Thanks again to Mark for his thoughtful conversation! Check out his channel here: ua-cam.com/channels/0Fwhzr1yeoQ84yC3Isd4Lg.html And definitely watch his documentary on shmups! ua-cam.com/video/t7RY0FHTI68/v-deo.html Other than the difficulty- and story-related sections, some of the best moments in this episode come from the discussion on teaching the competitive mindset. 0:58:51 Lastly, a pair of editing oopsies where Pr0nogo talks, but is not visible, crop up towards the end of the video. Sorry about that!
Thanks so much for inviting me onto the show :-) I'm honored to officially be a Non-Fraud :-D The conversation was really great and I'd be happy to return again in the future.
Have you ever read what I said about Castlevania's one stroke attacks being outdated? Do you really think its not? Every melee based 2d platformer metroidvania seems to be applying the megaman x 3 hit melee attacks as a standard.
I absolutely love when Mark gets going, so the fact that you left him uninterrupted for so long so many times is just perfect. And you definitely had interesting points and I felt like you bounced off each other very well. I'll be back for more of this podcast for sure
32:32 Video games as a way to discover that you can overcome challenges is such a brilliant observation, and exactly what I enjoy most about my favorite games!
Wow, I LOVE the idea that video games are closer artistically to music than any other medium. Mark has opened my mind to a lot of game design truths, and completely changed the way I think about games! Dark Souls is my favorite game of all time, and it's because it evokes a story with difficulty. The story of Dark Souls IS your struggle with the game and the world.
You're definitely one of the best interviewers I've seen as far as giving your guests ample time to speak, your own insights on what they say, and bouncing back new questions to them. Keep it up.
Loved this conversation. I think for me one or the best visions for story in games would be something like Dwarf Fortress (maybe, i actually haven’t played it so I’m talking out of my ass) or how board games do it. Where there’s emergent gameplay, and the story is the story of player choice combined with game logic, and the narrative drive of the game is represented by its mechanics. So maybe you build a bar so that your minions fight harder during battle, but it also has the consequence of trashing your economy a bit. Or you have a hippie/artist class, which most of the time does absolutely nothing, but occasionally randomly advances your culture leaps and bounds. And then the things that happen in the game are emerging naturally through all the individual cogs grinding together in a vast gameplay narrative. Also I want to push back on “would you like Final Fantasy 7 if the story wasn’t there?” Well, I happen to prefer (lately at least) gameplay driven RPGs. Playing Crystal Project lately, and the story is basically “alright we’re going on an adventure.” But combining the classes, taking down hard bosses, platforming(!), and exploring the open-ish world are all masterfully done, about as well as anyone’s done within RPG mechanics. And it feels more like going on an adventure. Dragon Quest 3, Final Fantasy V, Etrian Odyssey… not many people are playing these for the story. But in a way they are purer “role playing” games. You’re not really playing the “role” of Cloud Strife very much. But if you’re assembling a group of warriors, wizards, and warlocks, fleshing out their skills, and then combining those skills in new and meaningful ways… yeah it might not be the best *narrative* out there, but it’s bigger on playing a role (don’t tell me you’re not attached to the dude you named Jeff who gets big crits), making meaningful choices, and exploring a world. Which I think is more in line of what you guys are saying, even if you may (or may not) malign the humble JRPG.
This conversation really nails down what I have been thinking about myself for a very long time and that I see so many times other gamers don't understand. When they say "I understand what you are saying, but it would't hurt Dark Souls to have an easy mode", it's so obvious that they DON'T understand at all. So what I have to do from now on is just point them to this video! Much appreciated!
Out of curiosity, is there anyone who is advocating for an easy mode for souls games these days? I recall one article some years ago saying sekiro should have an easy mode but that's about it.....
Many of the issues with contemporary game reviews isn't even necessarily inherent to journalism. It's also part of a wider issue in the field in that the model at these outlets isn't actually journalism anymore; it's content farming.
Game reviewers even have an impact before release, as the large companies will hire game reviewers as "consultants" before release to manage risk. They even publicly admitted to feeling sore about this when Microsoft complained that the mock review scores for redfall were higher than the actual scores. You have to have some success for game writers like Kasavin and the old man murray boys who went on to work on successful games.
But I do feel like it is too narrow to focus on punishing death mechanics, punishing parry mechanics, and so on. The general thing that games should have are compelling feedback loops. When a player does something core to the game, there should be some sort of reaction that tells the player they can do better or worse. I saw someone saying that Terra Nil is simply a bad game because it is not punishing or frustrating enough. In reality, people like Terra Nil and find it involving to play, because it provides very good feedback to the player on how their actions are changing the sandbox and how some outcomes are desirable. Is Terra Nil a bad game because people don't want to play forever and grind a battle pass?
I do know some stories in games. Journey, Ico, Shadow of the Colossus, and Chants of Sennaar all have good stories. I think they are all pretty abstract and tie into what you as a player are doing. I do agree that they kind of feel like scenarios. I especially like Journey because it includes replaying the game into its story and I think that is why it is the game I have beaten the most.
Hyper demon is so good, and mark is such a legend honestly. His videos massively helped get me into shmups years ago, and he’s a super thoughtful dude with a lot of illuminating things to say
Critics seem to be comparing games to movies rather than games to games... like if chess came out today it would get panned for having no narrative and not being free-roam, i can't do whatever i want, this game is also hard, where's the easy mode? Chess sucks.
On the issue of story(telling) in classic RPGs, the grind of progression should be seen as a parallel form of character development, where the time investment in empowering characters to successfully overcome the next set of challenges is equally a form of narrative investment (and vice-versa). When the grind is decoupled from narrative relevance you start to get that dissonance. I notice this a lot with single character so-called action RPGs, where you are constantly cued to finick over your build in ways that have very little relevance to how you will overcome ensuing parts of the game. The same few dominant strategies prevail everywhere, and the whole gamut of character progression - skilling up but also gearing up, and therefore inventory management and the inevitable crafting - begins to feel like a side task unrelated to the immediate problems of narrative progression. In classic JRPGs, characters were introduced on the premise that they would be essential to your immediate success through the next phases of the main questline. This often resulted in gratitude for and bonding with said characters, resulting in further narrative investment, and so on.
Thank you. These guys really don’t understand RPGs and some other game design concepts. They make tons of good points but quite often their critiques don’t land because they are projecting their preferences and won’t meet games/art on their own terms which is what crappy criticism is. Their ideas make a ton of sense for certain kinds of games but fall completely flat when trying to apply them to games with a completely different conceit from arcadey gameplay. The point of FF7 being better as a visual novel was just… absolutely awful to be honest.
Sure, you could see it that forcing the player to spend/waste their time grinding using the new character help build narrative investment, but is that really the best way, or even remotely a good way to do it? For example, if you remove the grinding and structure the game to only have necessary encounters like some classic Fire Emblem or Riviera (without using "practice" option), narrative investment built through facing challenges using those characters would still be built without the risk of the player associating the character with boredom like trying to level up a slow growing pokemon through grinding. That's just one example. I'm sure there are other better ways to achieve narrative investment without wasting player's time forcing them to repeat mundane set of tasks without honing any of their skills. Classic JRPGs might did it that way because it's simple and due to memory limitations. I'm not familiar with classic CRPGs, but I might look into how they attempt narrative investment and compare it to classic JRPGs' method of grinding. I get what you're saying by preparations not involving combats feel too detached from the next combat challenge in terms of narrative, but it could also be given relevance in the narrative when the game acknowledges the preparations and strategy, such as intentionally giving the player information on their next encounter and encouraging specific preparations, or by character dialogues if the game detects the player is preparing or when their strategy negates the enemy's strategy. Also, making the character stronger doesn't mean character development, as "development" in "character development" strictly means changes in their psychology, not powerups.
@@san_nevo Well, yes, the perfect game would seamlessly blend progression with narrative, but in large party JRPGs there are too many characters to level them all by way of the main story, so you have to choose, and I do think some amount of voluntary time investment affects how you value certain characters in a way that supplements their narrative role. Character development may refer to psychological change in a literary sense, but games are unique in allowing for participatory projection onto characters, and how one experiences those characters is tied to things like usefulness and combat relevance, as well as the time spent to develop these. Many early RPGs took grinding too far for sure, but the best ones folded the grind into the logic of exploration with random encounters - just by being really thorough in looking around, you would greatly increase your number of combat encounters and thus your levels/abilities. What you mention about tactical RPGs is one of the reasons I like that genera - often all substance with very little filler, allowing for the story to tightly align with progression. Unfortunately you can't achieve that same alignment in RPGs with overworlds and exploration etc. because the player has to be engaged off-story as well as on. I like what you said about the game tracking your preparation, build and dialogue to tailor meaningful encounters that actually reward (or punish) the player for their progression choices. I think that is the future, especially for open world games, which really struggle to narrativize progression after the first twenty hours or so. I hope AI proves to be the fix, because personally when I'm given tons of options but these only minimally affect the challenge, story or world-state I find myself alienated from my character and the game world.
Also about the lore of games: Older games had the movie principle of „show, don‘t tell“. The bosses were super hard, you didn’t have to tell the players constantly how epic and big the fight was. You felt it.
15:31 The meta game across all games reminds me of how so many games really do have very, very similar control schemes. e.g. Even Call of Duty and Elden Ring have very similar controller feel. Primary actions on shoulder buttons. X is jump. O is slide/dodge. Triangle is weapon swap. Etc.
This is where I'd disagree. While yes there is something of a standard for several games, particularly on gamepad, that's not something I see being improved by changing it every game. I don't think it's always the best setup (I've moved dodge/run to L2 in From's games because that way I can run and control the camera while not locked on, which I've found crucial in Elden Ring specitically), but I don't think it's something developers would benefit from re-inventing for every game. Once you have movement on one stick and camera controls on the other, the rest of the controls basically fall into "actions that need active camera control and free movement to use effectively" on the shoulder buttons, "actions that need free movement but not camera control" on the face buttons, and "actions that can be done standing still regardless of camera control" on the d-pad, and given most first- and third-person games have you run, slide/dodge, jump, shoot/swing, and change weapons in combat the reasons to set controls a certain way for one game apply pretty well to the rest.
I really like the point Mark makes at around the 2 hour point about story overshadowing gameplay and why it causes problems. *The core of videogames is gameplay. It's what makes them different from all other art forms, and it's what they excel at.* If you want to write an engaging linear narrative, make a book. Or a comic. Or a radio drama. Or a movie. If you want to write a narrative where the spectator can influence the story, make a visual novel or a non-combat RPG like Disco Elysium or Pentiment. (Pentiment is incredible and more people should play it NOW.) If you want to enhance the narrative of a videogame, do it in ways that do NOT take away from the gameplay. (E.g., Soulsborne lore descriptions, in-comabt dialogue, character design, location design, music, vocal performances, UI design, gameplay that evokes specific emotions, etc.) NEVER place story above gameplay IN A VIDEOGAME.
I kind of wonder about the thing about reviewers being influential. Earlier Mark mentions his friend not liking the original RE4, which I think raises another possibility, which is just that IGN reflects what the average "gamer" would actually think about a game. Like... maybe we are all just freaks and the normies all love this stuff. That's kind of the sense I get most of the time I talk to someone who likes games.
People always find it hard to accept the possibility of them being a peripheral target audience. It's often the case with cartoons' writing and online rant.
the section at 1:10:39 where you wondered what game has really had a good story is something I've wondered as well, it's a limited medium for storytelling. I liked the comparison of games to music in the way it evokes emotion and is more abstract. one of my favorite games that exemplifies this is Shadow of the Colossus.
Surprising crossover. Really enjoyed it. My biggest disagreement is with the characterization of speedrunning, the suggestion that it should be directly connected with the intended gameplay. Who cares if it's a completely different game, as long as it's a good one? It's kind of like rock climbing. You find some wall that exists in nature. It wasn't designed to be climbed, but it happens to be a very interesting challenge, and so people climb it. Similarly some games happen to be very good for speedruns. It often has very little to do with the intended gameplay experience. The original game is used as a surface for a completely different game which in many cases is much more rich and interesting.
I enjoyed the rock climbing analogy! I was a bit clumsy with my initial framing speedrunning and never circled back to it, but I would clarify that I think it's *bad* specifically when the resultant gameplay is not actually intrinsically rewarding. But in reality, that would only hurt the person doing it, so long as the developers don't cater to the speedrunning minority and hamper the experience for the rest of the playerbase. Cheers!
I like jrpg because of the aesthetic possibilities of the genre, it's not just about the story, the whole package is what makes it good and unique from any other storytelling medium. It's not so much the case now, when video games try to look as close to live action as possible, but it was the case before, and Is still the case with some indie stuff probably. Final Fantasy VII for example has a very unique aesthetic with its unlit low poly 3d models and the the way they're colored. There's no anime or a movie that looks like that, and that stuff is I think a big part of what resonates with people, on top of the fact that the game has a resonant story.
The game (ff7) is in a big part inspired by a movie Gunhed, but it still looks unique ( and great ) because of the way they embraced limitations of the platform.
Plus you don't have to grind in a lot of great jrpg's, there usually is a way to get around things underleveled if you understand the game's systems, it's just that those games have a way to get around understanding mechanics properly by grinding a bunch.
Plus, I dislike how convenient it is that you guys rule out older jrpgs and dungeon crawlers out of the conversations, cause those games rarely have a lot of story, and are more dense gameplay wise.
Interesting one-off to the speed run conversation: Mike Tyson's punchout. To this day the speedrun is basically you just have to be god-tier skilled at actually playing the game. Also: Mario Kart blue shell is an interesting case too because it was designed from the get-go to have that experience. It's intentionally designed that way to achieve a specific experience. This is totally different than competitive multiplayer games who take that kind of mechanic and try to shoehorn it into a more serious gameplay. It's kind of like what TEU mentioned about game devs that need to acknowledge that microtransactions are counter to artistic integrity. The MK mechanics are counter to serious competitive play, but that's ok because the devs went in with the premise that the game is not meant to be a serious competitive game.
Great discussion. I had similiar issues with Ninja Gaiden Black's scoring system in Mission Mode. I set my goal at 40 million points for that mode, knowing that it would mostly be Ultimate Technique farming with the weakest weapons, to milk each mission and try to get 50 UT's, if I were to keep pushing past the 40 Mil. It also meant constantly pausing the game, menuing to switch armlets constantly to get essence bonuses or shortened manual UT charge times. Shit like that. Getting the 40 million was the most brutal gaming achievement I completed, taking 100's of hours, but I really lost interest beyond that. Most of that score was gotten by beating all but 2 missions on Master Ninja without healing or using ninpo. After that it was really a slow grind to get the extra points, involving alot of UT farming. This pretty much negates using any other regular moves and it doesnt feel like the same game. Its a good and bad thing, but chaining UT's also changes the survival gameplay and moment to moment, since it is the most effective way to kill shit and score the most points. Many parts of the game also get degraded to AI manipulation by fucking around with the camera position and things like that. It takes an incredible amount of patience and skill to grind all those missions for UT's but its not what made me want to test my skills in that game. Ultimately I find more satisfaction in taking on my own challenges and completions and not trying to do something for the sake of doing it. A good way to utilise these critic reviews is, if they complain about something I will probably love it.
Great talk, I feel vindicated about a lot of ideas since they're not mainstream, so this made me feel less alone in that. I would say that the interview kind of petered out after the first hour. The first hour was jam packed with different ideas, but then the rest felt like retreading the same ideas from slightly different angles and yet not getting anywhere deeper. These interviews could really do with some shortening, lol.
2:31:00 an example that came to my mind is how slowly improving in the original Sonic game mechanics will allow you to blaze through the levels more stylishly and that was the meta advantage
If you are looking for an RPG that implements a scoring system, one of my recommendations would be Rogue. It crosses RPG design and arcade design really well in my opinion.
Also idk what the landscape of RTS games looks like, but Mark’s idea of a rank-based dynamic difficulty RTS has all the makings of a hit tower defense game (or even genre?) imo. Like you take normal RTS mechanics, resource gathering base building etc, and then waves of progressive and adaptive difficulty and skill-based gameplay point bonuses (like halo’s double kill and multi kill). Maybe that’s been done before (to death?) but imo that just sounds like a major breakout hit for people that might like RTS mechanics but just not really playing pvp or moba style games. Honestly that sounds better to me than almost any single existing RTS single player mode by… a large margin.
The was such a great discussion. I fall into the trap of putting old fighting games a pedestal. I feel the new games removed the fundamental neutral game to reward offence. But then to bring myself back down I remember that it was new games that introduced throw techs, which was really evolutionary. You guys made great points about how single player modes should integrate multiplayer meta fundamentals more. I think this why I couldn’t get into the competitive side of RTS games to be honest lol Great point about the stamina meter in actions games, but it’s also fighting games too (SF6 Drive Meter). It’s popular right now. People praise Dark souls but I’m pretty Monster Hunter came first? Or at least was like right there with it. They have hallway walking parts and mini puzzles because they think they are bridging the gap with “interactive storytelling”.
Beautiful discussion. Agree with Mark about video game story telling 100%. Its more operatic in that way. A good example of this is the Tomb Raider series. The original Core Design games have a very basic story and Lara is barely even a character, more like a figure or archetype. Its all vibes and gameplay. When Crystal Dynamics took over and pivoted towards a cinematic approach it became a very bland and uninteresting 3rd person action game. This obsession with psychology and relatable "characters" is a huge misstep in my opinion. As it is not like suddenly we have some European arthouse film type of character study..no we have a character that is even less interesting than the painting of an abstract person that we had with the original games.
One thing I have trouble with is that Mark seems to believe that games journalists simulataneously force their tastes onto the public and also seemlingly just tell the public what they want to hear (i.e. God Hand) and like, it can't exactly be both. What I believe is that these major outlets are simply a reflection of the modern mainstream consensus and how that consensus arrived where it is today is a lot more complicated than "well, cuz IGN said so".
One of the most interesting mma to me is Aleksandr Karelin's first try in mma. That greco-roman wrestler really won in in purest form of wrestling. Randelman vs Emelianenko was sick to me, something you wouldnt see in modern mma anymore.
With the point of comparing video game storytelling to trying to tell a story through music, I think an apt comparison would be opera. Most operas have incredibly simple stories, but opera enthusiasts still really like the characters and stories because they're told through very well-made music. Even Wagner's Ring Cycle, an epic spanning four three-hour operas, is not nearly as complex in terms of its actual narrative as something like Lord of the Rings, because at that point the story would get in the way of the storytelling itself. You can see this play out in a lot of concept albums that try to tell these epic stories, but get bogged down and bloated by long sequences of narration and non-music segments (basically the music equivalent of non-interactive cutscenes).
I agree with a lot of Marks takes but at 1:53:00 I would argue that stamina bars in action games introduce risk / reward in an interesting way which is something he talks about a lot in other videos I’ve watched. You can only attack or block or roll so much before you run out of stamina and get shrecked. It forces the player to take into account everything they do rather than mindlessly button mash. That damn stamina bar when you climb in zelda tho… big oof. Great conversation anyways guys!
Honestly, the stamina bar is just an excuse to have an overpowered dodge mechanic. A be all end all answer to everything... as long as you have stamina, so it's fair, right? lol. So when sekiro removed it and forced people to use more moves than just an overpowered roll, people HATED it, at first. Elden Ring brought it back but also the other stuff from Sekiro like jumping and crouching... No one used anything besides rolling because there's no reason to.
@@belldrop7365 guess it's just a matter of taste. Not saying anyones wrong its just my opinion that the stamina bar makes things more interesting. You're not wrong if you disagree with me we just enjoy games differently. one other thought though - If you equate the stamina dependent enemy attack memorization parry / roll / block system to a glorified quicktime event then the same can be said about literally any other combat mechanic. In beatemups Mark always talks about spacing - well by that logic isn't spacing also just a glorified quicktime event as well - player moves into position and attacks or waits until the enemy is in range and attack. It's the same as memorizing enemy attack patterns and learning when to dodge or when to parry or block. Same with shmups, no one get's a 1cc first try. You have to memorize bullet patterns and learn to manipulate the incoming attacks and then also have the reflexes to avoid getting hit. No one plays a souls game for the first time and just knows when to block or when to roll its trial and error just like literally every other game out there.
@@keithcampbell9845 Sure, any discussion about difficulty always falls down to "a matter of taste". I'd still say this though, a literal qte is harder than a stamina based rolling system, cause spamming one button, like the roll, will cause you to fail, lol. I really mean this. Who needs reading whatever is happening on the screen, roll 2 win, baby. It's like having unlimited bullet wiping bombs in shmups that just have to regen once every few spamming sessions.
@@belldrop7365 I kinda wish they reduced the i-frames of the roll along with the distance (which they did reduce compared to DS3, at least until 1.06 for light load characters). That distance reduction led to a lot of Dark Souls vets getting roll-caught by moves that were easy to run around or jump over, but given the frequency of complaints I've heard about ER's combat system being "luck-based" I don't think they considered the other defensive options, and stuck with roll->R1 as the playstyle, something which probably would have been easier to unlearn with fewer i-frames. I'm really glad my first boss was the Ulcerated Tree Spirit in the Hero's Grave you start at, since I found it to be an amazing tutorial boss for how to choose the right defensive tool for the job.
Too add to the story v. gameplay discussion, w.r.t. Final Fantasy... Much of the leadership at squaresoft/square enix aspired to work in cinema/stage plays. The entire FF production team was sent off to Hawaii to make that accursed Final Fantasy: Spirits Within film in the late '90s. No doubt the fans enjoy those games for the story, especially in the PS1 era onwards. If you watch FF7/8/9 tv ads, the games were basically marketed as movies.
that's the great point that player should feel something is going on. the tools to get him to feel that are secondary whether it's cutscenes or some rng like in gnouls'n'ghosts
53:20 Them’s Fighting Herds is an excellent example of how to do a tutorial like this for a fighting game. Even though he is clearly a controversial figure, Leffen makes great points when discussing the game in his fighting game tier list. Based on this discussion, I highly recommend you check it out
This is awesome - and I appreciate your points on video games as art. They really do more than film or TV shows. They can have all of the same plus the director/dev can communicate aspects of a story through gameplay mechanics (Raiden movement speed, extra combo hit, jumping in MGS2), force the player to do things you know they will disagree with etc like what has been done in Metal Gear Solid and The Last of Us games, or give a good, awesome reason for a gameplay timer like the Akujiki in Shinobi (PS2). I hope more people see this
In regards to art, “doing more” doesn’t inherently seem like a good thing. A beautiful song can bring someone to tears in minutes. That’s a lot rarer in games. Games can have 1000x more going on but there’s no recipe for art. It’s not a linear process. It's like saying a buffet is better than a restaurant because it has more food. This song is the deepest because it has the most instruments. In fact in my opinion, gameplay is key, and games are getting way too bogged down in trying to be seen as “serious art”.
2:25 I understand his argument perfectly but I think that DMC is probably the worst example for this. DMC is freedom of choice done right. People like donguri have demonstrated that combos in DMC4 and 5 can be an art for in and of themselves, with a virtually unlimited upper skill ceiling.
Incresible discussion. You two are on the bleeding edge of these topics and you have completely different focuses. Very refreshing interview. Keep your gamification outta my games!
3:25 exactly. When you give the player all the option, he ends up discarding 90% of them to keep only the best of each. And in fact it renders the game more limited, less interesting in the end.
1:48:38 Slowly, slowly, and then all at once has always been the pattern for achieving popularity in any given field. Grind long enough and the plebs will eventually clamber over each other to proclaim how they were into your niche before it was cool.
Until it is acknoledged that subjectivity is not the only standard which we can use to evaluate art and that games aren’t art as much as they have art, we will never see any meaningful progress in games
The only "games as art" people whom I have any respect for is the people who believe that gameplay itself is art. Otherwise just write a book, make a movie, etc.
I’m sorry but this makes no sense. You can attempt to remove emotion from critiquing a game but it’s impossible. What you feel makes an objectively better game is still subjective. Every aspect of every game is weighed differently by everyone. I think it’s cool and maybe important to have multiple standards that weigh criteria differently but let’s not act like there is a righteous way to feel about a game.
@@AnguishXA The two fields that we use to evaluate the quality of games: Esthetics and Game Theory are both objective, so I see no reason why we can't integrate an objective theory of game design. Emotions are not primary so do not necessarily tell us of truth, this does not mean they're useless, far from it. They're indispensabile in communication, but for any consistency to be attained one must assume a consumer of rational emotion. Games are not an art, but a craft.
@@doofmoney3954 I fundamentally disagree that both aesthetic and game theory are objective. My opinion is coming from someone that doesn’t really even care much for the story aspect of games. Everything about the game itself in a vacuum is art. The problem is that consumerism is a primary influence on devs.
@@AnguishXA Imagine if you will, a desolate village out in the siberian frost, uncontacted by the rest of civilization. If they were to be given the oppertunity to watch a movie out of the following two options, which would affect them more greatly: A Movie of their very village, with them toiling in dirt and misery. Or you could show them the bustling modern city, filled with people producing their own happiness, the means of their survival always being within reach. It should be clear to anyone that showing the people footage of the city would inspire them far more greatly, man's creativity and drive is not for naught. This shows to us that the content of art is important to man's life and thus can be evaluated using philosophy, because truly art is the distillation of what the author deems important in life, a distillation of the authors philosophy. And for ethics in this case, the individuals life is the only logical standard for evaluation. To think that the masterworks of Frazetta are somehow equal to a rotting banana taped to the wall is ridiculous and an outright evasion of fact. The standard for art is objective, of reality. As for game theory it's literally math so I don't know what to tell you, you don't propose that math is not a means of knowing the world? Blaming the stagnation of games on the pandering of the consumer is really strange seeing that companies today specifically don't have to do so as they are protected by intellectual property. A studio only needs to release a single good title before they can sit on it, take advantage of the artificial scarcity and lack of competition
I think one mistake that you guys seem to make is to lump game journalists and game critics together. They are different people serving different roles. Anybody who cares deeply about video games really pay no attention to game journalists anyway. And IMHO even game journalists don't even know how to game-journalism
What you mean about the limitations of classic games, makes the player use timing in their actions. The timing skill has been replaced with more options.(In modern games)
Going through some of my old vids of NG3 Razors edge, I could tell what kind of a mood I was in by how the game play looked. Not to many games are complex enough that enable you to determine something like that. Recently a lot of the newer God of War combat seemed kinda mundane & reused no matter who was playin it
The comment about messing with the camera and people getting upset extends to so many things its unreal. The one that comes to mind is gamepad input for FPS games. The basic setup was cemented decades ago in order for it to be easier to pickup. However if you change how it works players have more option for skill expression as well as the potential to remove autoaim. ua-cam.com/video/KwcOP8CVR5I/v-deo.html This guy shows how it "should" be. Noone has ever picked this up, because it would alienate huge swathes of the playerbase. But it might be better in the long run.
Once upon a time you had to actually learn how to play a game and play it well in order to beat it. People do not want this anymore just like they dont want unique gameplay mechanics, controls, or ideas.
I was *just* thinking about this exact topic in regards to Ultrakill What a fucking fantastic game, it completely captures the spirit of older games along with a beautiful art style/ setting
Without having watched the video, that is definitely true. It sucks how much gameplay has taken a backseat to badly written stories and filler elements. It's definitely noticeable with almost all genres of games, but I think shooters were hit especially hard by it. I'm a fan of CoD zombies, played since BO1 back in 2010. Looking at the modern iterations of the mode just makes me cry, because they're all dogshit. Even BO3's zombie mode, which is regarded as the best by many, many people, is already kinda iffy. That game marked the downwards trend of the mode. Every version following that game just got worse and worse. Genuinely good design and skill was replaced by brain-dead maps with 50 flavors of safety nets and filler elements, the latter of which add nothing to the games. I know I am rambling, but to provide an example: In zombies you can upgrade your gun, so it deals more damage. In the older games, you upgraded your gun once, for $5000. That was true for W@W, BO1/2 and kinda 3 too. In 3 upgrading again for less money just added a somewhat broken range of effects to the gun, which could deal infinite damage, but only at set intervals. In 4 you have to upgrade your gun not once, not twice, not three times, but 5 fucking times. You upgrade it once and then you have to do it 4 more times to get the full firepower of the gun, which in older games, again, required a single upgrade. So what ends up happening is you go to the machine, pay $5000, wait like 7-8~ seconds and then pay another 10k across 4 separate upgrades. There's a perk which speeds up different things in the game, it's mostly useless really, but it also turns a 7-8 second ordeal into a 1~ second action. I ran it solely to make upgrading less painful. In the fifth BO game it's no different. They made it so it takes 3 upgrades (50k points) to get the full firepower, but additionally you have to upgrade the weapon tier as well, which also increases damage, and has to be done up to like 3-4 times. It uses separate currency, 2 actually, which compete with armor upgrades and craftable items. It's a shitshow. I dropped that game after 40 hours and honestly would've just refunded if I hadn't been gifted the game. And even tho modern RE is garbage too, I at least had fun with RE3/8/4 and beating those games on HC with my own rules. Difficulty and actually learning how the game works adds a lot to the enjoyment you get from playing. It's a shame that most people just want to "consume" and nothing more.
"I cant imagine a world where progression system like that equate to a more satisfying end result". We are living in that world, it's called GaaS and it sucks
2:19:15 Undertale does this for its harder bossfights, especially the hardest one which had unique dialog for your first 10 deaths/retries, and I legit has never found any other game that does this
In response to your comments about experience points always being bad: have you ever played a roguelike? Not the fluff that gets called roguelike these days, I mean an actual roguelike, like Nethack, DCSS or, well, Rogue. Keeping up with the experience curve is critical to success in these games, and mechanics like the food clock disallow grinding forever, forcing the player to constantly evaluate their own strength vs the enemies in front of them, whether they should flee or fight, use a consumable, etc. The randomness also makes finding new gear or skills meaningful, because the player must think critically about how to incorporate the new stuff into their current run.
I dont think game reviewers like ign really have mainstream influence. They have a solid niche influence among more casual enthusiasts who exist solely online and I think because of where they exist they can make it seem like there's way more influence than there really is. I dont think the genuinely casual gaming audience even knows that ign exists.
Haha, pianos. If they were made like, (a lot of but not all), modern games, the keys would all be in order to play a single song. You'd just press the keys from left to right. They'd be 50 metres long 😆
I don't buy this radical anti-story argument at all, like for instance in RDR when they put a song while you're riding a horse in mexico, that's lame gameplay but it's indeed elevated by context, setting and story, so it can be done right. the problem is they do it all the time even when it doesn't make any sense (like they did it again in rdr2 and it didnt work as well). game mechanics being like music, I like that analogy, both mediums have space for more variety than you think at first. cinematic games have a place too, just not everywhere all the time. one-time only experiences can be done right. it's a matter of games knowing what they are. good difficulty can have lame stories, good stories can have not-so-deep gameplay, but they must be good stories (inside, tlou, lisa, pathologic...) never using the story as an excuse for lame gameplay which is what happens a lot today.
Do gamers take the IGN Review logic at 18:00 and apply it to the rest of the media? Like, maybe it's not just games that they are lying about. They have all these problems - a mix of malice and incompetence - when the topic is games. What's the chances they are like this on ALL topics.
The take about jrpgs and grinding is pretty misguided imo. Every good jrpg I’ve played I have never felt like I needed to grind and the game itself is still challenging and requires skill and knowledge. SMT Nocturne, FFX come to mind.
![How to Get a Developer Job - Even in This Economy [Full Course]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/6nz8GXjxiHg/mqdefault.jpg)
Thanks again to Mark for his thoughtful conversation! Check out his channel here: ua-cam.com/channels/0Fwhzr1yeoQ84yC3Isd4Lg.html
And definitely watch his documentary on shmups! ua-cam.com/video/t7RY0FHTI68/v-deo.html
Other than the difficulty- and story-related sections, some of the best moments in this episode come from the discussion on teaching the competitive mindset. 0:58:51
Lastly, a pair of editing oopsies where Pr0nogo talks, but is not visible, crop up towards the end of the video. Sorry about that!
Thanks so much for inviting me onto the show :-) I'm honored to officially be a Non-Fraud :-D The conversation was really great and I'd be happy to return again in the future.
Have you ever read what I said about Castlevania's one stroke attacks being outdated? Do you really think its not? Every melee based 2d platformer metroidvania seems to be applying the megaman x 3 hit melee attacks as a standard.
I absolutely love when Mark gets going, so the fact that you left him uninterrupted for so long so many times is just perfect.
And you definitely had interesting points and I felt like you bounced off each other very well. I'll be back for more of this podcast for sure
32:32 Video games as a way to discover that you can overcome challenges is such a brilliant observation, and exactly what I enjoy most about my favorite games!
Also in competitive play, the best come back mechanics are the skill the player brings.
Wow, I LOVE the idea that video games are closer artistically to music than any other medium. Mark has opened my mind to a lot of game design truths, and completely changed the way I think about games! Dark Souls is my favorite game of all time, and it's because it evokes a story with difficulty. The story of Dark Souls IS your struggle with the game and the world.
You're definitely one of the best interviewers I've seen as far as giving your guests ample time to speak, your own insights on what they say, and bouncing back new questions to them. Keep it up.
Loved this conversation. I think for me one or the best visions for story in games would be something like Dwarf Fortress (maybe, i actually haven’t played it so I’m talking out of my ass) or how board games do it.
Where there’s emergent gameplay, and the story is the story of player choice combined with game logic, and the narrative drive of the game is represented by its mechanics. So maybe you build a bar so that your minions fight harder during battle, but it also has the consequence of trashing your economy a bit. Or you have a hippie/artist class, which most of the time does absolutely nothing, but occasionally randomly advances your culture leaps and bounds. And then the things that happen in the game are emerging naturally through all the individual cogs grinding together in a vast gameplay narrative.
Also I want to push back on “would you like Final Fantasy 7 if the story wasn’t there?” Well, I happen to prefer (lately at least) gameplay driven RPGs. Playing Crystal Project lately, and the story is basically “alright we’re going on an adventure.” But combining the classes, taking down hard bosses, platforming(!), and exploring the open-ish world are all masterfully done, about as well as anyone’s done within RPG mechanics. And it feels more like going on an adventure. Dragon Quest 3, Final Fantasy V, Etrian Odyssey… not many people are playing these for the story. But in a way they are purer “role playing” games. You’re not really playing the “role” of Cloud Strife very much. But if you’re assembling a group of warriors, wizards, and warlocks, fleshing out their skills, and then combining those skills in new and meaningful ways… yeah it might not be the best *narrative* out there, but it’s bigger on playing a role (don’t tell me you’re not attached to the dude you named Jeff who gets big crits), making meaningful choices, and exploring a world. Which I think is more in line of what you guys are saying, even if you may (or may not) malign the humble JRPG.
This conversation really nails down what I have been thinking about myself for a very long time and that I see so many times other gamers don't understand. When they say "I understand what you are saying, but it would't hurt Dark Souls to have an easy mode", it's so obvious that they DON'T understand at all. So what I have to do from now on is just point them to this video! Much appreciated!
Out of curiosity, is there anyone who is advocating for an easy mode for souls games these days? I recall one article some years ago saying sekiro should have an easy mode but that's about it.....
Many of the issues with contemporary game reviews isn't even necessarily inherent to journalism. It's also part of a wider issue in the field in that the model at these outlets isn't actually journalism anymore; it's content farming.
Game reviewers even have an impact before release, as the large companies will hire game reviewers as "consultants" before release to manage risk. They even publicly admitted to feeling sore about this when Microsoft complained that the mock review scores for redfall were higher than the actual scores. You have to have some success for game writers like Kasavin and the old man murray boys who went on to work on successful games.
But I do feel like it is too narrow to focus on punishing death mechanics, punishing parry mechanics, and so on. The general thing that games should have are compelling feedback loops. When a player does something core to the game, there should be some sort of reaction that tells the player they can do better or worse. I saw someone saying that Terra Nil is simply a bad game because it is not punishing or frustrating enough. In reality, people like Terra Nil and find it involving to play, because it provides very good feedback to the player on how their actions are changing the sandbox and how some outcomes are desirable. Is Terra Nil a bad game because people don't want to play forever and grind a battle pass?
Never expected a Chesterton reference even in passing lol. Great talk guys lots to chew on.
I do know some stories in games. Journey, Ico, Shadow of the Colossus, and Chants of Sennaar all have good stories. I think they are all pretty abstract and tie into what you as a player are doing. I do agree that they kind of feel like scenarios. I especially like Journey because it includes replaying the game into its story and I think that is why it is the game I have beaten the most.
Insane crossover, get Thorin to interview this guy for historical record
If your story is better than your gameplay, you should write a book or make a movie.
I felt like I had seen this guy somewhere before, I decided to check and I remembered his HYPER DEMON review. Incredible game
Hyper demon is so good, and mark is such a legend honestly. His videos massively helped get me into shmups years ago, and he’s a super thoughtful dude with a lot of illuminating things to say
This is excellent analysis of a nuanced topic
Critics seem to be comparing games to movies rather than games to games... like if chess came out today it would get panned for having no narrative and not being free-roam, i can't do whatever i want, this game is also hard, where's the easy mode? Chess sucks.
On the issue of story(telling) in classic RPGs, the grind of progression should be seen as a parallel form of character development, where the time investment in empowering characters to successfully overcome the next set of challenges is equally a form of narrative investment (and vice-versa). When the grind is decoupled from narrative relevance you start to get that dissonance. I notice this a lot with single character so-called action RPGs, where you are constantly cued to finick over your build in ways that have very little relevance to how you will overcome ensuing parts of the game. The same few dominant strategies prevail everywhere, and the whole gamut of character progression - skilling up but also gearing up, and therefore inventory management and the inevitable crafting - begins to feel like a side task unrelated to the immediate problems of narrative progression. In classic JRPGs, characters were introduced on the premise that they would be essential to your immediate success through the next phases of the main questline. This often resulted in gratitude for and bonding with said characters, resulting in further narrative investment, and so on.
Thank you. These guys really don’t understand RPGs and some other game design concepts. They make tons of good points but quite often their critiques don’t land because they are projecting their preferences and won’t meet games/art on their own terms which is what crappy criticism is. Their ideas make a ton of sense for certain kinds of games but fall completely flat when trying to apply them to games with a completely different conceit from arcadey gameplay. The point of FF7 being better as a visual novel was just… absolutely awful to be honest.
Sure, you could see it that forcing the player to spend/waste their time grinding using the new character help build narrative investment, but is that really the best way, or even remotely a good way to do it? For example, if you remove the grinding and structure the game to only have necessary encounters like some classic Fire Emblem or Riviera (without using "practice" option), narrative investment built through facing challenges using those characters would still be built without the risk of the player associating the character with boredom like trying to level up a slow growing pokemon through grinding. That's just one example. I'm sure there are other better ways to achieve narrative investment without wasting player's time forcing them to repeat mundane set of tasks without honing any of their skills. Classic JRPGs might did it that way because it's simple and due to memory limitations. I'm not familiar with classic CRPGs, but I might look into how they attempt narrative investment and compare it to classic JRPGs' method of grinding.
I get what you're saying by preparations not involving combats feel too detached from the next combat challenge in terms of narrative, but it could also be given relevance in the narrative when the game acknowledges the preparations and strategy, such as intentionally giving the player information on their next encounter and encouraging specific preparations, or by character dialogues if the game detects the player is preparing or when their strategy negates the enemy's strategy.
Also, making the character stronger doesn't mean character development, as "development" in "character development" strictly means changes in their psychology, not powerups.
@@san_nevo Well, yes, the perfect game would seamlessly blend progression with narrative, but in large party JRPGs there are too many characters to level them all by way of the main story, so you have to choose, and I do think some amount of voluntary time investment affects how you value certain characters in a way that supplements their narrative role. Character development may refer to psychological change in a literary sense, but games are unique in allowing for participatory projection onto characters, and how one experiences those characters is tied to things like usefulness and combat relevance, as well as the time spent to develop these. Many early RPGs took grinding too far for sure, but the best ones folded the grind into the logic of exploration with random encounters - just by being really thorough in looking around, you would greatly increase your number of combat encounters and thus your levels/abilities. What you mention about tactical RPGs is one of the reasons I like that genera - often all substance with very little filler, allowing for the story to tightly align with progression. Unfortunately you can't achieve that same alignment in RPGs with overworlds and exploration etc. because the player has to be engaged off-story as well as on. I like what you said about the game tracking your preparation, build and dialogue to tailor meaningful encounters that actually reward (or punish) the player for their progression choices. I think that is the future, especially for open world games, which really struggle to narrativize progression after the first twenty hours or so. I hope AI proves to be the fix, because personally when I'm given tons of options but these only minimally affect the challenge, story or world-state I find myself alienated from my character and the game world.
Also about the lore of games: Older games had the movie principle of „show, don‘t tell“. The bosses were super hard, you didn’t have to tell the players constantly how epic and big the fight was. You felt it.
That's not a "movie principal"
@@etymonlegomenon931 Godzilla would like to speak to you.
15:31 The meta game across all games reminds me of how so many games really do have very, very similar control schemes. e.g. Even Call of Duty and Elden Ring have very similar controller feel. Primary actions on shoulder buttons. X is jump. O is slide/dodge. Triangle is weapon swap. Etc.
Is this also the reason why bowgun in Monster Hunter Rise is now on R buttons instead of the O button like in Freedom Unite and Portable 3rd.
having attacks on the shoulder buttons gives you slightly more freedom to control the camera with your right thumb
This is where I'd disagree. While yes there is something of a standard for several games, particularly on gamepad, that's not something I see being improved by changing it every game. I don't think it's always the best setup (I've moved dodge/run to L2 in From's games because that way I can run and control the camera while not locked on, which I've found crucial in Elden Ring specitically), but I don't think it's something developers would benefit from re-inventing for every game.
Once you have movement on one stick and camera controls on the other, the rest of the controls basically fall into "actions that need active camera control and free movement to use effectively" on the shoulder buttons, "actions that need free movement but not camera control" on the face buttons, and "actions that can be done standing still regardless of camera control" on the d-pad, and given most first- and third-person games have you run, slide/dodge, jump, shoot/swing, and change weapons in combat the reasons to set controls a certain way for one game apply pretty well to the rest.
Mark got me into Wanted Dead such a lovely game. Great conversation!
Bless the algorithm for putting this in my feed! Great stuff guys!
Very interesting conversation, great guest! Thanks!
I really like the point Mark makes at around the 2 hour point about story overshadowing gameplay and why it causes problems.
*The core of videogames is gameplay. It's what makes them different from all other art forms, and it's what they excel at.*
If you want to write an engaging linear narrative, make a book. Or a comic. Or a radio drama. Or a movie.
If you want to write a narrative where the spectator can influence the story, make a visual novel or a non-combat RPG like Disco Elysium or Pentiment. (Pentiment is incredible and more people should play it NOW.)
If you want to enhance the narrative of a videogame, do it in ways that do NOT take away from the gameplay. (E.g., Soulsborne lore descriptions, in-comabt dialogue, character design, location design, music, vocal performances, UI design, gameplay that evokes specific emotions, etc.)
NEVER place story above gameplay IN A VIDEOGAME.
I kind of wonder about the thing about reviewers being influential. Earlier Mark mentions his friend not liking the original RE4, which I think raises another possibility, which is just that IGN reflects what the average "gamer" would actually think about a game. Like... maybe we are all just freaks and the normies all love this stuff. That's kind of the sense I get most of the time I talk to someone who likes games.
People always find it hard to accept the possibility of them being a peripheral target audience. It's often the case with cartoons' writing and online rant.
the section at 1:10:39 where you wondered what game has really had a good story is something I've wondered as well, it's a limited medium for storytelling. I liked the comparison of games to music in the way it evokes emotion and is more abstract. one of my favorite games that exemplifies this is Shadow of the Colossus.
Surprising crossover. Really enjoyed it. My biggest disagreement is with the characterization of speedrunning, the suggestion that it should be directly connected with the intended gameplay. Who cares if it's a completely different game, as long as it's a good one?
It's kind of like rock climbing. You find some wall that exists in nature. It wasn't designed to be climbed, but it happens to be a very interesting challenge, and so people climb it. Similarly some games happen to be very good for speedruns. It often has very little to do with the intended gameplay experience. The original game is used as a surface for a completely different game which in many cases is much more rich and interesting.
I enjoyed the rock climbing analogy! I was a bit clumsy with my initial framing speedrunning and never circled back to it, but I would clarify that I think it's *bad* specifically when the resultant gameplay is not actually intrinsically rewarding. But in reality, that would only hurt the person doing it, so long as the developers don't cater to the speedrunning minority and hamper the experience for the rest of the playerbase. Cheers!
I like jrpg because of the aesthetic possibilities of the genre, it's not just about the story, the whole package is what makes it good and unique from any other storytelling medium. It's not so much the case now, when video games try to look as close to live action as possible, but it was the case before, and Is still the case with some indie stuff probably. Final Fantasy VII for example has a very unique aesthetic with its unlit low poly 3d models and the the way they're colored. There's no anime or a movie that looks like that, and that stuff is I think a big part of what resonates with people, on top of the fact that the game has a resonant story.
I agree with what Mark is saying though, just would like to add this on top.
The game (ff7) is in a big part inspired by a movie Gunhed, but it still looks unique ( and great ) because of the way they embraced limitations of the platform.
Plus you don't have to grind in a lot of great jrpg's, there usually is a way to get around things underleveled if you understand the game's systems, it's just that those games have a way to get around understanding mechanics properly by grinding a bunch.
Plus, I dislike how convenient it is that you guys rule out older jrpgs and dungeon crawlers out of the conversations, cause those games rarely have a lot of story, and are more dense gameplay wise.
I will always leave a like and comment and up vote for Mark❤🎉
You guys are speaking my language here! Some great analogies too.
Interesting one-off to the speed run conversation: Mike Tyson's punchout. To this day the speedrun is basically you just have to be god-tier skilled at actually playing the game.
Also: Mario Kart blue shell is an interesting case too because it was designed from the get-go to have that experience. It's intentionally designed that way to achieve a specific experience. This is totally different than competitive multiplayer games who take that kind of mechanic and try to shoehorn it into a more serious gameplay. It's kind of like what TEU mentioned about game devs that need to acknowledge that microtransactions are counter to artistic integrity. The MK mechanics are counter to serious competitive play, but that's ok because the devs went in with the premise that the game is not meant to be a serious competitive game.
Agreed regarding Mario Kart -- and happy to hear about examples of high-skill being the deciding factor for speedrunning!
Great discussion. I had similiar issues with Ninja Gaiden Black's scoring system in Mission Mode. I set my goal at 40 million points for that mode, knowing that it would mostly be Ultimate Technique farming with the weakest weapons, to milk each mission and try to get 50 UT's, if I were to keep pushing past the 40 Mil. It also meant constantly pausing the game, menuing to switch armlets constantly to get essence bonuses or shortened manual UT charge times. Shit like that. Getting the 40 million was the most brutal gaming achievement I completed, taking 100's of hours, but I really lost interest beyond that. Most of that score was gotten by beating all but 2 missions on Master Ninja without healing or using ninpo. After that it was really a slow grind to get the extra points, involving alot of UT farming. This pretty much negates using any other regular moves and it doesnt feel like the same game. Its a good and bad thing, but chaining UT's also changes the survival gameplay and moment to moment, since it is the most effective way to kill shit and score the most points. Many parts of the game also get degraded to AI manipulation by fucking around with the camera position and things like that. It takes an incredible amount of patience and skill to grind all those missions for UT's but its not what made me want to test my skills in that game. Ultimately I find more satisfaction in taking on my own challenges and completions and not trying to do something for the sake of doing it.
A good way to utilise these critic reviews is, if they complain about something I will probably love it.
Great talk, I feel vindicated about a lot of ideas since they're not mainstream, so this made me feel less alone in that.
I would say that the interview kind of petered out after the first hour. The first hour was jam packed with different ideas, but then the rest felt like retreading the same ideas from slightly different angles and yet not getting anywhere deeper. These interviews could really do with some shortening, lol.
1:57:01 People think I am crazy when I ask about "storytelling without much reliance in overextended dialogues".
excellent discussion i hit a new pb in hyper demon while watching this
excellent discussion guys! Thank you
2:31:00 an example that came to my mind is how slowly improving in the original Sonic game mechanics will allow you to blaze through the levels more stylishly and that was the meta advantage
If you are looking for an RPG that implements a scoring system, one of my recommendations would be Rogue. It crosses RPG design and arcade design really well in my opinion.
Haven't watched the video yet, but I'd take the quote in the thumbnail one step further. Gameplay _is_ story.
Glad to see you back. Keep codin' on your project and keep making time for these conversations
Really interesting chat, thnx fellas
Also idk what the landscape of RTS games looks like, but Mark’s idea of a rank-based dynamic difficulty RTS has all the makings of a hit tower defense game (or even genre?) imo.
Like you take normal RTS mechanics, resource gathering base building etc, and then waves of progressive and adaptive difficulty and skill-based gameplay point bonuses (like halo’s double kill and multi kill). Maybe that’s been done before (to death?) but imo that just sounds like a major breakout hit for people that might like RTS mechanics but just not really playing pvp or moba style games.
Honestly that sounds better to me than almost any single existing RTS single player mode by… a large margin.
I'm pretty sure that describes They Are Billions precisely
Really enjoyed this
The was such a great discussion. I fall into the trap of putting old fighting games a pedestal. I feel the new games removed the fundamental neutral game to reward offence. But then to bring myself back down I remember that it was new games that introduced throw techs, which was really evolutionary.
You guys made great points about how single player modes should integrate multiplayer meta fundamentals more. I think this why I couldn’t get into the competitive side of RTS games to be honest lol
Great point about the stamina meter in actions games, but it’s also fighting games too (SF6 Drive Meter). It’s popular right now.
People praise Dark souls but I’m pretty Monster Hunter came first? Or at least was like right there with it.
They have hallway walking parts and mini puzzles because they think they are bridging the gap with “interactive storytelling”.
Beautiful discussion. Agree with Mark about video game story telling 100%. Its more operatic in that way. A good example of this is the Tomb Raider series. The original Core Design games have a very basic story and Lara is barely even a character, more like a figure or archetype. Its all vibes and gameplay. When Crystal Dynamics took over and pivoted towards a cinematic approach it became a very bland and uninteresting 3rd person action game. This obsession with psychology and relatable "characters" is a huge misstep in my opinion. As it is not like suddenly we have some European arthouse film type of character study..no we have a character that is even less interesting than the painting of an abstract person that we had with the original games.
One thing I have trouble with is that Mark seems to believe that games journalists simulataneously force their tastes onto the public and also seemlingly just tell the public what they want to hear (i.e. God Hand) and like, it can't exactly be both.
What I believe is that these major outlets are simply a reflection of the modern mainstream consensus and how that consensus arrived where it is today is a lot more complicated than "well, cuz IGN said so".
I do agree however that the state of games critique is fucking dire lmao
I absolutely loved your take on speed running nofraud!!
Reminds me of MMA. MMA was interesting when it was style vs style. But it’s all been homogenized into a single style, everybody has the same style.
One of the most interesting mma to me is Aleksandr Karelin's first try in mma. That greco-roman wrestler really won in in purest form of wrestling. Randelman vs Emelianenko was sick to me, something you wouldnt see in modern mma anymore.
With the point of comparing video game storytelling to trying to tell a story through music, I think an apt comparison would be opera. Most operas have incredibly simple stories, but opera enthusiasts still really like the characters and stories because they're told through very well-made music. Even Wagner's Ring Cycle, an epic spanning four three-hour operas, is not nearly as complex in terms of its actual narrative as something like Lord of the Rings, because at that point the story would get in the way of the storytelling itself.
You can see this play out in a lot of concept albums that try to tell these epic stories, but get bogged down and bloated by long sequences of narration and non-music segments (basically the music equivalent of non-interactive cutscenes).
This is a really great listen
i think a good example of a player skill forward jrpg would be Etrian Odyssey
Ahh, nothing beats good old dungeob exploring.
Fantastic Interview, came over from electric underground and I'll be sticking around and will try out your RTS game it seems interesting.
fire emblem has been scoring your performance since the famicom bro
I agree with a lot of Marks takes but at 1:53:00 I would argue that stamina bars in action games introduce risk / reward in an interesting way which is something he talks about a lot in other videos I’ve watched. You can only attack or block or roll so much before you run out of stamina and get shrecked. It forces the player to take into account everything they do rather than mindlessly button mash. That damn stamina bar when you climb in zelda tho… big oof. Great conversation anyways guys!
Honestly, the stamina bar is just an excuse to have an overpowered dodge mechanic. A be all end all answer to everything... as long as you have stamina, so it's fair, right? lol.
So when sekiro removed it and forced people to use more moves than just an overpowered roll, people HATED it, at first.
Elden Ring brought it back but also the other stuff from Sekiro like jumping and crouching... No one used anything besides rolling because there's no reason to.
@@belldrop7365 guess it's just a matter of taste. Not saying anyones wrong its just my opinion that the stamina bar makes things more interesting. You're not wrong if you disagree with me we just enjoy games differently.
one other thought though - If you equate the stamina dependent enemy attack memorization parry / roll / block system to a glorified quicktime event then the same can be said about literally any other combat mechanic. In beatemups Mark always talks about spacing - well by that logic isn't spacing also just a glorified quicktime event as well - player moves into position and attacks or waits until the enemy is in range and attack. It's the same as memorizing enemy attack patterns and learning when to dodge or when to parry or block. Same with shmups, no one get's a 1cc first try. You have to memorize bullet patterns and learn to manipulate the incoming attacks and then also have the reflexes to avoid getting hit. No one plays a souls game for the first time and just knows when to block or when to roll its trial and error just like literally every other game out there.
@@keithcampbell9845 Sure, any discussion about difficulty always falls down to "a matter of taste".
I'd still say this though, a literal qte is harder than a stamina based rolling system, cause spamming one button, like the roll, will cause you to fail, lol.
I really mean this. Who needs reading whatever is happening on the screen, roll 2 win, baby. It's like having unlimited bullet wiping bombs in shmups that just have to regen once every few spamming sessions.
@@belldrop7365 I kinda wish they reduced the i-frames of the roll along with the distance (which they did reduce compared to DS3, at least until 1.06 for light load characters). That distance reduction led to a lot of Dark Souls vets getting roll-caught by moves that were easy to run around or jump over, but given the frequency of complaints I've heard about ER's combat system being "luck-based" I don't think they considered the other defensive options, and stuck with roll->R1 as the playstyle, something which probably would have been easier to unlearn with fewer i-frames. I'm really glad my first boss was the Ulcerated Tree Spirit in the Hero's Grave you start at, since I found it to be an amazing tutorial boss for how to choose the right defensive tool for the job.
So happy to see these conversation videos come back. Lots of good stuff discussed in so many of these!
Too add to the story v. gameplay discussion, w.r.t. Final Fantasy... Much of the leadership at squaresoft/square enix aspired to work in cinema/stage plays. The entire FF production team was sent off to Hawaii to make that accursed Final Fantasy: Spirits Within film in the late '90s.
No doubt the fans enjoy those games for the story, especially in the PS1 era onwards. If you watch FF7/8/9 tv ads, the games were basically marketed as movies.
that's the great point that player should feel something is going on. the tools to get him to feel that are secondary whether it's cutscenes or some rng like in gnouls'n'ghosts
Great episode
53:20 Them’s Fighting Herds is an excellent example of how to do a tutorial like this for a fighting game. Even though he is clearly a controversial figure, Leffen makes great points when discussing the game in his fighting game tier list. Based on this discussion, I highly recommend you check it out
Really enjoyed this guest.
This is awesome - and I appreciate your points on video games as art. They really do more than film or TV shows. They can have all of the same plus the director/dev can communicate aspects of a story through gameplay mechanics (Raiden movement speed, extra combo hit, jumping in MGS2), force the player to do things you know they will disagree with etc like what has been done in Metal Gear Solid and The Last of Us games, or give a good, awesome reason for a gameplay timer like the Akujiki in Shinobi (PS2). I hope more people see this
In regards to art, “doing more” doesn’t inherently seem like a good thing. A beautiful song can bring someone to tears in minutes. That’s a lot rarer in games. Games can have 1000x more going on but there’s no recipe for art. It’s not a linear process. It's like saying a buffet is better than a restaurant because it has more food. This song is the deepest because it has the most instruments. In fact in my opinion, gameplay is key, and games are getting way too bogged down in trying to be seen as “serious art”.
Feedback of players on problems with the game is usually good.
Feedback of players on how to fix them is usually bad.
2:25 I understand his argument perfectly but I think that DMC is probably the worst example for this. DMC is freedom of choice done right. People like donguri have demonstrated that combos in DMC4 and 5 can be an art for in and of themselves, with a virtually unlimited upper skill ceiling.
I’m so glad I found this video. Holy shit
Incresible discussion. You two are on the bleeding edge of these topics and you have completely different focuses. Very refreshing interview.
Keep your gamification outta my games!
3:25 exactly. When you give the player all the option, he ends up discarding 90% of them to keep only the best of each. And in fact it renders the game more limited, less interesting in the end.
I agree, game critics should be viewed as the bottom of the hierarchy. Lower than a snakes ball bag.
18:58 I feel like Unicorn Overlord is part of this trend
1:48:38 Slowly, slowly, and then all at once has always been the pattern for achieving popularity in any given field. Grind long enough and the plebs will eventually clamber over each other to proclaim how they were into your niche before it was cool.
Mark should have conversation with Ross Scott of Accursed Farms next. Afaik Ross loves casual euroshmups (the Turian video).
there's a convo with ross on this channel as well
this is way better to listen to than castle super beast
Until it is acknoledged that subjectivity is not the only standard which we can use to evaluate art and that games aren’t art as much as they have art, we will never see any meaningful progress in games
The only "games as art" people whom I have any respect for is the people who believe that gameplay itself is art. Otherwise just write a book, make a movie, etc.
I’m sorry but this makes no sense. You can attempt to remove emotion from critiquing a game but it’s impossible. What you feel makes an objectively better game is still subjective. Every aspect of every game is weighed differently by everyone. I think it’s cool and maybe important to have multiple standards that weigh criteria differently but let’s not act like there is a righteous way to feel about a game.
@@AnguishXA The two fields that we use to evaluate the quality of games: Esthetics and Game Theory are both objective, so I see no reason why we can't integrate an objective theory of game design.
Emotions are not primary so do not necessarily tell us of truth, this does not mean they're useless, far from it. They're indispensabile in communication, but for any consistency to be attained one must assume a consumer of rational emotion.
Games are not an art, but a craft.
@@doofmoney3954 I fundamentally disagree that both aesthetic and game theory are objective. My opinion is coming from someone that doesn’t really even care much for the story aspect of games. Everything about the game itself in a vacuum is art. The problem is that consumerism is a primary influence on devs.
@@AnguishXA Imagine if you will, a desolate village out in the siberian frost, uncontacted by the rest of civilization. If they were to be given the oppertunity to watch a movie out of the following two options, which would affect them more greatly: A Movie of their very village, with them toiling in dirt and misery. Or you could show them the bustling modern city, filled with people producing their own happiness, the means of their survival always being within reach.
It should be clear to anyone that showing the people footage of the city would inspire them far more greatly, man's creativity and drive is not for naught. This shows to us that the content of art is important to man's life and thus can be evaluated using philosophy, because truly art is the distillation of what the author deems important in life, a distillation of the authors philosophy. And for ethics in this case, the individuals life is the only logical standard for evaluation. To think that the masterworks of Frazetta are somehow equal to a rotting banana taped to the wall is ridiculous and an outright evasion of fact. The standard for art is objective, of reality.
As for game theory it's literally math so I don't know what to tell you, you don't propose that math is not a means of knowing the world?
Blaming the stagnation of games on the pandering of the consumer is really strange seeing that companies today specifically don't have to do so as they are protected by intellectual property. A studio only needs to release a single good title before they can sit on it, take advantage of the artificial scarcity and lack of competition
I think one mistake that you guys seem to make is to lump game journalists and game critics together. They are different people serving different roles. Anybody who cares deeply about video games really pay no attention to game journalists anyway. And IMHO even game journalists don't even know how to game-journalism
Banger
What you mean about the limitations of classic games, makes the player use timing in their actions. The timing skill has been replaced with more options.(In modern games)
Worse options*
"Hibachi's sprite is just this little pile of shit"
LMFAO
This is great, very interesting insights! You guys should do this more often :)
Great vid
Going through some of my old vids of NG3 Razors edge, I could tell what kind of a mood I was in by how the game play looked. Not to many games are complex enough that enable you to determine something like that. Recently a lot of the newer God of War combat seemed kinda mundane & reused no matter who was playin it
The comment about messing with the camera and people getting upset extends to so many things its unreal. The one that comes to mind is gamepad input for FPS games. The basic setup was cemented decades ago in order for it to be easier to pickup. However if you change how it works players have more option for skill expression as well as the potential to remove autoaim.
ua-cam.com/video/KwcOP8CVR5I/v-deo.html
This guy shows how it "should" be.
Noone has ever picked this up, because it would alienate huge swathes of the playerbase. But it might be better in the long run.
This guy seems cool
Once upon a time you had to actually learn how to play a game and play it well in order to beat it. People do not want this anymore just like they dont want unique gameplay mechanics, controls, or ideas.
I was *just* thinking about this exact topic in regards to Ultrakill
What a fucking fantastic game, it completely captures the spirit of older games along with a beautiful art style/ setting
Without having watched the video, that is definitely true. It sucks how much gameplay has taken a backseat to badly written stories and filler elements. It's definitely noticeable with almost all genres of games, but I think shooters were hit especially hard by it. I'm a fan of CoD zombies, played since BO1 back in 2010. Looking at the modern iterations of the mode just makes me cry, because they're all dogshit. Even BO3's zombie mode, which is regarded as the best by many, many people, is already kinda iffy. That game marked the downwards trend of the mode. Every version following that game just got worse and worse. Genuinely good design and skill was replaced by brain-dead maps with 50 flavors of safety nets and filler elements, the latter of which add nothing to the games.
I know I am rambling, but to provide an example:
In zombies you can upgrade your gun, so it deals more damage. In the older games, you upgraded your gun once, for $5000. That was true for W@W, BO1/2 and kinda 3 too. In 3 upgrading again for less money just added a somewhat broken range of effects to the gun, which could deal infinite damage, but only at set intervals.
In 4 you have to upgrade your gun not once, not twice, not three times, but 5 fucking times. You upgrade it once and then you have to do it 4 more times to get the full firepower of the gun, which in older games, again, required a single upgrade. So what ends up happening is you go to the machine, pay $5000, wait like 7-8~ seconds and then pay another 10k across 4 separate upgrades.
There's a perk which speeds up different things in the game, it's mostly useless really, but it also turns a 7-8 second ordeal into a 1~ second action. I ran it solely to make upgrading less painful.
In the fifth BO game it's no different. They made it so it takes 3 upgrades (50k points) to get the full firepower, but additionally you have to upgrade the weapon tier as well, which also increases damage, and has to be done up to like 3-4 times. It uses separate currency, 2 actually, which compete with armor upgrades and craftable items. It's a shitshow. I dropped that game after 40 hours and honestly would've just refunded if I hadn't been gifted the game.
And even tho modern RE is garbage too, I at least had fun with RE3/8/4 and beating those games on HC with my own rules. Difficulty and actually learning how the game works adds a lot to the enjoyment you get from playing. It's a shame that most people just want to "consume" and nothing more.
Super easy rules!
1:46:06 Supreme Commander has this.
"I cant imagine a world where progression system like that equate to a more satisfying end result". We are living in that world, it's called GaaS and it sucks
to be fair in quake you can get a lucky frag whit a rocket that put out out of bonds maybe 1 every 400-500 frag :')
Great conversation. Thanks for the video!
2:19:15 Undertale does this for its harder bossfights, especially the hardest one which had unique dialog for your first 10 deaths/retries, and I legit has never found any other game that does this
For developer going against majority is even worse you can’t get “rage” views as youtubers
In response to your comments about experience points always being bad: have you ever played a roguelike? Not the fluff that gets called roguelike these days, I mean an actual roguelike, like Nethack, DCSS or, well, Rogue. Keeping up with the experience curve is critical to success in these games, and mechanics like the food clock disallow grinding forever, forcing the player to constantly evaluate their own strength vs the enemies in front of them, whether they should flee or fight, use a consumable, etc. The randomness also makes finding new gear or skills meaningful, because the player must think critically about how to incorporate the new stuff into their current run.
I dont think game reviewers like ign really have mainstream influence. They have a solid niche influence among more casual enthusiasts who exist solely online and I think because of where they exist they can make it seem like there's way more influence than there really is. I dont think the genuinely casual gaming audience even knows that ign exists.
Welcome to the No-Frauds Club!
Haha, pianos. If they were made like, (a lot of but not all), modern games, the keys would all be in order to play a single song. You'd just press the keys from left to right. They'd be 50 metres long 😆
I don't buy this radical anti-story argument at all, like for instance in RDR when they put a song while you're riding a horse in mexico, that's lame gameplay but it's indeed elevated by context, setting and story, so it can be done right. the problem is they do it all the time even when it doesn't make any sense (like they did it again in rdr2 and it didnt work as well). game mechanics being like music, I like that analogy, both mediums have space for more variety than you think at first. cinematic games have a place too, just not everywhere all the time. one-time only experiences can be done right. it's a matter of games knowing what they are. good difficulty can have lame stories, good stories can have not-so-deep gameplay, but they must be good stories (inside, tlou, lisa, pathologic...) never using the story as an excuse for lame gameplay which is what happens a lot today.
Do gamers take the IGN Review logic at 18:00 and apply it to the rest of the media? Like, maybe it's not just games that they are lying about. They have all these problems - a mix of malice and incompetence - when the topic is games. What's the chances they are like this on ALL topics.
How come the problem with modern gaming is giving too much choice and then the problem with sekiro is that there's only one way to play it?...
The take about jrpgs and grinding is pretty misguided imo. Every good jrpg I’ve played I have never felt like I needed to grind and the game itself is still challenging and requires skill and knowledge. SMT Nocturne, FFX come to mind.