SomTervo

I don't think it would be a very successful taster considering half of the expansion's content takes place in medias res with the main game. All the bits would probably ruin any sense of mystery surrounding where the full game might go. Though I guess the gameplay alone in Left Behind might sell it. Better than the full game in a lot of ways.

I think PR people use the terms interchangeably, but developers definitely know "sandbox" means emergently interacting mechanics and "open world" means one big level. Ie BArkham isn't sandbox because there's only you and thugs in preset places and preset things that happen. If thugs from different factions duked it out dynamically and could chase you across the city and police went at them and more junk just happened, then it would be sandbox gameplay. But that's not really what Batman's about. So it ain't. It's open world, but with tight gameplay. I thought Arkham City's map was laughable, but it was still open world.

It seems like such a no brainer to make it standalone. Surely it wouldn't be difficult and would work fine. Though I guess it's an addendum to the main game, so it might mislead people who haven't completed the original into buying it, thinking it's a standalone story.

I feel like that's the whole reason such "mistreatment" above happens. It's like an obligation to include some eye candy or just "a female touch"- it's an obligation from a problematic, distant age. So now when female (or male) characters are just included when not necessary, it brings the whole thing down. They won't be treated with respect if their included out of expectation.

Started my Grounded playthrough a couple of nights back. It's bloody amazing, and everything I hoped it would be. Even on Survivor, it's pretty easy to blunder into every scenario in the game and come out alive. Either unscathed or minimally hurt. Dealing with things going wrong was way easy. But on Grounded, it feels truly real for the first time. Like 1 or 2 shots will kill you, and letting a non-Clicker infected get up to you often means death. Gunfights are amazingly tense. Things going wrong really feels like things going wrong. Surviving, through tough stealth or no, feels like an actual achievement. You have to plan every encounter like a little puzzle, working out the best movements to make and order of targets to take down. Love it.

It's the scariest of stuff. The game has a kind of nice little thread of backstory which is quite clever, and it's clear that the triggers relate to meaningful objects and actions in the environment. GAF is a good shout, Waldy. I was looking on GameFAQS. Pretty funky stuff going on over there.

I hate it when creators shoehorn in women and use them for secondary plot points, nothing else. No character development, no plot impact or good lines, just background bullshit. Two Guns did this, it was fucking disgusting. Such a shit thing I was tempted not to spoiler-tag: Goddamn whadyacallit did this, too. That James Bond one. Skyfall. Christ. Fuck.

I'm in the "liked Deathstroke" camp. It was simplistic, but totally did the trick. Also doing it without counter notices was sick. One feels like an absolute badass if one manages it without heads ups. I actually liked all of Origins a lot. I preferred it to City. Controversial, I know. My main beef was that, to me, City felt like Arkham Asylum 1.5. The map was barely bigger, though you had more freedom to traverse it. The story was utterly tiny. The side content was okay, not amazing. Arkham City had the most irritating world that looked like a shitty circus, and took about 1 minute to traverse in entirety. Then Origins felt, to me, like what City should have been from the start. It felt like the real Arkham Asylum 2. It had a properly big map which, even though a lot more filler, was a ton of fun to explore. It looked drab but that felt more realistic. It had lots of empty corners but they were still nice to look at and felt like they had a place in Gotham. And all the little additions to gameplay were great. Even the bosses- I liked almost all of em. Also the Joker/ Batman "origins" scene. Fucking brilliantly done. And everyone seems to forget that. Troy Baker having a massive monologue about the Joker trying to psychologically wrestle with his first encounter with Batman. While we get to play him in a little Scarecrow-style section. Just brilliant. I think Origins' only true problem was the fucking Worst Nightmare challenge thing. Like you how can't progress past Level 6 or whatever once you've done the GCPD building. That was genuinely fucked up, and more of a huge error than bad-but-playable design. I really liked everything about Origins except that.

Yeah, AND

RDR's last act totally killed it, but aside from that I found it just to be a regular GTA game. Read: pretty dull after a while of gameplay. Rockstar really have to mix stuff up to make it more fun. I did find GTAV a fairly big improvement though. A lot of the side content was very fun, it just wasn't deep enough. As usual they wasted energy making the campaign 4x longer than it needed to be and making broad, not deep side content. Cool story: At a party the other week I met a dude who's a QA tester at Rockstar North. I'm from Edinburgh, where they are based. I used to get the bus past the Rockstar North offices every day. He was a nice guy, and obviously NDA'd up to the nines. I'd ask him really basic stuff, which wouldn't be problematic, like "How's the Remaster coming?" and he'd just pull a tragic frown and say "I'm not allowed to say." After working out that I'm fairly clued into gaming etc., the guy asked me sincerely to tell him everything I think is wrong with the GTA games. It's his job, and he wants to hear thoughts. So I did. And after I had a little rant, he said they know. He said everyone at the office who works on GTA knows that fundamentally, the series has become dull. They know the stories are all basically shit. They know the gameplay mechanics are often dead end and get quickly repetitive. He even said that the job interview to be a QA tester fundamentally came down to having a chat about games with a couple of the team- and he said he ripped GTAIV to shreds. And that he thinks this was a big + point in getting the job. I said the stuff I thought would fix it- like the Chinatown Wars drug economy system, or slightly procedural/ random content, and he said, predictably, that those things are absurdly difficult to do. Like, building a pyramid with no manpower or horsepower difficult. They want to, they know it would make the games better, but it would just be unfathomably complicated with their existing systems. I think they're tied into doing what they know sells- and whatever they're doing, it certainly sells. He seemed pretty apologetic about it. Third encounter I've had with Rockstar staff. Real cool. Before he moved, one of my bandmates lived nextdoor to a Rockstar North programmer. The one time he got the guts to ask what the guy was doing, the guy said he spent about 4 weeks tweaking the suspension physics on two cars. Apparently the guy hated talking about it, and immediately got very distant. Haha. EDIT: On the "sandboxes are empty" line of argument, I totally agree, and that's the main reason I'm so excited for MGSV The Phantom Pain. Apparently the whole level design team have built areas around no player commands and no linear objective, but frequent opportunity for interactions which will affect other interactions. They say they looked at GTA and other sandbox games' models and found them terribly wanting. In their opinion, GTA isn't sandbox at all, because most of the time it's telling you where to go and how to get there in a straight line.

I'm still stuck on the last loop, too. Unbelievably tough. Certainly one of the most intricate and deep puzzles I've ever seen in gaming. EDIT: Also the amount of things and interconnecting triggers in the last scene is insane. It's, like, impossible to correlate how exactly you can do it. I've read some 40 or 50 different accounts of success or failure, and every one was utterly different. There must be some arcane logic to it which nobody has discovered yet.

But if each Xbone gamer gets 2-3 BRs each maybe it offsets that? Idk

It's an unbelievable isnt it? And just a little demo. Perhaps the greatest proof of concept ive ever seen. The weird thing is it's so hard to put your finger on what makes it scary. I think it's a couple of very basic things: - No running. Even in the Silent Hill series' scariest bits, you could always sprint. Eg confronted with Pyramid Head suddenly? Run! He literally can't catch you! PT totally fucks with you, increasing the "fear in anticipation" dial to 11 because it takes 20 seconds to walk down a short, dark corridor. I booted it up last night to finish it off, and quit within a minute because i couldnt face the whole game's single right turn. - very fucking realistic graphics (lighting at least) The two people i played it with are halfway between casual and hardcore gamer. Lets call them cascore gamers. They were not prepared for how good the graphics are. I think the head movement, slow pace, and minimal but perfectly executed lighting is what does it. All these aspects combined make it perfectly immersive which raises the essentially basic horror to insane heights.

I dont think even Kojima is a big enough chancer to try putting GZ in TPP as a traditional prologue. The backlash would probably rip his head off. They'll probably do a promo bundle at most, like GZ for 5-10 bucks with a fresh TPP purchase.

Preposition stuff. I hate prepositions and preposition phrases. 90% of it, like that to/than/from distinction, is meaningless.

I feel exactly the same about AC, though i dont think the VA has ever been that good and i dont think it's ever mattered what mechanics they introduce because so many of the core mechanics were flawed. Also i really enjoyed Resi 6. *Cowers from thrown stones*. But we're getting off topic. This gen will be fine. AAA budget games are a risk for publishers, not platform creators. Playstation/ Sony especially will be fine. How much do Sony make on every blu ray sold including XBone games? That's what i want to know.

I think the several-hundred-person staff count is very much justified when it comes to AAA-budget games. Mainly because of the level detail and polish in games like that. They need a team of tens of people just to get the environments looking good alone. Then tens of animators- for main character stuff, enemies, etc. Then tens of modellers for all the characters and environments. Then tens of people dealing with the game design, making each little bit works and makes sense and is the best mix of playable/fun/not too difficult. Then tens of artists who do the front-end work of planning. Then tens of QA testers finding bugs and feeding back on what needs fixing. Then the tens of audio guys making sound and ensuring it works with triggers and the environment... The list goes on a bit more. Like when you play TLoU or something and you look at how, from start to finish, the game's tiniest corner is full of detail and objects, or how utterly deep they are. And the tiniest twitches and animations and movements. So many people designed and worked on all of it.

Aha, same bit! I'll give it a blast tonight (presumably I'm a few hours ahead of you if you're US-side) and report back...

Yeah, we played PT last night for a good 20 minutes. Incredibly powerful proof of concept for what Silent Hills could be. We did it hotseat style; where me, my gf and best friend passed the controller every time we got through the door at the end of the corridor. It basically ended up like the Russian Roulette of horror videogames. Every time you were passed the controller you'd get hit by a wave of sheer dread and horror and have to push through the door. I was holding the controller when you first peek into the crack in the door... Need to finish it tonight anyway. Fucking terrifying.

I know, I meant I wonder specificallyhow much they change the results. Obviously they do it.Clearly high level semantic stuff like that is up for swapsies. Not just what local companies/ locations/ events show up. On uptalk: when it first kicked about for me was when it was connected to the American "valley girl" accent. All it means is tone of voice going up at the end of sentences, similar to if the sentence was a question. Willow in Buffy the Vampire Slayer was the absolute worst for it.

You know, the only really positive inference I get from this news is that Kojima was hesitant to release MGS5 until PS4 had at least 9 million install base, or something. Here's to hoping he pulls forward the release date on TPP a bit now that we know the console's doing absurdly well. Taking for granted, of course, that the game is, you know, ready.

Yeah, right. So P.T. is sorta like a proof of concept just in terms of being able to make scary snippets of gameplay. And it'll probably be stylistically connected to Silent Hills, if not directly connected in plot/ character/ universe. Sorta like a spiritual teaser. 'Sake.

Yeah, so I thought a thread might be good for A) the trailer B) the playable demo (which I haven't tried yet, apparently on PSN for free?) and C) upcoming developments. Looks bloody good to me. But what the hell does "This game is a teaser. It has no direct relation to the main title" mean? Is Silent Hills just a tiny teaser game? The teaser demo which is online? Will the full game be something different, like Silent Hill 5 or something? Man, Kojima just had to make everything so confusing.

Yep, I should have said re the minimap that the 8-way wedge motion sensor was the improvement I was talking about specifically. I always hated seeing the dots of your enemies in Halo. Removed a lot of the tension. The wedge display is a nice half-way point.