Some more notable games. (Gaming)

by EffortlessFury , Sunday, January 02, 2022, 15:58 (1056 days ago) @ cheapLEY

Halo Infinit
I'm still not sure about this. I had a good time playing through the campaign, but I didn't do much of the open world stuff, and I think it was actively bad design decision. It's not additive to Halo (at least not in the way 343 implemented it).

This is a bit of a divisive topic. Some say that an open world adds nothing to Halo, others say it's the future (and of course there's a spectrum of opinions in-between). The implementation isn't fantastic; it certainly bears the scars of its trouble development. That said, I greatly enjoyed what was implemented to the point that I've nearly cleared the entire map of all objectives and collectibles. The design definitely needs to be improved going forward; they can't get away with doing the exact same thing next go around.

Rescuing Marines should have a reduced focus now that some semblance of strength has been established for the UNSC. FOBs make far less sense; perhaps rather than recovering lost territory, it's about pushing forward and establishing new bases. Maybe even incorporate a little bit of Halo Wars flavor into the mix.

I do genuinely believe an open world is not only well suited to Halo but absolutely has a place in the series when done well. I get that some folks don't really care about being able to explore the world as if it is an actual place, but I know myself and plenty of folk have always wanted that, explicitly or implicitly. Despite its open spaces, AotCR does not strike me as a logically designed location from a lore perspective. It might make more sense if you had the context of how it was situated within the ring by having its entrance accessible from the ring, rather than being dropped in from a what amounts to a dead end.

Not being able to go back and replay those missions without starting over is something they need to fix, too.

They're aware and will be doing so, so that's good.

Warframe
It's just fun, y'all. You think your Guardian feels powerful? Your Guardian is a fucking chump. Warframe is Powercreep: The Game, and it's an absolute blast. Building out guns and frames with stupidly powerful mods and laying waste to everything the game throws at you is just joyful.

I played this for a while. It's fun, but perhaps a little too grindy, and I'm always overwhelmed with figuring out what I should be doing next.

Genshin Impact
This game is legitimately great. It's good, not just good "for a free to play game." It's legitimately one of the best, most well designed games I've ever played. It's just a joy to play with fun exploration, fun combat, fun stories to experience, great characters. I know at least one Bungie dev that plays this game a lot, and I genuinely hope he's taking notes. The open world of Genshin is just enormously fun to hang out it in, and it's rewarding to just run around a do open world activities. It's filled with puzzles. Some are large and involved, lots are very small and simple, but they're all fun to engage with and rewarding to complete (both in terms of just joy of completing the challenge and also in the drops you can use to level up characters or gear). There is no Two Tokens and a Blue equivalent here--activities that take a tenth the amount of time as any Public Event are far more rewarding with tangible rewards for your characters.

Agreed. Even being a gacha, I feel like the money I spend on it is well worth it (just don't buy currency directly, that's the typical rip-off). Sure, sometimes I don't get all the characters I want, but I have every 4* and a good number of 5*s, and that's far more than I have time to build out and utilize. I could stop spending money on the game and be set for a long time as a pure F2P player. The game is incredibly generous for its quality level.

The one thing that sucks about Genshin that also sucks about Destiny is the limited time events that contain narrative, but Genshin still wins out here as that narrative is never essential. Anything that progresses the state of the world is permanent (to be fair, it helps that the game is solo with co-op as an option rather than a shared living space). The narrative events are also not padded out with ridiculously time-consuming requirements. The events last around a month but I could finish most of them in a single day if I really wanted/needed to.

I've cited Genshin when giving feedback to Bungie (in a context where it was appropriate to do so). I'm sure they're well aware, at the very least.