I hate that older millenials and gen x caller ourselves boomers, we're not, we're just old, shit we liked from when we were young wasn't associated with our parents. Its us, we're the walking olds.
First time I ever saw Doom my Dad's brother was playing it, and he's very much a boomer
This single anecdote proves your entire thesis wrong, I am so terribly sorry
does anyone even make single player first person shooters anymore? I guess some indie studios doing lower budget retro style games?
Oh I guess valve made that VR half life 2 prequel
there's a new cod game every year
I am specifically discounting the cods and whatever similar crap because the single player parts are at this point pretty ancillary to the real product (from the business side's point of view), the multiplayer
I hate that older millenials and gen x caller ourselves boomers, we're not, we're just old, shit we liked from when we were young wasn't associated with our parents. Its us, we're the walking olds.
First time I ever saw Doom my Dad's brother was playing it, and he's very much a boomer
This single anecdote proves your entire thesis wrong, I am so terribly sorry
My boomer dad played Doom when I was a kid, and then later Half Life and several WWII shooters I forget which ones. I was allowed to watch Doom, but not play (it was both too hard and Too Scary for little me). I was 12 when Half Life came out; I tried to play it once and practically had a panic attack after the first headcrab. Full-on adrenaline rush, but not the fun kind.
As a result of this and a lack of consoles in the house I grew up thinking Computer Games were For Grownups (aside from obvious edutainment like Treasure Mountain, etc.).
I was legitimately surprised when I discovered, as a teen, that some people thought Video Games were For Children.
i got burned badly enough by Kingmaker to know that I probably wouldn't enjoy WotR
i'm not sure if it's more a matter of just me being old, but I found pathfinder more obtuse to learn than BG's AD&D 2E ruleset
just really difficult to figure out what I was screwing up when my entire party got wiped multiple times in a chance encounter in the first chapter of the game, or what I needed to change to avoid that
What's that, we're talking about the BG encounter right at the start of the game where they throw a mage at you that immediately casts Mirror Image and then proceeds to wreck you?
that mage doesn't have shit on the wee spiderlings
Have you considered getting better at rolling dice?
My mother never had the coordination for wasd+mouselook but before that became standard those family duke nukem lan matches using a bunch of shitty ebay laptops were fun times.
FishmanPut your goddamned hand in the goddamned Box of Pain.Registered Userregular
My Boomer Dad loves the Sniper Elite games.
Just loves killing Nazis, I guess.
My mother is into first-party Nintendo Switch games, mostly. Saves me buying them, I just borrow BotW, Pikmin 3, Super Mario Odyssey, etc. when I feel like.
does anyone even make single player first person shooters anymore? I guess some indie studios doing lower budget retro style games?
Oh I guess valve made that VR half life 2 prequel
Roboquest
Adaca
Ready or Not
G String
Prodeus
Vomitoreum
Space Beast Terror Fright
Viscerafest
Blood West
Just off the top of my shooter filtered by singleplayer list.
There's a shit load of really good and cool single player FPS's. They just aren't COD but singleplayer or whatever popular vibe people expect. It's kinda rad after dealing with a decade of everyone trying to mimic gears of war and then cod gameplay.
My mom doesn't play video games other than occasionally solitaire. My dad doesn't play any anymore, but he used to be super into Tetris and SimCity back when I was a kid. It's basically his fault that I got into Tetris.
I remember being confused your character continued to the third game with metro exodus until someone pointed out I had gotten the bad ending two games in a row. Woops.
I would like some money because these are artisanal nuggets of wisdom philistine.
a thread with probably unpopular grumbling of a non-violent game designer who's tried and failed to escape making combat-based games many times
ok not every game but you know what I mean. theoretically Moon Hunters would be better and more thematically consistent without combat as its central gameplay -- persuasion or cultural exchange or just exploring would be more thematic. beating up random wild animals is weird.
and Ooblets for example is SO much stronger for not having your cute little friends fight and defeat each other. the dogfighting analogy at the heart of Pokemon remains deeply unsettling and just glossed over for the same reasons Moon Hunters does it:
we wanted a system-driven challenge for individuals AND groups of players that was relatively easy to understand as soon as you picked up the game. that's combat.
consider the number of comabt concepts that have varied definitions across genres and games but have a generally-understood relationship to each other: hitpoints, damage, weapon, armor, vulnerability, poison, piercing, vampirism, ranged, block, dodge, trip, unarmed, etc.
you CAN build a different metaphor. Ooblets has dance-offs.
but then you have to explain a bunch of new elements (victory points instead of HP, beats, warm-ups, hype, fluster, trepidation), but regardless of abstraction, they FEEL more abstract due to unfamiliarity.
Ooblets dance-offs are really "just" a turn-based card RPG combat.
example move: Pilfer Polka, which costs 2 beats in order to steal 4 victory points.
but what is happening in this metaphor? how is my dancing stealing their glory? what kind of polka makes them look bad? huh?
by comparison, imagine a similar move from Slay the Spire -- it'd obviously be lifesteal/vampirism, leeching HP from the opponent. even though it's just as abstract (how did my sword waving around take their blood and put it into me again???), it feels more grounded.
this isn't a knock on Ooblets! it's a design that fits their needs! but my imagined story of what happens during their little dance-off battle is much less clear than my imagined story of standard RPG combat.
ok hold on I know there are some beautiful non-combat system challenges! in TTRPGs especially. Blades in the Dark uses grand heists as a metaphor. but there aren't _that_ many familiar situations that have analogs to all those combat elements I mentioned above. let's just take 1.
poison is heckin' complex in real life. IRL, poison can instantly kill you in some doses or take years to kick in, be a liquid or powder or gas, absorbed by skin or mouth or only open wounds, have various symptoms and treatments, etc.
but RPGs have used them in such a consistent way over the decades that we know what to expect, roughly: some damage over a longer period of time, possibly forever, or until a generic antidote has been consumed/applied.
you don't need to explain almost anything when you label something in a RPG as Poison unless you're wildly different than the standard, since just from observation players will be able to see and interpret its effects.
even better, due to its use in various media throughout our lives, the player can immediately imagine the details of what being exposed to Poison means -- feeling weak, green around the gills, sickly, etc.
to implement a similar-complexity mechanic in a Kissing game for example would be a nightmare of exposition. maybe Drool makes your mouth more Wet for some turns? is that bad? are my lips getting paralyzed? wait, why are we Kissing competitively as a challenge in the first place?
if I were to make a Poison analog in Ooblets dance-offs, I guess it would take away victory points for the next X turns? is it because their shoes are slippery, or until they clean them with a special antidote-analog cloth? ok sure.
ok so my examples are silly but you hopefully see my point (familiarity eases communication, approachability and imagination), which leads to the next point -- if the point is competitive challenge with a winner & loser, uh, maybe combat is thematically resonant after all.
overcoming an arbitrary-but-fair challenge is a unique pleasure, especially when doing so with friends, even fictional friends. in Ooblets dance-offs, it feels nice to see points go up, win, get loot, etc. (and often you praise/admire the loser afterwards! adorbs!)
but that pleasure is mitigated when you first have to spend a lot of time understanding sort-of-analogous mechanics, and imagine competitive-challenge scenarios that are unfamiliar, instead of focusing on the nuances and strategies of overcoming the challenge itself.
it will surprise no-one for me to say that the dance-offs in Ooblets are uniformly "easy" compared to most turn-based RPGs, and thank god. when you have an unfamiliar metaphor and abstract-feeling elements, making the challenge harder than trivial is a recipe for frustration.
the combat in Moon Hunters was also p easy, but in moments when we did make it a bit more difficult, I like to think it was a bit more approachable, since the WAYS it was difficult and the player's strategy failed were immediately evident, since it was using familiar metaphors.
all that to say I'm currently FINALLY working on a game without combat and uh yeah, thank goodness it is unlikely to attempt to have deep strategic systemic challenges for the player to overcome because if it did I think I'd "whoops" a combat core loop again.
the familiarity might not all be trained, either. most mammals play at wrestling and pouncing, and most human toddlers wave sticks like swords. even in an entirely non-violent environment, maybe there would be a draw towards playfighting Combat metaphors, idk.
anyway good luck out there game designers! stuff is hard! we'll do our best!
does anyone even make single player first person shooters anymore? I guess some indie studios doing lower budget retro style games?
Oh I guess valve made that VR half life 2 prequel
Roboquest
Adaca
Ready or Not
G String
Prodeus
Vomitoreum
Space Beast Terror Fright
Viscerafest
Blood West
Just off the top of my shooter filtered by singleplayer list.
There's a shit load of really good and cool single player FPS's. They just aren't COD but singleplayer or whatever popular vibe people expect. It's kinda rad after dealing with a decade of everyone trying to mimic gears of war and then cod gameplay.
those are the sorts of things I was thinking of for lower budget indie retro stuff yeah, at least the ones I recognize
I am specifically discounting the cods and whatever similar crap because the single player parts are at this point pretty ancillary to the real product (from the business side's point of view), the multiplayer
Ultrakill is a thing. Early Access, but also free demo on Steam?
does anyone even make single player first person shooters anymore? I guess some indie studios doing lower budget retro style games?
Oh I guess valve made that VR half life 2 prequel
there's a new cod game every year
I am specifically discounting the cods and whatever similar crap because the single player parts are at this point pretty ancillary to the real product (from the business side's point of view), the multiplayer
"[Songs of Silence] took inspiration from some of our all-time favorites, such as Ogre Battle, Kohan, and Warlords," creative director Alexander Kehr said.
My friends and I used to play tons of middling RTS games back in the mid 2000's, I hadn't thought about Kohan in years.
I wonder if it was actually good or if I was just 13
My friend is working on a roguelike game you can play if you want to. (It has free demo)
fun fact: after the game got big in 2020 we had to change the colour of the MedBay cross because we apparently violated the Geneva Conventions Act by making it red???? oops
I grew up watching my Dad play video games like Doom, Duke Nukem, Tex Murphy, Day of Defeat, Wolfenstein, and Half-Life
I was allowed to play them if I wanted but in games where your character could die I felt extremely guilty if it happened, so I stuck to stuff like Mario Paint or point and click adventure games (fuckin, played Stay Tooned and Mario is Missing so many times...). I started playing other games around when Team Fortress Classic came out and started to branch out from there
Dad got me into gaming early and we never had restrictions on playing because they figured we'd be better off in the future having computer skills, which was a good bet in retrospect
He still games but has a tendency to hyperfocus on one game for a few years at a time, which is why he's a diamond tier Apex Legends player and will pitch the game to anyone who comes over
(He also does not look the part of a nerd at ALL, exceedingly old tradesman-who-looks-like-he-might-shiv-you-in-an-alley when he's wearing his torn up Canadian tuxedo outfit)
I've got a friend who played through all of Wrath of the Righteous and I watched it sapped his will to live in real time. It's one of those games where I see someone saying "I'm gonna play this, I heard it's good!" and I start running in slow motion yelling "nooooooooooo"
so, wrath of the righteous the isometric rpg is very good (but very long) with improved pretty much everything over the first game that was incredibly buggy with balance issues for the first 6 months of release that absolute robbed a lot of enjoyment
wrath of the righteous the incredibly poor might and magic part of it is absolute dogshit and they have patched is repeatedly and kinda just said fuck it please turn on auto-victory
the game as it stands now is absolutely one of the best of its kind
I've got a friend who played through all of Wrath of the Righteous and I watched it sapped his will to live in real time. It's one of those games where I see someone saying "I'm gonna play this, I heard it's good!" and I start running in slow motion yelling "nooooooooooo"
so, wrath of the righteous the isometric rpg is very good (but very long) with improved pretty much everything over the first game that was incredibly buggy with balance issues for the first 6 months of release that absolute robbed a lot of enjoyment
wrath of the righteous the incredibly poor might and magic part of it is absolute dogshit and they have patched is repeatedly and kinda just said fuck it please turn on auto-victory
the game as it stands now is absolutely one of the best of its kind
Wrath of the Righteous also has this weird problem where there's a side plot that is just a better version of the main plot.
0
BroloBroseidonLord of the BroceanRegistered Userregular
my dad worked in telecom in the 70s and 80s, so we had PCs in the house from the original XT and 8086
my brother was 4 years older than me so he generally got parts first, and then I would get hand me downs
so we learned on dos,
had to figure out how to make a boot disk with AUTOEXEC.BAT,
how to use EMM386
how to load mouse and sound drivers into HIMEM
how to get cd games to run with MSCDEX
how to set RAS to CAS timings on memory
how to configure HDD cylinder heads and partitions via the BIOS
and every time you got a new piece of hardware to play a new game you'd have to spend hours to get all of this shit working, and there was no internet to refer to for answers, just DOS's miserable help commands and settings that you hoped matched whatever knockoff brand of cyrix processor you got on the cheap
and then you'd wonder why the fuck dad wouldn't just let you get the fucking super Nintendo that every other kid in school had, it had fucking Street Fighter 2 Super Turboon it! And an okay version of Mortal Kombat! (dads reasoning was that he didn't want you plugging a console into the good TV, that was for sports and news)
but then after like three solid days of fiddling you finally got Wing Commander 3 working
Posts
damn, destroyed with facts and logic
yeah those were sort relatively recent, ish... was the most recent of those doom eternal? which came out... 3 years ago, hmm
remember how with doom 2016 they wanted really badly for their multiplayer mode to be a thing that people cared about
The executive class of ABK is FULL of Bush appointees, so it truly does not matter.
I am specifically discounting the cods and whatever similar crap because the single player parts are at this point pretty ancillary to the real product (from the business side's point of view), the multiplayer
My boomer dad played Doom when I was a kid, and then later Half Life and several WWII shooters I forget which ones. I was allowed to watch Doom, but not play (it was both too hard and Too Scary for little me). I was 12 when Half Life came out; I tried to play it once and practically had a panic attack after the first headcrab. Full-on adrenaline rush, but not the fun kind.
As a result of this and a lack of consoles in the house I grew up thinking Computer Games were For Grownups (aside from obvious edutainment like Treasure Mountain, etc.).
I was legitimately surprised when I discovered, as a teen, that some people thought Video Games were For Children.
Just loves killing Nazis, I guess.
My mother is into first-party Nintendo Switch games, mostly. Saves me buying them, I just borrow BotW, Pikmin 3, Super Mario Odyssey, etc. when I feel like.
Roboquest
Adaca
Ready or Not
G String
Prodeus
Vomitoreum
Space Beast Terror Fright
Viscerafest
Blood West
Just off the top of my shooter filtered by singleplayer list.
There's a shit load of really good and cool single player FPS's. They just aren't COD but singleplayer or whatever popular vibe people expect. It's kinda rad after dealing with a decade of everyone trying to mimic gears of war and then cod gameplay.
pleasepaypreacher.net
"Knight to rook4" Oh you dirty motherfucker.
pleasepaypreacher.net
no choice but to give up
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1620832596719702026.html
those are the sorts of things I was thinking of for lower budget indie retro stuff yeah, at least the ones I recognize
Ultrakill is a thing. Early Access, but also free demo on Steam?
You didn't say only single-player
Gamertag: PrimusD | Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
My friends and I used to play tons of middling RTS games back in the mid 2000's, I hadn't thought about Kohan in years.
I wonder if it was actually good or if I was just 13
There was also High on Life recently, although the Roiland connection there might be a deal breaker (he got shitcanned from Squanch at least?)
Does Neon White count? It's a weird case I will grant you
Gunfire Reborn is a roguelite FPS
Scorn? Though this one would have been better with less shooting
Those are a few more recent ones that came to mind, but I'm sure there's a bunch more
EDIT: Oh yeah Prodeus and Metal Hellsinger were pretty recent too
High on life probably counts, I have sort of avoided paying any attention to it
More like shitty bits
Gotem
haha hell yeah
Just a profound disconnect with reality
Just a bunch of people with buzzwords and money where a brain should go
Does your favourite game commit war crimes?
Steam: YOU FACE JARAXXUS| Twitch.tv: CainLoveless
And yet Facebooks stock went up I think 20% today?
pleasepaypreacher.net
I uh deeply regretted it as soon as the portrait changed and felt the same reaction that Kim had
I was allowed to play them if I wanted but in games where your character could die I felt extremely guilty if it happened, so I stuck to stuff like Mario Paint or point and click adventure games (fuckin, played Stay Tooned and Mario is Missing so many times...). I started playing other games around when Team Fortress Classic came out and started to branch out from there
Dad got me into gaming early and we never had restrictions on playing because they figured we'd be better off in the future having computer skills, which was a good bet in retrospect
He still games but has a tendency to hyperfocus on one game for a few years at a time, which is why he's a diamond tier Apex Legends player and will pitch the game to anyone who comes over
(He also does not look the part of a nerd at ALL, exceedingly old tradesman-who-looks-like-he-might-shiv-you-in-an-alley when he's wearing his torn up Canadian tuxedo outfit)
3DS Friend Code: 0216-0898-6512
Switch Friend Code: SW-7437-1538-7786
so, wrath of the righteous the isometric rpg is very good (but very long) with improved pretty much everything over the first game that was incredibly buggy with balance issues for the first 6 months of release that absolute robbed a lot of enjoyment
wrath of the righteous the incredibly poor might and magic part of it is absolute dogshit and they have patched is repeatedly and kinda just said fuck it please turn on auto-victory
the game as it stands now is absolutely one of the best of its kind
I enthusiastically but politely disagree
my brother was 4 years older than me so he generally got parts first, and then I would get hand me downs
so we learned on dos,
had to figure out how to make a boot disk with AUTOEXEC.BAT,
how to use EMM386
how to load mouse and sound drivers into HIMEM
how to get cd games to run with MSCDEX
how to set RAS to CAS timings on memory
how to configure HDD cylinder heads and partitions via the BIOS
and every time you got a new piece of hardware to play a new game you'd have to spend hours to get all of this shit working, and there was no internet to refer to for answers, just DOS's miserable help commands and settings that you hoped matched whatever knockoff brand of cyrix processor you got on the cheap
and then you'd wonder why the fuck dad wouldn't just let you get the fucking super Nintendo that every other kid in school had, it had fucking Street Fighter 2 Super Turboon it! And an okay version of Mortal Kombat! (dads reasoning was that he didn't want you plugging a console into the good TV, that was for sports and news)
but then after like three solid days of fiddling you finally got Wing Commander 3 working
and holy shit it was all worth it, Chris Roberts is a genius
anyways star citizen is going to be so good you guys
pleasepaypreacher.net