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Video game thread.
I played return to moria this past two weeks. It's a survival crafting game. Gameplay wise it is fairly standard for the genre. The setting of middle earth is fun. I'm not a massive LOTR nerd, so I'm sure I missed some subtleties.
There are some mechanics that definitely make the game better suited for co-op. I played it alone and felt like I was missing out. Storage sizes always felt too small, there were legendary gear items that you could only carry one of, and you could be picked up upon death by a comrade if you had one. I eventually downloaded a mod to fix the first two issues. It expanded storage and allowed carrying multiple legendary items.
Progression happens entirely through gear. And gear drops on death. Corpse runs were not as brutal as I feared. The game seemed to handle agro and grave placement in a way that helped corpse runs.
Resource collecting was generally pretty standard but sometimes I'd find myself making fun little mining platforms to get higher.
The map is procedurally generated, but it's more like pre-made rooms that are stuck together in an odd assortment rather than fully new terrain each time.
Navigation was tricky with the map not helping much except to provide general directions. I ended memorizing a lot of tunnel layouts in order to get where I needed to go.
Replayability felt low. I didn't want to totally start from scratch after getting used to all my awesome gear. The next update is supposedly adding NPCs for bases, I'll probably replay the game when that comes out.
Meta-gaming question I have is: what are some game stories that can only function in the form of a game. Archetypal games that were bound to happen at some point.
Games have art, music, story as components. The unique part is the interactive component with the player. A game like SpecOps:TheLine could function as a book. Spitballing a few famous tropes.
game has no story. pure skill expression.
gameplay making sure the player understands the story.
games that setup difficulty as an exclusive club:
games where the entire main story is a lie that the player can optionally uncover
morality where being evil makes the game easier
EDIT: actually, I'm going to generalize this a bit: "Science Sandbox" is a unique video game genre. Kerbal Space Program is the obvious one, but it also works for the soft sciences, as below.
It would be really difficult to do something like "The Interstate Anarchy model of international relations is true. Discover (or blindly follow) the constraints this places on a country and win, or miss (or defy) those constraints and lose.", as described in the Teaching Paradox series of blog posts.
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