The Ducker Method Of Purchasing Games

[andrewducker]

I can boil down my game-buying methodology to one sentence "Is it less than £10 on Steam?", but that would be a little _too_ simple. The actual decision-method is closer to "Is it less than £10 on Steam for a mainstream game with great reviews, or £5 for something Indie with great reviews, or £3 for something quirky that looks like it might be worth playing about with?"

When I posted yesterday that I was picking up Fallout 3, and whether it was worth picking up Morrowind and Oblivion for £5 each on top I received multiple messages from people saying "Buy Skyrim instead!", which to me felt like the height of pointlessness. I've already said that it's FO3 that I really want, and Skyrim is (a) a very different game, (b) twice the price and (c) still getting regular patches so that the dragons fly in the right direction.

People seemed to vie in actively putting down Morrowind (apparently so old-fashioned that one would need a monocle _and_ a penny farthing to play it) and Oblivion (so repetitive as to be unplayable), despite me remembering that when they came out people raved about how awesome they are. And, indeed, if I check the reviews they both get Game Of The Year awards from multiple places, 90-95% reviews, and general acclaim. But because everyone has now moved on to _this_ year's games, they aren't worth having.

As someone who has recently had huge amounts of fun playing Cave Story, a game that looks like this:

I can quite happily say "Fuck That".

While I am quite sure that Skyrim has fixed some of the things that bugged people about earlier games, and contains all sorts of shininess undreamt of back in 2002, it seems to me that people really enjoyed playing Morrowind, have produced all sorts of addons for it, and that if I can't get £5 out happiness out of it then I will be very, very surprised.

So, going back to the actual title of this post - my method is not to be so caught up that I can't wait a year for a game to drop in price, have a massive backlog of games that will quite happily keep me going* for numerous months, and realise that I will never play every game that I want to, so I will happily browse away at the massive amount of options that I have. Heck, I waited more than six months to play Portal 2 when it came out, and that was fine too (I even managed to remain unspoiled!).

*I'm halfway through Dragon Age, and was very-much enjoying it when my life imploded and I didn't have the attention span for it, have Mass Effect 2 and DA2 after that, then Fallout 3 to play. In the meantime Cave Story+ is my active game, with Defense Grid as a background snippet game, for when I have 15 minutes and want to pick up another medal. Batman:Arkham Asylum is after that, and then Bastion. Plus Julie and I had Sacred recommended to us as a fun co-op action-RPG. Oh, and I have non-gaming things I do for fun too.

Comments

[octopoid-horror.livejournal.com]

A game that got 90% five years ago would not necessarily get 90% now. I love text adventures/interactive fiction but some of the hugely influential and adored classics are postively painful to play today. Some of them can be completed in 30 moves or so, are painfully linear or have puzzles that are ridiculously obscure and rely on out-of-game knowledge or simply brute forcing them. I enjoyed the Ishar RPG , back in the day, but frequently you could die in the first minute or so of starting the game, and this was accepted because games at that point WERE that much harder to a large degree. Times change. I wouldn't enjoy that now because I don't have entire summers of doing nothing to throw at a game.

The flaws in Oblivion were complained about at the time and were arguably not necessarily taken into account in a lot of reviews (since reviews can be a] bought and b] reviewers would not always have played the whole game - you could easily play for fifteen hours before getting to the repetitive section) and also because while Oblivion was better than other RPGs at the time so that flaws could be ignored at the time, the flaws were specifically addressed for the next game in the series, while leaving much of the rest the same. The main gameplay mechanic that Skyrim lacks, compared to Oblivion, is something that was relatively late-game and only relevant for magic-users. Compared to Morrowind, I'd say that both Oblivion and Skyrim are far more accessible and playable in a more casual way by people who don't have hours and hours a day to play. If you look at reviews of Skyrim, you'll see this mentioned - that while Oblivion seemed good, there were problems that were overlooked because of the time it came out, but now seem like a big deal.

Similarly, Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay was a great system when it came out. Now, the WFRP style critical hit tables that are used in Dark Heresy/Rogue Trader seem pretty stupid when compared against more modern RPGs which don't feel the need for that kind of thing. They slow down the game and add nothing that a competent GM or player can't do themselves - they're a legacy from a time when RPGs were written differently.

GTA 3 was amazing when it came out but Vice City, San Andreas and (sort-of) IV improve on it in every way and unless you're actually wanting to play all the GTA games then if you're just wanting a cool driving-around-and-shooting-people game, VC or SA or IV is a much better option. The Sims was fun and popular, but (from my admittedly limited experience of both) The Sims 2 is simply better. The same with Assassin's Creed to AC2 and Saints Row to SR2. The originals were good, but the sequels were better because they improved on the same core experience and mechanics.

Of course, this isn't always true (Mass Effect 2 is a radically different style of gameplay to the first game, for example and I can understand why that put people off) - and it depends what you want from a game. Morrowind is certainly a lot more challenging and less accessible at the start than Oblivion and Morrowind, and you can break the game more easily if you try. If that kind of experience is what you want from a game, fair enough. But if you're keen to play Morrowind because it was well regarded at the time, and nostalgically so now - why start there? Why not play Daggerfall too? There are people who see that as the peak of the Elder Scrolls series, and it's free. Heck, it has 750 times as many NPCs as Morrowind and a huge amount more to do.

[andrewducker]

I didn't realise Daggerfall was free. I assumed it wasn't compatible with modern PCs at all, to be honest.

[octopoid-horror.livejournal.com]

I think it is runnable, with dosbox and a couple of patches. But then, you'd most likely need to patch Morrowind and Oblivion too - both are buggy as hell. It's kind of Bethesda's hallmark :-) Although still not as much of a patch-fest as installing the non-steam version of Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl.

It's annoying that some games simply don't work on modern systems. The Bladerunner game from 1997 which is apparently really really good, is nigh-impossible to get running.

[philmophlegm.livejournal.com]

Ahhhh. I have very fond memories of Blade Runner. Best film tie-in game evaaahhhh.

[steer.livejournal.com]

I thought Mass Effect 2 was a real masterpiece myself.

Oblivion and Morrowind also had that STUPID mechanic where repeatedly jumping made you better at jumping and jumping was faster than walking -- so you travelled everywhere jumping and casting fireballs -- while people in cities tried to converse with you. Talk about breaking mimesis.