The Walking Dead Games
- Thread starter Kenjitsu_Hokori
- Start date
EyeofCalamity
[10] Knight
Can't wait for season 2....which is next year!
Ghengis_John
[13] Hero
Oh LP I'm sorry man. The way that my ipad seems to screw up is when I quote people half the time it crashes. So I've been quoting first when I want to multi-quote so I don't lose when I've written something then I go about copy/pasting the other quotes to the bottom. After writing my response to Force I just plum forgot to get around to what I meant to ask you. Which was put succinctly: You don't necessarily feel that escapism and grandiose plot lines are bad things though do you?
Honestly, it's hard to say. I played Saint's Row: The Third in July and frankly I don't know that I've enjoyed any games I've played this year as much. I never had any plans to play it, the plot seemed the stupidest part, gangsters run around like celebrities not getting arrested. But after getting it as a gift on steam I decided to give it a chance and couldn't put it down for about 90 hours. (Non consecutively mind you) Technically though it came out in November of last year. And as much as I really really want to give Mass Effect Three that title for the things it did right, I can't ignore the things it did wrong, which were essentially everything on my list. At the moment I can only leave you with, let me ruminate on that one.
I find it strange that two of your candidates are games that upset/disappointed their fanbases so much.
This is actually a fair assessment, to an extent. One of the things that bothered me so much in mass effect 3 for instance was the conversation wheel. As an example of how much it was crippled between Mass Effect 2 and Mass Effect 3, when we first meet Jacob in ME2 we get a dialogue tree with seven investigation options. When we first meet James in ME3 we get... ZERO. We have a lot more auto dialog in conversations and used for squad mate interactions, instead of talking to NPC's to actually get quests we just eavesdrop, neutral options are largely extinct and many times we aren't allowed to investigate for additional information. Heck the final confrontation in the original release of the game has an unskippable 15 minute conversation sequence with one inconsequential tree that has 2 meaningless options. So why is this a problem? Because this is a role playing game and the conversation wheel is HOW we role play. It's like Maslowe's hierarchy of needs or the way in which a child first learns words to build sentences. If your underlying mechanics are unenjoyable it's difficult to progress to the level of enjoyment. If your underlying mechanics are shoddy it's difficult to progress to the level of emotional attachment. So of course a mechanical perspective is important because games have to be operated to extract that emotional current. It should be a cornerstone of good design. There's nothing broken about Journey's mechanics, but there's nothing inherently novel or engaging about them either. If there were I might want to stay longer.
That said though I do feel things when I play games. But I need time, I need the right hook and I need to have underlying barriers removed. I felt joy when I played Saint's row the third. I continued playing Mass Effect 3 all the way through simply because I loved those characters. Emotion is definitely a strong component to any game but it can't be the sole component. This is still a game, it has to be enjoyable and to be enjoyable you must occasionally reward the player. More on that later.
Here's the thing, maybe for you the reward is catharsis. I however get my daily allotment of catharsis in life. I don't really need anymore, henceforth the thing that you value most about the game holds little to no meaning to me. So what rewards are left? I can fly? A million games let me fly. But why should I want to fly when there is nowhere I really care to fly to? If you tell me that my reward for spending days of my life walking towards a virtual reality mountain is that I get to see the virtual reality mountain I'm going to call you pretentious. If you go on to tell me your game is artistic because you're like braid and limbo and every other game with no story or a fantastically vague story that makes aesthetics ponder how brilliant your inability to write is I'm going to call you pretentious. Then I'm going to point you towards Bastion and smack you in the back of your head.
I could too, that alone doesn't make it a good as a game. You put a lot of your value assessments on emotion and that's fine. But different strokes for different folks.
What's the statement here? That's like choosing between eating a bowl of dogshit and a fresh pineapple. I get that you're saying you loved these titles and you'd recommend them, but the amount that you loved them has no bearing on me.
The Landslide
[13] Hero
...I thought Braid was expertly done...
