I do, but I'm also not normal, right? (Gaming)

by Kahzgul, Thursday, August 10, 2017, 16:46 (2662 days ago) @ Korny

So I've never heard of this game, but it sounds cool. I'm also very unlikely to play it any time soon, because my backlog of games is extensive (having a kid, I pretty much only get to play after he goes to bed, and then after the wife and I watch something on TV, so... rarely). BUT... In my single years I would totally buy this. Hell, I will likely buy it in the future, too. It sounds awesome on a purely mechanical level. I'm intrigued.

That being said, I'm also an outlier. I've played more games than most humans. Heck, it was my job for two glorious weeks to play every FPS game currently for sale at GameStop as "market research" to help fine tune Call of Duty's online multiplayer. I don't even remember all the games I played (it was like 5 a day, just to ensure I got to play a bit of all of them). My point is, I've seen some shit. I know games, I've played games. And, in the last five years or so, I've really been searching for games with novel mechanics that draw me in.

Back in the old days of Mac Gaming (Yes, i'm one of those), before every game in a genre was basically the same game reskinned, there were some great games like Quarterstaff, which featured interactive characters you could talk to, or Wizardry, which invented prestige classes, though no one knew that's what they'd be called when DnD finally did the same thing years later, or Citadel, which had too many novel features to include here, but I'll list a few: Parentage and upbringing determined your starting stats and available classes, spells were discovered as graffiti in the lower levels on the dungeon, so if you never looked at the walls you'd miss some important ones, though you could always experiment by randomly mixing runes to see if a new effect occurred, and combat was a 2D map where you could move freely and attack anyone within the radius on your weapon - all things I'd never seen before.

Now, as time has passed, we have a shorthand for most games. A yellow ! means they have a quest for you, good items are Purple, For some reason the entire way the game is played changes if you hit max level (seriously I hate that design element of modern games). It's... boring. Especially when games don't invest in a story to keep you hooked. Like, WHY should I spend my limited free time playing your game which is the same as everyone else's game? I played all of 5 minutes of the latest CoD because holy shit it's basically Destiny. Think bigger, guys.

So here you present me with a question: Do I want my games to surprise me? The answer is a resounding YES. I do. I have grown bored of the tired tropes of triple-A tripe. I yearn for the novel, the original, the unexpected. Save the Date was a revelation to me. Horizon Zero Dawn was a delightful surprise. I did not even bother buying Mass Effect Andromeda despite being enthralled with ME3's multiplayer. In a space where anything you can think to make is possible, making the same old thing is lazy at best. And I get it. The formula for corporate profits is minimal investment for maximal return. This is why Madden is just a stat update with 1 new feature every year. And why CoD is now aping Destiny. And why freemium games that are basically slot machines couched in competitive gameplay are all the rage (Hearthstone, anyone?).

If you don't game as much as I do, if you haven't lived through the development of the gamer shorthand and seen what it was when no one agreed on what it had to be, then you probably like that you can pick up any game and "get it" right away. I certainly did for a while. But I've changed. And now I want to be surprised.