Because everyone knows that the combat shrines repeat, even if they have slightly different ways to create pillars or slightly different enemies. I was wondering if you thought that any other shrines repeated or if it was just them.
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- Thread starter Mezentine
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Because everyone knows that the combat shrines repeat, even if they have slightly different ways to create pillars or slightly different enemies. I was wondering if you thought that any other shrines repeated or if it was just them.
If I'm being honest I can't remember. There are a few standouts one that I still remember but a lot of them are also so slight that they don't standout right now 2 years removed.
Was... was that a Battletech thing. I've forgotten.
In any case, Battletech has more xpacs rolling out throughout 2019 so I imagine they'll get back into it somehow. Tire Fire can't be denied forever.
Like, the notion that video games are designed to be "completed" rather than just "finished" has skewed player perception of how to play. They feel compelled to see everything a game has to offer, which means, y'know, checking all of the boxes--so if there is a number of whatever, all of it has to be done. Every ending must be seen, every collectible nabbed, every quest finished, every enemy killed, etc; this makes players anticipate games designed to accentuate this playstyle--making "no missables", one-run games, and easy achievements desirable to them.
The very culture of achievements is to make them anytthing but.
And y'know, it's fucked up and limiting to what games are. It is the sort of needless masochism that is deservedly punished in BotW.
Say no to completionism in games.
In any case, Battletech has more xpacs rolling out throughout 2019 so I imagine they'll get back into it somehow. Tire Fire can't be denied forever.
I'm going to pivot a bit, because padding... that's just achievement culture ruining games. BotW is a game with 0 padding, because you can literally go straight from the tutorial to the final boss.
Like, the notion that video games are designed to be "completed" rather than just "finished" has skewed player perception of how to play. They feel compelled to see everything a game has to offer, which means, y'know, checking all of the boxes--so if there is a number of whatever, all of it has to be done. Every ending must be seen, every collectible nabbed, every quest finished, every enemy killed, etc; this makes players anticipate games designed to accentuate this playstyle--making "no missables", one-run games, and easy achievements desirable to them.
The very culture of achievements is to make them anytthing but.
And y'know, it's fucked up and limiting to what games are. It is the sort of needless masochism that is deservedly punished in BotW.
Say no to completionism in games.
But botw's main path isn't interesting enough for me to see through. Once I've had my fill of the world I was done. The exploring of the world was far more interesting than the path to the castle. And the shrines are a part of the exploration of the world part.
Someone left this take in the fridge too long — warm it up now or I'm going to throw in the bin to keep it from stinking up the place
Combat shrines and the nuts you need to expand inventory space aside, i don't think BOTW has too much repetition. But for all it got right (and it does a lot really well) i do think Nintendo went a bit quantity over quality in some places.
There's quite a bit of content in BoTW that's just not very good. There's a fair few of quests that's just collecting bugs and considering how sparse they are that's disapointing. The shrines, as cool as some of them were, also came at the expense of any sort of meaty puzzle challenge. I think a game like Wind Waker, which is also full of bite sized content, had a better balance of between the islands and bigger dungeons.
I enjoyed the big beasts but Ganon's castle was very disapointing. It took me like 10 mintues to get to the center. I didn't even try to cheese the dungeon but there was nothing in place to prevent me to just climb to the center.
The most glaring issue however is enemy variety. There's just very little of it even by Zelda standarts. You can kill almost every enemy in the game save a few optional big guys the same way.
etc.
These are obviously complaints on a high level, I found a lot of BoTW very refreshing.
There's quite a bit of content in BoTW that's just not very good. There's a fair few of quests that's just collecting bugs and considering how sparse they are that's disapointing. The shrines, as cool as some of them were, also came at the expense of any sort of meaty puzzle challenge. I think a game like Wind Waker, which is also full of bite sized content, had a better balance of between the islands and bigger dungeons.
I enjoyed the big beasts but Ganon's castle was very disapointing. It took me like 10 mintues to get to the center. I didn't even try to cheese the dungeon but there was nothing in place to prevent me to just climb to the center.
The most glaring issue however is enemy variety. There's just very little of it even by Zelda standarts. You can kill almost every enemy in the game save a few optional big guys the same way.
etc.
These are obviously complaints on a high level, I found a lot of BoTW very refreshing.
BotW is a fantastic game with an amazing world (it's easily the high water mark for open world design in games), but the stuff in it often left a lot to be desired. The sidequests were almost all bad, forgettable, or both, with the exception of creating Tarry town and the dragons (which only led to shrines, which was another problem). Without talking about padding, the problem with the shrines was that most of them just weren't all that interesting. I'd say maybe 20-30% felt like they had interesting puzzles, and even that may be a tad generous. And the fact that they were all identical-looking contextless puzzle boxes made them feel less like interesting content in a narrative sense and a little bit more like Content in a "we've gotta put stuff in this game" sense, which I think explains why it can feel like padding to some.
The Beasts were good, but far too short and infrequent. I'd have rather had fewer shrines and more Beast-like areas, or more areas like Hyrule Castle that were really interesting to explore and had an almost Dark-Souls esque feeling to them in terms of threat and looping back in on itself.
It's a shame. Like I said, it's a great game, but it was deflating to me personally when I realized that everything would lead to a shrine or a Korok seed. The doing of things itself was still good enough to keep me playing the game, which is great! But a little bit more interesting and varied things to do (and rewards) would've gone a long way.
The Beasts were good, but far too short and infrequent. I'd have rather had fewer shrines and more Beast-like areas, or more areas like Hyrule Castle that were really interesting to explore and had an almost Dark-Souls esque feeling to them in terms of threat and looping back in on itself.
It's a shame. Like I said, it's a great game, but it was deflating to me personally when I realized that everything would lead to a shrine or a Korok seed. The doing of things itself was still good enough to keep me playing the game, which is great! But a little bit more interesting and varied things to do (and rewards) would've gone a long way.
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Awards are whatever, but I'm kind of surprised there wasn't a single piece that cracked this list given Waypoint's labour focus this year;
https://variety.com/2019/gaming/news/new-york-game-awards-journalism-1203107009/
https://variety.com/2019/gaming/news/new-york-game-awards-journalism-1203107009/
I'm surprised there's anything that got picked up by Era (the Kotaku nominations specifically) - usually the forum as a whole don't spend any time reading actual journalism and instead just react to shit.
Is there anything that went as in depth as some of these, though? I definitely liked/appreciated the articles I read on labor in the past year, but at a glance these seem like some of the bigger deep dives, long time reporting, tons of sources, etc. pieces of 2017. Unless I'm forgetting something, there wasn't anything on quite that scale, was there?
I'm sure it's not like their articles were ignored, in any case, given the journalism committee chair that article mentions is someone they know.
I'm sure it's not like their articles were ignored, in any case, given the journalism committee chair that article mentions is someone they know.
They're all very impressive articles, with a couple I hadn't read yet. They're all real good ones!
That's a fair distinction. I'll admit I haven't really stuck around to take in much of Waypoint's editorial output this past year but had just assumed that there must have been relevant pieces considering their conversations on it on the podcasts. At a glance it seems maybe it was just that they covered unionization in brief and did the interview series over E3 - not to the depth as the pieces nominated as you mentioned. My bad!
I did like some of the pieces during their Guns and Games week from early last year, though.
Honestly the newshound stuff someone like Jason Scrier does is more worthy of awards than what Waypoint produces.
I have never really jived with that sort Kieron Gillen inspired gonzo games journalism, and that was long before Waypoint existed. But that experiencial personalised writing is what they specialise in all the same.
I have never really jived with that sort Kieron Gillen inspired gonzo games journalism, and that was long before Waypoint existed. But that experiencial personalised writing is what they specialise in all the same.
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I've been messing around with listening to podcasts at 1.3x-1.5x speed at work lately, and it's hilarious because everyone sounds sped up... Except for Natalie, who sounds like she's talking at a normal pace.
I mean personality-wise. She's bubbly and giggly.
And like. The main character she defaults to is a baby voice.
I think you have to be incredibly careful with words like that when describing someone who's just doing their job. Particularly a woman. It's tying someone's professional worth in some degree to how they look, whether that's the intention or not.
Austin is a good looking dude but literally no one here has commented on his looks or said he was cute here, to my knowledge. Because it doesn't and shouldn't matter.
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You're being sloppy with your pronouns. What is the antecedent of "it" in the section quoted? You're the one that did the tying.
Which: fair, I get the misunderstanding. But how about extend the benefit of the doubt to your friends in the community and give me the room to clarify instead of scolding me?
There's absolutely no need to be defensive. I gave you the benefit of the doubt in my last post. My first post was literally a question.
If you think that's scholding you're in for a rough time on the internet.
He calls himself Papa Bear for a reason. (I waited too long to post; curse you Jintor.)
But to be real, defaulting to complimenting a female streamer / on-screen personality's appearance has always seemed problematic to me. It's such a massive double standard that is never applied to male counterparts in the same way. 'Cause even with the best intentions it's creepy af.
If descriptors like "cute" (and so on) were used unilaterally it wouldn't stick out to me so much, but that's never been the case.
Anyways, Natalie is genuine. That's why I think her presence on pods and streams so fun. Something like the Dragon Age: Inquisition deep dive only happens because of her.
And Austin likes mechs so he's automatically BGAGAI.
But to be real, defaulting to complimenting a female streamer / on-screen personality's appearance has always seemed problematic to me. It's such a massive double standard that is never applied to male counterparts in the same way. 'Cause even with the best intentions it's creepy af.
If descriptors like "cute" (and so on) were used unilaterally it wouldn't stick out to me so much, but that's never been the case.
Anyways, Natalie is genuine. That's why I think her presence on pods and streams so fun. Something like the Dragon Age: Inquisition deep dive only happens because of her.
And Austin likes mechs so he's automatically BGAGAI.
Peweedeepie and Logan Paul are about to be eaten by the shark from Jaws and you have to save one
Who do you save
They said they're recording it today. So it's likely either today's pod or Friday's.
Mark of the Ninja is incredibly good.
Also, Adam Conover of Adam Ruins Everything is on today's pod! Neat!
https://waypoint.vice.com/en_us/article/eveg7e/adam-conover-waypoint-radio-nintendo
mark of the ninja was, at the time, one of those games that made me feel like I was looking through the window at a party everyone else was enjoying -- and this is despite playing the game all the way through. i played it again for the 101 and felt more or less the same all this time later and I think that's because motn is a game about planning more than it is about the drama of execution (ie it's a fuck up and retry checkpoint game rather than a "oh shit my plan is completely fucked and i'm only two steps into my three part masterpiece, who cares, let's see what happens" game). this is maybe extreme, but i think i'd rip the game's scoring and challenge system out completely. i know, i know, i could get out of my head about it, but expanding your toolkit is *directly* tied to it -- it isn't just an abstract number or grade.
i think someone mentioned there's no real chance for improvisation in MoTN and that's probably the thing I like least about that game. Something that came out around the same time is Ronin, which is a turn-based action ninja sort of thing which plays in 1-second increments or something, and isn't really stealth at all but felt way more up my alley than MoTN.
It's funny talking about the appropriation stuff to me, cos I get it, but also I lived in a village in Japan that was famous for their ninja show which was literally the descendants of a martial tradition telling you how crappy life as a ninja was and then doing shurkiken tricks to cheesy 80s sound effects. To be fair, they were very fucking good at ninjitsu.
It's funny talking about the appropriation stuff to me, cos I get it, but also I lived in a village in Japan that was famous for their ninja show which was literally the descendants of a martial tradition telling you how crappy life as a ninja was and then doing shurkiken tricks to cheesy 80s sound effects. To be fair, they were very fucking good at ninjitsu.
It's weird how much of the conversation about Mark of the Ninja is couched in it "being of an era", as if they had to dust off an Atari 2600 to plug in the Mark of the Ninja cart. Especially since they also conclude that nothing has really come out since then to supplant it in the space of 2D sidescroller stealth.
I get that Waypoint is vehemently anti-'git gud' but Mark Of The Ninja checkpointing after literally every meaningful encounter thereby ensuring there's virtually no penalty for failure more or less kills any tension in the game. Patrick's anecdote about how MotN 'solves' the problem of waiting around after you get seen in Metal Gear encapsulates why I think it ultimately fails as a stealth game. Incidentally, Metal Gears pre MGSV had a solution to the issue they have with living with imperfection/mistakes by not having autosaves or quicksaves but requiring you to fully quit out and manually load a save (took a good ~30 seconds to do this).