Video Game General

[anthony]

Relevant to note here that Spartan citizens referred to one another as ὅμοιοι ("Homoioi") which roughly translates to "peers", but the literal meaning is something like "similars". This urge is deeply baked in.
Reference

I do believe that the lone hero fantasy is a kind of weird historic mistake, inculcated largely by the limitations of entertainment media. "FPS" tended to be "lone hero" because programming useful allies and teamwork has always been difficult. Non-interactive narratives have lone heroes for convenience. Etc. I don't actually find anything that inherently cool about being some kind of superhuman in a battlefield of any kind. I don't know if anybody does. So many examples come to mind. Like who enjoys Total War degenerating into Marvel Heroes using ugly korean mobile MOBA powers on hordes of goblins who fly away like weightless holograms in response to rainbow Marvel Hero blasts being fired at them?

[anthony]

I've been playing a little more Tarkov recently. One way to power through a miserable and low energy episode.

On favourite level, Reserve. The old army base. With the UMP, one of the guns that's borderline free because you can trade junk items for it.



Someone called a plane. Time to get away while people tear each other apart for the contents.



I went inside to hide but it turns out I am the danger. Me and this guy surprised each other and exchanged fire through the railing of these stairs a bit further up from where I am. Very awkward angle both ways.



He probably felt pretty dangerous going into this thing. His gun is probably almost ten times as valuable as mine. His parts are optimised. I pull mine out of boxes I find.



Now I'm the boss. This gun's going on the display rack and I'm on my way out.

The exit I'm going for is at the end of a bunch of tunnels connected to an underground bunker system. Along the way I found several bodies, including one suspiciously close to the final door. I suppose this got my guard up because I reacted very successfully when a guy tried to surprise me at the exit. Quite likely the plate carrier I took from the guy (in addition to his gun) stopped or at least took the sting out of a bullet or two here.



Kind of feel bad for the first guy getting unlucky in our spray-off, but this guy had this coming. He's ambushing people on their way out.



Great detail in this game. Players drop dogtags when they die. You can see who they were, who fired the shot that killed them, and you can collect these things. This guy called himself "rat", which is what people who play this game like assholes are called. He knew what he was doing. Now his MDR is mine.



I carried six guns out of this. This might be enough of a win for me to consider the game done again for a while.



I don't know if I've shared too many thoughts on this game here. Have I talked before about how much I like Nikita Buyanov (Lord BUYanov)?



I think this game is a great example of oriental tendencies in video games put into practice at a very high level of production, and also what an artfag leading what can incidentally be called a shooter looks like. This relates strongly to what I said about 'The Citadel'. Buyanov is a lot more like Doekamuri than the Southeast Asian airsoft enthusiasts and white guys with moustaches who like to mod STALKER.

This game is very object fetishist. This game has very elaborate and meticulously realised lore. In the mind of Buyanov Tarkov is not a stand alone game. It's a part of a greater multimedia project called 'Russia 2028'. There are also books, very elaborate movies that look like that movie about Wagner (I think Russians can probably make good war movies for much the same reasons they can do games), music (which Buyanov produces himself), it's all more tools to realise the idea and scenario.

That is both why so much of Tarkov is so nice, and why so much of it will remain infuriatingly distant to what gamers want it to be (but I am of course very happy with it). Tarkov was able to be so strikingly different because of its different goals. Buyanov wasn't play mad libs with random adjectives to come up with a new kind of "FPS". His novel ends required novel approaches. The details which fascinate him demand attention to details others ignore. To gamers much of the game is maddeningly wrong or unfair or uneven, but that's because to Buyanov it's not really a game.

A lot of people who play the game hate this man, but everything they say makes me like him more. As I said above, Buyanov isn't into Tarkov as a gamer. He doesn't even play it. People raise this like a mark against him, but it seems perfectly natural to me. The work is bigger than the experience of playing it. He likes to observe the thing being played. Our game is playing Tarkov. His game is running Tarkov. We're playing an fps. He's playing some kind of weird top down management game. Directing the future and creating weird novel scenarios to see how we react. He put snow in the game recently for about a month or two, for example.

Also, on the business end, I find it funny to call him BUYanov, but nothing about him strikes me as remotely greedy. This reddit thread by a Russian is supposed to be the big drop on how much of a bastard he is, but it's basically a talk about the practical realities of making money while running a game. Like the Palworld developers he made a smaller, cheaper, very cynically constructed game to secure income and get experience for himself and his team before moving onto what they were more passionate about. 'Contract Wars'. A cheap, free to play shooter with a more conventional round and deathmatch structure.

This game was free to play, with call of duty style weapon progression unlocks and the ability to pay your way up the tree. Also serious problems with cheaters. Buyanov is frank about all of this. There's nothing really shocking to any part of this story if you read the whole post. The strongest language comes out towards Tarkov at the end, despite being in my opinion such a brutally one sided deal in favour of its playerbase that I think it's slowly breaking Buyanov's back honouring it.

Nikita seem to be a huge fan of aggressive monetization techniques. Their previous project was straight up P2W bullshit, with paid services like clan system tackled on top. Tarkov has a retail price tag, with EOD premium version that for all intends and purposes is a soft P2W. (And again, before you reply with "GiT GuD! iTs nOt P2w!", fuck right off and educate yourself on definition of P2W in games. Economic advantage is still an advantage, it has direct gameplay implications in EFT, and it's purchasable with cash) Premium version of EFT are designed to create a visible discomfort for non-paying user leaving enough room for premium users to keep repeating "but it won't win you the firefight". It's merely a middle ground between providing a direct advantage in a firefight for money, and just selling cosmetics or fluff features. In this case I find degree of the issue absolutely irrelevant. The game is ether free of P2W elements, or its P2W;

What is Reddit Man saying here?

If you haven't played Tarkov, 'EOD' is 'Edge of Darkness' edition. Which used to be purchasable as a kind of premium buy in for something like twice the game's already fairly substantial base cost. What this got you was a bigger 'Stash' (more space right away to keep stuff, don't need to fuss about item management between playing so much, base game players have to earn this bigger stash by collecting stuff and levelling up), more starting gear (you get a much bigger pile of nicer stuff when you start the game (every time, the game resets everyone's status now and then) meaning you can hit the ground running and work your way up to having a stronger and richer character faster), and a bigger 'container' (magic box where items aren't lost even if you die).

You may already have seen me say that I'm generally pro microtransactions in real games, and not even averse to 'pay to win'. This guy clearly feels very strongly about all of this, "fuck right off and educate yourself", but even if it is P2W, why should I care?

For one, I think that paying to "win" a game which is both a complete aesthetic experience which can be appreciated no matter how well you're doing and is limited in given stuff to do (the game's Tasks which are its storyline and primary source of goals have an ending already), what exactly are you paying for? I'm struck over and over again in threads about this game by the impression that I'm the only one enjoying myself, and that everyone else is stuck in a psychological trap in which they have to invest in the game, to win and become stronger in the game, so that they can invest further into the game... and this process ends when they finish the final big task and are set free. This is Nikita Buyanov's Time Casino.

The game accidentally became that, and if you're into it, Nikita will feed your problem. And by means that are rather restrained compared to most video games which are capable of trapping people in compulsive loops for an indefinite period of time. He will massively boost your convenience and power for as long as the game exists for a one off payment of a decent sum, about the price of another video game.

Look at how much money phone and tablet games bring in by mindraping people into buying points and gem boosters or a 1/1000 chance of rolling Venti. Yes I am saying you should consider what other people are doing. "whataboutism", naming a phenomena does not explain or refute it, soyjak.

In my own experience of this game, pretty much everything people are paying to skip or get an edge over is a part of the game. Maybe my experience is unique because I mostly try to avoid other players. I see them like the ghosts in Death Stranding. Weird extreme environmental phenomena to be navigated around and avoided. Things like having poor guns, not a lot of money, a small stash, what other people call 'the grind' I consider 'the game'. I enjoy this part. It looks much more fun than the stuff you're doing in the lategame, which nobody else seems to be enjoying either. I don't even get that far.

This is a game that seems set to run indefinitely, and be worked on indefinitely, and you pay in once and you're just in. That's kind of insane. 'EOD' is gone now, but its benefits are coming back in smaller purchasable parcels, which will again be one off buys for indefinite benefit. I don't see how one makes a case for this being a greedy production. This seems like a uniquely excellent deal in video games. It's an online game made and sold to the logic of an older single player one, because I think in most essential ways that's what Buyanov feels like he's making. He's simultaneously very business savvy and capable of cynical analysis, but also seems compelled to run an artfaggy production. He's very, very interesting to me like that.

I see him and this whole situation kind of like Bungie after Halo. They've got this big artfag project running, and loads of momentum and money built on people who don't really appreciate what they're doing. Now they run this bizarre clown show for the plebs in which the real work is embedded as a kind of subtext for those who know. Perhaps we could say that both are cases of one work offering two radically different experiences based on the media literacy of the audience.

Inside of you there are two gamers. One is fascinated with the brilliance of Russian virtual object fetishism. Another is looking up patch notes for the penetration values of 7.62 rounds and quest guides.

[Virtue]

8 years. I hate Yandere Simulator.

[FlyWithYou]

Relevant to note here that Spartan citizens referred to one another as ὅμοιοι ("Homoioi") which roughly translates to "peers", but the literal meaning is something like "similars". This urge is deeply baked in.
Reference

I do believe that the lone hero fantasy is a kind of weird historic mistake, inculcated largely by the limitations of entertainment media. "FPS" tended to be "lone hero" because programming useful allies and teamwork has always been difficult. Non-interactive narratives have lone heroes for convenience. Etc. I don't actually find anything that inherently cool about being some kind of superhuman in a battlefield of any kind. I don't know if anybody does. So many examples come to mind. Like who enjoys Total War degenerating into Marvel Heroes using ugly korean mobile MOBA powers on hordes of goblins who fly away like weightless holograms in response to rainbow Marvel Hero blasts being fired at them?

I can see the appeal. This idea goes back at least as far as the Iliad; the way it appears there is more nuanced and not exactly a "power fantasy".

[Guest]

What's the deal with Dragon's Dogma? I remember playing it a while ago and thinking it was entirely unnoteworthy. Everyone I know seemed to feel similarly. Years after release, there were a few youtube videos cropping up claiming it as a 'hidden gem', but I didn't think it caught on. Now that a second one is being released everyone is pretending the first one was a masterpiece.

[anthony]

What's the deal with Dragon's Dogma? I remember playing it a while ago and thinking it was entirely unnoteworthy. Everyone I know seemed to feel similarly. Years after release, there were a few youtube videos cropping up claiming it as a 'hidden gem', but I didn't think it caught on. Now that a second one is being released everyone is pretending the first one was a masterpiece.

I couldn't quite get it, but I get its reputation. Think back to how bleak the Obama era was. The PS3. The Xbox360. Dragon's Dogma was kind of like the lesser Dark Souls. In that it was a solid game that kind of won by default compared to its competition, especially in retrospect, because it wasn't a stumbling soulless iteration towards a refined ZOG forevergame or some weird pretentious faggotry combined with a failed "gameplay" form that was never fun. It feels like what a video game should be (Japanese).

There are only so many big Japanese games that aren't totally Japanese in their nature and appeal. And its always been cheap on steam sales. A game that you can be there for after the party via /v/ threads about character builds and stupid video game stuff that happens within.

Pretty much every big Japanese game from this era has been or will be picked out as a masterpiece sooner or later because they were a peak in production values of the "book shop" video game model. Scenario and idea driven complete works being made at a solid scale and spread with excellent craft and production values. The standards were high enough at this point that with basic porting they look, feel, and handle like modern games and they were actually allowed to be idiosyncratic and ambitious. And there are just so fucking many of them. And they weren't cancer bloat contentvaniabornelikes that had to be 500 hours long because it would take them six years to make the sequel.

People are idiots who can't identify what was good about the time, so we're saying individual titles hit upon some golden formula and need to become the new Horizon: Zero Dawn. What one should actually miss is that this was the last time AAA was even remotely close to artist and expression friendly in scale. Yes, Japan is still good. But their bleeding edge productions are fucking massive like everywhere else, even if good. Hideo Kojima can still make games, but he doesn't have 500 competitors working simultaneously like he did in the time of the PS1. Or even a dozen like the time of the PS3. By PS6 him and Miyazaki will be the last ones making video games outside of Nintendo.

Back to the subject, isn't it weird how stock and normal the premise of Dragon's Dogma feels? It's a game about D&D classes fighting monsters and stuff with fairly normal video game handling and rules and systems.

[Guest]

Thanks anthony, that context is what I was looking for. I was having trouble understanding the current craze.

In terms of the game itself,

Back to the subject, isn't it weird how stock and normal the premise of Dragon's Dogma feels? It's a game about D&D classes fighting monsters and stuff with fairly normal video game handling and rules and systems.

You've touched on my issue with it. It feels like a template game. It feels like a game made in RPG Maker. I really hate when a piece of media makes me dwell too much on how it was made. There are only a few rare cases where my perception of what the developers were doing improved my experience. With Dragon's Dogma, I can't help but feel like a team was tasked with implementing real time D&D combat. Another team was given the D&D monster manual and told to implement the assets. Once those things were completed, writers were told to make a D&D campaign with those resources. Even though everything was produced well, that perception prevents me from seeing what the greater artistic vision was supposed to be. Maybe that was the vision, single player D&D video game. In that case, I really wasn't the target audience.

[ecofren]

This interview with Itsuno basically answers your questions. He very much intended for the game to feel "normal" as in what any given person would expect of a fantasy world. The interesting "mechanics" were mounting and the pawn system. Mounting was so notable that it was subsequently implemented in Monster Hunter a year later. The pawn system appealed to me at the time because it was the only game I had played that allowed me to have my ideal elf witch wife that I could command to be silent. I replayed it last year and it just felt like a Japanese game. Meaning it was a fun and competently made experience. There's certainly a sense of it feeling unfinished with barren areas and unremarkable npc's but it's clear what Itsuno wanted it to be. I think it's great that his idea for the pawn system came from wanting an online experience without having to interact with retarded animals. I felt a similar way of being part of a larger experience but to a much greater degree while playing Death Stranding. Single player worlds with indirect multiplayer input is a very fun idea and totally novel in 2012 as far as I know.

[Virtue]

[anthony]

Ah yes, my first dbdr video. I just got Cats watching him and he had the same observation as me, that he plays all games in the same flat meaningless way.

[Unformed Golem]

You've touched on my issue with it. It feels like a template game. It feels like a game made in RPG Maker. I really hate when a piece of media makes me dwell too much on how it was made. There are only a few rare cases where my perception of what the developers were doing improved my experience. With Dragon's Dogma, I can't help but feel like a team was tasked with implementing real time D&D combat. Another team was given the D&D monster manual and told to implement the assets. Once those things were completed, writers were told to make a D&D campaign with those resources. Even though everything was produced well, that perception prevents me from seeing what the greater artistic vision was supposed to be. Maybe that was the vision, single player D&D video game. In that case, I really wasn't the target audience.

"Doing the formula right" is harder than it looks and consistently produces good results.  If you can do it then you just need to add a little bit of flair and you've got something Good.

[anthony]

Our friend Ptolemy is back. I left him another comment.



I've been thinking in general about gamergate. Tweeting a bit, and used this comment section to draft some thoughts. The gist of my thinking is that Western AAA is just a pointless industry which never developed consciousness of itself as a potential artform. It falls so easily into corruption because it has no healthy growth within itself to provide a meaningful drive that would be hard to subvert. Ties into what I said under his last video. 

Now do I reply to his other commenters and harrass him on twitter too...?

[Roy]

Our friend Ptolemy is back. I left him another comment.



I've been thinking in general about gamergate. Tweeting a bit, and used this comment section to draft some thoughts. The gist of my thinking is that Western AAA is just a pointless industry which never developed consciousness of itself as a potential artform. It falls so easily into corruption because it has no healthy growth within itself to provide a meaningful drive that would be hard to subvert. Ties into what I said under his last video. 

Now do I reply to his other commenters and harrass him on twitter too...?

I feel like modern games lack passion and creativity. Many AAA companies are creatively bankrupt, attempting to replicate old games from the 2000s, and it feels like a mere shadow of their former selves. In my opinion, indie games represent the future, where anyone can create games without the constraints of big corporations.

[Guest]

It's not about passion and creativity. There are plenty of developers in AAA companies that care about their work. And there are directors/producers like Todd Howard who seem to express a desire to make the games they do, regardless of how we perceive the result. The issue is just intentionality of the experience. What am I supposed to feel playing this? How do the structures of the game complement that? The intention of these studios is to make a 'game' and that's what we get. Ubisoft camp clearing simulators. This issue is also present in plenty of indie games. AI tech will allow single authors to create meaningful multimedia experiences. The future of gaming is its transformation into the novel of the 21st century.

[Unformed Golem]

AAA games are the product of fully regime-compliant bureaucratic organizations using accepted best practices for outsourcing, contracting, diversity, employment of political officers, etc.  Of course they're bad.  It would be shocking if they were any good.  It's entirely possible that Todd Howard has lost his edge (it happens, everyone peaks) but more likely it's that he's gone from an empowered auteur to being another Stakeholder in the Content Industry (Interactive Media subsidiary).

[anthony]

It almost feels like going backwards but I believe we should be focusing on corporate issues. Nobody has really talked intelligently about how American corporate structuring and standards makes art impossible. All just communists like that retard who made the gabe newell video going into hysterics about horse armour.

Hiroshi Yamauchi (Nintendo's old owner who turned them into a video game company) saw himself as a patron of a new art form even as far back as the original Nintendo System. Even before that. He understood that his product was inextricably linked to the people making them. So he invested in and supported people. He understood that the value in Donkey Kong wasn't in the gorilla or the hat guy, it was in Shigeru Miyamoto. The average American counterpart to Yamauchi would have fired Miyamoto and gotten a bunch of Indians to make DonkeyKongvaniabornelites until the concept went bust, at which point he would declare that people just don't like games anymore and go into human trafficking instead.

This is basically what happened to Bungie after their acquisition by Microsoft. Which amusingly came back around all these years later with them having to beg Joseph Statten to come back and pull Halo Infinite into a bare minimum acceptable state after a billion years and dollars of failed development.

[Guest]

I watched your video, anthony, about Oriental Gun Fetishism. I enjoyed it and had a few follow-up thoughts.

Firstly, there's a type of object fetishism which I don't feel you fully addressed; namely, multiplayer Halo and Quake are the games on my mind. In both, the weapons are well loved by the fans but there is the added significance of the 'weapon drop' that encourages players to hunt for certain types of guns during the multiplayer match. I think it's reductionist to say this is only a type of power fantasy. When finding an energy sword for example (not a gun, I know), I definitely felt like I was wielding and operating the sword. Even in maps that made little sense to use melee weapons, I would often times pick up the energy sword or gravity hammer simply because I loved them so much. There is definitely a type of object fetishism involved in this experience.

Next, what are your thoughts on Gears of War in this context? The weapons are a pretty important part of the experience, the characters definitely feel like you are controlling them and not just the guns, the reload event is purposefully there to get you to think about weapon operation, and the close-combat component of weapons like the Lancer are pretty intense. I'd go as far to say that the entire point of these games is about the weapons and the dude-bro Americans wielding them.

[anthony]

I watched your video, anthony, about Oriental Gun Fetishism. I enjoyed it and had a few follow-up thoughts.

Firstly, there's a type of object fetishism which I don't feel you fully addressed; namely, multiplayer Halo and Quake are the games on my mind. In both, the weapons are well loved by the fans but there is the added significance of the 'weapon drop' that encourages players to hunt for certain types of guns during the multiplayer match. I think it's reductionist to say this is only a type of power fantasy. When finding an energy sword for example (not a gun, I know), I definitely felt like I was wielding and operating the sword. Even in maps that made little sense to use melee weapons, I would often times pick up the energy sword or gravity hammer simply because I loved them so much. There is definitely a type of object fetishism involved in this experience.

Next, what are your thoughts on Gears of War in this context? The weapons are a pretty important part of the experience, the characters definitely feel like you are controlling them and not just the guns, the reload event is purposefully there to get you to think about weapon operation, and the close-combat component of weapons like the Lancer are pretty intense. I'd go as far to say that the entire point of these games is about the weapons and the dude-bro Americans wielding them.

Thank you. Always glad when people like what I do. Was considering a thread for the subject if people are more interested.

Halo is an interesting subject I considered going into. I also almost mentioned Gears of War. These are both American but slight outliers in their own ways. Bungie love Japan and were an odd hybrid operation between artfaggotry and STEMfaggotry. There's a Japanese character engraved into the model of the Halo CE Magnum pistol. For me, when I was a kid, I appreciated these guns as objects. I actually recently found a guy on /v/ who couldn't understand this exact subject. Just remembered now.

He was accusing Halo of badgamedesign because there are pointless weapons. What is the role of the Needler in the weapon sandbox when it's so slow and unwieldy? I explained that its role is to be the cool purple and pink gun that shoots needles. It's cool because it shoots needles. It's in the game because that's cool. But of course he just had to sigh and shake his head. I am a bad shitbaby and gamedesign is beyond me.

Finding a shotgun in the second half of the game is really cool. It's not just a powerup. It's a new weirder looking unique gun for the master chief to hold and handle. You find it on the ground and pick it up, dropping your current gun. The Halo guns are cool 3D models. They also actually bounce and get thrown around when not being handled. They, like everything else in the Halo world, are functionally objects. Also they are rather finely realised objects. Much more effort went into them than was necessary at the time. Well above standard. Another one of those Halo details that was nailed so well that everyone took it for granted. It feels weird to say, but Halo has incredible voice acting, some of the best understated world design in the history of video games, exceptional virtual props, etc. Nobody trying to compete could match them on this stuff.

Halo, I'll say yes. As I've said several times, Halo is one of the most physical "fps" games ever made (because it wasn't designed as an "fps").

That's how I appreciated Halo, and you may have too. But as I've also said, Halo is something to everyone who looks. And a lot of visions of Halo do not appreciate this. Like that guy on /v/. He only saw weapons as variations on his floating laser platform that is his presence in the world of Halo. But there is undeniably something there to appreciate.

And as for Gears of War, I could have mentioned that in relation to World of Shooting. Both have what you could call "active reloads". And Gears of War came from Cliff Blezinski playing paintball and feeling like the physical experience of a gunfight wasn't captured by video games at all. The way characters physically haul themselves in a rush to get from cover to cover and move like they're roughly handling what they're holding does give a sense of viscerality. But I believe that this is undermined by the third person perspective, and general floaty insubstantiality of the Unreal Engine.

You can feel like you're handling a gun in third person. Metal Gear does this quite well. But you also can go first person in Metal Gear Solid. 2 onwards especially the animations and level of detail on the guns is fantastic. I included a screenshot of MGS4 on the video briefly in the "good guns" spread. That game in particular struck me as brilliantly executed. 5 too of course. It's a few different things. Sounds, how your character looks using them, the feedback. Despite the size and intended heft Gears of War feels rather weightless by comparison in my opinion. It's a lot of subtle things, and so hard to quantify. But I never got a great feel for the guns playing Gears of War. They feel very Obamamaxxed. Their prime was the reign of shit weightless third person shooters. I included Kane and Lynch 2 in the "bad guns" spread. In particular it was what I meant by a good game having bad guns. One of many points where K&L2 loses out to Max Payne 3. And it really would have benefited from this part being done well.

Back to what you said, you are controlling the person in Gears of War. The need to physically cover yourself and bounce around does that. That was Blezinski's intention. But it doesn't all come together for me to get the tactile feeling I care about. As much is true of K&L 2 and many other games from the time. Gears of War may have always struggled with a final "point". There are elements I like, and they feel totally divorced from what most people like. I like the trailers for the first two games, the massive architecture, and the brief hints of melancholy and hopelessness in the tone and presentation. Other people like playing as a particularly bouncy lasertag turret.

Oh, and Quake. In Quake the guns float when they can be picked up, are somewhat crude and simple looking, don't give much in the way of feedback when fired. I just can't care for them at all. I barely remember what they were and I've beaten Quake. I like playing it for its general physicality and kind of weird presentation, but it's not something that really impressed me.

If people want to weigh in further maybe we can make a thread. There are things I might still want to explore further.

[oyakodon_khan]

Yet another victory for Todd Howard as the unwatchably bad writing of the Fallout TV series makes it easily the most accurate screen adaptation of any video game.

[anthony]

I'm more concerned about how this looks. Everything looks materially cheap. And of course everyone has a brown and boneless nu-face. And the one white male character is a sexless wandering golem who hasnoenemies and is going to find meaning in his life by being the dad who stepped up to protect brown girls and old women from something very white and man coded.

Really though, the costumes. Everything looks like cosplay.