Comment on Control - the first game to get me to turn on cheats in decades

Aurix@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

Nah, Control was gameplay wise jank. I see in fact more and more modern games with terrible takes on encounter design. I grew up with frame tight games. They were at times brutally hard and speed runs do end there with deaths to normal mechanics. However you could systematically learn the timings, patterns in a pleasant way until you got it right. You might fail at them crushingly, but you know quickly a no-hit run would be possible and truly unfair situations are quite rare even on the highest difficulties.

Not so the past few years it seems. The gamer press lets many games get away with actually terrible game design. Off camera attacks, bad tells, awfully tight frame windows, multiple enemies which can on a dice roll attack unfairly together into undodgeable situations and so on. And while I do think the extremely tightened game design I prefer limits creativity, I do expect from those games who make it a bit wonky at times that they know their place about it and loosen the demand on the player.

Quickly the criticism on this gets drown out by the hardcore “git gud” crowd which probably never went past half the game. And then there is another fraction of players, who learn to cheese the systems as in exploiting high DPS outputs to reduce the interaction with the encounter design.

Back to Control, yes, I was similarly very frustrated by some gameplay sections and the story doesn’t pass a basic writing course test. It sets up this wonderful intrigue in the beginning and then forgets that a story needs something like stakes and tension. And towards the end it just drips along until it ends.

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