What videogames have you been playing? version 1.22: What's with that plural?

[Gorbles]

I know it's not gonna sell (at least not outside of the niche rom hack subculture), which is also why, imo, video games have continuously been getting worse on average since the late 00s.

I mean, everyone has their own ideal for what is or isn't a good video game. I can't argue that. I like some games that are considered mainstream, some not. I like "good" games and "bad" games.

The games dev industry often suffers for having to turn a profit, but this far predates the late 00s. We were just younger then. The stories already existed.

(there's a bunch of worse stuff at the moment, but it's relatively cyclic and tuned to external forces like crypto nonsense for example, to take a modern one)

The only way "more content is always better" doesn't apply is that there are practical limitations on how much content there can be. Okay, fair enough. But all other things equal, more content is always better than less content.

Hard disagree. I see where you're coming from, but this generally not how design works.

Or maybe we're not discussing the same things. I'm saying there are valid reasons to constrain the number of Pokemon. In response to you saying it's an artificial limitation. You're focusing on content from the perspective of a consumer (which is valid! Just not where I'm coming from).

To provide one just off the cuff; Pokemon has always tried to model a simple ecology. Just throwing every Pokemon into a new region completely breaks that assumption (and destroys things like forms, which have been established for a few generations now and also build on that simplistic ecology).

I also don't see what anything you wrote below this has to do with what I wrote. The analogy here is if I have some civs I like to play for roleplaying or nostalgia reasons, I don't want any of them to be arbitrarily excluded from the pool of civs in the next civ game. If, say, civ 7 came out and I couldn't play as the Mongols because the developers only wanted to pick 10 civs to focus on, that would severely impact my ability to enjoy the game. I don't understand how you don't feel the same way. Is it just that all of your favorite pokemon happen to be in the newer games?

My favourite mainline Pokemon game is Crystal, and my favourite starter is Cyndaquil.

But it's not a dealbreaker for experiencing a new game (though I got lucky with Arceus there haha).

But here you're saying "arbitrary". I don't really know what you mean by artificial (any more than certain Pokemon you can't catch in Gold / Silver / Crystal and need other copies for is artificial), but arbitrary I can argue against. These choices are made intentionally. They may seem arbitrary but that's because the developers are working to a system that you or I don't have any exposure to. Even Pokemon Red / Blue (/ Green) had limits. That's how the Missingno cheat worked. Overwriting pointers in memory or something like that. It's why Kanto in Crystal was comparatively empty compared to everything Johto had going on. It's why there are entire websites devoted to "lost" Pokemon because the devs design a ton more than make it through to the final product.

It's not (just) needing to make a profit. It's about meaningful decisions. Would your starter choice matter as much if the elemental types were easy to obtain from the offset? No. That's why Grass, Fire and Water types not only are harder to get (but not the hardest), but the Gym design in each generation reflects your choices. Like how Charmander was hard mode in Gen 1, but in the Gen III remakes Steel Claw made up for a lot of his weaknesses (but Misty was still a hard challenge because Steel did nothing there).

More isn't always better!

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

They cannot even reverse-engineer it from copies of the game in circulation? Sheesh.

I think in an article it was mentioned they only found out about the missing source code when short on time already. In any case modders later did that.

 

[Lexicus]

(any more than certain Pokemon you can't catch in Gold / Silver / Crystal and need other copies for is artificial),

We all know that's arbitrary so they can sell more games. What I'm talking about is not comparable - the Pokemon don't exist in the game at all. That is different than having to trade the earlier gen pokemon in from another game. I would be fine if you had to trade the pokemon in, what I object to is them being completely absent and unobtainable.

What this comes down to, as you say, is that this doesn't impact your experience but it's pretty much everything to me.

It's not (just) needing to make a profit. It's about meaningful decisions. Would your starter choice matter as much if the elemental types were easy to obtain from the offset? No. That's why Grass, Fire and Water types not only are harder to get (but not the hardest), but the Gym design in each generation reflects your choices. Like how Charmander was hard mode in Gen 1, but in the Gen III remakes Steel Claw made up for a lot of his weaknesses (but Misty was still a hard challenge because Steel did nothing there).

You yourself said that single-player pokemon is never challenging so what meaningful decisions? In any case, this is why gen 2 and 3 put limits on bringing in pokemon from other gens - you can't do it until after the elite 4 in the gen 3 remakes of red and green, and you can't trade with gen 1 until after talking to Bill in gen 2. Fine with me, again, my objection is to the pokemon not even being obtainable in the game.

 

To provide one just off the cuff; Pokemon has always tried to model a simple ecology. Just throwing every Pokemon into a new region completely breaks that assumption (and destroys things like forms, which have been established for a few generations now and also build on that simplistic ecology).

same objection as above; more regions is better than one region. Lock other regions behind the elite 4, that's fine too.

Anyway as to your claims about how design works, again, there are evidently romhacks that have what I want, made by people working for free, so I disagree that it's somehow impossible or impractical to design a game the way I'm describing.

 

[Gorbles]

We all know that's arbitrary so they can sell more games. What I'm talking about is not comparable - the Pokemon don't exist in the game at all. That is different than having to trade the earlier gen pokemon in from another game. I would be fine if you had to trade the pokemon in, what I object to is them being completely absent and unobtainable.

For someone who only ever had one Gameboy and one copy of the game, something being trade-locked was unobtainable for me!

Trading isn't like that anymore. You have wireless trades, wonder trades, the works. Nothing is unobtainable anymore because you trade for it, like you always did. It's the same principle at work.

You yourself said that single-player pokemon is never challenging so what meaningful decisions?

Challenging on a competitive curve. Again, veering into essay territory here but even casual experiences require meaningful choice. "casual" is not "bad" and competitive is not "good". Imo, they're different disciplines. Different experiences.

Anyway as to your claims about how design works, again, there are evidently romhacks that have what I want, made by people working for free, so I disagree that it's somehow impossible or impractical to design a game the way I'm describing.

I never said it was impossible. I'm sure I could argue impractical if I really wanted to, but the argument here was "artificial" and / or "arbitrary". All I'm doing is arguing against those.

(also I say this as a games modder with the greatest respect for other modders, but modders frequently do not design or even implement things well at all)

 

[Lexicus]

Trading isn't like that anymore. You have wireless trades, wonder trades, the works. Nothing is unobtainable anymore because you trade for it, like you always did. It's the same principle at work.

Lol, no, it isn't, and you know it. The pokemon that are unobtainable in the newer games are unobtainable, by trading or any other method. They are not in the games, period.

Challenging on a competitive curve. Again, veering into essay territory here but even casual experiences require meaningful choice. "casual" is not "bad" and competitive is not "good". Imo, they're different disciplines. Different experiences.

I don't agree with this really, if there is no challenge there can be choices but they aren't meaningful in the sense you seem to be saying because you will win no matter what choice you make. Anyway your point here just isn't really relevant to what I'm saying. In Yellow for example you're stuck with Pikachu at the start which makes for quite a difficult battle against Brock, but you can later get all three of the original starters. I am not arguing that you should be able to get any pokemon at all from the start of the game. In this sense a bigger selection of pokemon obtainable in the game has no relevance whatever to the gameplay choices available to the player at certain points in the game. This, again, is literally what the post-elite 4 content is for, and more generally why RPGs tend to lock content behind in-game barriers that have to be surmounted by progressing in the game.

As an example, in Fire Red you can start getting certain gen 2 and 3 pokemon after you do a quest that is only available after you finish the elite 4. So you get the same gen1 gameplay experience, more or less, but the other pokemon aren't completely absent from the game. You can catch a lot of them in the wild and the ones you can't get that way can be traded in.
And to your point about wireless internet trading, that is exactly why I feel this to be an arbitrary limitation that destroys any interest I would have had in playing these newer games. The fact that I could easily trade these pokemon in if they were in the game just ruins it for me.

 

[Gori the Grey]

video games have continuously been getting worse on average since the late 00s.

Since Asteroids, actually.

Regarding the Pokemon games, I'm laughing because literally the only thing I know about Pokemon is the slogan "Gotta catch em all." So I have to side with Lex on that point. The game has to be made in such a way that you can catch em all. Because you Gotta.

 

[Angst]

on pokemon, i know it's a different thing, but coming from mtg, i quite prefer the available options being cycled and restricted from environment to environment. besides the archaic and janky reasons it was so, it fascinates me to no end that tauros was so powerful in gen 1, but has been thoroughly eclipsed by later gens. cycling through pokemon can give new environments where both new and earlier weaker mons get larger niches. i mind my particular favorites not being available in a generation, but there's something nice that things that don't have cosmic stats can shine if they cycle through options. it's a question of options/choices; sometimes fewer options make choices more compelling. of course, that's all abstract and a question of implementation. they're not really aligning with what would make a restricted pokedex work for me personally, since they both phase out old things and continue the power creep. as they make a lot of other choices i don't particularly like.

(eg, i'm one of the few idiots that think the physical/special split also has had a negative effect on the game (among the positive ones; it was majorly a positive choice). i also don't like that each type has increasingly expanded effects that decreases identity even if it balances out the type chart i guess. but i'm, again, coming from another vantage point than what pokemon is mostly supposed to be. i have looong rants on the potential that pokemon has had if it had other kinds of visions; and for the argument of vision, while catch em all has been gone for ages, i think most of the appeal comes from, well, having a stupid big roster of creatures to play with. it's what made the first game succesful.)

 

[Gorbles]

Lol, no, it isn't, and you know it. The pokemon that are unobtainable in the newer games are unobtainable, by trading or any other method. They are not in the games, period.

Honestly it's hard to keep track. SwSh had a bad issue with trading glitched Pokemon, and the game data contained data for Pokemon not in the game at release. I didn't dig my Switch out, change the cartridge and check. So that's on me. I was pretty sure at the time of posting I could get Pokemon that weren't catchable. Event Pokemon being a lot less rare helped this impression I think.

I'd ask if you did, but you apparently haven't even played them! With the expansions, SwSh gets up to over 800 Pokemon. It's kinda hard to benchmark that against whatever the actual total is.

You don't need to go off just because you think I know something I'd forgotten. Covid brain, aye? I've also had Arceus in the cartridge slot pretty much all 2023 so far.

I don't agree with this really, if there is no challenge there can be choices but they aren't meaningful in the sense you seem to be saying because you will win no matter what choice you make.

You're thinking of this from a perspective of "winning", instead of the experience along the way. The story is designed so that you can "win" with pretty much any team. But how you build your team affects how you approach fights, use items, and so on. These choices are meaningful, because while the game curve allows for a variety of "win" conditions, you can still design a team (if you knew how to) that had no chance of winning at all.

Giving you a Psychic starter, for example, would radically change this (especially in Gen 1 when they were practically god mode).

In Yellow for example you're stuck with Pikachu at the start which makes for quite a difficult battle against Brock, but you can later get all three of the original starters.

Yes, and Yellow is widely recognised as being easier than Red or Blue because of this (after Brock, with Misty being a breeze regardless).

But I'm not talking about getting the starters. I'm saying there's a reason you don't get decent fire types until way later in the game. It preserves the strength of Charmander. Venusaur is flat out one of the best Grass types, and the same goes for Squirtle (Venusaur has the most competition with three-stage evolutions in Vileplume and Victreebel, but both require stones that you can't easily get, if at all, before Celadon).

I am not arguing that you should be able to get any pokemon at all from the start of the game.

I know you're not. I'm trying to explain why restrictions exist at all, and why they're far from arbitrary, even if "making money" is also a factor (and not one I'd ever deny). Even with "make money" as a prerogative, the ones they kept will have been chosen.

And to your point about wireless internet trading, that is exactly why I feel this to be an arbitrary limitation that destroys any interest I would have had in playing these newer games. The fact that I could easily trade these pokemon in if they were in the game just ruins it for me.

shrugs

Sorry, but at this point I think not experiencing the games in question is holding your arguments back.

Like, I get preference. I respect preference. But I'm saying the restrictions aren't arbitrary in the slightest. They designed an entire DLC around giving people a lore-justified way of farming Legendaries you couldn't get up until that point. This is good, because having all eleventy billion Pokemon catachable would otherwise mean you'd hit a Legendary every town. Restrictions matter to the experience.

Certainly, to a kid with a single copy of the game, a link cable and someone else willing to trade was far more of a barrier to getting 150 Pokemon than restricting over 1,000 to 400 was. That's my perspective on it; my story.

 

[Lexicus]

I'd ask if you did, but you apparently haven't even played them! With the expansions, SwSh gets up to over 800 Pokemon.

800's much more reasonable than 350 or whatever the new one is.

 

[Gorbles]

800's much more reasonable than 350 or whatever the new one is.

400, same as SwSh on release.

Of course, it also runs far worse than SwSh, so, eh. I doubt it'll get the same post launch investment unless they can really improve on that.

 

[Sommerswerd]

Obviously, I disagree. More content is always better than less and more content is better than 3D graphics.



to me this is like saying "I don't get the appeal of having 30 civs to play instead of 10", it is self-evidently better to have all the pokemon available in the game as far as I'm concerned just as more civs in a civ game is self-evidently better.

I don't care about completing the pokedex, as I said my concern is the ability to have all my favorite pokemon on a team, which is literally impossible when a bunch of those pokemon aren't even in the game.

I feel the same way about every Street Fighter release...

 

[Takhisis]

Decompilation often requires filling in gaps. If you can't fill in gaps, it can cause problems.

Like we mostly have this solved for code; modern decompilers are pretty darn good. But the margin for error with game source code is very slim given the arcane and often cursed optimisations in the original code. And this before we get onto assets.

The modder-ported DLC page linked has a lot of interesting information about their process vs. a typical development process (short version: they edited the compiled version of the game using software that has been built on for years). And notes that the lighting hits the GPU hard.

*sigh* This is the kind of thing that has me thinking I'll never get to play some old flash games should AlbinoBlacksheep ever go down.

That's a weird way to spell crystal

Obviously, I disagree.

 

[Zardnaar]

Now started playing Europe Universalis 4. The game is just unreal cool, I recommend it to everyone, although I've played it for 30 hours only.

Been there done that. It's really good.

 

[Akka]

Meh. I find EU3 better than EU4 in all ways but graphics. EU4 has already a somewhat inelegant basic design with the magical instant monarch points, and the years of piling up unrelated features through paid DLC have made it a confusing, disjointed bloated mess.

 

[Gorbles]

*sigh* This is the kind of thing that has me thinking I'll never get to play some old flash games should AlbinoBlacksheep ever go down.

On that front, there's actually a lot of interest in preserving Flash content. Which is funny, because as a plugin people hate it. But the games are in our heads. Was partial to Order of the Stick and other stickman themed games myself.

 

[Synobun]

*sigh* This is the kind of thing that has me thinking I'll never get to play some old flash games should AlbinoBlacksheep ever go down.

Flashpoint probably has all of those games already archived.

 

[FredLC]

I usually don't play multi either, it's just that targeting with a pad is awful ^^
I know it's THE point that frustrated me when I played Horizon Zero Dawn on PS4. Especially as you had to aim at those tiny sensitive spots on the robots.

Strategy games with a pad feel just like some abomination (in fact I don't think they even do them anymore).
I can understand the point of the couch (though my gaming chair can be both when reclining ) and I admit it's something that makes me wonder which kind of controller I'll use in some game (like Dragon Dogma). But for FPS, it's always going to be M+K.

The first FPS I played on console was Halo 3. I was back into gaming a couple years before (I had left playing games as a young teenager; but after college, a work opportunity took me for a couple years to a small town in which I knew nobody and that had little entertainment options - bars are not very fun when you have no friends around, and going to the beach everyday gets old and don't work at nights; so I picked up the habit again). I tried some FPS on my PC, but decided that a console would be more practical and portable, and cheaper.

It was weird at first, I agree, but I got used to it. Trying it first with a good game helped. And as I do not play competitively, the performance downgrade does not bother me. Today, I actually find playing games that demand reflexes with K+M actually not very intuitive.

As for RPGs with classical pause design, well, they are usually meant for K+M - the one I remember that follow that trope and is primarily meant for controller is DA Inquisition - but usually, the most successful ones get ports, like Pillars of Eternity, Pathfinder and Divinity. But I do prefer to play those with K+M, except, again, Inquisition, probably because it was designed that way. What makes me unsure if it's more an issue of how they are design originally, and how far a port can go to translate the systems...

It's been at least a decade since I last played an RTS; kinda lost interest in that genre. But I agree with you there; can't see it being a pleasant with a controller...

 

[bene_legionary]

I lost almost 550 hours to EU4. Although learning EU4 was a blast but in the end it felt like I wasn't working for anything except a bigger blob. If they ever release EU5, I'll be hesitant to buy it.

Meanwhile, I'm still chugging along on FTL: Faster Than Light. I've been able to beat the Rebel Flagship on Easy, but on Normal it's much harder. For one, scrap isn't that plentiful anymore, and I'm now playing with Advanced Mode which really ticks the difficulty up from before. I didn't have to deal with all this hacking and mind control and cloning and stunning and charging nonsense!!!!

The last run was Federation Cruiser type A and I focused on not upgrading the Artillery Beam at all, from some comments on the FTL subreddit. Weird but it made sense because the cruiser has very little defensive ability and in FTL offense is often the best defense. Artillery Beam is pretty useless early on because the shielding on your enemies are so low you might as well save that power for your shields or engines. Instead I had the Burst Laser II and Hull Laser I combined with Charge Ion I or Hacking, trying to use Hacking / Ion to get past enemy shields and destroy their weapons. This did not always work but it was reliable until the Rebel Flagship. By then I pretty much ran out of things to upgrade since I defeated everything I came across almost without hull damage, apart from those cracked Rebel / Elite Invaders in the Last Stand sector that are harder to fight than the Rebel Flagship. I also didn't have enough energy, even though I maxed out my reactor and had a Zoltan providing some power, so I was constantly shuffling power between Drones, Ions, Artillery, Hacking, Engines and Oxygen. I got through the first two stages of the Flagship with a few scratches but the Artillery Beam carried me through when I couldn't get at the Flagship because of its shielding.

Annoyingly at this point a repair station right next to the Federation Base got taken over by Rebels so I couldn't repair my hull damage, so I went into the second and third stages under 50% hull points. The third stage I was pretty much unlucky because my lasers kept missing, while my 45% evasion chance for the Flagship's missiles meant nothing because they kept hitting and my Defense I drone just couldn't hit those missiles. I got it down to about 3/5 hull, but on the end, the super laser burst from the Flagship got me. Such a good run, unfortunately a failure. It's now my high score at something like 4800 points, though.

 

[Lexicus]

But I'm saying the restrictions aren't arbitrary in the slightest.

Them restricting the selection of pokemon as part of a conscious strategy of squeezing more rent out of the game is actually worse than if they picked the pokemom at random

 

[Gorbles]

Them restricting the selection of pokemon as part of a conscious strategy of squeezing more rent out of the game is actually worse than if they picked the pokemom at random

I think it's not just that, but I think that was a factor. I think, again, design and technical factors were at play.

Like, you're free to focus on the worst one. Moneymaking sucks. But it's not new. It just happens to this time coincide with a restriction you particularly dislike / is a dealbreaker .

Trade was always a hard barrier for me, like I said. They were literally unobtainable for me. So that aspect of the monetisation has always been forefront in my mind. That and selling a third "improved" version. I love Crystal, but I'm glad they killed the "repackage and improve" version each generation. Not sure when it stopped, maybe after Platinum? Not sure about the B / W and X and Y generations. Was happy that Sword remaining the usable version without having to shell out for Gun or whatever.