This week’s episode takes a look at Sony’s State of Play, Ubisoft Forward and Nintendo Direct, and all of the games revealed in each conference. In addition, cryptocurrency gets all the reaction it deserves. Jonah expresses an unpopular GoldenEye 64 opinion, too.
Let us know what you think.
There was a lot of shocking news in the past week — unfortunately, Jonah was at PAX East, so last week’s episode ended up not being published. But there’s still more news this week.
The news includes:
Let us know what you think.
I remember a day when old RPG games had either a level cap or a definite ending. From Pool of Radiance to Secrets of the Silver Blades to Final Fantasy the game had a final boss or stage and often had some type of level cap. Today, gamers don’t want it to end, they’d rather have the option to wonder around aimlessly or completing minor quests in order to soak up every ounce of money they spent on the title.
Now even Bethesda is saying “we’ve learned our lesson” from the whiplash of ending their game title and capping levels. Gamers want to go back and re-try content they missed, they want to run side quests and talk to everyone in the world they want to grind themselves to über powerful levels and become a god in their fantasy world. Can you blame them?
You can’t really blame them for wanting to maximize the content, although it’s slightly more evolved than RPG’s of old. Perhaps it was World of Warcraft and other MMORPG’s that brought us to the stage in life where we all want to squeeze every last RPG dime out of the title. As a kid I wondered the world of Hyrule and covered every tile of graphical color, burned every bush, bombed every stone looking for all the content. However, even Zelda had an end with scrolling credits – you didn’t just land on a platform with your master sword and a dream.
Other titles have used level caps to limit you and draw you into the next release of the game. This was popular in the D&D world because the game is designed to target specific levels of difficulty. They may only allow you to gain level 10 because the enemies are no tougher than level 13, allowing the challenge to be good but not overwhelming. If they allow you to get to level 50 they’d have to design the game so all the enemies grow powerful along with you — that’s not always a desired result.
Final Fantasy is a popular franchise that typically allows you to grow infinitely powerful depending on how much time you want to spend repeat killing the same enemies. Gamers aren’t always into the grind, they just want to grind “enough” to make the challenges a little more do-able.
Today, however, with larger storage capacity, larger development teams and the desire to build more value into your gameplay experience titles have dozens of side quests and sub-plots that are totally optional. The result of so many sub-quests results in a player who is much more powerful at the end of those quests compared to a player who sticks to the narrow path of the main plot. So, games much grow dynamically challenging to keep the fun per dollar high.
Do you like your RPG’s to have a definite end and a high but capped level?
This week Jonah and Jordan go it alone without Paul, which is unfortunately since the Gaming Flashback is the classic Nintendo 64 title Paper Mario. It might be just as well as the events of the last week made the crew ramble on about the industry at length, making the post much longer than usual.
This week’s impressive news items:
Lots of Reader Feedback, but no Question of the Week this week – just too much show.
Hi guys.
Thanks as always 🙂
I played a lot of Magic the Gathering because a new expansion was released. And since wrath of the Koch king classic was released for WoW I got back to it for a lot of hours 🙂
Regarding the topics: I have a simple stereo setup at my pc, because most of the time I play with headset anyway to talk to my friends in discord or listen to music. In my living room I have good 5.1 setup with a new receiver and 5 nice Teufel speakers 🙂
X-com: I played it 10 years ago but I don’t think I will replay it. Maybe … we will see.
Pac-Man 4 sound interesting… maybe I will check it out 🙂
Kirby Games: I think the only Kirby game that I have played is the one for the first game Boy back in the days. Good old times when you spend a lot of time to a single game!
The other games I barely know … i have heard of fire emblem but never played it :/
Please stay healthy and keep on gaming!
Greetings from Germany
Ralf