Whoever decided that “hold to interact” was to be the new default needs shot.
It works when building tension, or even for showing a character putting effort into an action, but when I need to hold a fucking button for 5 seconds just to have random junk magically teleported into my pockets, it kills my want to interact with the world.
Fuck you, David Cage. I don’t think you’re the progenitor, but you certainly abuse the shit out of it as a mechanic, and your reign of terror shoulda ended with Indigo Prophecy.
i also don’t love the new default of unskippable animations for trivial things. no, i don’t want to see the same animation every time i go to pick up a plant, craft an item, skin an animal, etc. i’m going to skip the activities if i can’t skip the animations.
i have a similar disdain for inventory/shop menus that don’t let you sell/move/craft things in bulk
I specifically downloaded a mod to have nicer cigarette smoking animation on Stalker. I want that immersion of smoking one after getting assraped by fucking cats
S.T.A.L.K.E.R fans are a strange breed. You either bull through it and walk away with a “Okay time, never going to boot it up again”, or you’re 2 hours deep and already halfway through the bottle of vodka, chewing on hard bread, and singing along with the NPCs.
We live and die by the Zone.
I recently started playing again. Stalker Anomaly is pretty good but even for a veteran of the series (played them all vanilla) it has a pretty high barrier of entry because there’s just so much shit. Options, new mechanics, so much new stuff to learn about. And after you think you’ve sorta figured it out, you walk outside the Rookie village and a single cat mauls you to death without you even having time to react.
I love it. After some insane encounters, you really feel like it’s time for some pocket warm vodka and a smoke.
To be fair, the first 3 hours of Indigo Prophecy are absolute kino.
I always thought David Cage pieces were movies that accidentally had games inserted into them
I feel like that’s the calling card of every David Cage game.
“This chunk is actually pretty good, but everything after this? A flaming boulder rolling towards an orphanage”.
I like the Borderlands approach where clicking interact would put it in your inventory, holding interact would either equip the item if it was equippable, or else pick up all the pickups around you if it wasn’t.
While I mostly agreed another good application would be survival/crafting games with limited inventory. Or even games like Skyrim where you can put almost every object into your inventory.
But yeah it’s overused.
With survival/crafting, I tend to lump them in with tension-builders. Even in the calm ones, it’s that extra bit of time, that little effort that only takes seconds but builds up into your whole day. It fits the experience, you’re facing time as much as your own needs and desires.
I recently replayed Arkham Knight and the way you’re handling those toxic containers, requiring you tu be very slow and careful while everything explodes around you is a perfect example of this done right. Such a great game. Shame there wasn’t a spin-off sequel to that.
your reign of terror shoulda ended with Indigo Prophecy.
Well, at least it ended with JASON!
Fun fact. The original sound file for “SEGA” that played right before you started some of the original Genesis titles was larger than the games themselves.
Looks like we’re returning to tradition.
For me, that is a very fun fact. I can hear that “SEGA” in my head. Now it seems obvious, but little kid me didn’t understand why we had such amazing graphics and sound, but so few spoken words.
The video game goddesses “sega” and the dude gods “rise from the grave” are probably the earliest I remember.
“Finish Him” from Mortal Kombat was also genesis no? “Round 1, FIGHT!” I think was street fighter, but for me at least sf2 on SNES was my intro to that series…
Anywhoots I’m less mad now about balders gate 3 asking me to pick a voice for my character that it (so far, for me) uses for literally none of the dialog options.
Earliest voice I can remember in a game was BLADES OF STEEL on the NES.
Had a DOS game (which was a port of something even older) that started with a “BARBARIAN!”. Had the worst control scheme I’ll ever see. Function keys for fuck’s sake.
Mine was SKI OR DIE, and young me was very impressed. If anything, I might actually be more impressed now by the ingenuity in tricking chiptune technology into sounding plausibly like a human voice!
The NES actually did have a 7-bit PCM audio channel, there wasn’t really any “tricking” beyond finding the storage capacity to hold a sample of useful size.
Okay, more I’m legitimately interested. All this time I’d assumed that the voice was a clever manipulation of the chiptune tech to make it sound like a human being. But it was actually just a dramatically compressed audio clip? That might be even more impressive.
Some technical details then, if you’re interested!
https://www.nesdev.org/wiki/APU#DMC_($4010–$4013)
The most important point for getting “higher” quality audio from it is probably this:
The $4011 register can be used to play PCM samples directly by setting the counter value at a high frequency. Because this requires intensive use of the CPU, when used in games all other gameplay is usually halted to facilitate this.
Which is why you generally only heard it on title screens. Usage in games was much rarer, and usually much shorter samples.
First one that I heard that comes to my mind is Super Smash TV on the SNES.
“BIG MONEY. BIG PRIZES. I LOVE IT.”
“I’D BUY THAT FOR A DOLLAR.”
“GOOD LUCK. YOU’LL NEED IT.”
I had more limited time on the NES. It was mostly duck hunt and Mario 2 and 3 for me.
To be fair we had no idea how to pronounce it before that.
They were also sometimes used to detect piracy by looking at the code to create them making sure it was “official” in timing and white space.
press any key to proceed to the main menu
WHY CAN’T YOU JUST SHOW IT???
blame Nintendo and Microsoft, you have to do that to be certified for their platforms.
Actually, this isn’t the worst idea. It can be hard to tell what kind of input device the player’s using, especially on PC. Are you using kb+m, xbox controller, psx controller, generic bargain bin controller, etc? Also you can’t just assume that because a controller’s connected the player is going to use it (and lots of games do… much to my dismay since they make me go disconnect the controller). Once the player presses at least one button you can tailor all the inputs to that thing.
Newer games simply switch active input devices on the fly by using the input scheme of the last pressed button. For example, if you’re using WASD but then press A on an Xbox controller, the engine automatically and quickly switches to that input
GTAV was great for that, I could use KB+M for shooting and stuff, then switch to a controller for driving/flying, which is much easier with analog inputs
But the player will press some button or will use their mouse in the menu anyway.
And you couldn’t do that by just interacting the the menu itself? Come on mate, plenty of games switch it on the fly.
also, get flashbanged by the extremely bright white logo screen on a dark game at night
Bethesda titles…
Big Elden Ring energy
Best DLC change.
Oh man idek if I caught that change! So often I’ll boot game and run to refill water or whatever.
Oh, oh, and: the volume setting for background music only applies once you load into a level so you get blasted with loud music while you wait.
I’ve stopped buying EA games when they turned Battlefield 2 into a pay-to-win game back in the mid-2000’s. But I remember distinctly how bad EA was with those stupid unskippable splash screens. My guess is that they’ve never improved, from what I can see. What’s the point of those anyway, other than annoy your players and make them hate your company?
I’ve stopped buying EA games when they turned Battlefield 2 into a pay-to-win game
Battlefield Play-for-Free. Horribly cut down and butchered version of a great game.
It was my first Battlefield game and I had so much fun with it
I’m talking about the 2005 game.
Pirated the shit out of it. Had great time - no pay to win mechanics in the pirated version
Was that battlefield 2, or battlefield 2, the second 2?
The 2005 game. I had paid full price for the game and enjoyed it for a while. Then they released the expansion pack BF2:SF. The players who owned that expansion pack had access to more powerful weapons which they could use online against players who didn’t have that pack. Essentially turning a paid game into a “pay to win” format. I since then haven’t given EA a penny.
Huh. I guess I got the pack with both but was always such a casual player I never even noticed. I remember the games having two separate sets of servers.
Why don’t games have playable credits?
Let me play the tutorial and show the obligatory Unreal and whatever logos during it like in the movies
PCGamingWiki is a great resource that includes instructions on skipping intro videos for every game that it’s possible to do it with.
Love to spend $70 on a game and then spend another thirty minutes to an hour learning how to hotwire it to start in a timely manner.
But think of the time saved! Only need to launch it 30-60 times for that payoff.
There’s your problem, you’re buying new games!
usually it boils down to deleting a specific file or adding a parameter (a symbol and a short word) to the launched application, but I’m not here to judge other people’s reading speed.
Sure. But finding which file/character to alter isn’t intuitive. It typically requires knowing about a forum where people fix this stuff all the time or pitting your GoogleFu against whatever godless SEO and anti-optimization your favorite search engine is running.
I recently started doing this for all of my games! It helps a TON when modding, and for general “Okay, cool. I’ve seen this 10 times now!” moments. It’s especially helpful when you click Play on Steam, and it just boots to the game main menu screen.
I don’t mind watching them the first time, as I used to watch all the actual video game intro videos for my PS2/Gamecube/Wii/etc. My problem is after the first or second time, just stop fucking showing them!
What pisses me off for the most part is that you first load the intro video, then you skip that and is just taken to a static screen where you click/press enter to continue, then it has to login so you wait again.
Why can’t the game logon while the videos are playing?
I’m pretty sure the unskippable videos are hiding the loading portions of the initial game.
For sure not true for a lot of games. Surely all the videos before the main menu isn’t it loading the main menu? How much processing power could a menu possibly take.
I think there are absolutely games that need the loading time
Multithreading will be covered in Game Development 201.
If on PC, you can usually remove the abundant startup logo videos by finding the relevant video files in the install directory and either renaming them or deleting them. Just make sure if it’s a steam game you disable the automatic update for it or it’ll just redownload them.
For some games you can even just add -skipintro to the launch parameters.
First website I go to before booting up a game: https://www.pcgamingwiki.com
Absolute GOAT for finding fixes or workarounds to nearly everything these days. If I have an issue not mentioned on it, I know I’m fucked because it’s probably a rare issue. lol
Thanks for this. I like to be able to hop into games and save/quit at will. I have five minutes to play, I load the game, play for 4 minutes, save, quit, move on to whatever I have to get done next.
Works for single player stuff mostly, anything event/match based (TF2/CS2/fortnite/whatever) this doesn’t work super good unless the match timer is less than the time I have free.
There’s a good number of games that I have to intentionally make time to play, because I’m not waiting through 3-4 minutes of bullshit to play for 10 minutes. It’s just not going to happen.
So by eliminating the title screen/splash screen garbage, I might be able to have a quick session of game between tasks.
It’s not just “press a button” either, for some reason you have to hold it
For immersion.
At least they are finally putting the option to remove this hold thing, but it’s somehow in the accessibility area?
“You’re finally awake”
Legit one of the best games every though
You were crossing the border, right?
“Border? I was supposed to be on a boat headed to Vvardenfell!”
Not a chad pirate, eh?
A movie with extra steps.
I honestly like games opening logos, I think they are really cool… not with unskippable cutscenes tho
I hated those opening logos on older games because the game always waited for all the openings to finish before starting its initialization process. So those 30 seconds spent on the openings could have half the game initialized by then.
Every time I want to play Lego DC Super Villains I have to go through this intro which lasts an entire minute. Unskippable, by the way. That game is awesome, but that intro is only worth watching it on the first time.
https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Lego_DC_Super-Villains#cite_note-Note1-10
This is a simple mod that doesn’t add anything new to the game, but instead makes some small ‘quality-of-life’ changes to things already present in-game, making the experience slightly different and hopefully more enjoyable and/or immersive. No new models/textures/effects are applied by this mod, only a few script changes to the base game.
· Fast Boot- Makes the startup screen and cutscene (LEGO,DC,Tt logos) faster and skippable, respectively.
· Rush Start - Some unskippable cutscenes can now be skipped (e.g.: can skip level 0 cutscene and jump right into character creator)
· More Characters- Unlocks “hidden” unobtainable character and animal.
· More Vehicles- Unlocks every “hidden” unobtainable vehicle and turret.
· No Bad Words - Custom characters are allowed to be named anything, all ‘bad words’ have been removed.
· Kill Everything - Civilians, Babies and animals can now be killed, they can even fight back when attacked.
· Bigfig Ride- Allows Bigfigs to use vehicles and ride animals
· Grabs Extended- Allows to use Grab moves and executions on followers (or other player) and civilians. Cannot be performed on all characters.
· Faster Credits - End credits scroll much faster and are forced to finish 156 seconds in, instead of 900 seconds (15 min), ensuring only one playback of the “I fought the law” song. Credits can still be skipped at any time.
· Customizing+ (experimental and buggy) - Custom characters can now use more than one body attachment part at once and with every hair, without limits.This mod is useful, but I can’t use it. I only play this game on the Nintendo Switch, and I won’t mod it due to damage concerns.
