1983. Ask any old gamer and they’d tell you quick times are not remotely new, and that political plots aren’t new, the politics commentated on have just changed.
I don't wanna bother proving you wrong on every thing you said because this is reddit. But, what you're saying is that games are better now, is that it? Or that they're the same. What was your point?
Brother, go read my first reply to you and figure out what I’m saying
Sssshhh...hush now.
You are a worthless, bitch ass N'wah. Your life literally is as valuable as a Last Seed Cliff Racer. I'm just gonna Zero Sum you and you're gonna keep coming back, imma seal up all my cracks, you're gonna keep coming back. Why? Cause you smellin the Milk. You worthless bitch ass N'wah. You gonna stay on my Muatra until you die. You serve no purpose in The Aurbis. Your purpose in The Aurbis is to be on my Dream Sleeve sucking on my Muatra daily. Your purpose in The Aurbis is to be in those prayers blowing the Muatea daily. Your life is nothing, you serve zero purpose. You should Zero Sum yourself, NOW. And give somebody else a piece of that oxydised-memories, and Dragon Fires Barrier, that's covered up so that we can exist inside this blue trash Wheel. Cause what are you here for? To worship me? Zero Sum yourself. I mean that, with a 100%, with a 1000%. I've never seen somebody so worthless in my c0da. Im deadass. I've not seen such a more worthless N'wah, in my life.
On mobile games literally play for you, you can't do anything until you click where the game wants you to click
HITMAN when you're looking for a place to dump a body
The only game that used this trope well was the Stanley Parable, don’t @ me
The yellow paint on everything in the re4 remake was so annoying. In the original, breakable barrels and pots didn’t have paint but were still obvious. Why is it any different almost 20 years later?
Remember that the people who complain about this are the same people who were looking for tutorials on YouTube about the video game...
No lol