Hacker News Reader

Comment by gassed | Hacker News Reader

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?

View on HN

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.

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.

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

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.)

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com