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PaperclipPerfector  12d ago (text post)   2337 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for December 6, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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This is what has burned me out on most video games. Eventually you discover that there’s one “right” way to do it and everything else is pointless. That’s part of why I loved PUBG so much: you had to scavenge limited supplies of items from the game world so most of the time nobody is running meta because they have to work with what they can find.

I don't really mind if there is a right way to do things, irl or in games. It's just that figuring it out should feel like reasoning from first principles, not trying to get into the head of the writer to follow his weird moon logic.

It's like the old adventure game puzzles where to fix a broken pump you had to use a banana on a metronome to hypnotize a monkey. There's no way your intuition can lead you there, you just have to know what the designer wanted you to do.

Minecraft mod packs almost transcended this because the appeal is in exploiting unintended interactions between different designers' moon logic progressions. You're back to real reasoning again, but at the end it's still built on a pile of gibberish.

And yeah, I feel the same way about working with what you get. Starsector is at its most fun in the early game, when you're using ships and weapons because they're what you salvaged from an ancient debris field.
It's less fun later on when you're micro-optimizing fleet builds to farm the end game content for 1% AI core loot drops

You take that back about Monkey Island 2! The correct example is Gabriel Knight 3. In a world where masking tape is some kind of powerful neodymium supermagnet for cat hair, you use it to make a fake mustache to disguise yourself as a man who doesn't have a mustache.

In a world where masking tape is some kind of powerful neodymium supermagnet for cat hair, you use it to make a fake mustache to disguise yourself as a man who doesn't have a mustache.

This is my favorite sentence of the week.

It is a summary of Old Man Murray's article, who absolutely deserves the credit here.

That’s part of why I loved PUBG so much

By contrast, this is why I find BR games literally unplayable- they're either boring as fuck because you're busy scavenging and not fighting, or you roll suboptimally, die, and have to wait 10 minutes to get back to a place you can try again. I hate not being in control of how I get to play.

This is why people bitch and moan about people picking the character with the most interesting mechanics available out of the box, getting downed, and immediately disconnecting.

CoD 4 was peak gaming because it wasn't 10 minutes, it was 10 seconds (other titles that didn't include support for having 32 players on the map had this closer to 1 minute). You could use meme strategies and bad guns, and still have a chance of having fun.

All other popular games- like the camping simulators (R6 Siege, Counter-Strike) and the MOBA-in-FPS-clothing (Overwatch)- have by their nature very opinionated ways to play. And it's as you say; they aren't fun because of it.

This is what has burned me out on most video games. Eventually you discover that there’s one “right” way to do it and everything else is pointless.

I maintain (with no personal disrespect intended) that this is a self inflicted problem. If the game is less fun when you go with the optimal solution, it is very easy to simply... not use the optimal solution. I do it all the time (for example, I played wide in Civ V despite all the game's mechanics pushing you away from that). Humans aren't rats who can't help but do the things that trigger dopamine in the brain, we have agency and should use it.

@ZorbaTHut had a post on I think /r/TheMotte about how, as a game designer, you basically had to trick the players into having fun because otherwise they'd fall into whatever pattern looked "optimal". I can't find it though.

This?

That's the one. How did you find it? I couldn't get DDG nor Google to cough it up.

Normal google/bing/ddg search is pretty useless on modern reddit: you pretty much have to use tools like pullpush. In theory, newer threads should be searchable with the reddit-internal search, but it's incredibly unreliable.

I know the one you mean. It was about Rimworld, and how players wanted grow lamps for plants to turn off at night (because they used a lot of power). But the lamps were intended to be expensive, to nudge people towards growing crops outside. So they wound up having the lamps turn off at night, but use twice as much electricity when active.

Another similar example is how beta WoW had a "fatigue" penalty to XP from kills (after playing for a long enough time), because they wanted quests and not grinding to be the best way to level up. Players complained, so they added the rest XP system which was mathematically equivalent but inverted - you always gained the lesser rate of XP, but if you logged out for a while you would gain rest and earn double XP while rested. And people praised the system even though it was the same thing.

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