Iro

I'm not dead yet.

  • he/him

Consumer, sometimes creator.
Inattentive.

Asks are on. Go wild.


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juliemuncy
@juliemuncy

something that strikes me most while playing Sony's brand of cinematic action-adventure games is the insistence, in both mechanical and narrative terms, on "finding a way through." by which I mean: these games share a fundamental spatial ideology that i find as fascinating as i do troubling.

the last of us. god of war. uncharted. these games are, on a basic level, less about combat or stealth than they are moving through hostile spaces. these spaces provide combat, story beats, and navigational beats, but that inch-by-inch procedurality--how to get from point A to B, then C, etc etc until the credits roll at Z--is essential to their flow. this is true even in god of war's more open-ended design, especially during the core narrative missions. in these games, there's a certain kind of interaction that i see constantly, and that always gives me pause.

upon finding an obstacle, character A will say to character B something to the effect of, "Looks like we can't go that way!"

and character b will reply, "let's keep looking. there's gotta be a way around."


vectorpoem
@vectorpoem

i think the reason this pattern of the hyper-linear "eat the path" single player game has persisted with such strength (if not dominated; other models such as the Ubisoft Open World All-You-Can-Eat Content Buffet™ have found similarly profitable local maxima) is that it's the lowest risk way to build and deliver Content. the game's world and narrative, the player experience itself, is understood as a long disneyland-ride-track of content and the purpose of the game's design is to create the reliably mass-reproducible experience of moving down that track with just the right amount of perceived friction. and when your threshold for acceptable friction is low (ie you are targeting the largest audience possible) you have an incredibly strong incentive to avoid contradicting player expectations. this is the ossified monolith "traditional game design" has become. i definitely wouldn't say it isn't fun to play when done well, and that tons of talented people don't pour head-spinning amounts of craft into it. but it's one of the most transparent forms of "AAA games are about putting money on screen, technology exists to enable the maximization of money on screen" we have today, and worth understanding as such.


Iro
@Iro

people often bring up fromsoft/Souls related to this concept regarding, for example, being able to walk right past the great hollow and ash lake in DS1 because those areas are deliberately hidden in an obtuse manner, and the game broadly trusts you to either be the kind of person who finds that shit or to collaborate with other players who might
(and this nebulous element is a series draw for certain kinds of people, i think)

also seen some related talk with CRPGs, where in say, Baldur's Gate 2, each main class has its own chain of mutually exclusive stronghold missions, but how many people have played the bard or ranger stronghold quests as opposed to the fighter or wizard ones? it could be argued that in a major-scare-quotes "true" RPG, you simply shouldn't be able to do or see certain things because of your build, but devs/pubs presumably want their hard-made content to be experienced, and players presumably want to see as much content as possible as well. i mean shit, i sure installed the mod that let me do every stronghold quest even though i was not playing as a paladin, bard, ranger, druid, or cleric.

RPG design more recent than the 1990s seems to be that everyone gets to do 99% of the same things but those kind of character creation decisions mostly let you pick different expressive dialogue options or give you parallel vectors for getting to the same place so that it still feels meaningful. Combat, diplomacy, and stealth all ultimately lead to the same objective after all, and that sort of expression is still role-playing.

so i guess I'm saying like, really good story-based games that nevertheless have a lot of player-determined differences like Disco Elysium or Pyre still sort of carry everyone along the same flow but pack a lot of flavor and meaning into how those choices pile up. you will always find the suspect, but a playthrough with Physical Instrument and Authority shouting in your ear all day feels very different from one with Drama and Conceptualization.

this sort of limited mutability is definitely less "sexy" and "marketable" than AAA babychild-bigfriend prestige roller coasters though, don't know where i was going with this really


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in reply to @juliemuncy's post:

this is really interesting to think about - particularly when I think about how the kind of critical path as an idea with all these side paths to explore before going down and locking off the previous areas - or, as was often the way in Control - if you do this too often you end up finding the solution to the 'puzzle' of the locked progression before you've even noticed it was locked.

And then you have 'open worlds' that I end up feeling more trapped in than enclosed ones, as I invariably hit invisible walls that belie their freedom more than just, a space that is not for the player at all.

This reminds me of how years ago the label of “backtracking” was made to connote bad design. This usually was still applied to games with a linear progression, but even mild resistance we (reviewers, gamers, whoever) taught ourselves to sneer at.

in reply to @vectorpoem's post:

I think about this a lot, and one of the things I like most about for example Fromsoft games is the way they, even if they are still about progression in many ways, there is also a lot you can miss or lock yourself out of content most others would demand you experience.

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