I still laugh at the one-liners the PC gives after the boss fights. I fuckin’ loved that about the first one. You’re a silent protagonist, except during these random awkward moments after defeating a boss and then you just deliver the dumbest puns and jokes unexpectedly.
So many I can’t even narrow down a specific one. Many new titles have tutorials that go over generic bullshit like how to move and aim and then don’t tell you how to do anything that’s actually unique to the game itself. I hate that shit.
Really hate having a tutorial objective of “put the goober in the jibjab” but then it doesn’t explain what the fuck either of those things are, and it’s not obvious by just looking at the situation.
Oh, The Ascent did this. Tells you to hack something early on; does not tell you how this is achieved. Everything up to that point was walk up to thing and press A/X. To hack you have to HOLD A/X. But it doesn’t say that. I had to look it up online. Which is stupid.
Dark Souls also. But… It’s hard to be mad at that one, since being vague is literally purposeful game design with those. 🤷🏻♂️
The best systems I’ve seen so far are super new and janky because they use AI and you just actually fucking talk to them, and are also only in some niche indie games atm. It’s what I’ve always dreamed to be the future of dialogue systems in games since getting into RPGs way back in the 90’s. The systems themselves are perfect; but the AI still has a little ways to go.
Morrowind similarly used this dialogue system, and I truly do like it a lot more than most others, even with a lot of options because it feels more like naturally discovering information and acting up on it, rather than just having a threshold on your stats, or completing quest triggers.
The original is still my favorite. There are some awesome ROM hacks that provide competitive 2-player mode, while keeping the original rules, scoring and graphics.
Marketing. It generally being a good game and part of a beloved series, set in a beloved franchise (D&D). WOTC has been marketing and growing the Hells out of D&D lately. The recent movie and this game are part of that.
The fuss seems to be mostly just the Japanese developers getting butthurt that people in the west got bored of their simplistic combat systems and random encounters, and came up with a term to differentiate the games that, at the time were entirely developed in Japan, that fit this style.
It’s not the Japanese part that made them disliked more. It was the style of gameplay they offered. If you played one, you played them all, basically. They are barely RPGs, taking a more linear, choiceless approach to not only character creation, but dialogue options if even offered, are generally “yes/no” responses to questions that don’t have any real impact.
It took the big developers of these games way too long to actually listen to fans’ very valid criticisms and make changes to these systems, and they still very much keep so many more traditions that the term endures.
Fuck Hi-Rez for making a really good Tribes game and then abandoning it for Smite. I sure hope they merely licensed the name and don’t hold rights to the entire IP, cuz I want a good, modern Tribes game so bad.
These are all things that have existed in all of their RPGs since Arena. These aren’t empty promises, but they’re also not something to be super hyped on.