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| quick save and more articulating watch dogs' failures by jeep 05/29/2014, 12:00pm PDT | ||||
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| there should be net zero space between save points because quicksave needs to be available at all times. I'm having fun all the way through a portal map but if I called for delivery and it shows up like halfway through can I not hit f6 and then quit? then reload to the same point after I'm done eating? is that not one of the most tuned-to-the-save points games ever? I don't mind that there's some types of timed missions that require it, particularly when those are side quests so I can just skip them. 15 years ago buzzard told me there's some game design stuff that doesn't work with quicksave. I am willing to forego this, and I'm one of the fools who thinks video games are a respectable art form. if I'm irritated enough with some gameplay that I start savescumming it's just a matter of another hour or two before I quit and uninstall anyway. maybe I come back later with cheat stuff, crack the game open and look at its guts, but more likely I set it aside forever.
outside of quicksaves which is a matter of taste I figure, I want to try to get to a clear statement as to why this game is broken, and broken from its core. watch dogs only had to be a near-future gta3. hell a near-future sleeping dogs would have been fine too. I have no other requirements. I don't need any great leap in game design, just a smallish gta city full of hacking targets and objects would have been enough to make it great fun. this thing isn't overambitious and falling short, though. they were aiming for exactly "near future gta" and nothing more and just got nowhere close. I'm not a huge fan of the carmack amusement park thing but even within that analogy I should be able to go on the rides I want, right? in this you can't pick up a couple missions and then go do whichever or start them whenever, you can't just drop a non-timed mission once the game drops it on you without the game resetting you, and every single side thing you did, to before you were assigned the mission. you can't use the fucking train to go from here to there to even get to the place the mission happens, you have to suffer through the indignity of horrible driving controls to get to the start of the game-assigned mission and then do more driving to accomplish half the missions they've asked me to do for the main plot. even if you spent the last hour hacking people and unlocking shit on the map, all the progress, unlocks, whatever with open world fun stuff is just gone if you quit out of or restart the mission the game forced on you. really basic thinking about game design and how people like to play these games should have forced them to fix it, I can't imagine zero people involved in this didn't spot it, and I can already tell any excuse I hear is going to be like shadowrun returns' "oh implementing basic features is hard." the fix was "coding some shit to happen in order, and other shit to happen asynchronously" and it's just fucking awful to deal with this amateur hour bullshit. this isn't even really about quicksaves or whatever, this is the same goddamned problems that held back dxhr on first release except for this one they made a whole game out of those two problems: the player is artificially limited from engaging in the best part of the gameplay, and then the player is funneled through the worst part of the gameplay to unlock more variety. dxhr needs you to burn precious battery to do a stealth non-kill takedown, which isn't the whole game but is definitely the peak of it, and it should be free instead of costing you limited resources. dxhr forces you through just pathetic boss fights to get to the next chapter of the game where there's more stuff to do. in watch dogs the peak gameplay so far, the ability to be really clever with hacking through a set piece, is limited to one type of mission instead of ubi taking the necessary time to integrate rewarding clever use of peak gameplay into whole world. and then the player is funneled through the worst part of the gameplay, which in this case is driving anything but a dirtbike. if a third title comes out of quebec with this shit we'll christen it 'montreal game design.' I mentioned it in the op but this I think is just really reinforcing why I thought saint's row 4 was goty last year. that game got every fucking thing right that this one gets wrong. |
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