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Comment by Fragoel2 | Hacker News Reader

Apparently making the same game over and over (with different intellectual property to tie it up) does not pay off.

It seems to work for most AAA games.. In fact they usually dont even bother changing IP

eg. assassins creed series, farcry series, call of duty series, madden series, etc. etc.

Look at the ridiculously popular battle-royale games like fortnight.. They are pretty much clones of each other, and that gameplay has been done (better) decades ago.

Battle royale games were done better decades ago? I can't even think of a battle royale game from the 90s.

quake, unreal tournament, tribes, battlefield, planetside.. Deathmatch with many players. Same thing pretty much, but with more action.

The fundamental difference between all of those games and what I would consider a battle royale game is you only get 1 life.

As an aside, I loved Tribes 2 construction mod.

I dont know but I'd bet theres an old quake mod that makes that small change.

it's not a small change, it completely changes the style and feel of the game play.

Just stop. You clearly have no idea what a Battle Royale game is.

Networked DOOM would like a word.

Last I recall from playing unreal 2004, there is a slider to select how many life players have when starting a death match.

Battle royale was available, long before battle royale was cool.

There were also a lot of other gameplay available on top of death match, all built in: team death match, assault, onslaught, capture the flags, domination, etc...

No, you need the blue circle, looting and big maps as well. Just having one life is not enough.

There is looting. Weapons, ammo and equipment appear in defined locations at various times.

If you look at good players who win their games, it's a lot about being at the right place at the right time. Get the best stuff and locations for yourself and don't let opponents have anything.

It's not the same kind of looting. In Battle Royale you need to search through houses, locations and move over the map to gather loot and when you kill someone you take their gear. Loot doesn't spawn after start and it's definitely not in defined locations.

Sorry, but you're talking about something completely different.

I think this is more of a current iteration of BR. I would say BR is a little more generic than this. My idea of it, which might not be exactly right I will admit, is just this: A battle royale game is last-man-standing or winner-take-all. The looting, houses, starting gear -- this all seems like variation more than essential.

It seems like what you're describing is definitely the mainstream take on the genre right now, but I think you could make another variant that isn't like the popular ones today but is still a BR.

Fair enough, I guess it's subjective what the actual minimum requirement is but I kind of agree with the Wikipedia article personally: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_royale_game

Reasonable.

BR is a very different type of game and especially Fortnight has VERY different game play. It plays nothing like quake or ut. It's much closer to counter strike but with a higher level of tension.

Also, add a giant map and an exploration/preparation period where most players are searching for weapons before fighting anyone.

> Same thing pretty much, but with more action.

That's exactly why we play BR games.

These days I play mostly PUBG. Before that, Day of Infamy. Before that, Insurgency. Notice a trend? Each one of those games has a lot at stake (relatively speaking) when you get into an engagement. If you die, you sit out for a while. They're about communication and coordination between players on the same team.

PUBG (and Fortnite, though that's not my preference) take it to a whole other level. It's not uncommon for me to play a game of PUBG where the first 10-15 minutes is spent either not encountering anyone or spotting them before they spot me and purposefully avoiding them. It's about tactics - either coordination with your squad, or maneuvering into a better position for the next phase of the game, or waiting until someone you're stalking has engaged someone else before engaging them.

Because the preparation is longer, there's more at risk when you actually engage, and the anticipation builds to a crescendo. So, yeah - there may only be seconds of "action" in a PUBG match, but that's the whole point.

Ok then, thats been done many times ages ago in the likes of ARMA, rainbow 6, Operation flashpoint.. etc.

Those are squad-based tactical military shooters focused on realism, yet another genre completely different from battle royales!

Here, watch this:

https://youtu.be/ffryiLmQb1U

This is Fortnite build battling. BR as a whole just refers to a game ruleset that forces and encourages a last-man-standing situation. That part has been done before there was a video game. But the details of what's being communicated are different. They're different even between Rust and PUBG, despite both of them being military styled. Fortnite is in a class of its own since it's cartoonish and the building and mobility options present a lot of unique options. Even comparisons to Minecraft don't fit since the build system is different.

Performing jadedness about the games being "done before" is basically like saying new movies are just collections of old cliches. Even when they are, they end up saying something different.

Battlefield usually annoyed me when I would spend minutes traveling back to the scene of the action. In Fortnite I would spend minutes just trying to find anyone on the map at all sometimes. It feels like I'm doing a lot, lot more of the unfun stuff (traveling) than the fun stuff (shooting and outmaneuvering the opponents). I just can't get into it myself.

I'll just keep playing Quake (actually I'm mainly playing puzzles and graphic novels right now) until people get tired of Battle Royale modes and need a break from them.

unreal tournament and counter strike for sure. Unreal tournament had an option to limit the number of life, not that is was common to use.

Unreal and Fortnight are made by the same company by the way. It's really a reskin with adjusted gameplay settings.

Yeah but in those you have some mechanics to use. Telltalle took the adventure game formula, which is mostly exploration and puzzles, and dumbed it down until you were left with linear exploration and kindergarten puzzles. I stopped looking at their titles ages ago because while I grew up with adventure games, the Telltale titles ain't that any more.

Edit: also, games made after a movie license (or a game license, Minecraft Story, wtf?) tend to be crap. Especially when they're story based so basically you're replaying the movie that you've already seen.

> Especially when they're story based so basically you're replaying the movie that you've already seen.

Weren't most of Telltale's stories original? I didn't play any of the others, but I know the Borderlands and Batman ones were.

Maybe, if you mean as original as they can be within the restrictions of the franchise.

Personally, I played Borderlands but I never stopped and thought "oh gee, it would be nice to find out more about their background story". I just looked for the next thing to shoot. As for Batman... saturation anyone?

Are you saying that Batman games in general don't sell well?

I'm talking for myself. I stopped at like 3 movies and one game (Arkham Asylum was nice, but I didn't want more of the same), then lost interest completely.

Telltale's games since The Walking Dead became narrative focused, essentially the interactive version of a "choose-your-own-adventure" book. Personally I loved the format since I hated the cartoon logic behind a lot of adventure game puzzles, but Telltale never evolved it. Supermassive Games (Until Dawn) and Dontnod (Life is Strange) both showed that you can expand on the concept and tell interesting stories.

I also liked that TWD was narratively focused and more about dialogue and moral dilemmas than puzzles; puzzles in adventure games almost always feel artificial to me. I just wish TWD's dilemmas had resulted in more varied consequences, and of course more plot branching.

They're much closer to the Visual Novel genre then the Adventure Games formula. But even than, most really good VNs that come out of Japan have branching stories. It's dependency on Anime Harem tropes and fanservice notwithstanding, many of the stories (Steins;Gate, Fate/Stay Night comes to mind) branch significantly and well beyond the "600 dead end bad endings and 1 good ending". They're well written and (again, once you get past the fact that you have to rummage through a sex scene you're totally not interested in ever seeing to get to a particular ending) engaging.

Telltale had a chance to take the Visual Novel, clean it up some for more Western sensibilities, and really create a market here for the genre.

Instead you just got a badly rendered machina. It was unfortunate.

That said, I've heard great things about the writing for Minecraft Story from adults. So, you know. If your expectations are appropriate, there's room to be impressed.

Visual Novel is an apt description, though I'll disagree with you on one thing: most Japanese visual novels back when I last checked them, which was in the 90s/early 00s, were terrible. And I mean, really, embarrassingly terrible, and not just for their random and bizarre sex scenes, but overall badly written and cliched. Some of it could be chalked up to poor English translations, but most of it was mind-numbing cliches and nonsensical situations you'd laugh at if found in a book or movie, and which you had to repetitively click through.

That said, yes, I think The Walking Dead Season could accurately be described as a Visual Novel with very little branching, more than a full-fledged point-and-click adventure. I think it succeeds at this; Lee's story is certainly more interesting than whatever happens with Rick & crew in the tremendously repetitive TV show. I can see how Telltale's formula gets repetitive for subsequent games, since it's essentially a one trick pony, but still... I was entertained for one season :)

Fate Stay Night doesn't really branch. It just makes you play it 3 times for 3 different versions of the story. There's very little interactivity, it's more like an author wrote 3 drafts of the same novel where different things happen in each draft than a work of interactive fiction.

The games did have significant differences, but the extensive reuse of very old technology had a big negative impact on both development costs and reviews.

Can someone explain more about "making the same game over and over"? I don't know anything about these games. Were they all similar, despite being different franchises?

Telltale's games tended to utilise similar mechanics across their games. They'd generally follow a linear storyline to certain points where players could make choices that changed some outcomes, along with limited scene exploration and the use of quick-time events. There was a lot of noise made about player decisions affecting the overall outcome of the story, but not everybody would agree that this was the case.

They all shared the same narrative focus and gameplay mechanics of titles in the "adventure" game genre (inspect environment, walk around, quick time events, make decisions in conversation or events that at least promised branches in storyline.) Typically the engine and graphics styles were roughly the same, though improved as time progressed (to the point where you often felt they were battling the old engine).

I understand the limitations to this style and the problems became pronounced as time progressed but to have a "Telltale take" on a property, I roughly knew what kind of experience I was getting and at least for a while made me cautiously optimistic for the release (though I may be a minority.)

Sounds like those Sierra games. Those hacks.

Yup. LucasArts too obviously. It doesn't really matter if the gameplay is identical and the puzzles similar and formulaic if the story is interesting and the game is fun. Perhaps there's just no appetite for the adventure genre anymore?

Or there is appetite, just not at the speed at which Telltale was pushing out sequels. They have clearly been successful for a while (otherwise hardly anybody would be noticing their demise), but while sequels are comfortably predictable compared to the lottery ticket of a fresh launch, they also come with an inherent limitation: the market for a sequel can be no bigger than the number of people who have already consumed the iteration before and still want more. There will always be losses. Repeat that a few times and numbers will be predictably low. Do the same at a high release cadence and you also lose those who might eventually want a sequel, but not at the prescribed sped, they may not even have finished the previous iteration. Consumers who built up a consumption backlog will lose interest in the whole franchise because they are immune to new release hype.

Classic adventure games thrived on the originality of their settings and characters.

The Sierra DNA is there, but on a much, much more accessible level (for better or worse depending on how you want to take on the narrative or the game.)

All the games followed the same basic gameplay roadmap. Event happens -> Talk to other characters -> Another event happens

Usually the events were cutscenes or QTEs (timed button presses) that you either pass or get a gameover if you fail too many.

Now this wouldn't be an issue if the games were marketed as such but instead they tried to present them with the taglines "Your choices have consequences" while it was clearly not the case. You could run the same game twice making completely opposite choices and the end results were always the same; sometimes a character would die but at most that just resulted in some extra dialogue since those characters were designed to be non essential.

Here is an example of what I mean: Alice is a fugitive on the run and needs a car so she can:

1)Go to her friend Bob and have him drive the car after asking him 2)Threaten Bob to drive her around

In the end Bob is always driving the car and his opinion of you doesn't matter outside a throwaway line where he says "Hey, you owe me!" or "Hey, you're a jerk!"

The illusion of choice is very apparent at times even DURING the game since the events occurring are just too limiting.

It didn't help that Life is Strange and the Witcher 3 came out and had more in depth consequences and exploration of these systems.

I haven't played any of these games either, and the kinds of "press a button in time to make stuff happen" events you describe are something I really hate in games, so I don't think I will.

That said, your description of the illusion of choice in the story... sounds like every story-based videogame ever. I've been playing games since the 90s, and I can't really think of any such games off the top of my head where your choices will lead you down a completely different path.

Commonly the game will have different ending cutscenes depending on your choices, but the main story quest always takes you to the same locations.

Deus Ex was lauded for giving you choices, but you always took the same general path through the game. Maybe you saved that character and then you meet him again for a short conversation much later - but it didn't really matter.

Planescape Torment is often described as the best story-driven RPG ever written. While it had lots of optional sidequests and offered the option to roleplay your character in loads of different ways, in the end you always took the same path through the main storyline.

These are just two examples of higly rated, character- and story-driven games that happen to be among my favorite games of all time.

It's understandable, after all creating content costs money, and content that won't be seen except by a tiny minority of players seems like a sunk cost to the developers.

I agree somewhat; it's pretty difficult to create a COMPLETELY different game. However the second act in Witcher 2 was quite different depending on your choice in the first act to the point that replaying it adds a lof of depth to the overall story and presentation. I heard the 3rd game is just as impressive but I haven't been able to experience it myself

Meanwhile, Deus Ex was revolutionary because it gave you a lot of choice in terms of gameplay variety. Your mission could be to enter a building and just some of the ways could be:

A)Sneak Inside through vents B)Bribe a guard C)Impersonate an employee finding a loose ID card D)Use your high jump to go through the roof E)Shoot your way in F)Use a keypad by overhearing the password from a guard E)Use an explosive to break down a wall

Telltale games did neither of these things and got left behind pretty quickly when it failed to innovate off the success of the Walking Dead

I played The Wolf Among Us twice through. I thought the story was very interesting, and wanted to see what happened if you did everything different. Obviously you know a lot of content is going to be re-used, but by and large probably 95% of it was unchanged. It lowered my opinion substancially, though I still liked it more as a movie/TV show, than a game.

While story based games do have to fight combinatorial explosion of possibilities, games like Planescape Tormet deal with that by having actual gameplay: random encounters, item drops, side quests, leveling up. All the traditional RPG mechanics.

Life is Strange was also panned for having the illusion of choice, but I think was able to resist some of that criticism due to the strength of the story, and the different environment: most of the game is peaceful and sullen, not thrilling, so the limited gameplay isn't necessarily a problem.

Farenheit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fahrenheit_(2005_video_game)

There are actually quite a few games that I enjoy because your actions actually mattered in the game, and I highly recommend you try it if you enjoy a good story.

Heavy Rain and Detroit: Become Human are excellent examples in that your choices actually matter. For example, it's possible to lose a character much earlier on and drastically change how the whole story plays out, or choose an action which entirely changes a few 'stages' you proceed to. There are also a lot of different versions of the ending, either by showing totally different ending scenes, or tweaking some scenes with different characters, or additional cutscenes that change the whole meaning of the ending.Gameplay was also very satisfying for both games, from the things you can do in each stage or the Quick Time Events (QTE) which also change how the story plays out.

In comparison to Telltale's games which are supposed to be about how your choices matter, the only thing that gets affected are some throwaway dialogue and maybe a few short scenes. QTEs are also laughably simple and nearly impossible to fail, and if you do fail you just restart in the last scene anyway.

As others have posted, the game play of all of them are largely the same. They were really fighting their game engine which really limited what they could do. For example, at one point in one of their games the characters had to go into a building and I wondered how they were going to do that because of the limits of the engine. They just played a cut scene instead of having the player do it.

The strengths were in the writing and voice acting.

Sad that an adventure game studio could die off for this reason when "Call of Duty" is pretty much the same game every year and somehow manages to be one of the best selling franchises of all time.

Just because they make adventure games they aren't superior.

Also your argument is flawed. After all, all football matches are the same.

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