Ok uh, what can you do, in terms of actual gameplay mechanics, in Fallout76, that you can’t do in… basically every multiplayer, survival/craft/open world/fps game?
There are so many of those… and… FO76 basically came out around the tail end of the kind of craze for those kinds of games, they were trend chasing.
Uh lets see, Valve did make Portal, what happened was they saw a demo of a game (Narbacular Drop) being concepted at a nearby gaming college expo, and they basically hired all of them, taught them Source, gave them more team breadth and depth to work with.
Valve has… or had… a track record of doing this, in the 90s / 00s. Oh, thats a neat mod for our game: Hire them.
So yes, Valve did originally make Portal. By seeing a neat concept demo, hiring the people behind it, and then making Portal.
I mean, you can say that after 5 more years of development, F076 became a basically functional open world survival craft fps, sure, but like…
No Mans Sky basically revolutionized the concept of what you can do with procedural generation, oh and, they just kept adding more and more stuff, just to the base game, not as DLC, not as MTX.
CP77? Yeah very rough start, but uh, entirely different scope of production value, being an actually competent RPG that’s practically an ImSim in many ways, all with an absurd level of graphical fidelity.
Like, everyone just expected that game to be Grand Theft Auto 5, Cyberpunk Edition, started their standards there, and then got mad that it wasn’t at parity.
CD Projekt Red was a AA studio when they were making this.
They were not Rockstar. They were not Bethesda.
Ok, I’ll give you that PayDay2 does actually have similar map mutating dynamics, I also have not played Vermintide, we do not speak of Back 4 Blood, what an embarassment, I am also unfamiliar with Remnant.
What I was trying to get at is … map mutations is how you solve the age old FPS team v team problem of… if you just have better map knowledge, you tend to win, so this causes a problem where you either have to keep pumping out new maps to keep things fresh, or you have to have a bunch of other balancing gameplay mechanics to have variety from there.
But the fundamental problem is that vets will clown noobs all the time, often by just simply having the maps memorized, angles and positions figured out, etc.
Also Alien Isolation has pretty good monster AI that works with the rest of the game design, but no, thats not mutating maps.
Open world maps that move objective markers around are not mutating maps.
HellDivers 2 is a good example of doing proc gen maps… but again, thats an extraction shooter, co-op shooter type thing.
Nobody, that I am aware of, has pulled this off for mass PvP battles, like, 16-32+ vs 16-32+ players.
As for Valve not literally, technically, totally inventing VR… sure yeah ok, what I meant was they poured tons of their own resources into doing VR in their own way, they’re one of the only teams that’s made an actual AAA VR game that fully embraces the concept of ‘you are a person in another world, a world that has high graphical realism.’
Virtual reality.
The point there was they turned toward innovating in other areas, that they did more or less start from scratch and invent their own concept of VR.
Your final quip about gacha games is funny.
Just look at the numbers dude, the vast majority of money to be made in gaming is by selling MTX addiction simulators.
That’s not to say there are not still people who really do actually want well crafted, truly innovative or very well put together, fully fledged games… but the way the math of capitalism works on that is uh, those kinds of endeavors are way riskier, and have way worse ROI, than selling waifus to dorks.
I hope that actual games defeat waifu simulators, we are seeing a lot of AAAs crash and burn recently, but uh, I don’t think gacha games are going anywhere… and most of the outfits with the money to be able to undertake a truly groundbreaking project?
Theyre all incompotent morons at the management level, who, after failing hard at their attempts in the last 5 ish years, are now just gonna try and hand that all over to AI, to attempt to further increase ROI.
But, normies love ‘recognizable brand franchise’, normies consistently auto-hypetrain and nostalgia-bate themselves, normies prove that having more than half a game’s budget be marketing does brainwash them very well.
Here, I’ll end with another hot take:
If, after everything that happened with Bethesda, up to the point of Starfield releasing…
You still bought Starfield on day one, or pre-ordered it?
You’re the problem, you’re the normie, you’re the person marketing and nostalgia work on, you didn’t realize your in an abusive, parasocial relationship with Bethesda.
Uh. Mutation card system? Crafting system while not unique but extracting legendary mods is differend to many games where you just farm drops untill you get the perfect roll. Power armor is also something i havent really seen done that well outside of bethesda. Also they enviromental story telling in map big as FO76 is top notch. I understand if you have trendy hate for Bethesda. I dont especially like they releasing skyrim every few years or how they made the planets in Starfield, but i get the feeling you are not sharing your own opinions. Just yelling stuff you have hears in the internet.
About portal. Valve saw an idea, bought it out and gave it a new shine. They did a good job recocnizing talent but it was as much innovation from Valve as Adobe shows when they buy new shiny software.
I had fun with back 4 blood. It was shame they stopped the support for the game so early. Also most people i see bitching about it played it at the release time when it was very unbalanced or tried to jump on the higher dificulties too early without ever learning how to really play the game.
Also about the map mutations in general. Its not a problem to be solved. Reason why some maps are so popular for example in CS or CoD is because people have learned the maps and enjoy playing the game in a way where they can antipiciate the opponents movements and know how to play the game on “high level”. Some people enjoy more random maps more for the opposite reason. Its not a problem, its a preference. You are right that it makes it harder for the noobs to jump in to the games, but that is something many companies are trying to fix with match making.
I used alien as a example because it has similiar director behind the scenes as left for dead has. You know. The another big reason why the levels feel fresh. Id argue even that the director does more for the game feeling different than the small mutations in the level layout.
About valve vr… you were talking about innovation. They did not create the vr. They arguable made a great game and pushed it to the limit what can be done right now, but in its self there is nothing inherently innovative in the mechanics, except they are very well executed.
I found it pretty obnoxius that you raise yourself above the “normies”. Especialy when im feeling like most of your opinions come from other people and from gaming echochambers instead of you thinking things yourself. Personaly i have started gaming before windows was a thing and it has been one thing i can always get passionate about.
Another thing i find obnoxius is how people always think “big game companies bosses are incompetent” i bet most of the people in those position know much more about the markets than you and i. Their sole job is to try and generate money.
Maybe its easier to think they are some cartoon level evil morons, but they are hitting their marks more times than not and we really only hear about the royal fuck ups.
And your quip about the star field. Bought it pretty late after the release on pc and on purpose tried to avoid any reviews before i finished the game. And im glad i didint. The game was not awsome, but it was not as bad as internets opinion was. Reading review can screw your perspective and make you focus on the minor inconviniences that you would ignore or not think about if somebody would not have brought those on the top if your mind.
Try sometime to test completely unknown game to you from either a demo or use the steam return policy and after you have your own opinion see if you agree with the reviews.
Ok uh, what can you do, in terms of actual gameplay mechanics, in Fallout76, that you can’t do in… basically every multiplayer, survival/craft/open world/fps game?
There are so many of those… and… FO76 basically came out around the tail end of the kind of craze for those kinds of games, they were trend chasing.
Uh lets see, Valve did make Portal, what happened was they saw a demo of a game (Narbacular Drop) being concepted at a nearby gaming college expo, and they basically hired all of them, taught them Source, gave them more team breadth and depth to work with.
Valve has… or had… a track record of doing this, in the 90s / 00s. Oh, thats a neat mod for our game: Hire them.
So yes, Valve did originally make Portal. By seeing a neat concept demo, hiring the people behind it, and then making Portal.
I mean, you can say that after 5 more years of development, F076 became a basically functional open world survival craft fps, sure, but like…
No Mans Sky basically revolutionized the concept of what you can do with procedural generation, oh and, they just kept adding more and more stuff, just to the base game, not as DLC, not as MTX.
CP77? Yeah very rough start, but uh, entirely different scope of production value, being an actually competent RPG that’s practically an ImSim in many ways, all with an absurd level of graphical fidelity.
Like, everyone just expected that game to be Grand Theft Auto 5, Cyberpunk Edition, started their standards there, and then got mad that it wasn’t at parity.
CD Projekt Red was a AA studio when they were making this.
They were not Rockstar. They were not Bethesda.
Ok, I’ll give you that PayDay2 does actually have similar map mutating dynamics, I also have not played Vermintide, we do not speak of Back 4 Blood, what an embarassment, I am also unfamiliar with Remnant.
What I was trying to get at is … map mutations is how you solve the age old FPS team v team problem of… if you just have better map knowledge, you tend to win, so this causes a problem where you either have to keep pumping out new maps to keep things fresh, or you have to have a bunch of other balancing gameplay mechanics to have variety from there.
But the fundamental problem is that vets will clown noobs all the time, often by just simply having the maps memorized, angles and positions figured out, etc.
Also Alien Isolation has pretty good monster AI that works with the rest of the game design, but no, thats not mutating maps.
Open world maps that move objective markers around are not mutating maps.
HellDivers 2 is a good example of doing proc gen maps… but again, thats an extraction shooter, co-op shooter type thing.
Nobody, that I am aware of, has pulled this off for mass PvP battles, like, 16-32+ vs 16-32+ players.
As for Valve not literally, technically, totally inventing VR… sure yeah ok, what I meant was they poured tons of their own resources into doing VR in their own way, they’re one of the only teams that’s made an actual AAA VR game that fully embraces the concept of ‘you are a person in another world, a world that has high graphical realism.’
Virtual reality.
The point there was they turned toward innovating in other areas, that they did more or less start from scratch and invent their own concept of VR.
Your final quip about gacha games is funny.
Just look at the numbers dude, the vast majority of money to be made in gaming is by selling MTX addiction simulators.
That’s not to say there are not still people who really do actually want well crafted, truly innovative or very well put together, fully fledged games… but the way the math of capitalism works on that is uh, those kinds of endeavors are way riskier, and have way worse ROI, than selling waifus to dorks.
I hope that actual games defeat waifu simulators, we are seeing a lot of AAAs crash and burn recently, but uh, I don’t think gacha games are going anywhere… and most of the outfits with the money to be able to undertake a truly groundbreaking project?
Theyre all incompotent morons at the management level, who, after failing hard at their attempts in the last 5 ish years, are now just gonna try and hand that all over to AI, to attempt to further increase ROI.
But, normies love ‘recognizable brand franchise’, normies consistently auto-hypetrain and nostalgia-bate themselves, normies prove that having more than half a game’s budget be marketing does brainwash them very well.
Here, I’ll end with another hot take:
If, after everything that happened with Bethesda, up to the point of Starfield releasing…
You still bought Starfield on day one, or pre-ordered it?
You’re the problem, you’re the normie, you’re the person marketing and nostalgia work on, you didn’t realize your in an abusive, parasocial relationship with Bethesda.
Remember, no pre-orders.
Uh. Mutation card system? Crafting system while not unique but extracting legendary mods is differend to many games where you just farm drops untill you get the perfect roll. Power armor is also something i havent really seen done that well outside of bethesda. Also they enviromental story telling in map big as FO76 is top notch. I understand if you have trendy hate for Bethesda. I dont especially like they releasing skyrim every few years or how they made the planets in Starfield, but i get the feeling you are not sharing your own opinions. Just yelling stuff you have hears in the internet.
About portal. Valve saw an idea, bought it out and gave it a new shine. They did a good job recocnizing talent but it was as much innovation from Valve as Adobe shows when they buy new shiny software.
I had fun with back 4 blood. It was shame they stopped the support for the game so early. Also most people i see bitching about it played it at the release time when it was very unbalanced or tried to jump on the higher dificulties too early without ever learning how to really play the game.
Also about the map mutations in general. Its not a problem to be solved. Reason why some maps are so popular for example in CS or CoD is because people have learned the maps and enjoy playing the game in a way where they can antipiciate the opponents movements and know how to play the game on “high level”. Some people enjoy more random maps more for the opposite reason. Its not a problem, its a preference. You are right that it makes it harder for the noobs to jump in to the games, but that is something many companies are trying to fix with match making.
I used alien as a example because it has similiar director behind the scenes as left for dead has. You know. The another big reason why the levels feel fresh. Id argue even that the director does more for the game feeling different than the small mutations in the level layout.
About valve vr… you were talking about innovation. They did not create the vr. They arguable made a great game and pushed it to the limit what can be done right now, but in its self there is nothing inherently innovative in the mechanics, except they are very well executed.
I found it pretty obnoxius that you raise yourself above the “normies”. Especialy when im feeling like most of your opinions come from other people and from gaming echochambers instead of you thinking things yourself. Personaly i have started gaming before windows was a thing and it has been one thing i can always get passionate about.
Another thing i find obnoxius is how people always think “big game companies bosses are incompetent” i bet most of the people in those position know much more about the markets than you and i. Their sole job is to try and generate money. Maybe its easier to think they are some cartoon level evil morons, but they are hitting their marks more times than not and we really only hear about the royal fuck ups.
And your quip about the star field. Bought it pretty late after the release on pc and on purpose tried to avoid any reviews before i finished the game. And im glad i didint. The game was not awsome, but it was not as bad as internets opinion was. Reading review can screw your perspective and make you focus on the minor inconviniences that you would ignore or not think about if somebody would not have brought those on the top if your mind.
Try sometime to test completely unknown game to you from either a demo or use the steam return policy and after you have your own opinion see if you agree with the reviews.