For what it’s worth, the dev team for Fallout admits that it’s unrealistic that no one has swept up the skeletons or hung new doors in the past 200+ years but consider it part of the wasteland milieu.
Well, I don’t demand realistic weather (though there are mods for weather, too). However, I see no reason to think those areas would have a much warmer climate in the game setting, so I would presume it gets pretty damn cold there sometimes.
The clutter isn’t enough of an annoyance most of the time for me to mod it out. I did get a “scrap everything” mod for Fallout 4 so that I could make my base areas as clean and neat as possible. The one on Spectacle Island is now a gleaming edifice with clean dormitories, bathing areas, a marketplace, and a “lab”. It’s surrounded by farms and fully automated defenses. The clutter elsewhere might have made me go a little over the top with it. (I actually had to find and scrap submerged rocks along the shore to make room in the object budget. :p)
Yeah, I get that. Like I said, it’s not a huge issue for me, just something that nags at me when I happen to think about it. I know it wouldn’t look right to most fans if the settlements were realistically fixed up.
I still like the games. I mostly wish they had better endings (with New Vegas being the exception–they did that one right, IMHO).
I picked up an unlimited budget mod. Can’t properly protect Bunker Hill without it.
Those caravaneers went how long paying off the various raiders and now even a perimeter wall lined with missile launchers can’t keep them from dragging people off for ransom?
I had a settlement expansion mod that increased budgets, but it caused other issues–among other things, it made it way more difficult to raise settler happiness, for some reason, and I was going for that achievement. A budget-only mod might not have caused the same problems, but I didn’t bother looking for one at that point.
I gave up on getting that achievement. No matter what I do, none of my settlements even hit 90.
I managed it, but my method was pretty bizarre. Apparently, settlers like nothing better than medicine. I turned half the dormitory floor of my Sanctuary Hills Mall into a hospital, building about 25 fully upgraded clinics. I pulled people off every other task to staff them, leaving only a couple of farmers, and Dogmeat on guard duty. I pressed companions into service as doctors (Nick, Hancock, and Codsworth were running specialty clinics, I guess–though I imagine Hancock was just enjoying the chems.) Then I put a comfy chair by the wall between the hospital and dorm and sat there, babysitting them. That kept the companions from wandering away from their jobs, and apparently the settlers like having your character nearby. Eventually, their happiness maxed out, and I was able to send everyone back to more useful tasks.
This FAQ apparently tells you the easiest way to pick up that achievement. (I haven’t bothered going for it yet.)
Batman: Arkham Asylum was horrible. The graphics and story were great, I loved the stealth and searching around for little secrets. But the combat was the biggest pile of crap I’ve ever seen in a game that had so many other redeeming qualities. The problem was that it tried too hard to “help” you. For example, I’m beating on some enemy and I’m about to take him out with a combo attack of punches and kicks then his buddy wanders too close, and suddenly I’m attacking his buddy for no reason. And it lets him recover and get back in the fight.
It takes a lot of control away from the player. Seriously, I’ve approached an enemy, moving directly toward him, clearly focused on taking him down, hit the attack button and Batman turns around backwards and attacks someone else. Incredibly lame, especially when you are in fights where there’s one very difficult guy with a knife or stun baton you have to take down quickly and a handful of relatively harmless unarmed goons.
I kept pushing myself to finish the game anyway, enough that I completed all of the side content and went up to (what I think was) the final battle (with The Joker) and then gave up. It was not worth it.
For what it’s worth I played Arkham City later and it was vastly improved. I could actually control my character in a fight rather than hitting buttons and watching Batman do random things. But the first game was just so pathetically awful.
I understand the mechanic and why folks find it rewarding. I just find it frustrating. A perfect boss battle, IMO, would be one where a skillful plucky hero could defeat the boss the first time, using observable clues and information, instead of a trial-and-error discovery. I want to feel more like Batman, and less like Bill Murray in Groundhogs Day.
But then what would differentiate a boss from any other NPC? And killing a boss that didnt have X chance of killing you regardless wouldnt be fulfilling imo.
There should be a chance, yes, but not an overwhelming one. Doing something over and over again until you get it perfect is the opposite of drama. A good action sequence, to me, is where things go perfectly until about half-way through, at which point something goes wrong, everything goes to hell, and I just try to ride teh whirlwind out of there. I’m happy when a mission ends with me thinking, “Holy shit - how did I survive THAT?” I want to be able to make mistakes, suffer horrendous luck, and still prevail.
I picked up Oblivion in a package deal with some other “modern” game with some Meijer store credit I had. I played it for probably 5 hours and was just not interested in the way the world worked and the art direction. As much as WoW’s art direction is “cartoony”, that looks way better to me than something that tries to be realistic but gets almost nowhere close. The same is true with a lot of other games I’ve looked at; it’s just way too “Uncanny Valley” for me. If it had worked better for me artistically, maybe I could have managed dealing with how things worked in the game.
Many years before that I tried to get into NetHack. I tried the standard ASCII art and found it absolutely useless to understand what was going on, but then I found a mod that gave it at least somewhat representational graphics. After dying every time without getting much of anywhere, I gave up, but not without at least a dozen or more hours played. I still have no idea what exactly I was supposed to do to actually stay alive, since everything is so completely different every time.
For me, it has nothing to do with the realism, and everything to do with what colors the pretty flashy lights on the screen should be. A super-hard game like Ori and the Blind Forest will absolutely captivate me, and I’ll play through its ridiculous levels until I beat them, because it’s so lovely to look at; a similarly difficult game like Super Meat Boy has zero appeal to me, because it looks gross.
I’ve made that very comparison before (Ori enchanted me as well), but not to point out an inconsistency in either game. Both are true to their concept and aesthetic; I just happen to much prefer the aesthetic of Ori.
In the larger context of games in general, it’s not “realism” that I’m necessarily looking for. I like plenty of games with quite unrealistic art styles. It’s more about logical consistency within the setting and aesthetic of the game. In the case of the Fallout games, my minor complaint is that the setting presents us with human characters, but elements of the game’s aesthetic are inconsistent with human behavior. It’s a conflict between concept and construction. It’s a deliberate design choice by the devs; they decided to let internal logic slide a little in favor of their chosen aesthetic. I can respect that, but I would have preferred it the other way around.
It’s a matter of degree in the Dark Souls case. A boss that I have to die 2 or 3 times to figure out the solution for which I already have the necessary tools in hand to defeat can be a rewarding and fun showcase of the game’s graphics, story, drama, etc.
A boss that requires a dozen replays to pattern-memorize due to a massive health bar to repetitively chip away at, while punishing slight missteps with one-shot death swipes is the opposite of a showcase. Often it’s also meant to be a leveling grind gate where you can repeat what you’ve already seen over and over to reduce the difference between the boss’ disproportionate stats and your own–just trading one repetitive grind for another.
Exactly. I’m delighted for folks that enjoy Fallout, or Super Meat Boy, or for that matter Rush or De Kooning or uni sushi. They’re just not my thing :).
I agree with this. Dark Souls is the humble bundle pick for June.
I’m almost just the opposite. I think the GTA games are very fun and enjoyable.
I thought the Saint’s Row games were just idiotic. Just Cause I really liked (but didn’t like the long load times)
Dear God, you’re not kidding. I’m an old guy (55) and I don’t have the reaction time I used to. I found it nearly impossible to beat the ‘boss’ on the easiest setting. Screw that. I get no enjoyment out of beating a level that I have to replay 100 X to finish.
My final entry here is the God Awful (yes I’m aware I might be the only one that feels this way) The Last of Us. I would have enjoyed it more if there was a setting where I don’t play the game at all, and just watch it as a movie.
Shooters is my genre, recent ones being Borderlands, Doom and the Wolfensteins but further back Bioshocks, FEAR and the rest.
Yet, Halo has NEVER got me. I’ve tried about three times over the years, and the weapons are just horrible. I always seem to be using a weapon you’d get on the starting level of others games, and have to shoot an enemy like 5-10 times before killing them.
Call of Duty and Medal of Honor (when it was the people who moved onto Call of Duty) when they were world war 2 games, were great for me.
As soon as they hit Modern Warfare, I struggled. I’ve got so far in, and the continual “make a wrong move and your dead” gameplay was awful. And the storyline was totally fragmented. I didn’t have a clue why I was doing anything in the first COD: Modern Warfare. Just sort of killing people in different places and genres, but liking ones with stealth (another of my genres: Deus Ex, Hitman, Thief, Watchdog).
I have recently tried the first Dark Souls though, as people recommended it to me. Nineties graphics with the first boss which just kept killing me. I’m glad I didn’t buy any of the sequels in a bundle.
Agreed. I loved the game at first play, but on replaying it a year or two later it was painfully clear that the ‘game’ part of it was simple a series of small corridors of repetitive fights with no influence on the game or plot. Strip that out and I would have been more happy just watching all of the cut scenes as a short movie. The Uncharted games are the same way, just a series of small areas and quick-time events.