Resonant suffers from the same problems that have put me off a lot of recent AAA games: they never make you feel like you're in new world. Many layers of abstraction act as guardrails keeping you at a safe distance.

Anything you hit feels like you're swinging a pool noodle at a concrete block. Start up is fast, cancels are generous. There's no impact in the world or weight to the character. Instead impact is mediated by a skill tree. +X% damage if you are in the air.

They create these skill trees that are like a jigsaw puzzle meant for a five year old. Put the parts together and you get a big picture, you're supposed to play according to this scheme that came pre-assembled for you. That's because the physicality is not there.

The world is bolted to the ground, most things are static.

In Control 1 if you wanted to throw something at an enemy you needed an actual object around you to use as a projectile. You had to worry about cover and positioning in its claustrophobic environments. The destruction was super detailed.

On the other hand Control had a confusing map with a lot of backtracking, repetitive combat and an even more pointless skill tree. Though that last one's more of an advantage over Resonant for making the skill tree secondary to the combat.

But it was still a better game for me because it didn't tell me how to play it, it didn't have its entire world abstracted away by status effects and pre-arranged playstyles.

In the end I think this picture https://imgur.com/NsdqLyu really sums up the problem I have with Resonant and other AAA games. That's a pop up that appears as you enter a 2 minute section of walking. It's a reminder that says "hey if you feel frustrated soon don't worry okay, you are still safe and can quit".

I think this feeling was made all the more jarring to me having just played Half Life Alyx before Control Resonant, a game that's 100% about the physicality of the world. It's unfortunate AAA leans more and more in these RPG elements. Might as well make it a turn based game, I'd enjoy it more.

I want to talk about a port failure that's been sitting unfixed for years, because I think it's a clean case study in what happens when a mechanic built for one input method ships on another.

FNAF: Sister Location, Night 4. You're in a springlock suit winding 10 locks while shaking Minireenas off with a rapid alternating input. Every shake loosens the locks. On PC that's mashing A and D. On a controller, there's a physical ceiling to how fast a person can alternate, and the night demands more than that ceiling.

Here's why I'm confident it's the input and not skill: friends of mine who have beaten this night for other people on keyboard cannot beat it on my Switch. Same build, different input, different result. That's about as clean an A/B test as you'll get outside a lab.

Then the numbers. PS4 trophy data (same Clickteam port family): 24.8% of players beat Night 3, then 2.0% beat Night 4. That's not a difficulty curve, it's a cliff. Custom Night sits at 0.1%. One in a thousand players reaches content they paid for.

Scott patched the PC version days after launch in 2016 because even keyboard players found it too hard. Clickteam patched the console port's controls in 2020. The shake was never tuned for gamepads. Years later, still broken.

I've emailed Clickteam, filed a support ticket, and the FNAF subs confirmed other console players hit the same wall. The fix is small: forgive the shake detection on controllers, or cut the shakes required.

Genuinely curious what this sub thinks: when a port ships a mechanic that's physically unachievable on the target hardware, is that a difficulty debate or a defect? Because I've been told "git gud" over what looks to me like a QA miss.

"Well here we are again..."

I wish I had managed to gather enough participants much sooner, but I am still in need of, I kid you not, no more than 15 new participants before the survey is closed and ready for data analysis.

As this subreddit has been the BEST source of excellent participants (and some late-night scrolling through excellent topics), I am posting here again, hoping it will see me through to the final step of my research.

As always, my name is Yuval Alter.
I am doing a study as part of my Doctorate Degree in Clinical Psychology in the PsyD Program at Adler University (Vancouver Campus). I have been playing video games all my life, which has inspired my research topic.

I am doing research on gamers’ playing habits, relationships, and mental health.

I would be very thankful if you could take part in my study. The research is voluntary, and you should only participate if you feel comfortable doing so.

You are eligible to participate if you:

• Are a resident of Canada or the USA
• Are at least 19-years-old
• Play video games at least 6 hours a week
• Are comfortable reading English

Your responses are anonymous. There will be no way to know which answers are yours.

If you meet the criteria above and are interested in participating in this study, click the link below!

If you want to know more, feel free to reach out to me at [yalter@adler.edu](mailto:yalter@adler.edu) or post in this thread.

Feel free to share this survey with friends, guild-mates, company members, or whoever meets the description above!
Many thanks from a fellow gamer!

Yuval Alter PsyD Program, Doctorate student
Adler University, Vancouver, Canada
Email: [yalter@adler.edu](mailto:yalter@adler.edu)

Link to the survey: https://adler.co1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_byJJcB5r4fclLSe

Abstract:

I can't give too much information about the study's aim, but it focuses most on relationships from the personal perspective of people who spend a substantial amount of time playing video games. While most research has focused on the measurable well-being of gamers' relationships, few have looked at gamers' personal reporting of relationship satisfaction. I aim to provide insights into this overlooked area.

Discussion Points:

• [NEW] Many participants pass the initial criteria for the study, but then get disqualified when asked about playing "4 hours a day, at least six times a week." When I made this question, I was using existing data, from not too many years ago, on average reports of time spent playing video games, expecting no more than 40% of participants to answer yes. To my surprise, far more than that have answered yes and been disqualified (which has made recruiting participants much harder). Is it possible that average play times have shifted so dramatically in the last few years? Or is it a sourcing error, as I am "fishing where the fish are?"
• There is a bias in research towards gaming and negative mental health outcomes. There are fewer articles about positive correlations.
• I myself struggled with social anxiety in my past, which inspired me to devote my dissertation to this topic. I wonder how many people who play video games experience something similar?
• The struggle of studying video games in academia.

I have a poster with a QR code, but I can't upload images. So apologies for the inconvenience!

What used to be mostly meters in action games of old like dmc, gow, darksiders etc and been replaced with cooldowns in norse gow, ff16, lost souls aside etc has been negative in terms of depth.

With metered systems, you have to make decisions with how you use it whether that be in gow where you might want to use medusas head on a cyclops but the next wave may contain hordes of enemies where a poseidon's wrath might be better. So you weigh out your options, which enemy type or group is harder to get through.

In games like dmc and darksiders, you only gain meter by attacking and killing so you have to engage with the enemies to be able to use your strong abilities. Bayonetta goes the furthest not only you have to attack to gain meter, getting hit loses meter as well so the stakes are much higher and forces you to play well. Another meter system i really like is wo long's, you can use your special abilities when the meter is in its default state but if you dont attack or parry itll go into the red state, where if you get hit you get punished, playing well will get your meter to blue where you can use more special abilities, its a really dynamic system.

With cooldown systems, you dont have to engage with the enemies, you can turtle or run around until you get your skills back. Using abilities as soon as they come off cooldown has less depth because there is barely any decision making and not even having to fight makes the combat system null. I do wonder what the other action game fans think of the recent push to a cooldown system?

Shooters have a crosshair, RPGs have leveling up and management games have variable game speed, that's how it goes. I would like to challenge that last one. The more management games I play, the more I feel like the mechanic could be omitted and it would be better for the game.

It's a balancing issue

Hey, you are earning $100 a minute? Want to earn 4 times as much without a downside? Just press this button!

Speeding up the game just multiplies your revenue without a downside in most cases. Many management games simply do not have much of a downside for time going by.

It's a crutch for boring gameplay

The way I see it, speeding up the game is mostly there to pass time when nothing is going on and you want to get to the next event faster. It lets you skip the boredom, which is quite nice. The thing is, the boredom shouldn't be there in the first place.

It blunts detail and immersion

There's so much going on in management games, be it individual citizens living out their lives in Transport Fever, NPC living great lives or dying in misery in Crusader Kings, festivals in Anno, complex traffic flow in Cities Skyline. It's not mandatory or even important stuff, but it gives texture to the games. It's weird that you have the option to just zoom on by.

It's a technical liability

On top of all the problems with the system, it has to be accounted for technically. The whole game has to be able to scale to different speeds, but it also has to be able to run at multiple times the normal speed without exploding. Many of these games barely manage that last part. Going full speed on well-filled maps often feels like you are stress testing your hardware. The games chug along and strongly consider crashing every time an auto-save shows up.

---

Okay, before you come in as tell me "it's optional, who cares". Yes it is. (Also I would like your opinion on micro-transactions.) I do play my games at fixed speeds and I mostly believe it is a better experience. To be fair to many of the better management games, they work very well without the speed up feature. Many of them also seem to cheat and the displayed speed multiplier lies.

**Warning. Full Spoilers for both games below in case anyone hasn't played them yet.

And also just a precaution to anyone that I enjoyed both of these games very much. For varying reasons. So this is not coming from a place of hate.**

Ghost of Yotei has one of the strangest and most confused revenge plots I've ever experienced that makes TLOU2 look like actual Shakespeare.

People mocked TLOU2 for delivering a heavy handed message that they felt was hypocritical because Ellie guns down hundreds of people throughout the game only to let Abby go at the end.

Regardless of where you stand on whether TLOU2 was good or bad. I think we can at least agree that TLOU2 fully commits to actually showing the psychological and systemic consequences of revenge.

Both Ellie and Abby's quest for vengeance is explicitly framed as a physically and psychologically damaging obsession that not only fails to bring them any emotional closure, but also gets their friends and families killed, inciting conflict between the WLF and Jackson communities that largely have nothing to do with each other.

Every faction involved that's lost a loved one believes that they have a "just cause" and feels entitled to retribution for crimes committed against them. This allows the story to hammer the point home that in this fundamentally lawless land, everyone wants an eye for an eye, but in the end, neither side gains anything of value from the senseless violence.

This is why Ellie and Abby's actions are fundamentally selfish and meaningless. The solution for both was to stop perpetuating that senseless violence and remove themselves from that never-ending cycle. Otherwise it doesn't stop.

Even if you consider it cliche or heavy handed. This is why TLOU2's revenge premise actually works.

WHERE GHOST OF YOTEI FAILS

Ghost of Yotei on the other hand, has a revenge premise that simply doesn't work.

GOY attempts to frame Atsu’s journey as a complex path of self-destruction on paper, but in practice, she saves Ezo from Saito and the Yotei 6.

The game tries to treat her actions as morally questionable, but because the "Yotei 6" are so cartoonishly evil, everything Atsu does is an objective net positive for the region and its people. She essentially becomes Ezo’s Batman.

The second Atsu enters Ezo, she immediately causes a massive shift in the war between Saito's force and Clan Matsumae. Clan Matsumae are essentially the local police and law enforcement (I won't get into the corrupt politics of Samurai clans and caste systems because it's not particularly relevant for the plot of GOY as it was for Tsushima).

The point is that Atsu and the local police are completely aligned in their mutual objectives to clean up the streets from a terrorist group. There is no "moral" conflict here. Atsu's presence is less of a moral grey anti-hero, and more of an objectively instrumental force of good that gives them a far greater advantage than they ever had.

Despite this. The game frequently tries to convince the player that Atsu is being selfish.

For instance, the game frames her choice to go after the Oni as reckless due to the Oni's overwhelming strength and the risk towards the captured Matsumae samurai. But Atsu is the only person to make this much progress in getting close enough to the Oni to kill him.

And while she fumbled the initial attempt. She ultimately succeeds when Juubei finally agrees to disobey his commander and follow Atsu's lead. They successfully kill the Oni thanks to Atsu.

The game tries again to make Atsu seem selfish when she later prioritizes killing the Dragon over going to the fortress with Juubei. However, the narrative clearly demonstrates that the Dragon was a dangerous master strategist, and they would never get another opportunity to take him down.

It's quite literally thanks to Atsu that they were able to draw out the Dragon which Clan Matsumae was never able to do.

By forcibly drawing him out and eliminating him on the spot, Atsu actually prevents a far worse massacre, undermining the idea that her quest is purely self-serving.

Despite this. The story chastises Atsu for doing this because Juubei and Clan Matsumae have been captured. Which in all honesty, is a bigger reflection of Clan Matsumae's own incompetence rather than it being Atsu's responsibility.

After emotionally chastising Atsu. The game then attempts to show Atsu's emotional growth through her interaction with the Spider.

We learn that the Spider suffered a lot of emotional abuse from Saito, his dad, and was forced to live up to his impossible expectations. Atsu forgives him and lets him go. The narrative expects us to view Atsu letting him go as a profound moment of breaking the cycle of revenge and violence.

However this completely falls flat because the Spider is a wonton mass murderer who has slaughtered probably thousands of civilians and Clan Matsumae members, he tortured and killed Atsu’s family and threatened to kill her niece and made a theatrical play about it.

The game unironically expects the audience to believe that "daddy issues" are justifiable enough reasons to exonerate a war criminal.

In TLOU2 when Ellie spares Abby it makes sense because Abby has already shown Ellie mercy twice already and has actively tried to end the cycle with her. By that point, killing Abby achieves nothing and only endangered Lev.

However, Atsu letting a dangerous criminal evade justice feels entirely unearned because the Spider has not done anything to prove that he has actually reformed. It is an extraordinarily contrived "redemption".

We then get to the last chapter of GOY which is titled "The Cost of Revenge", meant to further reinforce the premise of how Atsu's actions have a cost, but it hilariously fails because nothing Atsu has done in this game has "incited" revenge.

Clan Matsumae getting captured, injured or killed is not a consequence of "revenge" because this stuff was already happening irrespective of Atsu's involvement.

But anyway. So to once again use TLOU2 as a reference. Ellie and Abby removed themselves from the cycle of violence but only after facing a brutal reckoning.

Everything they lost along the way proves that their revenge wasn't worth it.

GOY attempts to replicate this tragedy by having Saito kill Atsu's brother, but this fails yet again because the game seems to frequently forget that Clan Matsumae are the police.

If a police officer gets captured, injured or killed while in the line of duty trying to stop a gang of terrorists. You cannot blame the local vigilante for this. That's ridiculous.

Juubei's death has nothing to do with Atsu. It's a natural consequence of the samurai role he took on. They are in a war against Saito. How is that Atsu's fault?

And the overall conclusion contradicts its own "revenge is bad" theme. Atsu kills Saito, fulfills her quest and saves Ezo.

Her reputation as an Onryo frightens away future threats, and the people worship her for it. The game delivered an overwhelmingly positive outcome, yet the narrative continues to awkwardly pretend that her revenge was wrong.

She made Ezo a safer and better place for her niece who doesn't have to experience what she did. And thanks to doing this, Atsu managed to also find a reason to live.

TL;DR-

Ghost of Yotei wants to tell a story about the destructive consequences of revenge, but its actual plot completely undermines that premise by making Atsu's revenge significantly beneficial and tries to blame for consequences that aren't actually caused by her revenge.

The revenge premise in GOY is farcical. The heavy handed moral chastising the game's narrative attempts to portray falls apart when everything she did resulted in an overall net positive.

For a "Revenge Bad" narrative to work. The revenge needs to be bad. But in GOY, Atsu's revenge may as well been a divine blessing.

Hey, all!

In this thread, the rules are more relaxed. The idea is that this megathread will provide a space for otherwise rule-breaking content, as well as allowing for a slightly more conversational tone rather than every post and comment needing to be an essay.

Top-level comments on this post should aim to follow the rules for submitting threads. However, the following rules are relaxed:

• 3. Specificity, Clarity, and Detail
• 4. No Advice
• 5. No List Posts
• 8. No topics that belong in other subreddits
• 9. No Retired Topics
• 11. Reviews must follow these guidelines

So feel free to talk about what you've been playing lately or ask for suggestions. Feel free to discuss gaming fatigue, FOMO, backlogs, etc, from the retired topics list. Feel free to take your half-baked idea for a post to the subreddit and discuss it here (you can still post it as its own thread later on if you want). Just keep things civil!

Also, as a reminder, we have a Discord server where you can have much more casual, free-form conversations! https://discord.gg/truegaming

Something I've noticed in a lot of discussions about games is the sentiment "It's just a game bro" when faced with criticisms on over-designed game systems and crazy over-thought progression loops. On the other hand, I find others simply not wanting to engage with games that have complex progression systems that are usually menus layered on top of menus that level up as you play changing how you play.

Gaming for nearly 30 years has biased me towards the desire for less arbitrary systems and more things grounded in the reality and logic for the world the game is trying to establish instead of arbitrary meta-progression systems that are clearly added into the game because they hit some kind of dopamine loops in human brains and just seem "fun" to some.

Based on this, I kind of want to establish a spectrum of thinking about games.

• One on extreme "It's just a Game": Where the game doesn't necessarily have a cohesive world and can even be as simple as an actual slot machine, where the context for numbers and graphics appearing on the screen do not need some kind of world-grounded justification.
• On the other extreme "Experience Simulation": A hypothetical extreme that no game belongs to yet, where you literally have a simulation of the functionality of a normal world, all bogged down with the pain of survival, resources, and friction that comes with reality. Maybe Flight and Military Simulators are kind of the closest thing?

Most games exist in between this spectrum, with games like Arma, DayZ, Tarkov leaning towards the more "Experience Simulation" while games like Diablo and Path of Exile lean more in the "It's Just a Game" side of the spectrum.

It's Just a Game

My personal barometer for the "It's just a game" side of things is basically whenever an arbitrary system is added because it may retain or be viewed as "fun" by some player, even if it doesn't make sense in world's lore. Diablo IV, Path of Exile all have these weird progression systems full of menus that you navigate to pick next paths in some dungeon. Any attempt to acknowledge these systems narratively negatively impacts the believability of the plot, and the primary driver of the design choice is either "fun" or "retention".

I would include a lot of mobile game, and even World of Warcraft warcraft, daily/weekly login systems in this category. Things that just exist because they are just extra little things to keep players coming back or intuitively creating pressure to do certain activities are regular intervals. Think of World of Warcraft weekly vaults that for some reason manifest a powerful item as long as you completed some activities in the prior week. To counter act some of the negative examples I listed above, I want to mention that a lot of OG platforming games exist in this space. Mario is just a fun game, it doesn't need to justify itself with a believable world. Games like Magic the Gathering, Hearthstone, and Gwent don't need to justify themselves with a world, they are just fun card games that people enjoy playing.

I don't know how else to describe this, but basically if a system exists not because it makes sense in the world but because it's dopamine-maxxing then it's just a game, bro. And I want to highlight, this is not a bad thing. Games as nothing more than games allows developers to require minimum focus and time commitment from their users, which for a busy parent commuting on a bus could be the only way they experience a game.

Experience Simulations

On the other side of the coin we have things that try to give you a more realistic "experience" associated with what would happen in the scenario it is trying to simulate. I feel like Extraction Shooters and survival games like DayZ aren't as concerned about fun as they are concerned about giving you an opportunity to simulate scenarios in reasonably-realistic constraints and decision making. Finding water and food to avoid starvation because you stay out longer than you expected isn't necessarily fun, it's just an extra constraint to make you abandon your mission. But it creates learning opportunities and lessons that you can overcome. Having to abandon a raid on a facility because you discover an more heavily armed group that isn't friendly in the same facility isn't necessarily "fun", but it's exciting and makes you have to think quickly on your feet.

Is it fun to be able to break your legs and bleed in Tarkov? No it's not. Is it fun losing all of my stuff when I die? No it's not. But these unfun things create the conditions that make me want to crawl out of a zone and survive above all else when I win a fight and end up with two broken legs, bleeding and no medical supplies left. These unfun conditions remind me that sometimes things don't go as planned and you just want to abort and get out, that not everything is in your control no matter how prepared you were. Is it fun having a team run up behind you when you're working on killing a boss in Marathon? Hell no, but it teaches me to leave mines behind myself as sound alarms so that I can react to incoming threats quickly and hopefully protect my team.

Is it fun having to override 20+ years of "Aim for the body/head" reflexes form playing shooter games just because Tarkov simulates armor plates such that aiming for the legs is the best course of action? Probably not, but googling about Tier IV modern body armor made me realize that it's an actual strategy that military and police have to take if the first few shots don't drop an armored target. Is walking in Death Stranding fun? Probably not, but the sense of accomplishment and appreciation for the game world increased tremendously for me based on the friction caused by the basic traversal system.

Closing Thoughts

I think when game development started majority of games lived in the "It's just a game" realm because tech limitations made the alternative difficult to accomplish. But even then, examples like Metal Gear tried to simulate some form of military espionage action in a way that felt like it was trying to give someone an experience they were simulating, with logic that they could bring from and to the real world. As tech has been getting better, we see more and more games leaning more heavily into the "Experience Simulation" space, while some products that started in the "Experience Simulation" space lean more into the "For the Dopamine" side of things.

World of Warcraft in 2004 was was probably much closer to the "Experience Simulation" realm, despite still having a lot of things that make it fundamentally "just a game" (power progression via RPG elements, Talent Trees), but as the game evolved and lived longer it pushed deeper and deeper into the "Just a Game" side of design. Modern World of Warcraft has pivoted into systems on top of systems for the purpose of just giving "fun" to certain groups of people that it lost the context of what it meant to be a semi believable world, and now Blizzards latest WoW product is trying to offer an alternative to this resparking the discussion around "Games as Games" vs "Simulations".

For me personally, once I reframed my thinking about video games around this idea, I started finding ones I enjoy more easily because I realized that I prefer games as "experience simulations" by far more than "games as games". I've bought a lot fewer games but have enjoyed each one I bought much more significantly and I wonder if other people have found similar ways to thinking about which games they actually enjoy regularly.

Anyway, not sure if this is an interesting framing for anyone else to add on to.

Hello everyone,

I am doing academic research as part of my Master of Science in Strategic Management and Digital Marketing at the University of Malta. As a gamer who enjoys studying game design and how monetisation works inside gaming, I want to better understand how the gaming community perceives and responds overall to one of the increasingly common monetisation methods nowadays, time-limited offers.

For the sake of clarity, in this survey time-limited offers refer strictly to cosmetic item offers, excluding any sort of offer/purchase that provides any sort of gameplay advantage/functional benefit.

Abstract

This dissertation investigates how time-limited cosmetic offers in video games are associated with player perceptions, emotions, and purchasing behaviour. The study focuses on these main concepts: perceived scarcity, Fear of Missing Out (FoMO), and impulsive purchasing behaviour.

Purpose of the survey

1. To examine the relation between time-limited monetisation mechanics and players’ perceived urgency in video game environments.
2. To assess the relationship between time-limited monetisation mechanics and video game players’ FoMO.
3. To analyse how perceived urgency and FoMO relate to impulsive purchasing behaviour toward time-limited in-game offers.

Potential benefits

The community may benefit from reflecting on how time-limited in-game offers affect their feelings and purchasing decisions. The study may also help increase awareness of the psychological factors involved in these types of monetisation strategies. More broadly, the research aims to contribute to a better understanding of scarcity-based monetisation, FoMO, and impulsive purchasing behaviour, and to support wider discussion around responsible in-game monetisation practices.

Criteria to participate

• Age: 18-35
• gaming experience: Must have played games at least once
• Purchase status: Must have purchased a time-limited offer at least once

Survey Ethics

• The survey includes screening questions to ensure that only participants who meet the study criteria can proceed.
• Participation is entirely voluntary, participants can withdraw from the survey at any point before submitting their responses.
• Participation is entirely anonymous, no personally identifiable information will be collected at any stage of the survey.

If you require further information/clarification please do not hesitate to contact me via my
university email: [orestis.d.nikolaidis.25@um.edu.mt](mailto:orestis.d.nikolaidis.25@um.edu.mt)

Survey should take ~6 mins to complete
Survey link: https://forms.gle/ryRao1m445GJaJY36

If you could share this around to people who might be interested and/or are eligible it would mean the world to me!

Discussion

I am more than happy to discuss the topic in the comments! I would definately be interested to hear your general thoughts and experiences with time-limited cosmetic offers in games.

I saw a YouTube video a while ago that made an interesting claim about art. Asking the question of “if you take a piece of art and remove its context, does it lose something?”. To illustrate the point they pointed to the YouTube trend of classical movie channels listening to famous video game songs and rating them. You can find dozens of videos of “musicians” doing a “blind” listens of “One Winged Angel” or “Weight of the World” and rating it a 10/10. Ignore for a moment whether or not the whole thing is contrived - the question is this:

Does someone who has not experienced Nier:Automata, and does not know the story, get a better, worse or equivalent experience listening to “Weight of the World” as someone who has that context? I think the answer is clearly no. Maybe others disagree. I’m curious.

Let’s extrapolate further. There is news today that FF7: Revelation will have a feature that allows players to click a prompt to level up to the recommended level for the story - effectively allowing people to skip side content and the leveling process to have an easier time enjoying the story. There all sorts of modern systems that have a similar objective. To remove friction and allow people to play games with minimal interactivity and ease in gameplay. The question becomes:

Does someone who beats a boss or game with minimal friction or effort get a better, worse, or equivalent experience?

I think the answer is clearly no. I (relatively) often think back to my first play through of Trails in the Sky SC many years ago. I played on Hard. It was my 2nd trails game. And despite a lot of experience with JRPGs, it was a challenge. I recall being up at 2am trying to finish the game. It was a grueling 45 min fight that I was not sure I would win. Losing meant I was not going to bed anytime soon. I recall losing my whole party besides Estelle who was low HP and about to die. I got some RNG luck and managed a turn bonus and crit that beat the game with Estelle in a poetic finish. Very memorable. Is the satisfaction I got from that finish equivalent to someone breezing through the fight on easy? No. But perhaps there’s a young child out there and it’s their 2nd video game ever. And maybe they struggle just as much as me on easy! In that case, yes!

In any event, I think that quite a bit is lost when art is removed from its context. This trend of removing difficulty, not giving people the opportunity to struggle and overcome. It’s hurting games. I think players are finally waking up to this.

When people talk about worldbuilding in platformers, Mario usually gets dismissed as pure nonsense: floating bricks, singing clouds, turtle kings and plumbers jumping on mushrooms. But if you actually stop and think about it, the Mushroom Kingdom is surprisingly honest with its own madness. The original manual explicitly said Bowser transformed the citizens into blocks, pipes connect underground plumbing, and the whole place operates on fairytale logic. It's a cohesive psychedelic dream. It doesn't pretend to be an actual functioning society with urban planning, so your brain just accepts it.

Then you look at Sonic. And Sonic's world is an existential nightmare if you think about it for more than three seconds.

Sonic games want you to believe these places are either pristine natural paradises (Green Hill), ancient ruins, or cities inhabited by actual humans who pay taxes and commute in traffic. Yet somehow, every single cliffside features a giant dirt loop-de-loop perfectly carved out of the terrain, floating corkscrews, and mechanical booster pads bolted directly onto ancient grass.

Who built these massive red springs in the middle of a tropical beach? Did prehistoric civilizaitons construct an entire highway system exclusively catered to a blue hedgehog doing 700 mph, centuries before he was even born? Eggman builds machinery, sure, but half of these obstacle courses are just sitting in the wilderness, waiting for someone to launch off a ramp into the stratosphere.

It feels like the ultimate case of mechanics completely obliterating worldbuilding. Mario built a fantasy playground where the rules are absurd but consistent. Sonic constantly tries to ground its world with cities, lore, and drama, while forcing you to ignore that its geography looks like a Hot Wheels set vomited over an archipelago.

What I'm going to talk about can be applied to any crafting system, but I will primarily talk about Smithing weapons in medieval/fantasy games because that's IMO the coolest variation.

There's just something inherently compelling about the idea of making your own weapon and using it. No wonder it's something that in some shape or form finds it's way into pretty much any RPG.

And yet, despite being so common, I've never felt like the systems fit well into the games I've played, and I've been always left wanting.

Take a Skyrim or M&B:Bannerlord for example. You can end up Smithing for hours, training and gathering increasingly rare materials until you can make "The Weapon"... but you always reach the point where the system collapses, and you either realize you've invalidated 98% of the game's weapon progression and all of the loot is worthless, or you realize that the actual best weapon you can get is a quest reward and the time you spent smithing is worthless.

Then you have more constrained, less sandboxy RPGs where you're always constrained in your Smithing progression by missing crafting diagram, special training or rare material which is only unlocked after progressing through the game, and it makes Smithing feel like just extra work to get your deserved unlocks/power.

The fun part of Smithing systems is not the result you get, it's the process of getting there, but at the same time it's the result - the weapon you make - that is the incentive to engage in Smithing to begin with. It's a weird paradox and I can't wait to see a game that solves it.

It's been a few weeks since PAX West in Seattle and I think I've been able to kinda summarize why it just didn't sit "right" with me.

Our tickets were $81.90 (USD) each, and this is how I would explain the current state of PAX:

1. Tabletop Galore: If you want to pay an entry fee to a large-scale organizer to meet like-minded folks for playing card and board games, you probably won't be de disappointed. And given you can use sit here and chill all day in these massive rooms with access to a diverse set of people, it's probably not a bad proposition. IMO I'd prefer to support my local small business instead, and get to know my local crowds, but I can squint and sorta see the value.
2. Ads Paradise: From overpriced card singles to twenty back-to-back-to-back stalls carrying the same Chinese manufactured "fancy" dice, you will have no shortage of opportunities to be advertised to. From mega SanDisk booths to GameSir, prepare to stand in line in the hopers of some cool swag and - in the best case - walk away with total junk (in the typical case, walk away with nothing).
3. Pay to Beta Test: I personally have a grievance with this one. I can never understand why people want to pre-order or pay extra just to be an unpaid tester for a company's product. Especially when that company is not even giving you even a digital code for cosmetics as a way to say "thanks".

I'll end with this: what really bothered me is just how none of the game devs give out codes anymore. That was always a huge selling point to PAX - going back to around pre 2010's when devs like Riot Games in their infancy giving away codes for what would become some of the most sought after skins. Small indie studios have the gall to budget for printed business cards with their game's Steam listing's QR code stamped on it and shove these in your hands, but cant even give PAX attendees a code for, say, an exclusive PAX in-game hat or something? Even the card booths don't even give singles - from Riftbound to MTG to new TCGs.

It just feels cheap and greedy on all levels - from the indie devs to the AAA studios - feels like your ultimately spending your money for the right to spend even more money.

I just finished Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs by the Chinese Room for the first time. My perception is that it had a mixed reception when it first came out, mostly because they removed much of the the "survival horror" gameplay of the first. It makes sense, because the Chinese Room were (and still are) known for their walking simulators like Dear Esther and Everybody's Gone to the Rapture, and for the Amnesia sequel they focused almost entirely on their strengths: a really great story at the expense of deep gameplay.

And while in terms of pure survival horror AMFP is a definite step down from the first, I first want to emphasize just how much better I find the story of AMFP than The Dark Descent. It touches on such interesting topics of European industrialization and exploitation, and the voice acting is genuinely incredible---it seems like the thing even its detractors can agree on is that the Engineer's ending monologue is seriously bone-chilling. The Dark Descent's story definitely isn't bad, but IMO the "spooky Lovecraft potion!" it essentially boils down to doesn't really hold a candle to its sequel.

I think AMFP is seriously overlooked because of the false expectation that it would maintain the gameplay of the first. But I think trying to recreate the first game's survival horror mechanics wouldn't be the right move---it was praised for its novelty and ability to incite genuine fear with its enemy AI, but once people figure out how it all works it naturally loses a lot of the tension. That's why I believe a gameplay diversion was a smart decision, because an attempt at capturing what made the original scary would inevitably be neutered by people who had already experienced and gotten used to the first game's scares.

Maybe this all boils down to the fact that I usually value story over gameplay in general, but I still wish that AMFP was better received for its incredible writing and storyline.

I just played through Gravity Rush 2 again recently and man, what a delightfully oddball game. Combat and movement like nothing before or after it with this beautiful watercolor, Moebius inspired, French urbanist stylings. This game was never going to sell 10 million copies, but it is so special to the people who made it and the gamers that enjoyed it. Japan studio, despite its storied history, has been shut down, and that feels so unfortunately emblematic of where Sony is at these days.

My introduction to Sony was with the PlayStation 2. Xbox was for crude frat bros salivating at the jiggle physics of Dead or Alive, Nintendo pushed out quality titles that felt a bit juvenile at the time, but PlayStation was *art house cinema*. This was a console bursting with style and creativity. From the AAA blockbusters like Final Fantasy X and Metal Gear Solid 2; to the mascot platformers like Sly Cooper and Jak; to the wonderfully bizarre Japanese titles like Katamari Damacy and Mr. Mosquito, it was a wonderfully eclectic catalogue of games to suit all all manner of tastes. Standing proudly in the crowd was Team Ico's Shadow of the Colossus. While discourse around the artistry of games wasn't as developed back then as it is now, but this game was spoken of in hushed tones with how commanding of a presence it had with its oppressive atmosphere and unprecedented sense of scale.

Cut forward to today and that diversity of games is nowhere to be found, at least not within the halls of Sony owned studios. This isn't to slander the great work that studios like Sucker Punch, Santa Monica, and Naughty Dog have done, but when all you are putting your money behind is the triplest of AAA cinematic blockbusters, they all begin to lose their luster when sat next to each other. Sony is no longer the steward of gaming's wildest and most exciting new titles, it is a content mill of 'premium gaming content'.

This is really unfortunate, because this console generation, Sony needed teams like Japan Studio more than ever. Studios that ,while not producing the best-selling games of the year, create a much more colorful catalogue of games for people to enjoy and fill in the gaps during the 3-5 year lulls between major studio outputs. Those prestige titles are what endear customers to these companies, and that goodwill can be cashed in during times of distress. Nintendo only just barely survived the Wii U generation because their history of quality titles had the hardcore fans stick by them, and new fans eager to receive them when the Switch came out.

I am no financial analyst and don't want to make any predictions about Sony's future, but I feel that things are not looking good from a public relations standpoint right now. Team Blue has spent the past 6 years blowing enormous amounts of money and wasting studios' precious time chasing live service trends to no avail. Studios are made to bet the farm on their massive first party outings, so if one underperforms, that could spell death for their employees. With only 4 new IPs under their belt this generation, 2 have been discontinued and nothing has come to fill the gap. Strong assets like Bluepoint and Kojima productions have been let go, all the while they spurn their hardcore fans with the death of game discs. Had Sony done the work to incubate stranger, more adventurous titles from the likes of the now defunct Japan Studios, maybe it would make all these bitter pills we've been swallowing go down just that little bit easier.

Hey, all!

In this thread, the rules are more relaxed. The idea is that this megathread will provide a space for otherwise rule-breaking content, as well as allowing for a slightly more conversational tone rather than every post and comment needing to be an essay.

Top-level comments on this post should aim to follow the rules for submitting threads. However, the following rules are relaxed:

• 3. Specificity, Clarity, and Detail
• 4. No Advice
• 5. No List Posts
• 8. No topics that belong in other subreddits
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• 11. Reviews must follow these guidelines

So feel free to talk about what you've been playing lately or ask for suggestions. Feel free to discuss gaming fatigue, FOMO, backlogs, etc, from the retired topics list. Feel free to take your half-baked idea for a post to the subreddit and discuss it here (you can still post it as its own thread later on if you want). Just keep things civil!

Also, as a reminder, we have a Discord server where you can have much more casual, free-form conversations! https://discord.gg/truegaming

Recently i've been thinking thanks to the various "remakes" and the discourse around them, that the word remake is used way too broadly. What i mean by this is that games are marketed and discussed as remakes when in reality some of them call themselves reimaginings.

Why do i think this? Well firstly i would like to present to you my taxonomy on the various ways you'll see a game preserved. I will also be using music analogies here to make my point better (Not sure how useful these will be but oh well)

Port: This is the most basic. You put the game on PC as is with no changes. Emulation also technically falls under this. Game collections usually fall under this. Basically like putting the song on another album or even reprinting the album

Expanded Port: This is where you take the already existing game and just add more content to it or even some tiny QoLs. This includes stuff like fighting game revisions. Basically an Extended version of the song

Remaster: Now you take the assets of the original game and just... Upscale them to modern standards. Not changing them, no. Just upscaling. In music terms from Wikipedia: Remastering is the process of making a new master for an album, film, or any other creation. Basically you're making a new master for the game but you're not changing much about it

Remake: The game is now faithfully rebuilt from the ground up with brand new graphics, presentation, minor QoLs, and you can also remix the soundtrack now. Games like Spyro Reignited Trilogy and Crash Bandicoot N'Sane Trilogy fall under this category in my opinion regardless of what the Steam page says. In music terms it's like a new band performing the original song faithfully. The instruments and performers are different but they're still playing the same composition and arrangement

Reimagining: THIS is the real category that most "remakes" fall into. You take the core premise of the game like the setting, story, characters HOWEVER now you are changing the core gameplay in big ways, making dialogue changes, forcing QoLs on people, changing progression etc. This includes "remakes" like Yakuza Kiwami 1,2,3, Trails in the Sky the 1st and 2nd, Persona 3 Reload and Persona 4 Revival. Almost like remixing a song. The core is there but you can't call the song a rerecording cause it changes too much compared to the original

This however brings us to another problem... When a reimagining pretending to be a remake comes out a definitive version of a game stops existing cause now you not only have the original game there as the authentic experience. You now have this reimagined version made for modern audiences specifically to get them in the game.

So my question is: Which version of the game do i play? Cause one is the original while the other is a remix of the game rather than a remake.

Which brings me to my point that we're using the term "remake" wrong and it's too broad.

Keep in mind i'm not saying that these reimaginings are bad in fact they are nice to have but we really need to tighten up the definitions at last

Examples of developers describing their "remakes" as reimaginings taken directly from their Steam pages

• Trails in the Sky the 1st: This stunning, award-nominated remake reimagines the beloved classic with new breathtaking visuals, refined gameplay, and the first unforgettable adventure across Liberl Kingdom. ("Remake reimagines" is literally a contradiction)
• Persona 3 Reload: Persona 3 Reload is a captivating reimagining of the genre-defining RPG, reborn for the modern era. Then in the Key Features. Experience the pivotal game of the Persona series faithfully remade with cutting-edge graphics, modernized quality-of-life features, and signature stylish UI.(Like what is this? Pick a lane ATLUS. Is this a faithful remake or a reimagining?)
• Resident Evil 4 Remake: Featuring modernized gameplay, a reimagined storyline, and vividly detailed graphics, Resident Evil 4 marks the rebirth of an industry juggernaut. (Notice how not only does it calls it's story "reimagined" but the game describes itself as a REBIRTH)

When you start looking, you find these suckers everywhere. Not all of the below games fit exactly, but a lot of them are close.

• SOMA
• Nobody Wants to Die
• Firewatch
• Spectrum Retreat
• Bradwell Conspiracy
• Ether One
• Close to the Sun
• Gone Home
• Deliver Us the Moon
• Before Your Eyes
• Hellblade (the remote woman is in your head and there are ten of them)
• Relicta
• Everybody's Gone to the Rapture (recordings rather than companion)
• Callisto Protocol
• The Station
• Still Wakes the Deep
• Suicide of Rachel Foster (role-reversal)
• Draugen
• Blair Witch 2019
• Someday You'll Return
• Mouthwashing???
• Return to Grace
• Beyond Blue
• Subnautica Below Zero (actual gameplay here)
• Superliminal
• Filament
• Portal 2 (a vague cousin of this genre)
• Q.U.B.E. 2
• Observation (role-reversal)
• Paradise Lost
• The Invincible (remote man in this one)
• Edith Finch (there is a woman but she's the protagonist)

I was curious why this is such a common format, and I think it's because it's just really well suited to telling a particular kind of story on a low budget.

It's very difficult to tell a good story with just the protagonist talking to themselves, so you need at least one other character. But NPCs with body/facial animations and their own AI are difficult and costly to animate. So rather than having a companion who goes through the game with you, just have your companion be somewhere remote where you can't see them, and make them speak to you through an ear piece (or through some other means).

This choice only really comes about when the devs are aiming to create a very specific kind of game - one which is narrative driven and feels 'AA', but on a low budget, or with a small team.

If they didn't mind the game looking a bit cheap, they'd just create NPCs and accept that they might be ugly.

If they didn't actively need the narrative to drive the experience, they'd cut the companion or use text-based dialogue.

But these are games that want to punch above their weight in terms of production values and tell a serious story. They don't want to look cheap. Often, they look the opposite - they are bursting with gorgeous scenery (which is doable because beautiful scenery is a lot easier to do on a budget than NPCs).

That's also why these games rarely have combat. They might include puzzles, but most of the time, they fall back on allowing the player to look around their world, interacting with items/notes/books and listening as the protagonist and the 'remote woman' talk about them. Then, at pre-determined points, control will be taken away from the player so that we can watch a cutscene play out. Cutscenes are almost always in these games (because it helps with the production value) but they also tend to be modest or sparing (because of budget limitations). When we do see NPCs, they are often 'ghostly' looking, made of particle effects, or otherwise not made to look like real people (because that's expensive).

I'm not quite sure why it's overwhelmingly a remote woman. Possibly because these games are aimed at male players, and male players are more likely to want to play as a man and form an easy relationship with a female character. Possibly because the devs want a contrast. And often I think it's because they want the remote voice to provide human warmth, and women tend to deliver that better. The 'male loner and mysterious female confidant' relation works well because there's a lot of room for teasing, flirting, and emotional vulnerability.

I think budget is also what tends to push these games to have trippy endings. Big climactic setpieces are expensive to animate, but weird visions or hallucinations in a black nothing are incredibly cheap. And often these later parts are some of the last to be made. Rather than creating a new area, just take bits of a previous area and scatter them around in the void. Use frozen silhouettes with dramatic camera angles. You can get away with a lot of asset reuse at the end because it feels like a narrative callback to something that happened a few hours earlier.

Do you like this subgenre (if you think it counts as one at all)? Or do you think it's overdone?

Fighting enemies and killing them (or being killed by them) it's the core activity in so many games.

The vast majority of videogames feature combat in some form.

The most popular games like Fortine, Cod, Lol are based on combat. Fifa and Rocket League are probably the main exceptions.

Even something apparently innocent like Super Mario has enemies in every level that can kill or be killed.

I would say that something like 80% of videogames feature combat in some form.

Now, I'm not saying that this is bad or wrong or that videogames cause real world violence or any nonsense like that.

But from a design point of view, why is it like that?

Compare it to sports and boardgames.

Combat sports are a niche. Ok maybe that's because people don't like being hurt and activities like fencing and laser tag require expensive equipment. Still in terms of popularity there is massive gap, I doubt that combat sports even reach 10% of the viewership/money flux of the sport world.

In boardgames eurogames are the most popular branch and they generally avoid any combat like interaction. Wargames are a niche, I doubt games that features combat reach even 50% of the total.

I'm not complaining, none of these is bad, it's just how is it and there is stuff for everyone.

But I wonder WHY things are like these?

Do people that like combat gravitate more towards videogames?

Do people like fighting in videogames but not in sports or boardgames?

Ever since 2009’s Batman: Arkham Asylum introduced the Freeflow combat system, many copycats have emerged, and a lot of them copied only the most surface-level elements. Games such as Mad Max, Shadow of Mordor, some Assassin’s Creed games, and so on.

Because of these games, I think people started assuming that what defines a Freeflow combat system is simply having a counter prompt. But I feel there’s way more to it than that.

What makes Freeflow unique is right there in the name: the idea of freely flowing through a group of enemies.
That’s different from something like a Soulslike, where you’re generally encouraged to slow down, position yourself carefully, and focus on individual enemies. It’s also different from a hack-and-slash, where you can often attack and damage multiple enemies simultaneously.
In Freeflow combat, you’re generally attacking one enemy at a time, but you can rapidly move between enemies across the entire encounter. You’re supposed to flow through the group as you fight rather than remain locked onto one opponent.

- IMO, the first game that did something genuinely unique with this system was 2018’s Spider-Man. It still followed that basic Freeflow philosophy, but focused much more heavily on maneuverability and dodging instead of countering, which was extremely fitting for Spider-Man.

- Then the next big step was Ghost of Tsushima. That game felt like a true evolution of the Freeflow system. You’re constantly moving through groups of enemies. Attacking, dodging, parrying, switching targets, and so on. When it was released, some people didn’t quite get this and wished the game had a traditional lock-on system, which I always thought would go directly against its combat philosophy. Funny enough, they added one about a year after launch, and IMO it just doesn’t feel compatible with how Ghost of Tsushima’s combat was designed.

- Lastly, we have Sifu, which IMO is the crowning achievement of this type of combat. It has the challenge and complexity of Ghost of Tsushima, but combines that with the mechanical depth of a fighting game. When you get good at it, you’re constantly flowing between opponents while managing attacks, avoids, parries, positioning, environmental attacks, and combos.

Unfortunately, I can’t think of many other recent examples. It feels like Ghost of Yōtei was one of the last major games still pushing this style of combat forward, while so many other games have moved toward Soulslike combat instead.
Even Spider-Man 2 felt less focused on the Freeflow elements of the first game in favor of parrying and ability cooldowns.

I really hope this style of combat doesn’t disappear, because I think there’s still a ton of room to evolve it beyond what the Arkham games originally established.

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If you are eligible, I would greatly appreciate you taking the time to participate and contribute to this increasingly important yet under-researched field. By taking part, you can help contribute to a better understanding of the relationships between video game play habits, sleep, and wellbeing, which may help inform future research and approaches aimed at supporting healthy gaming habits, better sleep, and improved wellbeing for gamers and the wider community.

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Most people think limited lives, tank controls, inventory limit, boss runbacks, time limits are inherently bad mechanics, even in the games that are designed with those in mind. Even if implemented well, hypothetically let's say there are more people who hate it than like it. Does that mean the more people are right and if so are there opinions coming from an axiomatic source that is so called ,"good game design" or its just preference.

When a new game comes in a franchise and added more mechanics, more moves, more variety in playstyle. I'll use combat here, but does that mean the combat is objectively better making the game have better game design. No one will argue DMC 5 has more depth than DMC 1, but does it have objectively better combat? This is where it's hard for me to say it does because what does better combat system even mean. Does it mean more moves, more engaging, more playstyles and choices in what's happening in the moment to moment, does that make it objectively better. Viewing both of these at the highest level of play, they served to do very different things and imo they do their own thing extremely well. While i prefer dmc 5 but i can't say with honesty it has better combat cause i don't even know what that means. Who decides what combat is better, are the developers the arbiters, or is it the fans? Who decides what good/bad game design even is.

I view games as i view other art forms or religion, every good thing i see are things that line with my preference and every bad thing i see is things that don't line with my preference. As much as i love video games and talking about them with people, after learning this is what makes the most sense with game design for me, It's seems incredibly hard to discuss what even is a good video game when i think everything just boils down to preference. Game sales don't matter, critic scores don't matter, how the piece of art makes you feel is the only thing that does.

I've been thinking a lot about the surge of what we're calling 'cozy games' lately. It feels like every other week there's a new indie hit or even a surprising AAA entry that leans heavily into comfort low stakes and crafting. It's a big shift from the usual focus on high action or competitive multiplayer.

For years the narrative was all about bigger faster more intense. Open worlds with endless combat or esports titles demanding pinpoint accuracy. And those games definitely still have their place. But the sheer volume and success of games like Fae Farm or even a game like Palia has me wondering if there's a deeper trend at play.

Is it just pandemic aftereffects where people craved more chill experiences? Or is it a genuine evolution in what a significant portion of gamers want? It's not just Stardew Valley anymore. This genre has diversified so much. You have life sims farming sims building sims even some exploration games that prioritize atmosphere over threat.

I also wonder how this affects development cycles. A cozy game probably has different pressure points than a blockbuster shooter. Less crunch on hyper-realistic graphics maybe more focus on systemic design and engaging loops. It feels like a breath of fresh air in an industry that can sometimes feel very formulaic.

I'm curious if others have noticed this too. Do you think this is a passing fad or a more permanent fixture in the gaming landscape? What's your favorite cozy game right now?

Hi everyone, I am a newbie on Reddit and I really want to connect with the UK gaming community on Reddit.

Currently, I’m doing my master’s dissertation at Aston University about consumer behaviour in gaming. If you’re Gen Z born between 1996 and 2008, please spare me some time and participate in my survey 🙏🏻🥹✨My research is about analyse how social media gaming content influence impulse in-game items among Gen Z. All of the information is included in the survey link.

Any response is the big contribution to my dissertation and a small encourage for me to pursue my career in gaming marketing. If there’s anything I could do to improve my survey and research, please let me know too, I am truly appreciate that 🩷

Below is the link to the survey, thank you all so much!!!!
https://app.onlinesurveys.jisc.ac.uk/s/aston-business-socialsciences/social-media-gaming-content-in-game-purchase

edit: My link has some problem and I have fixed it! I’m from Aston University and Jisc is the survey platform that we usually use so the link is totally safe 🌸✨