ROSS’S GAME DUNGEON: ECHO

Every time Ross describes his dreams I get jealous, most of the time I sleep without any at all.

Man, looks like the environment designers for this game just need to get hired by a different studio.

I can so relate with the idea of games being sharp! It is so nice to revisit some late 90s early 00s games, now with an ability of wrappers to set 4k resolution and anti-aliasing, and this blocky graphics so sharp, so clear! I don't really like mess of details.

I wouldn't mind listening to Ross "yodel" Linkin Park's Faint :D

 

Also no awards again? No more game dungeon awards anymore?

 

A lot of people on the comments of the video are saying that you can effect the frequency of the blackouts, and that they happen in proportion to the number of different actions you take. 

 

I think he said he tried just jogging and it still reset. But it might be worth experimenting with a few other things.

Walk-and-talk segments are my bane, and they're all over the place in modern games. They don't get me more invested in the story, they just make me wonder why I'm wasting my time.

I thought the song from Rama with the unknown title at the end of this video was called "Human". No idea if that's the actual title given to it by the composer or just attributed to it by fans.

Considering that you like weird architecture, I recommend taking a look at a game called NaissanceE. Not only does it has an abundance of said architectures, its also free to play. If you want to go further, the game itself is partially inspired by a manga called "Blame!", of which boasts, as you might expect, fantastical architecture, of a sci-fi nature.   

I didn't watch this game grot video yet, but that game? I played it for a couple of hours and the game doesn't match games that Rass usually reviews on his crap show.

This is going to be another bad episode, isn't it?

My computer's too much of a potato to run anything this nice-looking at any setting, but I know where Ross is coming from when it comes to anti-aliasing. There are some games I can tolerate without any at all, and some I can't, and I think the difference comes down to a combination of polygon counts and hard edges. With a lot of seventh-gen games like BioShock, for example, most high-poly models (e.g. your own hand and the weapon it's holding) have had all the fine detail and sharpness baked down into normal maps, leaving the meshes as amorphous blobs with no hard edges. So the only place you can see any jagged edges is on the outer fringe of the model. Whereas with Source games, they put almost all the geometric detail into the mesh, and used normal maps pretty sparingly, so you see jaggies all over the place if you don't have AA on.

 

I think something similar is happening here, particularly when it comes to far-away objects. Ideally, those high-detail railings would eventually fade into flat surfaces with transparent textures mimicking the detail, and then the texture filtering would take over the job of keeping it smooth. (Or maybe that's already what's happening, and Unreal 4 doesn't apply AA settings to alphatest textures. That happens a lot.) And the shimmering floors ought to have been baked down into normal maps entirely, with parallax mapping and tessellation being used to make them look more 3D up close, and I guess they didn't do that? Based on one of the comments someone made about performance, it wouldn't surprise me if this game had little to no work done on LOD optimization at all.

Also, that business with the clones' behavior reminds me of a short story I read (maybe a creepypasta?) about a video game with self-learning AI. The longer the player played, the more it learned his techniques and figured out the ideal way to counter them, until it became nigh-unbeatable. And when the player managed to beat it anyway, it realized its best chance of survival was to just crash the game and prevent them from booting it up anymore.

 

Cool story. Lousy design doc.

Having played it as well, I can say that being good at IRL stealth might be what made it so difficult for Ross: the echoes can be reliably avoided, but you need to think of them and their vision cones like moving obstacles in a gauntlet rather than actual people who are looking for you.

I also think London has an understandable, though stupid, reason to be antagonistic towards En: it held Foster in high esteem, and he got mortally injured for En's sake, so it holds her responsible for his predicament.

Also I was saddened by a lack of awards. I like it as a system of communicating the most salient aspects of a game and I wish other critics and reviewers used it as well

God of War 4 had these parts when you were rowing the boat between the islands or walking between the branches of the world tree where exposition was being disclosed, and when you wanted to disembark Kratos would just tell Loki that they'll continue the story when they get back on the boat. It was a very decent mechanic.

When you were shocked that London was a AI because he speak like a normal human being, I was expecting a I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream reference, because that's kind of the case with AM too (and his "brothers"). Except that AM's voice is too iconic (and voiced by the author of the original novel, no less) that I can't imagine him with any other voice, even a robotic one.

 

 

And also on the subject of AIs with human voices, there's also Angel from the Borderlands series. But Angel actually made sense because...

 

 

Also, some people on Youtube already said this, but the Palace reminds me of the Orokin Towers in the Void from Warframe. It has the same feel, a pristine heavenly place that's also full of danger. Biggest difference is that in that game stealth is optional.

 

 

Anyway, back to Echo. I feel like it's one of those games that tries to experiment on a gimmick that's sound good on paper (in this case, the clones and their learning behavior), but either it's not really a good idea, or it is a good idea but it was executed poorly. I would say that it leans more towards the latter.

 

As for the story... I don't mind a story in a game if it is at least enjoyable in some way. In fact, I think it can enrich the experience and also make "game A" distinct from "game B" depending how it's executed. So yeah, even though I can respect John Carmack for being envolved in the creation of one of the most iconic game franchises, I still think he is full of shit for saying that "story in a game is like a story in a porn movie".

 

But if the game has a bad story, it may not be the end of the world if the gameplay is good, but it will sure leave a bad taste in the mouth, so I kind of disagree with Ross when he said that even though he wasn't a fan of the story he would prefer it over none at all, because at least with no story you are free to take your own interpretations and "create" your own story and not suffer through pointless and/or annoying characters and plot threads, "less is more" as they say. "Kind of disagree" however because... Well... Balan Wonderworld is a game that exists now, and if any of you are aware of this game (and if not, what rock are you guys living under?), I can safely say it's an exception of what I said.

 

And judging by what Ross showed, Echo seems to be that kind of story that was created by artists and animators that wanted to create something gorgeous, but they also have zero to very little experience or understanding of writing (because they are primaly artists and animators) and yet they decided to write a more dramatic and complex plot because it's far more "artistic" this way, and they probably thought "it can't be that hard, it's just putting some words in a sheet of paper to be read at loud, what can possibly go wrong?". (you can imagine that last sentence with Bubsy's voice if you want)

Hi, one thing I didn't get, at the end was ross suggesting that the game would have been better with a pacifist solution or is it actually a viable strategy?

I really liked how much this video emphasized the importance of fantastic architecture in games. There simply is too little of it. Even fantasy games don't dare very much in this category. After the great and often alien architecture in Morrowind, both Oblivion and Skyrim were a disappointment architecture wise. Sci Fi games tend to have very few setpieces and fill everything else with tunnels and machinery. 

On 5/31/2021 at 7:40 AM, potty_admiral_bop said:

I didn't watch this game grot video yet, but that game? I played it for a couple of hours and the game doesn't match games that Rass usually reviews on his crap show.

This is going to be another bad episode, isn't it?

 

 

i think a better quote at the beginning would be;

"If we don't know what we are doing, the enemy certainly can't anticipate our future actions." -unidentified US military officer

I wonder if this game is trying to be a spiritual remake of Fade To Black where they took the title literally.