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PaperclipPerfector  15d ago (text post)   2889 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for March 14, 2025

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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I just re-opened my Everquest2 account. So...yes?

I don't play many modern video games anymore, probably for all the reasons. I thought Diablo 4 was absolute dog shit, No Man's Sky was boring, Gloomhaven was fun but ridiculously time consuming and pretty much every other game I turn on turns me off in the first 5 minutes. I just figure I'm getting too old for this stuff and now I just want to piddle around for an hour or two harvesting resources and grinding stupid, pointless quests for crap gear.

I think the single thing I hate most about all games in the past 10 years is the pathological need to turn everything into a story. I don't care about the plot, I don't care about the NPCs, I don't care about voice actors or dialog or the poetry of the stars. I want decent mechanics and an interesting gameplay, maybe hidden stuff or puzzles. I think the last game I really liked was Fez, though I played the Conan MMO for untold hours. I was playing Hogwarts Legacy with my kid, which isn't bad, but even that can't seem to hold our attention. All she wants to dink-donk around in Roblox and build little towns in Minecraft.

I mean, you’ve gotta have some sort of aesthetic context. Gaming minus aesthetics is just computer science problems. Like, yes, you could play Pokémon without all the cute animals and sound effects—it’s just a big chart, mechanically—but somehow I doubt anyone finds being handed the Serebii data dump is a comparable experience to "Pikachu, I choose you!"

And don’t get me wrong, I do enjoy computer science. But it’s not the same thing as gaming.

Well, there's story in video games and story in video games. John Carmack once compared the importance of story in video games to the story in porn. It's there, and it helps to set up the context and make things more interesting, but it's not the main point. Games like Doom or Super Mario Brothers had stories that set up the motivations of the player character and the context for why he was going around shooting demons or moving from left to right towards castles, but they largely melted away in the thick of the gameplay. Doom's story was told almost entirely through a few paragraphs in the manual, and then a few paragraphs at the end of each of the 3 episodes, with basically nothing in between. On the other hand, I feel like modern AAA games tilt towards trying to tell stories, with gameplay in between, such that the playing is broken up every hour or less by story beats. This can work when the story is well written and well told, but that's often not the case.

I think the single thing I hate most about all games in the past 10 years is the pathological need to turn everything into a story. I don't care about the plot, I don't care about the NPCs, I don't care about voice actors or dialog or the poetry of the stars. I want decent mechanics and an interesting gameplay, maybe hidden stuff or puzzles.

I'm a story-fag at heart but I share this sentiment 100%; not because I dislike stories but because the writers are so incredibly dogshit. If your writing team is at best mediocre (it is) then please shut up or at least keep the narrative simple and minimalistic. Having narrative choices and reactivity for the player is great but the amount of useless prose and "lore" is getting completely out of control.

Have you played split fiction yet? If llms ever wrote that bad we'd have scrapped them. I can't believe the main characters are supposed to be writers! The fact it's getting tens across the board is just embarrassing for everyone involved.

While I haven't actually played SplitFiction since no friends, only saw some of the gameplay, the game itself seems decent and the schtick feels fairly novel. It's also co-op (couch co-op, granted), and IME co-op can salvage almost any garbage short of something virtually unplayable.

That said I fully agree that the writing (what I've seen of it) is garbage with zero redeeming qualities, and the people(?) who wrote that must be banned from anything resembling a writing implement. I try not to fall to the "everything I don't like is Reddit" mindset but this game really seems to be targeted at r*dditors/normies who run all latest blob updates, love Marvel-style quippy humor and aren't actually into videogames (which is probably why the friend pass is free so your gf/sibling can pester you into playing the cool game s/he heard about). Competently targeted too, if the rave reviews and flamewars in comments to negative reviews on Steam is anything to go by.

The game isn't terrible (hell I'm defending it) but it certainly isn't 10/10, the writing alone should take off like 4 points. I agree this is probably the ur-example of a game which would be substantially better if any attempts at "story" and "characterization" got mercilessly pruned.

After that ringing endorsement I can't say I'm chomping at the bit here...

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