What Video Games Have You Been Playing VI: Because There Are No Elections In Video Games

[GoodSarmatian]

Yeah, but those again make it a good sandbox, not a good game.

A good sandbox game. That's a genre in itself.

If you mean sandbox in a not-really-a-game-but-game-related context where you can do anything you want, Unity or Unreal Engine are probably better, and they don't hold a candle to C++ which is no fun at all.

 

[Broken_Erika]

Fallout 4 has it's moments, like the USS Constitution quest.

 

[EgonSpengler]

Coming from a tabletop gaming background, I kind of view Fallout 4 as a really great campaign sourcebook: Huge game world, a solid group of notable NPCs, a bunch of factions and towns with complementary and conflicting goals, tons of little details and side-quests and locations to explore, great artwork. But it really needs a good story and much of what directly involves the players and their characters is left unfinished, which would be deliberate in the case of a tabletop RPG sourcebook, because the GM and players would be expected to fill in the blanks. In the case of a CRPG, some mods have filled in a lot of those blanks, but there's a lot modders can't do, so the game is just kind of left unfinished. I presume whatever New Vegasy-type game comes next won't make use of what's been done here, but will start from scratch with a new setting and factions and everything, and The Commonwealth will just be left to rot.

 

[civvver]

Sid meier's pirates is about as sandbox as I want to go. Stuff that's more than that, I just get lost and bored. I hated mount and blade for example.

 

[Akka]

No base building is better than bad and hamfisted base building. Some of Skyrim's systems were pretty bad and the combat was rather rubbish, but the world size, the exploration aspect and the freedom were really good for games at the time. The landscapes were also very pretty.
Maybe you just can't appreciate it because you were 10 when it came out.
I get it.
I was part of the generation that was really, really impressed with Super Mario 64 when it came out and that game has also aged pretty badly. There's a reason retro games focus on the 8/16 bit era and not the infant years of 3D games.

I'm of the generation that was impressed with Legend of Zelda (and spent countless, COUNTLESS hours on it). I wasn't impressed by Skyrim outside the scenery.

Skyrim is a very good walking simulator with superb sceneries and some brilliant moments of immersion (the inn of Whiterun is just so... cosy), but it is very lacking in the gameplay and mechanisms department (and the whole sandbox is rather terrible due to level scaling), and that's especially egregious considering that Morrowind and even Oblivion were vastly better on the mechanism part (Skyrim is still better on the gameplay, and it's between Oblivion and Morrowind on the writing).

Also, they really overdid it with the desaturated colours. It looks good for a few hours, but after a time it really feels GREY.

Sid meier's pirates is about as sandbox as I want to go. Stuff that's more than that, I just get lost and bored. I hated mount and blade for example.

*shakes head in a sad, sad way*

Mount & Blade is sandbox done right, especially considering how small the team was. I'm eagerly awaiting for Bannerlord, and I'm going to hide in my basement and not see the sun for a fortnight when it finally hits GOG.

 

[Ryika]

Also, they really overdid it with the desaturated colours. It looks good for a few hours, but after a time it really feels GREY.

That's why Tetrachromatic ENB is the only ENB that counts!

Spoiler :

 

[Traitorfish]

Fallout 4 let me play as an alcoholic survivalist George Washington who was best friends with a Noir detective and repeatedly nuked Boston, it was great and if you disagree your opinions don't count.

 

[Ajidica]

I found Skyrim and Fallout 4 to be plenty enjoyable, but are starting to feel increasingly lazy. Other companies have put out pretty good open world games (even if not RPGs), with Witcher 3 and Dragon Age Inquisition showing that that an open world is not incompatible with strong characters and quests. Bethesda still did a far better job that CD Project or Bioware on making their world have lots of interesting places to explore (Witcher got repetitive and DAI felt conversely empty or cluttered with crap), but that won't last them much longer.

 

[cardgame]

Wow there's been a lot of talking past each other recently.

A game can be enjoyable without being good. Just like fanfiction can be enjoyable without being literary genius.

 

[Traitorfish]

Wow there's been a lot of talking past each other recently.

A game can be enjoyable without being good. Just like fanfiction can be enjoyable without being literary genius.

Most games are intended to be fun, though, first and foremost, and to be works of artistic or technical merit only secondarily, usually in service to their primary goal of being fun. Games-for-art's-sake doesn't really exist outside of a few prestige and indie titles, so it's generally pretty reasonable to take the enjoyableness of a game as the primary measure of success. It's to be expected, then, that when people present the artistic or technical shortcomings of a game as somehow negating whatever fun is to be found in them, as I think we're seeing in this thread, if not in so many words, others will take issue with that.

Nobody is arguing that because a game is fun, it must be artistically and technically perfect, but a few posters do seem to be straying close to the position that, if a game is artistically and technically flawed, it can't be fun.

 

[cardgame]

Well, sometimes it can be difficult to enjoy a game if it is clearly falling short of its potential. Even if it's freaking great, if it's obvious that it could be better - its real position can be hard to swallow. For example, Kerbal Space Program - while conceptually amazing - is clearly an immature work and it suffers for it. Poor frame rates highly limit what can be achieved with part counts. The resource system was simplified to essentially one thing where it could have been so much more from official dev teaser screenshots. Lack of more detailed terrain means once you've been to one place on Duna, you've been to them all. It's still amazing - it's just that it could be so much more, and that's bittersweet.

It can even be applied to supposedly high polish AAA games like Skyrim. As Akka said, "there is still this constant nagging 'this should be like that instead', 'this is wrong' and so on."

 

[Commodore]

Coming from a tabletop gaming background, I kind of view Fallout 4 as a really great campaign sourcebook:

You gonna get into that tabletop wargame they have coming out for Fallout? I saw a preview of the miniatures, and they look even better than the stuff Forgeworld puts out. Of course, no word on how the game is going to actually work yet since the rules are still being developed. If the rules are pretty good and easy to pick up, I might finally play something other than Warhammer 40k.

 

[Akka]

Well, sometimes it can be difficult to enjoy a game if it is clearly falling short of its potential. Even if it's freaking great, if it's obvious that it could be better - its real position can be hard to swallow.

And especially when it should be better (because the previous iteration DID right what the one of today did wrong).
Yeah, this aspect definitely plays a big role in why I find Skyrim so mediocre overall (though calling it "well-polished" is definitely giving it far, far too much credit ).

 

[EgonSpengler]

You gonna get into that tabletop wargame they have coming out for Fallout? I saw a preview of the miniatures, and they look even better than the stuff Forgeworld puts out. Of course, no word on how the game is going to actually work yet since the rules are still being developed. If the rules are pretty good and easy to pick up, I might finally play something other than Warhammer 40k.

I don't have the people to play tabletop games with anymore. I probably won't be able to afford it anyway. But I'm sure I'll gaze longingly at it and pine for my younger days.

Well, sometimes it can be difficult to enjoy a game if it is clearly falling short of its potential. Even if it's freaking great, if it's obvious that it could be better - its real position can be hard to swallow.

I agree. Fallout 4 and Civilization VI are incredibly ambitious projects that do a lot well, but are undermined by a critical flaw; the story in Fallout 4 ends with such a thud my backside still hurts, and the AI in Civ VI is so incapable of defending itself that fighting wars against the other civs is essentially an exploit. Both games have other issues, but those problems are just crippling, and as you point out, they go right to the heart of what the games were obviously trying to do and be.

 

[civvver]

A game can be enjoyable without being good. Just like fanfiction can be enjoyable without being literary genius.

Most games are intended to be fun, though, first and foremost, and to be works of artistic or technical merit only secondarily, usually in service to their primary goal of being fun.

I think what cardgame means is games can be fun even with flaws or being objectively bad. Well let's not even say bad, but mediocre. Fun is very subjective. For example candy crush is a bad game but millions of people have fun playing it.

My personal example, I played a ton of space pirates and zombies. It's a very fun game to me. But it's not objectively that good, it doesn't do anything really special, it probably wouldn't even make my top 25 or so games list. But it's my 2nd most played game in steam hours.

As far as artistic games, again, it's all eye of the beholder. I hated to the moon and the beginner's guide, but other people adore those games.

 

[Commodore]

I don't have the people to play tabletop games with anymore. I probably won't be able to afford it anyway. But I'm sure I'll gaze longingly at it and pine for my younger days.

Yeah, price is always a problem with tabletop wargames. Plus, it's a huge investment of time as well when just starting up or trying to get back into it after being away for a while. I'm finding that out now as I'm trying to get back into Warhammer 40k now that 8th Edition is out (which is awesome by the way). I'm trying to rebuild my Imperial Guard army after selling off most of my miniatures a few years ago. I have found that not only have the prices gone up, but I'm being reminded of just how long it takes to assemble and paint the little buggers.

As far as people to play with, you may want to look at your local tabletop scene again as it seems tabletop wargaming is experiencing a bit of a resurgence right now with game and hobby shops saying they are noticing a definite uptick in the number of new players for all different types of tabletop wargames coming through their doors.

 

[FriendlyFire]

Yeah, price is always a problem with tabletop wargames. Plus, it's a huge investment of time as well when just starting up or trying to get back into it after being away for a while. I'm finding that out now as I'm trying to get back into Warhammer 40k now that 8th Edition is out (which is awesome by the way). I'm trying to rebuild my Imperial Guard army after selling off most of my miniatures a few years ago. I have found that not only have the prices gone up, but I'm being reminded of just how long it takes to assemble and paint the little buggers.

The prices increases for all the new units though, just getting ridiclous
I switched over to Japanese Figmas, The Japanese are way ahead on both quality and value

 

[Broken_Erika]

When was the last time anyone played games like this?

 

[Synobun]

Never, because they're awful.

 

[Akka]

Not like THAT, but I played quite a bit Long Live the Queen (don't let the sugary anime drawing deceive you, it's quite darker than it looks ^^) which is basically a gamebook in computer form, so text + illustrations + choices, which is close enough.

(and I'm also a gamebook fan and writer, but that's going tangent from strictly speaking computer games)