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NEWEST CONTENT

Thought | Sunday, January 28, 2024 | 0 Comments


STAR OCEAN AND NON-PERSON CHARACTERS

For me, the most important thing an RPG can do is make its setting feel like a
real world inhabited by real people. Having recently played Star Ocean: The
Divine Force and Star Ocean: The Second Story R back to back has provided me
with a couple nicely illustrative examples to share. Minor/vague spoilers follow
for both games.


READ MORE...

0 Comments

#star ocean: the second story r #star ocean: the divine force

Tags: Thought, TOPIC: Storytelling, GAME: Star Ocean: The Divine Force, GAME:
Star Ocean: The Second Story R

Thought | Sunday, December 31, 2023 | 0 Comments


STAR OCEAN: THE SECOND STORY R ENDING CHECKLIST

I’ve been playing Star Ocean: The Second Story R and loving it.

Among the many improvements in this remake are some that make it much easier to
collect different endings (much appreciated since there are ninety-nine of
them). I decided to make myself a checklist tool, and then I figured I might as
well publish it. Pretty niche, but maybe someone out there will get some value
from it. So here it is.

Star Ocean: The Second Story R Ending Checklist

Oh, and happy new year.

0 Comments

#star ocean #star ocean: the second story r

Tags: Thought, GAME: Star Ocean: The Second Story R

Thought | Sunday, December 31, 2023 | 0 Comments


MY TOP FIVE GAMES OF 2023

Based on how much joy they brought me, not on objective greatness.

 1. Star Ocean: The Second Story R
 2. Star Trek: Resurgence
 3. Sonic Frontiers
 4. Star Ocean: The Divine Force
 5. The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog

Again, this is most of what I actually played this year. I almost called this
“My Five Games” instead of “My Top Five Games”.

Special award for joy that comes less from the game itself and more from the
social experience the game enables:

 1. Guess The Game, which I play daily with Allie
 2. Farming Simulator 22, which I play with Senpai-chan

Games that came out this year that I didn’t get to but which are high on my
wishlist:

 1. SteamWorld Build
 2. Dave the Diver
 3. Sea of Stars

Top games I’d like to see announced:

 1. A follow-up to Kirby and the Forgotten Land
 2. A follow-up to Star Trek: Resurgence

0 Comments

#top ten

Tags: Thought

Thought | Sunday, September 3, 2023 | 0 Comments


MINOR DESIGN DECISIONS AND IMMERSION IN STAR TREK: RESURGENCE

I finally played Star Trek: Resurgence, which I’d had my eye on for some time.
It’s an interesting game in its own right, but also significant as the first
game from Dramatic Labs (a studio formed by Telltale Games veterans) and as part
of a new wave of licensed Star Trek games during an exciting time for that
franchise.

So naturally I’m here to ignore all of that and instead discuss a specific
design decision that most people would probably ignore instead of fixating on.
(What can I say? You come to my house, you get my bullshit.)

Okay, so. Resurgence is mostly a game about making choices. There are a few
other flavors of gameplay including stealth/combat sequences, shuttlecraft
piloting, walking around and investigating areas, a handful of minigames and
QTEs, and so on. But the core is making dialog choices that have various effects
on the characters and the relationships between them.

Correspondingly, those choices are the foundation of the game’s
achievements/trophies. There aren’t any for, say, clearing a combat section
without taking damage. None of them are skill-based (except inasmuch as you need
to be able to complete all previous parts of the game to reach the particular
decision the achievement is for) and I think that’s absolutely the right call.
Those more-active parts of the game are for pacing and immersion; it’d be weird
to turn them into things the player has to master for full completion.

What seems like a less-right call to me is that the achievements aren’t for
passing decision points, but for making specific choices. Like at one point
there’s a crisis, both your science officer and security officer have
recommendations for getting through it, and you have to decide which one to
follow. There isn’t a trophy for getting through the crisis: there’s one for
following the science officer’s recommendation and one for following the
security officer’s. Almost all the achievements are like that. (On PlayStation,
there is additionally the Platinum trophy for getting all other trophies; on
Xbox, there are additionally three progress trophies for getting through the
three “acts” of the game.)

Now, that does mean that a player’s achievement list for the game becomes a
reference for the choices they made, which is kind of a cool thing to have and
to be able to share with other players (though the achievements have pretty
explicit descriptions so the list is full of GIANT SPOILERS until you finish a
playthrough). But the game’s website already provides a mechanism for this, and
achievements are particularly poorly-suited to this goal.

By positioning all the alternative choices as items in a completion checklist,
the game signals that you should see them all before you can consider yourself
truly done. This isn’t as obnoxious as it was in Q.U.B.E. 2, because the game is
at least about the choices and there is new stuff to see on a replay, though I
still think it smacks of insecure design. But it does mean that anyone who
replays the game to make other choices and get all the achievements renders
their list useless as a reference for their “actual” choices–and it turns those
choices from ones that allow the player to express something about their values
to obligatory ones that are just checked off a list with no personal meaning.
And the more effective the game has been at creating a real-feeling world and
characters, the less interested I am in doing that.

(It’s the same reason I was so relieved to see that Resurgence didn’t have
secrets or collectibles. Hunting through all corners of the map to find golden
ships or research data would destroy immersion instantly; I was really happy I
could just go where my character would go and not worry that I would be
mechanically punished for it.)

Resurgence wasn’t a perfect game, but it did a better job than anything else
ever has at making me feel like a Starfleet officer. I loved the scenarios it
put me in and the opportunity to make decisions that best reflected Federation
values and balanced protecting my crew with advancing our mission. I recognize
that I’m more sensitive to this than others, but I resent feeling nudged to go
back and make different decisions that will turn Resurgence from a world
populated with people to a series of arbitrary levers to pull.

0 Comments

#star trek: resurgence #achievement design #immersion

Tags: Thought, GAME: Star Trek: Resurgence, TOPIC: Achievements

Shared Link | Sunday, September 3, 2023


WHY NYT’S CONNECTIONS MAKES YOU FEEL BAD

Why NYT’s Connections makes you feel bad

Connections The new daily game at the New York Times is called Connections, and
I’ve seen a few people comment that they just don’t like it as much as Wordle or
Spelling Bee. That the d…

Raph's Website — Sep 2, 2023 at 4:57 PM

Raph Koster takes a look at Connections, the new daily puzzle at the New York
Times, and delves into the design consideration of puzzles and puzzle games to
explain why this one is perhaps less well-received than its predecessors like
Wordle.

I found this very interesting, and it pulled into the light a lot of things I
had only experienced as instinctive reactions. (Including how I felt about the
similar earlier Red Herring.) (Plus I felt a bit vindicated by the fact that one
of the things Koster calls out is one of my favorite hobby-horses: the game
punishes you for trying to learn.)

Tags: Shared Link, CREATOR: Raph Koster, GAME: Connections, GAME: Wordle, GAME:
Red Herring

Review | Sunday, September 3, 2023 | 0 Comments
★★★★☆


CAPSULE REVIEW: STAR TREK: RESURGENCE

A narrative adventure set in the Star Trek universe with compelling characters
and decisions to make along with some flaws in story and gameplay.


READ MORE...

0 Comments
Thought | Wednesday, June 21, 2023 | 0 Comments


CONVENIENCE FEATURES AND LAZY ASCETICISM

It’s common for people to complain about a game getting
convenience/difficulty/accessibility/approachability features they personally
won’t use and which thus won’t directly affect their own experience. My mental
model has been that this happens for several reasons. In no particular order:

 1. Status quo bias. If you already like something, change is scary.
 2. Status signaling. If more people can do something, that thing is less
    impressive.
 3. Gatekeeping. The more people enter a given fandom/community, the more the
    community changes to be like the mainstream, and the more the property will
    change to target mainstream tastes. (I haven’t written about this subject
    directly yet, though I’ve brushed up against it. My feelings are complicated
    and mixed: it frustrates me when something niche that I like reinvents
    itself to chase mass appeal, but there are also properties that I only fell
    in love with after they did that. Something to dig into another time.)
 4. Opportunity costs. If a developer spends time on these features, that will
    consume resources that could have gone elsewhere.
 5. The “intended experience”. I disagree with this one pretty strongly, but my
    attempt to frame it generously would be something like: Giving the player
    more ways to tweak the experience makes it more likely they will change it
    to a version significantly worse than what they could have had. (Sometimes
    this comes with half-hearted concessions for accessibility.)

For the first four of these, I can at least understand where people are coming
from. I generally think they are not sufficient reasons to keep these kinds of
features out of games (at least games that aren’t super-small and super-niche)
but I can at least see the possible outcomes these people say they want to
prevent. There’s something real going on there.

But for that last one, “intended experience,” I’ve always been a bit confused.
I’ve usually chalked it up to a lack of empathy, with people not realizing these
features are for someone else and just because you wouldn’t use or benefit from
them doesn’t mean nobody would. Lately, though, I’ve been thinking - what if the
problem is actually that people don’t want these features because they would use
them?


READ MORE...

0 Comments

#difficulty #neurodivergencies

Tags: Thought, TOPIC: Difficulty

Review | Sunday, June 11, 2023 | 0 Comments
★★★★☆


CAPSULE REVIEW: SONIC FRONTIERS

A flawed but promising take on Sonic as an open-world game.


READ MORE...

0 Comments
Thought | Saturday, June 10, 2023 | 0 Comments


SONIC FRONTIERS ON HARD (TO UNDERSTAND) MODE

Sonic Frontiers does something really weird with its final boss fight and I
wanna talk about it.

Obviously, mechanical spoilers follow. No narrative ones, though.


READ MORE...

0 Comments

#sonic frontiers #difficulty

Tags: Thought, TOPIC: Difficulty, GAME: Sonic Frontiers

Thought | Saturday, June 10, 2023 | 0 Comments


STEAM DECK AND NEW AAA GAMES

When I bought a Steam Deck, I wasn’t too concerned about its specs or
compatibility with new stuff. As a rule, I don’t exactly rush to play the latest
AAA releases. But sometimes I want to play a newish big-ticket game that happens
to be significantly worse on Steam Deck.

Sonic Frontiers was one of those games. It’s perfectly playable on the Deck and
the graphical issues didn’t get in the way of the experience I wanted, but they
did make me laugh when I saw that there was a photo mode.

I do love it when games allow for creative expression that you can capture as
persistent play artifacts, but it’s hard to get excited about setting up photo
ops when the platform I’m on means the resulting image will cap out at 720p with
limits on draw distance and texture quality and possible glitches.

This kind of thing doesn’t happen often enough that it would be remotely worth
buying a new gaming PC or current-gen console, but it happens enough to be
annoying. It’s another reason to hope that the Steam Deck keeps doing well and
becomes a widely-targeted platform by the AA and AAA studios and not just the
indies.

0 Comments

#steam deck #sonic frontiers #photo mode

Tags: Thought, TOPIC: Steam Deck, TOPIC: Consumer Experience, GAME: Sonic
Frontiers

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