So the inimitable Hbomberguy has a new video taking on the pickup artists we here at We Hunted the Mammoth have grown to know and loathe, focusing on two of the most loathesome, Roosh V and Matt Forney.
Watch it! This is one of those very rare 30 minute YouTube videos that’s worth watching (that doesn’t involve cats, Russian drivers, or pimple popping).
Well that was creepy yet enjoyable.
@John
Wow. All I can say is that gaming companies sure fucking hate their non-English speaking fans.
@Jack:
To be honest, one of the reasons I’ve enjoyed Harebrained Schemes’ Shadowrun games so much is because the games (sometimes) allow you to talk your way through things. It’s the same reason that I’ll stand behind Deus Ex and why I’m looking forward to eventually getting Tides of Numenera. Moreover, that degree of player agency is one of the reasons that Divinity: Original Sin managed to impress me only an hour or two in, because I’ve never seen another game that let you create and roleplay as two characters at the same time (though as with most of Larian’s games, it comes with the caveat that the mechanics aren’t quite as well fleshed out as they could be).
My point was more that while you and I have our ideas of what makes something an RPG, other people have markedly different criteria because they care about different things. I don’t think it’s really my place to say that someone is wrong if they think that Skyrim is a good RPG. I could argue the issues I have with it that I think hold it back, but if those aren’t problems for someone else, then why would the game be a bad RPG to them?
(I’m a bit worried that sounds like tone policing or concern trolling, but I’m not really sure how else to put it. I have a very mixed view of the way genre labels are applied to begin with, i.e. I kinda think they’re crap for various reasons, so whenever discussions about them come up I tend to feel like a fish out of water. It’s like when people argue that Portal isn’t a first-person shooter because you’re not killing enemies as your main gameplay loop.)
@dslucia
Or how Smash isn’t a figher, it’s a party game. As if it couldn’t be both. In that case it’s literally gatekeeping with tournaments and stuff. Blah, bleh, blergh…
@dslucia
Nah, I get it. I admittedly may have been a little harsh and stuff with what I said and stuff but I feel that the mechanics of it involve mostly writing in the sense that RPG video games came from tabletop gaming unlike platformers or shooters and such. A good GM writes well, has good imagination and allows the players to do a variety of things, you see. In a video game, that translates to having most if not all quests have different methods of completing them and having player choices have a deeper impact on the world. When a GM doesn’t provide a good story nor gives players more flexibility for gameplay (because they didn’t account for different scenarios), it sucks.
Video games can’t always account for EVERYTHING a person may want to do of course but what Bethesda had been pushing with Fallout or its Elder Scroll games. It’s always “freedom” and “choices” and “impact” but they don’t provide any of those. They KNOW an RPG game should have those, which is why they use such “buzzwords” to sell them, but what is freedom in a game and freedom in an RPG should be different. In a regular game, dumping you into an open world is freedom in a sense that you’re not stuck in a linear level but in an RPG it should be freedom to do quests however you want because having the option to do quests in any order but only one way isn’t freedom in an RPG.
I can’t say it isn’t a FPS because it is first person and you are shooting. There’s even enemies that shoot at you with bullets that you have to disarm without bullets but with shooting still, not that it matters if there’s enemies. Maybe if it was called First Person Killing Game, yeah, it wouldn’t be that, but there’s nothing that qualifies that the shooting has to be completely violent within the name “first person shooter”.
Uh, wtf IS a fighter if Smash isn’t?
No shitty translation has ever stopped a game from selling well. So they don’t see a reason to bother, I guess.
Metal Gear Solid is absolutely legendary here, because it has such bad translation and voice acting, people actually made t-shirts out of the worst lines. Incidentally, it was the last Metal Gear game to get voice overs in any other languages than Japanese and English.
What about non-lethal options then ? First Person Tranq Game ? What if a game has both ? THIS CAN GO ON FOREVEEER ! *evil laughter*
(I like non-violent options, and I like my violence with a non-lethal option, and I wish there were more of that in games. Like, Fallout 4 has a gun that fires fucking syringes and none of the half-dozen or so ammo types is a tranq. You can’t be fucking serious.)
@Pie
I like weavers for shallow reasons. They’re pretty, they make pretty things, and I’ve been told they don’t bite, so I perceive them as friendlier. Jumping spiders clear too much ground in too little time for us to be friends. I won’t even try to catch them; if I see a jumping spider in a room, it’s their room now.
@John
There might’ve actually been more spiders for the mage character, because I didn’t remember there being so many spiders in my rogue playthrough. I think that first area is the only different one, though, so maybe it just scarred me that badly. Don’t make my first mission where I’m bad at killing things giant spiders who tackle me and eat my face please.
And yeah, bears > spiders any day. Unfortunately, the shapeshifting DPS was garbage so I usually opted for the spider just to get a couple poison debuffs in. Morrigan died sooo fast in animal form. You’d have to time the shapeshifting just right so there weren’t enough tougher enemies left to take her out right away but she had enough time to actually shift before the battle ended. If you could get a group of weaker enemies, though, it was fun to rampage through with the bear.
@Axe:
Oh, if we want to get into gatekeeping…
@Jack:
See, I agree with all of this myself. In fact, to go on another tangent, the idea of “freedom” is kind of why I’m always a bit leery of open-world games, because their touted “freedom” always tends to be the “freedom” to go on killing sprees or do a certain number of incredibly specific menial tasks. I’m not usually going to fault an open-world game for providing the player with a variety of things to do, but I find that often the games suffer from the Ubisoft problem of none of that content really being meaningful in any way.
On the flipside, I know it’s infeasible but I would love to see an open-world city sandbox game that actually does manage to account for everything a player might want to do, even if it’s just roleplay some person’s random boring life. I want more player-world interaction, with a larger variety of ways for the player to interact with said world, and a more tangible impact due to the player’s actions.
Admittedly, I tend to just default to “first-person puzzler” if I absolutely have to, but yeah, that’s an actual argument I’ve been involved with in the past. It wasn’t worth having, in case you were curious.
Yes.
One thing I really liked about Skyrim was the little things like being able to cut wood or help people harvest their crops (when I don’t just steal them) or cooking. I loved cooking. Hearthfire happens to be my favorite add-on to Skyrim because of all the new things to make in it. Yeah, being thrust into adventure every second is totally rad and all but it’s just nice to chill and decompress with some alchemy. (One thing I like about Skyrim is that you don’t have to carry 20lb of alchemy equipment anymore. I hope they improve on that more.)
Hunting is also really fun. The animals are a little dumb but you get yourself a bow and just roam the plains all day, enjoying the sights, getting your ass bit by skeever and wolves. Wonderful. Only thing that would make it better is if the game could recognize me proper as a hunter or maybe even had mechanics that were specific to hunting, like being able to track animals. At least better animal AI.
You know what would be nice? If you’d join a guild (or college) and enjoy the learning part first before getting thrust into the big adventure all the guilds lead to for some reason. At least let me take more than one class before making me the fucking head of the school.
Yeah, I thought the Mage’s College was a huge missed opportunity. I’ve wanted a game that kinda just… simulated a magical school ever since Harry Potter (*cough* of course *cough*), and when I discovered that you can get boosted up to Archmage when you still have basic starting-level magic (or even hardly any magic at all), it’s like… sometimes the freedom to do quests actively hinders the player’s attempts at role-playing.
Ahem. Thieves’ Guild. You actually are required to be a decent thief before they allow you to take the helm, even after clearing the main storyline.
So you have to be good at getting your hands dirty to get the privilege of… getting a chestful of loot every week from the dudes who work below you while you presumably just chill.
But you can become archmage of what is arguably a very volatile place with no experience in magic whatsoever.
@John
Didn’t they get rid of the “no kill” rule? And you couldn’t get expelled by getting caught? Or at all though? Because I remember going though the Thieves Guild and killing a lot of people instead of sneaking. I think I got maybe 2-3 perks in Sneak when I finished it the first time through.
@Jack
Getting caught voids the job, from what Delvin and Vex say. Though I suppose it really means “getting caught and sent to jail, or bribing” like, if you flee outta town with the whole garrison chasing you, it’s still alright.
I don’t think you’re allowed to kill anyone related to the job though, but as far as guards and unnamed are concerned it’s open season. Like the mercs in that honey farm, though that ain’t a side-job.
They do tell you several times that they’re the Thieves’ Guild, not the Dark Brotherhood, and if they need someone killed they’ll call on the Brotherhood (which I think is a veiled threat but I could be wrong). So they tell you not to kill anyone but in the end you’re actually allowed to kill some folks, as long as they’re not folks that matter.
Or that time you have to wipe out another group of thieves because they’re too ruthless and kill their marks. Like, you choke on that irony yet ?
There was an attempt at an Ars Magica videogame kickstarter (that is, making a faithful adaption of the venerable tabletop RPG) but it didn’t get funded, sadly. It would have been pretty much what you’re describing.
Of all the might-have-beens in video game culture, that one always sticks in my throat.
FFVIII had a school that functioned like a school at the very beginning of the game. It wasn’t really integral to anything but tutorials and world-building from what I remember, and you could skip most of it, but it was neat. Spent some time sitting in classes, taking tests, and playing cards with the other students.
I’d love to see the games that allow you to have children actually age the children/base them on traits from you and your spouse if they’re biological. Harvest Moon did that with Animal Parade, even having the children help out around the farm based on their traits when they were old enough. Then they sabotaged every good aspect of their games, added a bunch of useless content, and refused to even consider making it an option to marry the same gender. And now Wada is basically taking full credit for Stardew Valley, even though everything about it is an improvement on his series.
@John
One thing I didn’t like about Skyrim’s Thieves Guild is the fact you could kill people at all and not get in trouble. In Oblivion, you couldn’t kill anyone on the job and if you did, you were expelled from the guild and you had to do a quest or pay a large fine to get back in (forgot which one). Also you couldn’t steal from fellow guild mates without consequences. Pretty sure no guild in Skyrim kicks you out at all for breaking rules, so booooo. I want consequences not hand holding boooo punish me game punish me.
@ryeash
You get all my points for mentionning one of my favorite games of all time, and one of my favorite things in that game.
The BGU is bawse.
@Jack
It really bothered me too. I’m pretty sure they changed those rules because maybe they were “too harsh” or something ? That’s kinda rich though, what with all the advertising on “choice & consequence” that actually doesn’t exist, and then they remove one of the few instances of it because the consequences are too much ?
Like… is robbing or murdering fellow guildmates really such an easy mistake to make ?
And I’m pretty sure that’s why the Guild itself is a bunch of assholes in Skyrim. Like, they made them more ruthless to justify the more lax membership rules ? That’s one mean example of why you should be careful about making room in your writing for gameplay-related decisions : that can go real wrong real quick.
I liked the previous Thieves’ Guilds much better. This one’s just… like, basically the mob, it’s kinda dumb. Already have bandits all over the countryside, if you want me to be the asshole kind of criminal, just lemme join the bandits instead. ’cause right now I don’t see much of a difference.
This totally warrants a double post : a Mr. Gutsy just actually called me a pansy ass pinko. I didn’t even know they had that line.
FO4 just became my favorite game ever for that single reason.