What Makes Games Wank - Gaming Contradictions

[Falksi]

Good game, bad game & everything in-between is obviously pretty subjective to a fair degree. But these debates seem to center around the same aspects such as gameplay, writing, RPG elements & their implementation etc.

What I've noticed over the years, and something which I feel doesn't get highlighted anywhere near enough, is one of my own personal biggest bug-bears in gaming, and something which plays a HUGE part in defining whether a game is good or shit to me - when game delivers on it's promises, and/or whether contradict themselves on a large scale.

Here's 3 examples of contradictions which for me all ruin the game to a varying degree:



The Witcher 3

The Wild Hunt seeks to capture Geralt's powerful adopted daughter, and through her bring about the end of the world. It's a race against time to see who will get there first......Geralt or the demonic horde!

Or not, as you plod along walking, riding, walking some more, doing day jobs, doing trivial errands, doing more days jobs etc. etc. The game is set up to be this tense race to Ciri, but the actual game itself is paced sloooooooow as fuck.

It's jarring and annoying as fuck. "My daughter to save, the emperor to appease and his reward to collect? Never mind that, you've a Nekker nest to clear, let's put everything else on hold to sort that out instead". It really grips my shit just how much the huge world & promise of exploration is at odds with the main quest & your main goal. Fucking retarded.



Fallout New Vegas

Survive the wastelands in a game about choice, freedom, and multiple routes for multiple playthroughs.

Well that's the promise here. The trouble is that to give yourself said best chance of survival, and avoid making things as deliberately hard as possible, it makes absolutely no sense at all to side with the Legion.

Every town, settlement and key encounter you make for around the first 1/4 of the game is NCR bias, and getting to join the Legion takes a committed, dedicated mindset & drive. You can't just drop into it naturally, and there's no real dilemma or choice on that front. The game is so heavily weighted in favour of the NCR that there really isn't any choice on offer at all if you're trying to roleplay that survival mindset.

I am going on my own experience of the game here though (I don't read walkthroughs etc.) so if that's wrong, feel free to correct me.



Sonic The Hedgehog

Think fast! Speed, action, pace, excitement! That's what it promises! And this is what you get........



......slow ponderous gameplay, where the road to success relies heavily on having a considered approach. Especially if you want to remain untouched thus retaining all your rings, and achieving the goal which the game sets you - to collect all the chaos emeralds. It's like being promised a wild night out, and instead of drink, drugs, strippers & whores you find yourself at a local Working Men's club with a pint of Mild and playing Bingo.


Conversely, I also find that rougher, ropier games which deliver on their promises tend to be more enjoyable, and have their bad elements more forgivable too.

The best example I can think of at this mo is Road Rash 2 & 3..........

Both games are absolutely rough as a cat's arsehole, and don't even play that well. But both deliver absolutely everything they promise when it comes to speed, violence, chaos and excitement, and so I really enjoy both games.


Are contradictions such as these one of the main reasons it's so easy to hate so many games now?

 

[A horse of course]

Your video doesn't work

 

[J_C]

The autist rating is just perfect for the opening post.

 

[Kalin]

Both games are absolutely rough as a cat's arsehole, and don't even play that well. But both deliver absolutely everything they promise when it comes to speed, violence, chaos and excitement, and so I really enjoy both games.

Awesome soundtracks too:

 

[Mark Richard]

The Wild Hunt seeks to capture Geralt's powerful adopted daughter, and through her bring about the end of the world. It's a race against time to see who will get there first......Geralt or the demonic horde!

Or not, as you plod along walking, riding, walking some more, doing day jobs, doing trivial errands, doing more days jobs etc. etc. The game is set up to be this tense race to Ciri, but the actual game itself is paced sloooooooow as fuck.

That opinion has been floating around here for a while now. I still don't understand. The Witcher 3's main quest isn't a Dragon Age: Origins situation where you're told from the very beginning that you're the only defence against the darkspawn threat, and the world map continually updates with a mobile black cloud of death. Geralt's mission to find Ciri is presented as a personal errand (he doesn't give a crap what the emperor wants). It's not until Skellige when it develops a proper sense of urgency. Until that point the local village's Nekker infestation seems like the more immediate problem. Futhermore, Geralt's journey takes several in-game months. The man needs nourishment, and let's face it, a cheap loaf of bread ain't gonna' cut it. No, those fabulous Witcher abs need a steady supply of the finest roast chicken money can buy. But how to pay? By plying his trade of course!

To recycle an example from the last person who argued this, it's like journeying to a distant place in a Dungeons & Dragons game and ignoring towns along the way. Unless you're specifically told the fate of the world hangs in the balance, you're not supposed to keep saying 'I rest for the night and leave early in the morning'. Everyone will think your character has absolutely no life and ceases to exist upon completion of his task.

 

[Gastrick]

Sonic 1 is a game where the platforming is meaningful which makes it fun to play. All games have a not-so-good level in the them. I'd rather be playing labyrinth zone any day rather than the tedious super-long marble-garden zone in Sonic 3&K. It's also better than that stage in Sonic 2 where you have to stand in place and screw up a screw while the starfish is shooting it's projectiles at you. They repeated that segment around a dozen times as well. And although it can be hard to differentiate it from the cartoon and ads, Sonic is a platform game that is about platforming, not going fast. There's also that instead of hunting around for annoying-to-find ring gates, you only need to focus on collecting coins and keeping them to get into the chaos zones. The team that worked on that game and Sonic CD was all around more talented than the mediocre American studio. You can see this incompetence culminate in their cringy, real edgelord game, Sonic Adventure 2. Running mindlessly forward and doing awkward knuckles and tails levels like the game they always wanted to make.

 

[Falksi]

The Wild Hunt seeks to capture Geralt's powerful adopted daughter, and through her bring about the end of the world. It's a race against time to see who will get there first......Geralt or the demonic horde!

Or not, as you plod along walking, riding, walking some more, doing day jobs, doing trivial errands, doing more days jobs etc. etc. The game is set up to be this tense race to Ciri, but the actual game itself is paced sloooooooow as fuck.

That opinion has been floating around here for a while now. I still don't understand. The Witcher 3's main quest isn't a Dragon Age: Origins situation where you're told from the very beginning that you're the only defence against the darkspawn threat, and the world map continually updates with a mobile black cloud of death. Geralt's mission to find Ciri is presented as a personal errand (he doesn't give a crap what the emperor wants). It's not until Skellige when it develops a proper sense of urgency. Until that point the local village's Nekker infestation seems like the more immediate problem. Futhermore, Geralt's journey takes several in-game months. The man needs nourishment, and let's face it, a cheap loaf of bread ain't gonna' cut it. No, those fabulous Witcher abs need a steady supply of the finest roast chicken money can buy. But how to pay? By plying his trade of course!

To recycle an example from the last person who argued this, it's like journeying to a distant place in a Dungeons & Dragons game and ignoring towns along the way. Unless you're specifically told the fate of the world hangs in the balance, you're not supposed to keep saying 'I rest for the night and leave early in the morning'. Everyone will think your character has absolutely no life and ceases to exist upon completion of his task.

"My daughter Cirilla....she's returned, and she's in danger. The Wild Hunt peruses her"

If that doesn't scream "big urgency on this one" I don't know what does. This cut-scene is very early on in the game, just after the White Orchid tutorial.

"If for no other reason than because I shall pay you. More than you customarily receive for a contract. Considerably more."

From the same meeting. Again, if that doesn't say "don't worry, you can leave everything on hold and prioritize the search" I don't know what does. Even if Geralt says he's only doing it for Ciri, that's a choice option which doesn't take away the fact that the offer implies high priority.


Seriously, I don't see how anyone can see that as anything other than "drop everything, and go find Ciri as fast as possible."

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

why should i know what makes games wank? sounds pretty gay.

 

[AdolfSatan]

I think it's less about how many contradictions or plot holes you can endure, but rather if the game is fun or not. If you're having a blast, you'll look at all those inconsistencies or flaws and find them funny or endearing; if not, you'll find the slightest bit to be annoyed with.

While on the subject of broken games that kick ass, nothing beats playing Mashed on couch vs mode. The broken physics, weird AI behavior, and sudden fps spikes only serve to make it even more hilarious than it already is.

 

[sser]

T&A makes them do that.

 

[Ash]

Classic Sonic does have occasional fast moments. It works just fine. For the time, in the context of classic sidescrollers the overall pace was fast. Nobody says he has to be going fast 24/7. The devs realised that just won't work in terms of making something actually good and fun, hence why it is a platformer with the occasional speedway. If it was instead equivalent to road rash I'd have got bored in minutes just as I did with that game back in the 90s. I don't know what you see in it when you can't even see shit that's coming. Same problem in sonic: when you're in the speedways you go so fast that you can't see shit coming. Doesn't make for good gameplay, hence there's like 1 or two per level (which are also optional).
Sonic 2 delivered what should be the perfect compromise with the spin-dash and special stage, yet NPCs make this stupid complaint over and over.
Labyrinth zone is quite the change of pace, again nothing wrong with that. It's just mixing things up with the base mechanics and design like most games used to do. People like you killed variety in gameplay. everything is now homogenized popamole.

New Vegas' Legion questline is flawed primarily because it is underdeveloped before anything else. they ran out of time and the SJW's on the team were opposed to it or some shit so it was left to the wayside. I'll give you this one though. It is one of the game's biggest flaws though that hardly makes it "wank" on the whole. Barely deducts half a point of the game's overall rating.

Witcher 3 is crap not because of some "ludo-narrative dissonance" which is very common in gaming and not that big a deal. It's crap because it is popamole (or so I hear. Can't actually attest to this one but I've heard it enough and played 2 which was shit).
"ludo-narrative dissonance" is very common in gaming typically because game devs are smart enough to realize that gameplay comes first, not story. It's still something I'd try to avoid if developing a game though, if possible. Easier said than done.

It's interesting that these things are what ruins the games for you entirely. Sonic is ruined because you in your own head built up the idea that Sonic has to be going fast 24/7 like a racing game based on some marketing blurb, which I should also note racing games were barely doable back then with primitive rendering methods (which resulted in not being able to see obstacles and turns until the last nanosecond). Witcher 3 is ruined for you because of a some ludo-narrative dissonance present in so many games. New Vegas is ruined for you because one of the factions is underdeveloped and NCR is encouraged in the first 1/3rd of the game.

weird. You do realise there are whole games under these trivial superfluous issues right?

 

[Serious_Business]

Fuck off kid, basic logic never made anything better. Fucking plebs, they want things to work like clockwork and feel pain when they don't

 

[Jaedar]

Every town, settlement and key encounter you make for around the first 1/4 of the game is NCR bias, and getting to join the Legion takes a committed, dedicated mindset & drive. You can't just drop into it naturally, and there's no real dilemma or choice on that front. The game is so heavily weighted in favour of the NCR that there really isn't any choice on offer at all if you're trying to roleplay that survival mindset.

I am going on my own experience of the game here though (I don't read walkthroughs etc.) so if that's wrong, feel free to correct me.

There is some truth to this, but at the same time, consider why this is. The legion is a well functioning military organisation. They don't need a random wanderer to come into their camp and solve their problems: they have legionaries for that. NCR otoh, is failing in their efforts. Just about every town under their jurisdiction has problems the NCR is too far stretched to solve, which means they have no choice but rely on this random person they've never met before who walked into camp 5 minutes ago.

In some sense this is the most scathing indictment of NCR there could be, they are almost completely helpless without you, whereas the legion is almost entirely sufficient. At the same time, it makes for bad gameplay. There's no real quests to do for the legion, they have no towns to explore or people to talk to. So they feel really boring to join. I think Sawyer has said that they cut out some legion content (iirc most notably there was going to be a legion town away from the frontier so you could interact with non-military people), but I also suspect that the difference in content is intentional, meant to highlight the competency differential.

 

[Cromwell]

"ludo-narrative dissonance" is very common in gaming typically because game devs are smart enough to realize that gameplay comes first, not story. It's still something I'd try to avoid if developing a game though, if possible. Easier said than done.

You write another story. In Case of the Witcher they would have to write it like you search for her and dont know she is actively pursued and needs saving or you write it like you have heard rumours and try to confirm shes back without actually knowing if thats possible / true. No need to change the gameplay just change the why of it. Its only hard if you think about the story you have first and then tack on the gameplay instead of thinking how something that gets easily changed can be made to work with something that takes more work to change.

 

[Falksi]

Classic Sonic does have occasional fast moments. It works just fine. For the time, in the context of classic sidescrollers the overall pace was fast. Nobody says he has to be going fast 24/7. The devs realised that just won't work in terms of making something actually good and fun, hence why it is a platformer with the occasional speedway. If it was instead equivalent to road rash I'd have got bored in minutes just as I did with that game back in the 90s. I don't know what you see in it when you can't even see shit that's coming. Same problem in sonic: when you're in the speedways you go so fast that you can't see shit coming. Doesn't make for good gameplay, hence there's like 1 or two per level (which are also optional).
Sonic 2 delivered what should be the perfect compromise with the spin-dash and special stage, yet NPCs make this stupid complaint over and over.
Labyrinth zone is quite the change of pace, again nothing wrong with that. It's just mixing things up with the base mechanics and design like most games used to do. People like you killed variety in gameplay. everything is now homogenized popamole.

New Vegas' Legion questline is flawed primarily because it is underdeveloped before anything else. they ran out of time and the SJW's on the team were opposed to it or some shit so it was left to the wayside. I'll give you this one though. It is one of the game's biggest flaws though that hardly makes it "wank" on the whole. Barely deducts half a point of the game's overall rating.

Witcher 3 is crap not because of some "ludo-narrative dissonance" which is very common in gaming and not that big a deal. It's crap because it is popamole (or so I hear. Can't actually attest to this one but I've heard it enough and played 2 which was shit).
"ludo-narrative dissonance" is very common in gaming typically because game devs are smart enough to realize that gameplay comes first, not story. It's still something I'd try to avoid if developing a game though, if possible. Easier said than done.

It's interesting that these things are what ruins the games for you entirely. Sonic is ruined because you in your own head built up the idea that Sonic has to be going fast 24/7 like a racing game based on some marketing blurb, which I should also note racing games were barely doable back then with primitive rendering methods (which resulted in not being able to see obstacles and turns until the last nanosecond). Witcher 3 is ruined for you because of a some ludo-narrative dissonance present in so many games. New Vegas is ruined for you because one of the factions is underdeveloped and NCR is encouraged in the first 1/3rd of the game.

weird. You do realise there are whole games under these trivial superfluous issues right?

Sonic was hyped up as "the fastest game ever" and failed to deliver that hugely. From the add above.....

He's the fastest critter the world has ever seen.

Watch him smirk in the face of danger as he blazes his way through underwater caverns

Don't blink or you might just miss him

And that's only 1 add. There were tons more as bad if not worse. In reality you get a few semi-fast sections in the odd level, but I'd say 80-90% of the game is slow as fuck. Ultimately, it doesn't deliver on it's promise.

Glad you agree about NV. I don't think it's a bad game, it just adds a dollop of wankness to it.

Yeah, I agree there are other reasons as to why TW3 is shit too, but Cromwell answers that fine for me.

These things don't ruin the game entirely for me, I'm just focusing on it as one of the elements which affects whether I like a game or not but which rarely gets attention.

 

[Ash]

The original Sonic was the first game I ever beat at age 4 or so, never was aware of any of the marketing.
I don't think you should hold marketing to much relevance in your evaluation or enjoyment of a game though. Many games have been marketed falsely yet turned out worthwhile nonetheless.
And it can be pretty fast even as a beginner, and lightning fast as a pro. e.g speedrunner shit.

Thanks for the clarification. Your op made it seem like these minor issues made the three games completely irredeemable; was the sole determining factor. Nice bait.

 

[Ol' Willy]

Twitcher case is the classic example of ludonarrative dissonance.

Situation is critical! Every minute counts! There's no time to waste! That's what story tells you.

Except that it's not. Take your time, talk to people, do boring fetch quests, grind. Don't hurry.

It's the situation when story tells you one thing, but gameplay totally contradicts it; sadly, this is very common in games. Ironically, Fallout 1, often criticized for having a timer, is a prime example of urgency done right.

 

[Savecummer]

 

[<3sRichardSimmons]

New Vegas' Legion questline is flawed primarily because it is underdeveloped before anything else. they ran out of time and the SJW's on the team were opposed to it or some shit so it was left to the wayside.

While possible, I've never seen any evidence of political/culture wars bias effecting the presence (or lack thereof) of Legion content. In fact, I'm pretty sure that every time Josh, Chris, or Eric has talked about the reasoning behind cutting so much Legion content he talks about how OES has mined achievement data for "evil" playthroughs across a multitude of games and it's generally less than ~10% of players that even start an "evil" playthrough, much less finish it (and iirc New Vegas' cheevos roughly support those numbers as well), so it was just the most natural place to make cuts from a business perspective.

It's also been obliquely hinted by those three that a lot of Legion content was tied to Ulysses which meant it was either going to take a lot of work to get Ulysses implemented as written, or it was going to take a lot of work to re-write Legion content after cutting Ulysses.

 

[A horse of course]

New Vegas' Legion questline is flawed primarily because it is underdeveloped before anything else. they ran out of time and the SJW's on the team were opposed to it or some shit so it was left to the wayside.

While possible, I've never seen any evidence of political/culture wars bias effecting the presence (or lack thereof) of Legion content. In fact, I'm pretty sure that every time Josh, Chris, or Eric has talked about the reasoning behind cutting so much Legion content he talks about how OES has mined achievement data for "evil" playthroughs across a multitude of games and it's generally less than ~10% of players that even start an "evil" playthrough, much less finish it (and iirc New Vegas' cheevos roughly support those numbers as well), so it was just the most natural place to make cuts from a business perspective.

It's also been obliquely hinted by those three that a lot of Legion content was tied to Ulysses which meant it was either going to take a lot of work to get Ulysses implemented as written, or it was going to take a lot of work to re-write Legion content after cutting Ulysses.

I don't know about the others, but over the years Sawyer has frankly been very inconsistent in his characterization of the missing legion content. In one old formspring poast he discussed a missing Legion-controlled settlement that demonstrated the benefits of Legion domination over previously raider-controlled areas, but in a later poast I remember he got very stroppy about people bringing this up and denied it was meant to show the "other side" of the legion. It might just be the result of his moving increasingly to the SocJus left and insecurity over the constant criticism he gets over old work involving sex slaves etc. on twatter.

 

[samuraigaiden]

Sonic's original prototype was probably an arcade style game (SEGA was bad ass at those), furiously fast all time, and it was over in 15 minutes. Then somebody noticed they needed the game to be longer and they made some filler, slow paced levels to pad it out.

 

[wahrk]

Witcher 3’s lack of urgency never bothered me. I didn’t interpret the search for Ciri as this frantic race where every second counted - this is a long, slow search that potentially takes months. Geralt has no clue where she is and all he has to go on is scraps of information from people who briefly saw her possibly months ago. If he’s going to travel across half the continent, he will occasionally need to repair his equipment and stock up on supplies. How does he do that? By plying his trade.

In that regard I thought Witcher 3 actually made a better case for side quests than a lot of other RPGs where you are the “chosen one” but inexplicably have time to solve the local villagers’ trivial issues. Here, Geralt is just doing his job. Could it have been done better? Sure, but it’s hardly the worst offender.

 

[KK1001]

Fixing Witcher 3's "contradiction" is easy: have cumulative side quests fill up an arbitrary "Clues to Ciri's whereabouts" bar, integrate dialogue into the end or beginning of side quests. Done.

 

[Fishy]

If Ciri had any sense of decency, she'd have waited until after the Gwent Masters Tournament before being abducted. Does she just expect me to drop my deck and waste all my efforts in the qualifier rounds because some Skeletor cosplayer is stalking her? Good luck with that, snowflake!

 

[Daemongar]

I think there needs to be a sense of urgency in games, but we all know that since whining about Fallout 1, developers are gun-shy about real limits on player time. So, I can't fault anyone on this type of "contradiction". Google "Fallout water chip time limit" for more background.

Every town, settlement and key encounter you make for around the first 1/4 of the game is NCR bias, and getting to join the Legion takes a committed, dedicated mindset & drive. You can't just drop into it naturally, and there's no real dilemma or choice on that front. The game is so heavily weighted in favour of the NCR that there really isn't any choice on offer at all if you're trying to roleplay that survival mindset.

I don't agree on this. Everyone sets up Caesar's legion as the worst of the worst. Then, when you finally meet the Legion and they make more sense than the NCR, it makes blowing up the monorail, and not being "Shoot on sight" with the NCR even more satisfying. (But I believe this problem with the game was due to time constraints, not that they wanted the game to be so heavy handed for the NCR.)