- Visually muddled and unreadable game worlds patched over by "hold L3 to activate Eyeball Vision"
- Recognizing the need to pace progression with modes of interaction other than combat but failing to find interaction that is thematic or interesting and instead resorting to fucking Sokoban again
- Over-reliance on context-sensitive interaction prompts with, again, narrow little trigger volumes or required positioning, forcing me to shimmy a character into the exact position that allows me to interact with something – the AAA equivalent of a point-and-click adventure pixel hunt
- Adding parrying to a combat system does not automatically make it good
- If you do add parrying to a combat system, you have to be obsessively precise about the consistency of every animation and the frame data of every attack. No AAA studio is.
- I absolutely do not want to go through a combat encounter with an enemy that can only be interacted with through parrying.
- "There are four color-coded flavors of enemy attack, and you counter them by pressing these four buttons accordingly". Combat shouldn't be Simon Says!
- All your cutscenes are too long
- he/him/they/them
video games | anarcho-communism | depression | blm | acab | trans rights are human rights | he/him/they/them | like 30 or 40 | movies | Senior Social Media Lead/QA for Mighty Foot Productions | runs @dnf2001rp
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in reply to @bruno's post:
every game with parrying needs an accessability slider that lets you go from 0 added time to 2x the window, I swear. I'm not even that cognitively impaired and can't get it in time half the time, between bluetooth controller latency and inconsistent animations
This. Some gamers will be able to enjoy the tight timing. Others will be able to enjoy it only if the timing isn't so tight.
it's sorta proposterous that it's not included for even non-accessability reasons, since between controller latency and TV-you-dont-know-to-put-in-'game mode', average reaction time has like a 20ms window to actually parry in for some of the games with inconsistent animations
i was a little offended/embarrassed by the shallow roteness of ghost of tsushima's combat. "simon says" nails it
Every moment a game has you spend not doing one of the main fun reasons you play the game has to really justify itself as supporting them or being reasonably secondarily fun. There are a lot of, as you identify here, standard "best practices" that really aren't, because games made to a standard mould are going to always be cargo cult imitations of the original game the mould is based on.
i agree with all of this but especially that first point. once again it falls into what I'd like to call "the thing that made it popular was pretty neat with it and everything since then has sucked ass".
In Arkham Asylum, Batman's Detective Vision was a very limited-use case thing that kind of fucked up your game if you were using it outside of, you know, the main purpose for it. And also: Batman is a DETECTIVE!! It was kind of a NEAT little nod to that, in a game that is mostly about doing Sick Takedowns. I LIKED IT
And in the later games, and in basically every single AAA Open World Adventure Action Megagenre game afterward, it was just like, "button that shows you all the shit that matters". it fucking sucks ass, I hate it, it's lazy, and I wish I could never see it again.
BUT I KNOW I WILL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
By the third Arkham game, enemies had not one but two different gimmicks that fucked with you for overusing Detective Vision and the titular Arkham Knight would actively mock you for using it.
But also the game was an unreadable visual mess so it was more dependent on it than the original!
Arkham Knight is one of the few games I have 100% All Achievements completed (mostly for the secret ending) and I wouldn't say that it's Worth It in a technical sense but that game went down soooooo easy. Just a Hop In and Do Something type of experience.
I fucking hated the tank stuff and I didn't have the patience for doing 300 riddler puzzles but it's true that those games are very moreish