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Thread: Bad parts in great games.
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2020-05-11, 01:15 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Aug 2014
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Re: Bad parts in great games.
The typical roguelike has a playthrough lasting around an hour. Without permadeath you'd be done with them in one afternoon. But with permadeath, you learn to enjoy the journey rather than the destination and can use the replayability of procedural generation for months, if not years.
Here is a bad part on a good game : XCOM 2 tried to have roguelike things, with randomized continental benefits going as far as making some options never available in any given playthrough. WotC doubled down on that with factions bonuses. Problem : the XCOM 2 campaign is not a short run. Having to make it work with random starting tools is fine, having options barred no matter how much time you invest in a playthrough just feels pointlessly punitive.Yes, I am slightly egomaniac. Why didn't you ask?
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Originally Posted by Fyraltari
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2020-05-11, 01:46 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Feb 2007
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- Manchester, UK
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Re: Bad parts in great games.
I'm on the other side of that argument, I'll say. I don't begrudge the idea of permadeath games existing, but I generally won't play them--especially since the sort of game that tends to get this also tend to be ones that take many hours to complete. Playing a game for hours upon hours only for a single error or difficult patch to throw me right back to the beginning is just frustrating, not fun in any way. Sure, you might get a slightly bigger buzz when you *do* actually finish it, but you have to actually finish it in order to get that, and I was never the best videogame player in the world even in the days when I still had the advantages of youth on my side.
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2020-05-11, 06:59 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Jun 2014
Re: Bad parts in great games.
I’m going to +1 this, and add that bugs are a thing that exist. It’s why I won’t do a permanent-death attempt on Subnautica: if my Seamoth clips through the ground such that I can’t reach it when I’m too deep to reach the surface, then I’d just get thrown back to the beginning through no fault of my own.
It also tends to discourage doing irrelevant-to-the-plot things like build enormous glass bridges between locations for no reason other than I can. And that takes some of the fun out of the game IMO.
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2020-05-11, 07:09 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Apr 2009
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- Germany
Re: Bad parts in great games.
The final "boss" in Metro Last Light. It's really unclear what you're supposed to do, and one NPC shouting it once over all the gunfire and explosions is almost certainly going to be missed.
Auto-Save points in Metro Exodus. In the hardest difficulty you can not save manually and only get auto-saves. In some cases it can easily take 30 to 60 minutes to get to another auto-save. This not only sucks when you die, but it also applies when you quit the game and can't save your progress because the game just won't auto-save.
Lost Izalith in Dark Souls. If it had not been absolutely necessary for story reasons to have that boss fought and defeated, that whole section should just have been cut from the game. The whole area feels like an early alpha build.
The Cloisters of Trials in Final Fantasy X.Last edited by Yora; 2020-05-11 at 07:13 AM.
We are not standing on the shoulders of giants, but on very tall tower of other dwarves.
Spriggan's Den Heroic Fantasy Roleplaying
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2020-05-11, 07:18 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Sep 2014
Re: Bad parts in great games.
Lost Izalith and the Bed of Chaos aren't quite alpha in their design but Lost Izalith is absolutely unfinished due to time crunch and funds dying up. It was intended to be a great deal more involved and there are some places in it you can reach through glitching that demonstrate this. I'm not 100% how true this is but it was intended to have at least one another boss fight. The Bed of Chaos is just a pain though and I'm not sure what went wrong there with the devs. There's a reason it's all but universally considered the worst boss is the entire Souls franchise.
Frankly, in a game where I just felt like it was a slog from start to finish, Black Gulch in Dark Souls 2 competes highly with the worst designed areas in any game I've played.
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2020-05-11, 12:49 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Jun 2018
Re: Bad parts in great games.
Permadeath in games doesn't necessarily mean rogue-like. To me, rogue-like specifically refers to games that are short, have you constantly upgrade your character as you move forward so that you can prepare for the final boss. It also means successful runs unlocking something for future runs, which is in essence the game's replay value.
Loads of games have gotten permadeath modes to increase difficulty, especially to make save-scumming impossible, but those should probably be called 'Ironman' modes instead. It feels more fitting and it clearly categorizes each playstyles.
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2020-05-11, 02:56 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Feb 2007
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- Manchester, UK
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Re: Bad parts in great games.
I'm not sure where this concept of roguelikes being short is coming from? The original Rogue had 26 levels and took several hours for a complete run. Also, carrying stuff forward into future runs is most definitely *not* part of the basic Roguelike formula, it's something that was added by games like Rogue Legacy. The replay value of a traditional Roguelike comes from (a) it taking hours to complete and (b) it being so ruddy hard that you have to play through approximately 3,726 times before you ever complete it.
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2020-05-11, 02:59 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Jun 2018
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2020-05-11, 03:34 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Nov 2010
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- Toledo, Ohio
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Re: Bad parts in great games.
No, that would be the concept of a Roguelite. Roguelikes were a thing as far back as the 1980s (although the term itself dates back only to 1993), with games like Hack and Moria (the progenitors of NetHack and Angband, which are the two big families of the genre today) being open clones of the original Rogue. Roguelike games are almost universally quite long, do not carry anything forward, and rely on extremely deep background mechanics to keep interest up.
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2020-05-11, 03:41 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Mar 2010
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- Back forty.
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Re: Bad parts in great games.
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2020-05-11, 03:48 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Apr 2009
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- Germany
Re: Bad parts in great games.
Me too. All I remember is that sense of dread every time I came to one.
I think the logic of the puzzles wasn't actually bad. I vaguely remember that every step took 10 times longer than it needed because you had to sit through long animations or clicking through command menus in slow motion.We are not standing on the shoulders of giants, but on very tall tower of other dwarves.
Spriggan's Den Heroic Fantasy Roleplaying
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2020-05-11, 04:17 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Jan 2009
Re: Bad parts in great games.
On the permadeath note, a sorta similar thing in the tactical game Ring of Red.
The game alternated between a "narrative phase" (forget the actual name), where you were expected to save, and battles. You could save during a battle (and I think always in a different save slot than the 'narrative' save), but if you saved you exited the game. If you loaded the save, the save was deleted. Which was reasonable to make decisions matter, but annoying when a battle could take hours and dying was a big deal.*
You could get around it by copying the Save file to another memory card, though. Which is what I did. But annoying. I'd rather that be a difficulty modifier.
*you lose your soldier crews (basically equipment to boost stats), and a dead PC doesn't get the xp boost at the end of a round, which matters since you can't grind xp anywhere
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2020-05-11, 04:37 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Nov 2007
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- Indianapolis
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Re: Bad parts in great games.
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2020-05-11, 04:56 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Aug 2008
Re: Bad parts in great games.
This all comes down to definitions eventually - what components of a roguelike are actually genre essentials is up for debate, as is what elements immediately shunt something into a roguelite instead.
Personally, I'd say that the absence of progression (which is distinct from unlocking different starts), permadeath, and random levels are key features, everything else is extraneous. This includes some longer games (Nethack, ToME), but also includes a whole host of shorter ones (Nuclear Throne, Spelunky, Slay the Spire, Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup*)
*Or whatever, the name is long and weird.I would really like to see a game made by Obryn, Kurald Galain, and Knaight from these forums.
I'm not joking one bit. I would buy the hell out of that. -- ChubbyRain
Current Design Project: Legacy, a game of masters and apprentices for two players and a GM.
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2020-05-11, 08:17 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Oct 2007
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- St. Louis
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Re: Bad parts in great games.
Anyone mention the Egg Spider from Sonic Mania?
I freaking hate that time waster and to add insult to injury they took the percussion out of the Sky Battery Zone musicAsk me about our low price vacation plans in the Elemental Plane of Puppies and PieSpoiler
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