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The gaming community discussion thread; Separate from gaming news
Topic Started: Jan 15 2013, 11:51 PM (1,864 Views)
Romanticide
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Granskjegg
Feb 7 2013, 08:09 AM
And to those gamer-girls who exploit their looks for money...you suck.

It might be offensive marketing, but the reason everyone in everything ever looks good is because it works. Hence the old adage: Sex sells.
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Granskjegg
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Indeed. It's just sad, though. =/
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Romanticide
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http://www.gamefaqs.com/features/top10/2559.html

Figured this would be as good a place as any. I suppose I could also post this in the reviews thread, but everyone criticizes games in some fashion; we just choose to do so in a more detailed manner in that thread.

But yeah, this is a pretty good list of things that people should criticize better. I don't think that these things are sacrosanct (we all take them into account and place differing values on each), but a lot of the criticism on these aspects is misguided.

That said, the list doesn't hit on *why* length is a big deal to gamers. Quite simply, we don't have infinite money and games are the most expensive medium of entertainment. Assuming I have money for only one game and all other things are equal, I'm probably going to shell out my money on the 100+ hour RPG over the 5-10 hour FPS that I won't even play online. There are exceptions of course, but then all things wouldn't be equal.

It's not such a big deal when I'm getting a game for under $10. At that point, I figure if I complete the game and derive some enjoyment from it, it was probably worth my money.
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LightningBolt
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Yeah, I was going to point out the length one before I read the rest of your post.

I almost think that list should be called "Top 10 Criticisms That Are Too Vague", because at the end of the day almost all of them are criticisms that are valid if expanded on properly or used on the right game. And the author essentially says this because they give an example of the correct way to use each.

And I guess another thing is to differentiate between a legitimate criticism of a game and a personal opinion. The author seems to go from one to the other at various points in this article. It's one thing to say "The Wind Waker has a bad art style because it looks kiddie." It's another thing to say "I didn't like The Wind Waker's art style because it looks kiddie." I don't agree with the latter, but who am I to say they're wrong? The former is not a legitimate criticism on the other hand.

I'd pretty much completely agree with this list if they're talking about things that shouldn't go into a legitimate review of a game. But the author does seem to have a bit of a "if you don't like this game because _________, you're wrong" vibe going from a few of these, including the length, art style, and no gameplay ones. The article starts out by saying it refers to criticisms of a game's quality, but I'm not sure they really stayed true to that.
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Romanticide
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http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/06/11...-great-stories/

I agree with much of what this article is saying, but the author doesn't even touch on the biggest problem in gaming today, one that touches everything in the industry: It costs a lot of money to make an AAA title.

I suppose that the cost to develop/market an AAA title doesn't have a direct effect on story quality, but it's one that I think is pretty easy to see. A lot of games in that marketplace have ten hour campaigns (or tutorials, if you're feeling more cynical) designed to familiarize the player with the basic gameplay before they go online. Of course, the quality of said campaigns is subjective, but I think most of us can agree that most of them are not storytelling masterpieces. That just isn't a primary focus.

I'm not going to sit here and claim that every game needs a story. It's pretty obvious which genres will never need stories/might even be detracted from by the presence of a story and which genres need at least some kind of story to motivate the player.

If I wanted to have no input from others I'd just write a blog entry. So some questions.


1) How can game stories be better told?

2) What elements does/should a good game story have?

3) Have we reached a point at which we can compare a classic game's story to a classic in another medium without being laughed at?

4) Finally, should story even be a primary focus of games?


Because I'm bored and ripping my last 2394054680 CDs, I'll answer my own questions.

1) Fewer cutscenes. This might seem like anathema to someone whose favorite genre constantly invokes the power of the cutscene, but gaming's one unique advantage over other mediums is gameplay. Cutscenes, by definition, detract from gameplay. They also make a game feel more bloated than it otherwise would be.

Obviously cutscenes will always have a place in games. There are simply times where a cutscene is more appropriate than gameplay. It's just that many games rely on them too much. Enter a dungeon? Cutscene. Something happens there? Cutscene. Beat the boss? Damn right you're getting a cutscene. They should be saved for the biggest, most pivotal moments in a game's plot IMO. Aeris dies? Cutscene. You cross a line on a map to trigger some inconsequential event? No.

I liked Bastion's narrative style a lot. It was probably the most compelling aspect of that game. The story was doled out by the narrator as you progressed through the game. Why not treat actual dialogue the same way? I find it hard to believe that everyone's just going to find 5-10 minutes (or more) so they can sit around and talk about the shit that's going on around them. Worlds are falling apart, the characters are being chased, or whatever else, and they magically find time in the middle of all this for some conversation.

Also, more ways in-game of telling the story. Dark Souls, from what I hear, is pretty minimalist. You have to piece it together yourself from talking with NPCs and other such stuff. The Elder Scrolls doesn't tell its story through in-game books, but it's a good way of world-building without approximately four quintillion cutscenes. It does detail events occurring in that world through newsletters or whatever else, though. It'd also help if that series' eight billion places had ways to further the various plots/build the world, as opposed to being just another place for you to loot.

Lastly, killing a metric shitton of enemies often gets in the way of telling a story. I can set aside my disbelief about many elements in a game if it's even barely justified, but most games just throw endless waves of enemies at you for no good narrative reason. It doesn't help they're just random mooks who are there for no other reason than to be a pain in your ass. I get the gameplay reasons, but in many narratives, hundreds/thousands of enemies make no sense at all. It also takes time away from telling the damn story.

2) Some of the most important elements are universal. Characters I care about are important. Without them, even the most moving set of events means precisely jack shit. Of course, a plot that I care about matters too, because what's the point of great characters if nothing happens to them? Without one or the other, a game's story often suffers.

Of course, you can take these *too far*. I loved To the Moon, but it's barely a game. The "gameplay" aspects of it can take like 30 minutes at best, and I'm being generous. Not that it'd have benefited from more gameplay, but you could have made it a movie too without losing a whole lot.

Other than money, the big problem is, "how can gameplay and story complement each other?" It's a question with no easy answers, unfortunately.

3) The simple answer is no.

The slightly more complicated answer is no, but we haven't even established storytelling rules in this medium. It's a young medium and most publishers involved in it have put money first and art second. The other forms of media have many years on gaming, and a lot of those were years where profit wasn't the sole basis for making art.

4) As with most things, it depends on the product in question. But if this were a life or death question, I'd probably say, "No, focus on what games do well - gameplay. Once you have that down, figure out ways to incorporate good stories."
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Volt
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One of the things I never quite understood about this discussion is the frequent comparisons between books and video games. Both a painting and a song have just as much potential of conveying a strong message to an audience, but they're impossible to compare because they're vastly different. The same exists for books and video games. With books, you have metaphors, poetry and rhythm, vivid words, tone, mood, and many other devices used to make a good story. With video games, the interactive part makes nearly all of these next to impossible to convey.

Being as new as the medium is, there aren't any standard rules yet. Even so, it's impossible to say that people haven't figured out how to make good stories with video games. Video games, at least for me, offer a far more personal experience than any movie or book has managed to do. The interactive element in video games allow you to become part of a new world, meet and become friends with new people, and experience events otherwise impossible in the real world.

In an action-filled book or movie, it's very easy to not grow attached to characters. Often any emotional scene is imbalanced by the amount of action in the book or movie. In games, however, fighting alongside other characters helps to create bonds with those characters. The interactive element makes for a brand new way to grow attached to characters, and as a result can make events in the games much more powerful and meaningful than otherwise possible.

Take, for example, the game Chrono Trigger. Because of the way you spend the game fighting with your party, you become attached to them. When that one scene happens (those who have played know the one), your party's actions cause a strong emotional response with the player. If a book or a movie did the same story with the same exact level of detail that the game did, that scene would not be nearly as meaningful. Interaction can play a very strong part of the game's story, it just depends on how it's used.

When it comes to the question of whether or not games will ever be able to tell powerful and meaningful stories, I say that we're already there. Games may not have all of the fancy metaphors, symbolism, rhythm, or whatever that books have, but that's because they're games. They're fundamentally different. People shouldn't be judging one medium with another medium's guidelines; that's just silly. I've been moved on many occasions by the stories in games, and anyone that tells me that games can't tell good stories I'll quickly call a liar.

To answer your questions, since you asked them:

1). Take advantage of the interactive part of games. You can use gameplay to convey feelings as well as cutscenes. Developers should also keep in mind that some gameplay elements can easily distract from the stories and kill the immersion. QTEs are the biggest offender of this.

2). For a game to have a good story (at least for me), it needs to connect with me on a deep emotional level. It's kinda hard to answer this one, as there isn't a pattern in what many of my favorite game stories are.

3). No, and we never will simply because of the fundamental differences between games and other mediums. Again, if anyone today were to compare a painting and a song (two very old forms of art) they would be ridiculed.

4). Yes, most definitely. If a game has little to no story, it can become mindless and uninteresting, but a game can have little gameplay and a lot of story and still be meaningful. The Walking Dead is the best example of this, since it won Game of the Year and all.


I have the intention of becoming an indie developer and my main idea is heavily story based and artsy. My intention is to make something that impacts the player on a deep emotional level, and to bring out not often seen negative emotions, creating a largely depressing atmosphere. I take great pride in my idea, so any discussion that tries to make my medium of preference less meaningful can get me riled up easily. It's pretty insulting when people call your passion dumb or mindless, y'know. Not a personal attack, just this type of discussion tends to get me on the defensive quickly.
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Romanticide
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Nice post there, Volt.

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In an action-filled book or movie, it's very easy to not grow attached to characters. Often any emotional scene is imbalanced by the amount of action in the book or movie. In games, however, fighting alongside other characters helps to create bonds with those characters.

I do agree with this. Fire Emblem comes to mind for me; the characters oftentimes have little personality. (Of course, it's hard if not impossible to develop 40+ characters without bloating the game.) I always fall back on Mia and Nephenee of FE9/10 for these discussions, and they have one shtick: Mia is constantly looking for a rival, and Nephenee is a simple country girl. They are objectively not fleshed out characters, yet I like them anyway. Why? Because they're good units and I'll fall back on them in pretty much every file.

It's just that when you're playing an RPG and killing your 500th monster for no reason other than "it's in my way", that's not really adding anything beyond experience and possible loot. Not that *everything* that happens in the other mediums matters to the plot at large, but they won't make you sit through hundreds of fights or whatever to get to the good stuff. While this is one of gaming's largest strengths (especially for open-world games), if you're looking to tell a focused story, it's also one of gaming's largest weaknesses.

The Last Story was really good about this. Sure, you still had fights because it's a video game and all, but it was one of the most focused RPGs of recent times. It had a story it wanted to tell and it didn't waste the player's time with eight trillion mandatory things that had little to nothing to do with telling a story.

However, focus on the story means shorter games, and shorter games means sooner potential resales to Gamestop. We both know what publishers say and try to do about this.


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I've been moved on many occasions by the stories in games, and anyone that tells me that games can't tell good stories I'll quickly call a liar.

Yup, same, and it's not just by the obvious "barely game" examples that we've both mentioned here.

I think now would be a good time to expand upon the concept of "being moved". We know that entails more than "omg i cried dat scene was so sad", but it often seems to me that this is where the discussion ends up. Yeah, I'm moved by the endings of Mother 3, Lufia 2, and Persona 3 (all sad endings), but if this is all "being moved" is, then we have a loose definition of being moved. You can be moved by a great villain doing villain-esque things, by having to make a difficult if not downright impossible choice, by fighting a villain you can somewhat agree with/empathize with, by making something that makes the player question his/her beliefs, and so on. There are many ways to move the player, but the way that gets focused on most is the "omg so sad" one.

With an expanded definition, I can easily add more "game games" to the list. However, many of these games eventually revert to tropes of their genre and thus lose a fair bit of their impact. For me, Final Fantasy XII comes to mind. It's a political intrigue for much of the game, but once a certain cutscene happens, it reverts to "save the world" shit. I also agree with its antagonists' goals more than the protagonists', but that's spoilers.


I didn't think to mention it in my first post (probably because the original post focuses on narrative), but who says all great stories have to be narrative? We don't watch sports because everyone involved is a great human being or because they have some grand story beyond "play for the title". Sometimes sports can tell us something about ourselves and about the human condition, but for the most part we watch sports because we like competition, usually at its highest level. Competition creates its own stories. I'm not much of a competitive gamer, but I'm sure the competitive genres/games have their own legendary matches. Like a great sporting event, these can be meaningful and will probably live on as long as gaming does, too.

And then there are the more personal stories. Nobody's going to care about a game of Civilization I played against the computer or about some random city I built in SimCity 3000, unless something truly compelling *did* happen. I could come up with various examples, but the point is: These are personal stories of creation. While they might not be meaningful on any level other than a personal level, who's to say narrative sorts of stories are the only ones that matter?
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Olinea
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A recent update is going through for Borderlands 2 which contains a huge assortment of fixes to exploits, balance changes, and more. Two noteworthy changes on the list are the removal of the Treasure Room Glitch and item duplication. This has resulted in an uproar from some members of the community. Let's get some context.

The Treasure Room is an area accessible at the end of one of the DLCs. Players will get two opportunities to visit it - after beating the final boss of the DLC, and after beating another certain optional mission available only after beating the story mode of the DLC. Abusing clipping issues associated with the final boss of the DLC has allowed players to re-gain entry to the Treasure Room, which, as the name would suggest, is an area which contains a substantial number of high-powered items. The general rarity scale in Borderlands 2 follows a color-coordinated system: White being the most common and least powerful, followed by Green, Blue, Purple, and Orange - also known as Legendary. Two other colors of items, Seraph and Pearlescent, also exist; however, Seraph weapons are limited to being sold by certain vendors and cannot be found in chests, and Pearlescent weapons are very limited in number - only 8 different ones exist, whereas the count of Legendaries is currently... 72, I believe; Legendaries therefore have a much more diverse set of applications in fields like elemental choice, magazine size, damage, and customization based on class and role. Legendary weapons are mostly hard to come by - almost every boss or significant unit in the game is tied to a specific legendary weapon that they drop more frequently; although this frequency is in the single-digit percentage, to the point where farming just one specific legendary item can possibly take dozens of kills and hours of repeated farming, and you may find that the item's level is suboptimal, the scope is not to your preference, or it didn't have the element you were after. By repeatedly abusing the Treasure Room exploit, players had a safe, fast way to open chests (which have chances to contain legendary items as well, albeit at a much lower frequency, and very rarely happening to be the one you might be after) and reap large numbers of legendary items. It seems Gearbox (makers of Borderlands 2) decided that flying through the air and running through the walls of the Treasure Room was an exploit, and the patch will put an end to this process.

In addition, I mentioned item duplication being put to rest. Borderlands 2 is a shoot-and-loot game, where the purpose of shooting is to get the best loot (weapons, shields, grenade mods, class mods) you can find. But sometimes people want the absolute best loot without having to shoot. To do that, you have three options:

1) Farm the weapon you want.
2) Find someone who has the weapon you want, and get it from them - through trading or asking nicely.
3) Use a third-party program to make the weapon yourself.

The main issue, as you can probably tell, is that option 1) can be lengthy, especially when you get picky about the composition of your loot (barrel, body, scope, element, etc.) and if you're playing with a group, you need to pick one person to take the gun out of 2-4 candidates, and option 3) leaves the legitimacy of weapons obtained through option 2) in doubt. Many players could not care less about where the gun came from, and modded weapons have since made the rounds; some with completely illegal combinations (for example, the weapon manufacturer Torgue makes the only guns that shoot explosive rounds, but they don't make sniper rifles ("I DON'T MAKE SNIPER RIFLES BECAUSE YOU CAN'T PROPERLY APPRECIATE THE EXPLOSION FROM FAR AWAY. IF YOU'RE NOT PICKING GIBLETS OUT OF YOUR TEETH IT WASN'T A REAL KILL" ~Mr. Torgue)). A sniper rifle shooting explosive rounds, therefore, is an illegal combination, and if you come across one it's been modded. However, third-party programs can be used to make yourself a Bitch with the corrosive element; a legal combination in-game, meaning there's no way to tell if someone's handing you a corrosive Bitch that came from the boss it corresponds to and was a pretty lucky drop, or if it was dropped into some modder's inventory through a program that wasn't Borderlands. While I don't have stats on the percentage of the playerbase who used these programs and continued to trade around these items, most of the time players would opt to use an exploit in which by putting an item up for the stakes of a duel (winner gets the item), then equipping and unequipping the item, throwing it on the ground, and having the other player kill you in the duel, that player will "win" the item, while a second copy remains on the ground. This was a commonplace method of duplicating an item, so that a trade never had to result in the loss of your weapon. Some used the method to effectively give everybody in the party a copy of a rare weapon that dropped from a raid boss, so that the decision of "which one of us 4 gets this super powerful rocket launcher?" never had to be made. Other times it was in goodwill. Mostly it was used for people who wanted an optimal copy of a strong gun but didn't want to farm or make it themselves. That's been patched out, too.

So why am I writing this here? Well, this incident made me think about the various cheats and exploits that have existed in games of the past, and just wondered what people had to say on the matter.

When I think of glitches/exploits, the first one that immediately comes to mind is the Missingno. glitch from Pokemon Red&Blue. For those not in the know, Missingno. is not actually a Pokemon - or at least not a legitimate, intended one. An error in the game's programming allowed players to encounter this glitch as though it were an actual Pokemon - despite it having the Bird type (not a formal type in the Pokemon universe) and several other problems including its encounter causing the sprites of certain game aspects like the Hall of Fame to scramble. For this reason, Missingno. can certainly be classified as a glitch. The exploit classification comes from the fact that players encountering it would soon find the sixth item in their bag had been duplicated to a near-infinite number; this was particularly useful when players organized specific items into this spot - three very useful applications being the duplication of TMs, one-time-use items which would teach a move to your Pokemon (some being very powerful moves - most of these were only obtainable once per playthrough, and so the decision to use a TM was not one to be taken lightly), Master Balls, which would allow 100% unfailable capture of any Pokemon, and probably most commonly, the Rare Candy, which would instantly level up the target Pokemon; with an infinite supply of Rare Candies, it was extremely easy to have a full team of Pokemon at Level 100 (the maximum level) in a very small fraction of the time it would take to train them to that point. Missingno. is probably the most interesting glitch to me - I can think of no other game where my very first thought upon thinking of said game is of a memorable glitch. To me, Missingno. was Pokemon Red & Blue; as somebody who very, very rarely abuses exploits in games, I don't think I'd ever play Red or Blue again without using this glitch. It demonstrates that people do make mistakes - that you are just playing a program in which careless testing can let something like this exist. It's not malicious or evil or wrong; it's an accident, and a beloved one at that.

Some glitches and exploits are a bit more drastic. Look at the Falador Massacre from Runescape. A long time ago, a player named Cursed You was the first to hit the maximum level of 99 in the new Construction skill, and invited a large number of players to his player-constructed house to celebrate. When he was forced to boot players from the party to relieve server lag (due to so many people being concentrated in one spot), players who were in a duel arena section of the house found that after being booted from the house, they retained the ability to attack other players around the world - without being hurt themselves. The biggest perpetrator, Durial321 (interview with him can be found here), went on an enormous killing spree, slaying player after player, causing a huge number of rare items to be left behind (in Runescape, if you die then all except your three most valuable items on your person will be dropped on the ground where you died; you can retrieve them if you died close enough to the global respawn point, but typically that stuff will be lost forever) and looted by other players in the area. Many, many players lost items from the killing spree - the entire ordeal lasted about an hour, but the damage had been done. He was, of course, banned, and the exploit patched. The interview posted earlier in the paragraph sheds more light on the event; from most anyone's standpoint, it was the ultimate in dick moves - killing players simply because you can, fully exploiting a glitch that cost many players some of their best gear that took countless hours to obtain. In reality, the act was perpetrated because letting an opportunity like that go to waste would probably end up being a big regret - a spur of the moment thing. After it all transpired he claims he would ideally like every player to have their lost items returned - an almost impossible feat, short of the servers being rolled back to before the event (which would affect a much, much, much larger playerbase than those who suffered). I don't think Durial was a bad person - granted, some people had the same power he did and never acted in the same way, but that seemed like an opportunity you almost had to take advantage of. I can't say for certain that I would 100% not abuse that in any way (I like to think if anything I'd use to to scare some friends at the time, but cause no real lasting damage) but something like this demonstrates that glitches can cause widespread problems depending on how players react; sometimes go down in infamy.

I could go on and on about glitches, bugs, exploits - but it's been a long enough time writing this so I guess I'd like to hear everyone's thoughts. "What do you think" is a bit too general to kick it off so let's see.

~Are there any glitches or exploits that you feel majorly positively contributed to a particular game or set of games? One example being the birth of the "combo" from Street Fighter.
~On the flipside, are there glitches or exploits that you think majorly detracted from the enjoyment of a game or set of games? This doesn't include poor game design or faulty gameplay, but unintended methods or actions that a player must choose to undertake which lessen the experience? In some circles the Missingno. glitch could be an example here.
~What drives people to apply glitches and exploits? To save time? Test the limits of a game? Avoid undesirable aspects of the game? Relieve difficulty? Simply to show off?
~I can't come up with other discussion points so fire away.
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Romanticide
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Quote:
 
~Are there any glitches or exploits that you feel majorly positively contributed to a particular game or set of games? One example being the birth of the "combo" from Street Fighter.

I suppose the Wavedash from Melee would fall into this category. It was never an intended thing as far as I know, but it changed the way Smash was played and eventually became a tool of the best Melee players. To this day you'll hear people bemoan that it's not in Brawl.

(I personally don't know how to wavedash. If I were ever going to play competitively, I'd learn how to, but competitive play is not a priority for me.)

That's really all I can think of. I'm not someone who looks too much into glitches/exploits.


Quote:
 
~On the flipside, are there glitches or exploits that you think majorly detracted from the enjoyment of a game or set of games? This doesn't include poor game design or faulty gameplay, but unintended methods or actions that a player must choose to undertake which lessen the experience? In some circles the Missingno. glitch could be an example here.

I don't know much about glitches in FPS games, but you always hear how something like a Call of Duty is filled with hackers and cheaters. Of course you have the people who call anyone better than them a hacker or cheater, but these things do happen. I can only imagine how stumbling into a room full of people using invincibility codes and whatever else ruins the experience for everyone not using this shit.

Quote:
 
~What drives people to apply glitches and exploits? To save time? Test the limits of a game? Avoid undesirable aspects of the game? Relieve difficulty? Simply to show off?

As with most things, it varies from person to person. Hell, it probably varies from game to game, too. Nobody's going to use glitches in Pokemon because it's difficult, but someone might consider using a glitch to alleviate the difficulty in something like Dark Souls.

The inverse question could be asked: What drives people not to abuse glitches/exploits? Obviously most hardcore gamers know they exist (at least in their favorite titles), but not everyone uses them, so why not?

I suppose the biggest factor would have to be effort. It takes time and effort to learn many glitches/exploits. You might be able to do it once or twice at random, but getting consistent generally takes time. For me that's time that could be going towards plowing through another game's story, reading a book, or whatever else, so it's not something I choose to partake in. For someone else that might be time they could be putting towards actually playing the game against other human beings, being social, or whatever else, instead of learning some trick.

Outside of effort, you have the purists. These are the people who would say "that's not how the game is meant to be played!" The reasoning for this stance in a multiplayer game or a single player game with leaderboards is fairly obvious: It puts players not using exploits on an uneven playing field, and considering that a big part of competition is in determining who the winner/high scorer is under a given set of rules, it's not fair and it tells us nothing other than "someone cheated".

I suppose each game/community would define what it considers to be an unfair advantage. I think we can all agree on things like unlimited ammo and invincibility being unfair, but there are probably many glitches/exploits that fall into a grey area. Some communities might allow these, others might not.

For a single player game, it gets a bit more interesting. I personally don't care what someone does in their copy of a game by themselves. They paid money for it (unless they say otherwise, I guess), they can do whatever they want with their copy because it won't be affecting anyone else. Would I say there's some shame in using glitches/exploits to beat a game they haven't previously beaten? Yes, but it's their shame to live with, if they feel any over it. But if you've already beat a game and want to fuck around/speed run it/make it easier? Fine, I suppose.
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LifeAgainstDeath
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I've only ever used one exploit, and that was one used to obtain the Zodiac Spear in Final Fantasy XII (the most powerful weapon in the game).

[spoiler=Explanation of this exploit]There are two legitimate ways to obtain the Zodiac Spear (full explanation here). The first, easier way is by avoiding opening four specific chests in the game, then finding it in a chest in a certain area. This method allows the spear to be obtained fairly early in the game, though the higher-level monsters and the optional boss you must face will make it difficult.

Unfortunately, I was not aware of the spear when I first started playing, had already opened three of the chests, and had to resort to method number 2. The second method is it'll randomly appear in a chest in a different high-level monster area if you have a certain accessory equipped. Here's the bullshit part: there's only a 10% chance of the chest appearing, a 10% chance it'll even have an item, and a 10% chance of the item being the Zodiac Spear (0.1% chance of getting the weapon). If you travel to this area and don't get it, then you must soft reset and try again, so it's extremely tedious. However, thanks to the exploit, you can manipulate the game's random number generator to force the chest to always have the Zodiac Spear.[/spoiler]

I'm not a big fan of using exploits/glitches in single-player games, but I don't really hate them. It's interesting reading about or watching videos of them (like that one complicated one that allowed OoT to be beat in 22 minutes). I actually subscribe to a guy on Youtube (KlydeStorm) who will regularly find ways to use exploits and whatnot to get shorter speedruns (most recently, he discovered how an exploit in Luigi's Mansion can be used to reach the final boss after fighting the first boss). I actually enjoy watching how these are done, even if I would never use them (and probably couldn't since some of them seem pretty difficult), because I just prefer playing games without them. If others want to use them, I don't give a shit.

As for multi-player, I guess it really depends on the glitch/exploit. I've seen ones that allow people to camp in normally unreachable parts of maps in Halo and COD. These can be considered bullshit, but at least you're still capable of harming that player (unless they went through a wall or something), so they're not that bad.

The more shitty ones though: someone able to go under a map in COD (either MW or MW2, don't remember), essentially becoming invincible and can kill whoever; someone able to get stuck in a wall in TF2 (though IIRC, that was due to lag or something) and same thing, invincible and kill whoever; etc. Also would hear from Darkie all the time about all the hackers and exploiters in Conduit who get infinite rocket launchers or whatever. These ones just suck and ruin the experience for the rest of us.

EDIT: Oh, I just remembered, I did use the screen warp glitch in Link's Awakening when I was younger, but I only used it to fuck around, never to progress further.
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Romanticide
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http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/971967...nd-theft-auto-v

This isn't news, nor is it a review or critique of the game. Rather, it's more so about the gaming community, how people can move away from even a series commonly viewed as one of gaming's cornerstones, and how game stories can oftentimes make no sense when viewed through the prism of what makes a "good story" in other mediums.

Definitely worth your time.
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Romanticide
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http://thinkprogress.org/alyssa/2013/12/04/3019411/silent-movies/

This isn't really "gaming news", per se, but I guess it's *news*, even if the column itself is more lamenting the loss of many silent films than reporting.

I post it in here because the problem of archiving is one that I feel we're going to have in gaming too. After seven, and now moving on to the eighth, generations of consoles, there are plenty of systems that have fallen by the wayside. If we haven't already started losing games, we'll start losing them at some point if only because of the passage of time. PC will have this problem too because older PC games were obviously not designed for Windows, and older Windows OSes are not supported anymore.

Many classics will not have this problem. Games like FF7, etc, will either be re-made or just carried on into future generations via emulation, streaming, or what have you. They've stood the test of time and, probably more importantly, made the publishers a lot of money over their lifetimes. But what happens to a cult classic? People thought Earthbound would never be on the Wii U virtual console because of the music issues. Mother 3 is arguably just as classic, at least to the Mother fanbase, but that never came over here and could very well wind up lost to time.

Sure, a lot of games that have been/will be lost are probably bad games. At the end of the day, nobody's going to mourn the loss of something like Lagoon on the SNES, which was bad but not infamously bad like Superman 64, Big Rigs, or what have you. Even games as bad as those will likely be preserved by somebody, if only for the ironic factor/knowing what not to do when designing a game. But should we be preserving only the best of the best and/or the games that are so bad that they should serve as examples of what not to do?

I'm not going to sit here and pretend that an obscure bad game is going to be mined for its cultural relevance tens or hundreds of years down the line, but neither should it be lost just because it's considered a bad game by the gaming populace/gaming media at large. We all have that one bad game nobody knows about that we enjoy anyway.
Edited by Romanticide, Dec 4 2013, 07:00 PM.
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GRhixe5KEPs

Boogie2988 makes the best points about how the internet service providers are holding back an all digital future for gaming. Up here in canada, I split the internet bill with my roommate, we pay 100$ a month for our internet. We only have a 90GB/month cap. Anything over that, and they charge an extra 2.50$/GB. Until that is improved, I am not going to embrace an all digital future.
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Romanticide
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There are a few things that would have to happen for me to embrace an all-digital future.

1) Higher internet speeds
This is the biggie. In the Twin Cities, the average internet speed is something like 15 mbps. This number is questioned because some think it includes corporate internet speeds, which are faster than residential speeds. Not the fastest ever, but it looks like the fucking Road Runner when you compare it to the rest of Minnesota. Only about one-third of the state has access to anything over 10 mbps. I'm rocking a very fierce 3 mbps connection (max is 10, but it's not our biggest priority), though as far as I know it has no cap. If it does, I've never approached it.

I have at least one game that's over 30 GB. Most of my AAA games are now pushing 15-20 GB. Considering that on average I download about a gig of data an hour, games are taking me, well, 15-20 hours to download. I put up with this because the games I'm downloading are at absurdly low prices. I'm not paying $50-60 only to wait many hours to play most games. (TES and Civ are the only exceptions at this point)

The issue here in the United States/Canada is probably, "Who would provide this for rural areas?" There isn't any profit in installing a whole new infrastructure for towns that might have 1000 people at best, and only a small handful of people who might actually *need* those speeds. Private providers would want no part of this when only like 5 people in a small town would ever need higher speeds. What we have is good enough for Facebook/Netflix (I doubt anyone I know got 10 mbps just for HD Netflix), and as it is that's what most people here use. The US government doing it would be decried as socialism, and given their track record on surveillance, I'm not sure I'd trust them to build infrastructure they can't use to spy.

2) Smaller games/a standard format
As it is, developers can develop and know they have 50 GB of storage to fall back on because lol dual-layer Blu-Ray discs. This is nice for console players who want to just pop in a disc and play, but assuming a lazy PC port, these games are still going to be huge. If the games are too big, people will just buy the disc inst- Wait this is what console developers would *want*. But again, not everyone has fast internet, and not everyone wants to sit around for hours twiddling their thumbs while a game downloads. If we go all-digital with these speeds, the industry will crash again. We're just not ready.

A standard format would be needed so our games don't just turn into 5-7 year rentals. If I'm buying a console that goes all digital, that's my biggest worry right there. I'd want to be assured that I can play whatever I buy not only on this system, but its next iteration and so on and so forth. I'd also want assurance that I can download a game that I bought but is no longer being sold. This might seem like a non-issue to collectors, who keep everything, but I'd rather not have to keep an old machine and hope its HDD stays alive for years down the road. (I know HDDs last a fair while, but they do not last *forever*)

3) Competitive services
PC has plenty of services other than Steam you can turn to. GOG is one that fills a niche that Steam largely ignores, old games. Other than that, there's also Green Man Gaming, Gamersgate, Desura, Amazon, and Gamefly, not to mention the bundle sites like Humble Bundle, Groupees, and Indie Royale, all of which I've used at points. I'm still mostly bout dat Steam life, but I'd be remiss to ignore these sites also have viable deals. There's also *shudder* Origin and Uplay. All this competition actually does what competition is supposed to do in the marketplace: Drive prices down. Just this year alone, the PC versions of Bioshock Infinite and Tomb Raider hit single digit prices. Even SimCity recently hit $15 (still $15 too much until it has offline play, but oh well), and that's an EA game, which generally don't have great deals for years.

I'm sure these games had deals on console too, but I don't think they fell as far or as fast as the PC versions at any point.

Consoles? While Sony took a step in the right direction by allowing Amazon to sell PSN downloads, there's still no competition on Nintendo and Microsoft consoles. Nintendo will obviously not allow competitors to sell shit on Nintendo systems. They don't have to because they know we come mostly for the first-party games. (Well, people like me come for the JRPGs. If not for them I'd swear consoles off.) Microsoft might benefit from allowing some semblance of competition, but I dunno if they will. Until there's competition, there's no incentive for any of these companies to have digital pricing that competes with PC, especially on exclusives.


It's not just on the ISPs; it's also partially on a greedy as fuck game industry that wants to push the envelope before both ISPs and itself are truly ready.
Edited by Romanticide, Jan 3 2014, 09:53 PM.
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http://kotaku.com/i-help-make-video-games-and-im-sick-of-the-hatred-fro-1500603631

Pretty much this. I mean, it speaks for itself; there isn't a whole lot I can add here.


EDIT: http://techcrunch.com/2014/01/13/booth-babes-dont-convert/

I'd agree with most of this. Tech fields tend to draw a group of males that is, well, intimidated by the prospect of socializing with women. I know, generalizations, but I think we know it to be mostly true.

Personally I'd rather speak with someone who's running the booth. Odds are they'd know more about the product in question than a couple of girls wearing low-cut shirts and shorts or a sexy costume or whatever. Also, if someone has to have booth babes, I wonder if their product is any good. If they could sell me on the substance of their product, well, they wouldn't be resorting to tactics like this.

Not sure I'd agree with laziness. I don't doubt there are girls who think their looks will see them through, but you'd think any reasonably competent hiring process would weed these sorts out. There's also probably a bit more to it than "standing around and looking pretty", even if that *is* a big component of their job.
Edited by Romanticide, Jan 16 2014, 03:19 AM.
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