The General Video Gaming Thread

[IslaKariese]

...So, I've somehow gotten myself pretty thickly entangled with the Persona games, namely Personas 3 and 4. It literally had no warning, I just saw something, decided to check out the source, and two weeks later I'm neck deep in... just about everything.

Only thing is, the whole Megami Tensei series is so damn big, I'm really not interested in anything except Persona, despite the fact that everything seems to tie together in one way or another. Also, Persona 5 is coming out in about a year or so, so that's something else to fangirl about.

[Pixelmage]

...So, I've somehow gotten myself pretty thickly entangled with the Persona games, namely Personas 3 and 4. It literally had no warning, I just saw something, decided to check out the source, and two weeks later I'm neck deep in... just about everything.

Only thing is, the whole Megami Tensei series is so damn big, I'm really not interested in anything except Persona, despite the fact that everything seems to tie together in one way or another. Also, Persona 5 is coming out in about a year or so, so that's something else to fangirl about.

Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.

Sadly, I won't be able to keep up with the series anymore because new consoles...

But Persona 3 FES is my favorite, and Persona 4 is amazing. SMT in general has a pretty interconnected lore, but the plots and stories are fairly independent. You could follow only one branch and not really miss a lot of what the other ones offer. Specially since the gameplay itself tends to shift massively from a branch to the others.

Main SMT branch generally focuses on 1 character, the Persona series follows a group. Then there's the Digital Devil Saga that essentially creates it's own thing, although it has the one hardest boss in the whole franchise, so it got pretty famous.

Raidou Kuzunoha isn't very widely known outside japan and is more of an action game, plus it's very japanese. Being set in early-modern japan and taking in a lot of historical themes, contrary to the persona series that are significantly more into the modern japan.

There's the Devil Survivor games for DS/3DS that are tactical games and really really good, even being pretty different in gameplay, they are a lot more similar to the Persona series than the other branches, following a group-focused narrative and all.

[Anura]

I need to finish P4...

I've played the original SMT on an emulator. I boggles my mind how we were expected to find our way around back then.

[IslaKariese]

The only thing that often trips me up is the Protagonists' names. Since you can name them whatever you want, any stories about them can vary quite a bit. It's not so bad with the males, since P4's can be either Yu Narukami or Souji Seta, and P3's is Minato Arisato almost exclusively, but with the female protagonist in P3P it's a little crazy. I looked on the wiki and the name Kotone Shiomi came up, though that was only for a stage play and nothing so popular as an anime or movie. Fans are fond of Minako and Hamuko, but the former sounds too much like Minato and the latter makes me think of Hamtaro. -_-

[Scarab]

The only thing that often trips me up is the Protagonists' names. Since you can name them whatever you want, any stories about them can vary quite a bit. It's not so bad with the males, since P4's can be either Yu Narukami or Souji Seta, and P3's is Minato Arisato almost exclusively, but with the female protagonist in P3P it's a little crazy. I looked on the wiki and the name Kotone Shiomi came up, though that was only for a stage play and nothing so popular as an anime or movie. Fans are fond of Minako and Hamuko, but the former sounds too much like Minato and the latter makes me think of Hamtaro. -_-

P4 is a brilliant game, I enjoyed it immensely.

let us know what your final Persona battle line up is when you get there, I am intrigued to see if we have a similar one. Also, social links. *Some of them are a bit eman, tbh, you have to basically be cruel is you don't wanna date a girl >.<)

[IslaKariese]

Oh, I'm not playing it myself. I consulted a Let's Play, as per usual. I had to spend a couple hours on the wiki to find out what each spell even does, and I still don't have a solid handle on what each character's strengths and weaknesses are. I know Yosuke uses wind and is weak to lightning, Chie uses ice and is weak to fire, and Yukiko is one of your healers and uses fire, but that's about it. Most battles I've watched don't tend to use Naoto, Kanji, or Teddie.

And of course, there are like, a thousand Personas for Souji to pick from, but I always do a little dance when he has Yoshitsune equipped and uses Hassou Tobi on someone.

But I know all about social links. I think they want you to be mean on purpose, sometimes. Like with Yumi, you can either accept her confession or leave her standing alone in the middle of the room while her back's turned. But of course, there's no issue with dating all of them at once. Unless you're playing Golden, in which case grab your earplugs and pull out a book - the sheer number of 'disappointed' lectures means it'll take a while.

[Krika]

Let it be known that a 2 gig SD card is barely big enough for Pokemon Y, and if you already have some game data saved to it, then you don't have the space to install the 1.2 update (which doesn't come with the download, for some reason).

Something to chew on, I guess.

[Scarab]

Like with Yumi, you can either accept her confession or leave her standing alone in the middle of the room while her back's turned. But of course, there's no issue with dating all of them at once. Unless you're playing Golden, in which case grab your earplugs and pull out a book - the sheer number of 'disappointed' lectures means it'll take a while.

I wonder if I still have that recording of my reaction when they made me do that to the poor girl... I know she smiled afterwards, but... yeah. Poor Yumi. She was easily one of the non-playable-characters whom I left the most interested in, although the level of complexity in each of their stories is frankly impressive.

[Krika]

So, I've been thinking a bit about ways to structure games to make them more free-form, and that brought up this idea that I had a while back, that I might as well throw out for your perusal.

The idea was rune-based casting, but in a way that makes the fact that they are runes a bit more important. So let's take Burst and Fire, for two examples. If you cast Burst, then it creates a fairly generic burst of energy - let's say that in this instances, Burst translates to essentially a shaped blast that covers a short area in front of you, a 45-degree arc with radius of 2 meters, to stick meaningless numbers to it. Fire, on the other hand, has the effect of setting everything that can be set on fire within 2 meters (again, putting a meaningless number on it, and for whatever being set on fire does).

Of course, those are simple enough, but then we get into the idea that they are both simply words in a language. So, we can combine them, to make Fire Burst, adding fire as a descriptor to Burst, and make the burst be of fire, rather than just generic energy. Alternately, you could use Burst Fire, which shapes the area that is set on fire.

And obviously, those are just two runes in what would be a bunch of different kinds, all of which could be used alone, but could be combined with other runes using a specific grammar to make them more versatile, specific, and what-not. Single-rune spells would be quick and easy-to-use, but as you start chaining runes together, you'd start to be able to not only make spells that have additional effects (say, using the Friend rune, combined with a not notation to create spells that don't have friendly-fire), but possibly effects that can only be used by combining runes (Soften might normally weaken armor and weapons, but if you throw Earth and Field onto it, you could turn stone floor into soft rock to slow people in the area).

And then you get into the deal that you need to have the runes inscribed somewhere, so equipment would come with "slots" that you can use to put your spells on, being able to have so many runes put on it, and thus be limited in what "spells" you'd have available based on what you have inscribed. And then you can have the runes be of different sizes, which affects the maximum power you can put into it, and therefore how powerful they could be ("casting" would be channeling power into the runes - you can choose to only channel a little power, but then it comes out less powerful).

And there'd be no pre-made spells. Obviously, people would eventually develop spells and such that work best, but in the end it'd would be all stuff that was made themselves, not taught to them by an NPC. You learn the runes, and then it's your job to figure out how you use them. And this is not to say that combining them is the only path - using single runes could be a valid path choice, especially if there was some sort of mastery mechanic that allows you to master spells faster the simpler they are.

I dunno how intuitive this would be, but it seems like a nicely free-form magic system that might be interesting to see if it works.

[Pixelmage]

It's a pretty darn good system, in thesis. But there are 2 major decisions you'd have to take into account, assuming this is to be programmed as a video-game, that is.

First is real-time vs. turn-based. That determines how dynamic the spell creation needs to be in order to be accessible. Magika is a good example of a similar model that works in real time. I can't think of anything good that uses something similar in turn-based systems.

Second is exponential growth of combinations, since your system needs to account for every possible rune combination in order to keep balance. More runes equals more results, even if you limit your spell-words to, say, 4 runes, that's already a very significant amount of combinations. Magika, again, offers a good example of how this generally turns out: You have a large variety of elemental shields, beams, bombs and the odd specific combination for a special spell, but the vast majority of the combinations turns out to be just the same laser with a different color (and different status effects and resistance play, but they're still the same spells attuned to whatever element you need to bypass your target's (or teammates) defenses).

...

That said, it would be interesting to see this in effect inside a minecraft-like environment where both the degree of complexity from the combinations and the balance between different approaches could be expanded according to the playerbase's degree of interest... I mean, take redstone dust: A guy made a Turing Complete computer in an unmodded minecraft beta release. With only redstone dust and torches.

So, I see a lot of potential for a system as open as this rune-vocabulary as an open-world / sandbox feature.

I'm slightly sleep deprived at the moment, so I might be missing several points here... @_@ Don't listen too intently to me. Just passing by and commenting. @_@²

[Scarab]

Second is exponential growth of combinations, since your system needs to account for every possible rune combination in order to keep balance. More runes equals more results, even if you limit your spell-words to, say, 4 runes, that's already a very significant amount of combinations.

First is real-time vs. turn-based. That determines how dynamic the spell creation needs to be in order to be accessible. Magika is a good example of a similar model that works in real time. I can't think of anything good that uses something similar in turn-based systems.

Yeah, the nature of the casting system suggests that spells and combinations would have to be formulated before hand, prior to even beginning a fight, while leaving basic spells available to use any time (but potentially useless or even harmful unless combined with others) . There's a new Miencraft server doing something a bit like that, Littlewood was playing it on the livestream yesterday... don't remember what it was, but yeah, in that game you would PICK what combinations you were capable of BEFORE hand, maybe limit at a max of 3. You would also have to think about how MANY spells could be combined: technicality might limit you to, say, only having three: let's say, burst, fireball, aaand some kind of pattern spread spell to create a meteor shower after the blast.
But that sounds like it'd be the limit to me. More than three would just be complicated and messy.

That's not a bad thing though, it would mean players came up with their own combinations of moves. As I recall, Remember Me does something similar with powers and attacks where you can mix and match your combinations to get the best possible forumla (although according to Yogscast Kim, it's perhaps not implemented as brilliantly as it could be)

Second is exponential growth of combinations, since your system needs to account for every possible rune combination in order to keep balance. More runes equals more results, even if you limit your spell-words to, say, 4 runes, that's already a very significant amount of combinations

Entirely possible you're overthinking it and getting bogged down in nitty gritty there, Pix. Yeah there are countless possible combinations, but there are only so many ways in which you can blow someone up. Also, if we start looking at it from a technical standpoint... sure, that's a lot of possible combos, but with the advancement we have in videogames today, I also don't think it's entirely implausible to HAVE that many combinations and have it work. I'd say limit the max number of run combinations at three, or have just SOME of them able to be combined with more than two, depending on the element.

[Krika]

Yeah, the nature of the casting system suggests that spells and combinations would have to be formulated before hand, prior to even beginning a fight, while leaving basic spells available to use any time (but potentially useless or even harmful unless combined with others) .

Scarab's got it here. The runes need to be inscribed onto something to be used, so you'd have to prepare your spells ahead of time, as it were. It'd probably be possible to specialize in something that lets you do it faster, probably reaching a point where pausing to inscribe spells in the middle of a dungeon would be possible, but aside from that, you have to prep ahead of time. Thus, in-battle casting would be pretty much like a normal game, with "cast times", albeit ones that you can cut short for a lesser effect, but faster cast.

Second is exponential growth of combinations, since your system needs to account for every possible rune combination in order to keep balance. More runes equals more results, even if you limit your spell-words to, say, 4 runes, that's already a very significant amount of combinations.

Well, yes, if you try to make each different combination a unique spell. But they could just have stats behind the scenes that modifiers stuck onto the initial rune alter. Targeting, for instance (as opposed to area). Friend would always make it so only friendlies are targeted (or everyone but them if you used a negation of it). Goblin would always make it so that only Goblins would be affected. The various elemental runes (Ice and Fire for instance) would just modify what kind of damage was being given, or if there was no damage it would just get a subtype thing (which is would really have anyway), in case monsters or environments can respond to that kind of spell. So a lot could just be simplified by runes having consistent effects when used in combination.

[Anura]

Hey, anyone here play Hearthstone?

[eli_gone_crazy]

Nope. What's it about?

[Anura]

It's an online WoW-themed TCG, currently in open beta, and very very fun. I've never played WoW, but I was a casual player of Magic: The Gathering for a couple years, and I played Yu-Gi-Oh the same as everyone else who was growing up around the turn of the millenium, so I've always had a soft spot for TGC's in general. This particular one plays like a very lightweight M:TG.

[Scarab]

It's an online WoW-themed TCG, currently in open beta, and very very fun. I've never played WoW, but I was a casual player of Magic: The Gathering for a couple years, and I played Yu-Gi-Oh the same as everyone else who was growing up around the turn of the millenium, so I've always had a soft spot for TGC's in general. This particular one plays like a very lightweight M:TG.

It has also resulted in the Yogscast s(amongst others) pending an absolute FORTUNE on it, even though it's free to play: http://youtu.be/HbnjFDm5scg?t=5m29s

[agoraoptera]

I play Hearthstone, but I'm moving more into MtG now. Been trying to homebrew pauper decks

[Anura]

And the Hero aspect reminds me of one defunct TGC that I never got to play: Magi-Nation.

[The Wild West Pyro]

So for all of you interested in Bioshock or fans of it, Burial at Sea: Part 2 is going to be the last one, sadly. However, it promises loads of Scenery Porn.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7bZWq9te9ys

Th-The bathysphere designs...*nosebleed*

It's truly a happy sight to see all the work and love they put into it, even if it is only a DLC and not an actual "game", it's going to wrap up the franchise.

[Scarab]

You know, Bioshock is lovely and pretty, but Adell put me onto the afct that Infinite also has a severe disconnect between gameplay and storytelling., and now that I know it's there, it's bugging the heck out of me in like, every videogame ever

This is something I probably should have noticed myself, actually, being a former animation student and all, but our resident game geek got to it first The fact is, you could watch Infinite or it's DLC Burial at Sea as a movie, and it would work just as well, there was honestly no REASON for the story to BE a game, and a first person shooter game of all things. That suggests a fundamental disconnect between the gameplay and the story. Not saying it's terrible, just that it's,... annoying.

Then again a total connect is rather difficult to GET, and to do well. it's the kind of thing you only get/see when you complete the story you're going to tell. Dark Souls for example. There's this really awesome video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XIx7Ot5Mq2Q that kind of explains it. The story and the gameplay are so intrinsically connected, you can't imagine one without the other.

[Pixelmage]

[...]it's bugging the heck out of me in like, every videogame ever[...]

That's a problem with video game design in general. Infinite was tied to being a Bioshock game, the story doesn't matter: Bioshock equals first person shooter with plasmids. So, really, like you said, they pretty much bundled together a game and a movie in a single package, instead of building a single cohesive experience. It's not that the game side is bad, nor that the movie side is bad; neither needs to be bad, they're just different.

You don't need the gameplay to experience the story, and you don't need the story to have fun shooting at stuff. Both might still be worthwhile, but it's not like Dark Souls, or Don't Starve for that matter, where the very foundation of the story is tied to the mechanics of the game.

For instance, the main character, in Dark Souls, defeats a dragon: as far as narrative goes, whatever. We all know heroes beat dragons, like rock beats scissors. It's not until you're there, personally, in the shoes of the hero experiencing the full brutal difficulty of the fight that the narrative weight of the victory really sinks in.

[Guyshane]

Guys we've already had the discussion about Infinite's gameplay versus story. Do we really need a retread if we're gonna bring up the same points?

[The Wild West Pyro]

You know, Bioshock is lovely and pretty, but Adell put me onto the afct that Infinite also has a severe disconnect between gameplay and storytelling., and now that I know it's there, it's bugging the heck out of me in like, every videogame ever

This is something I probably should have noticed myself, actually, being a former animation student and all, but our resident game geek got to it first The fact is, you could watch Infinite or it's DLC Burial at Sea as a movie, and it would work just as well, there was honestly no REASON for the story to BE a game, and a first person shooter game of all things. That suggests a fundamental disconnect between the gameplay and the story. Not saying it's terrible, just that it's,... annoying.

Then again a total connect is rather difficult to GET, and to do well. it's the kind of thing you only get/see when you complete the story you're going to tell. Dark Souls for example. There's this really awesome video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XIx7Ot5Mq2Q that kind of explains it. The story and the gameplay are so intrinsically connected, you can't imagine one without the other.

Aye, that was the issue. Infinite was a lovely game and the story was awesome and unique to the franchise, but the gameplay was incredibly segregated. The original Bioshock's gameplay, in my opinion, was considerably nicer. They basically tried to take a turn around from the survival horror, but it came out as a mixed bag.

[eli_gone_crazy]

In other news, I really want to get both the new zelda game and the new yoshi's island.

[Scarab]

In other news, I really want to get both the new zelda game and the new yoshi's island.

Watched a review for Yoshi's New island. The general opinion is that it's: adorable.