Numerion's Rants

Yesterday I finished Doom. No, not Doom Eternal, just Doom(2016). And I am happy that I did, the game is good and satisfying, but I just wanna talk about why it took me so goddamn long. I think I began playing it sometime in 2016, but took until now to finish it. All that time I was recommending it to everybody I know, but I still couldn't find the motivation to finish the game. Since Doom Eternal started making the rounds in the news and reviews and whatnot, I've been thinking about why I took so long to finish this not too long game that I enjoyed playing. Because honestly that is surreal. And I think I figured it out, but I will take the long way to explaining it. Today (and historically, actually) games frequently feature lots of secrets and hidden things and achievements and whatnot. When you collect all those, you get a 100% completion rate or something along those lines. I know myself. I gave up on all that back in 2011 when Skyrim came out. It just saps all enjoy

I have to. There is frustration inside of me and I have to let it all out in text and reddit is full of similar thoughts so I am doing the original thing and going elsewhere *taps forehead* For some context, I wrote a minor "expectations" theorycraft that turned out totally wrong and while I hoped it would be wrong, I also hoped it wouldn't go this far off. You can read it here  https://pastebin.com/5th9Dt64 For the purposes of this article I will ignore the books exist for a time being. Now I am disappointed. Not by the episode itself, besides some minor things (light cav charging front and center, artillery being the first line of the army...), I actually quite enjoyed the episode. I am however disappointed by the plot. The writing. The everything else than the episode itself to be honest. I have two major gripes and they are quite entwined, so I will be weaving through them both to save some time. First of these things is the character of the Night King himself. S

I like chess. I always did, it's a game that forces people to think and seeing as my winrate against people when I was small was way above average, it made sense for me to like it. I then grew into disliking it because people would take literal minutes between rounds and I'd get bored. There is still beauty to it, but at a certain point, my enjoyment of the game is running out. Now enter two player board games. Some of them are truly great. Amazing even. But they do end up in a chess situation. Let me explain a little. There are two factors of games that go into this: Information - how much information about the state of the game do individual players have  Randomness - how much the state of the game can change between rounds based on a random 'whim' and how much you can mitigate that affecting you. Chess has complete information about the sate of the game and there is no randomness to speak off. All the possibilities are clearly laid out. This causes you

I have played games since I was small. There were many games that I played in those days, but only a few of them worthwhile. I have fond memories of several of them, both playing with friends and alone. Occasionally, I'll go hunting for those scenes long gone and try to relive them, download a game, emulator whatever and try to play it. Needless to say, it almost never goes well. And it's not necessarily because the games are bad. But they are indeed different than I remember them. And the time I spend playing them is different. Back then, I'd boot up a game and play it for hours on end, blasting (the constantly same) music while playing and enjoying every second of the time (if the game was good obviously). Nowadays I just can't do that unless the game captures all of my attention. But the change didn't just happen overnight. I feel that if I didn't play so many games in the last few years, then I could maybe still replay those older games (or the likes o

This article might ruin your perception of rewards in games. Read at your own risk. Pokemon Go is a very smartly designed game. Part of that design is the rewarding scheme. Every action you do is rewarded by at least two different kinds of rewards. For example catching a pokemon gives you the pokemon(obviously), candy for that pokemon and experience. It goes even deeper. Some of the actions have an explicit (obvious)  and implicit (not so obvious) reward. For example curveballs. When you throw a curveball you get bonus experience (explicit) and a higher catch rate (implicit). Every single action can be shown giving at least two rewards to the player. That is very smart in multiple layers. The first layer is that even doing something you might not want to do, is at least partly giving you rewards that you want. (For example catching a Rattata) Second layer is that when you are doing something for one reward, you are still subconsciously aware that you are getting something more,

Unfair advantage means something that your company can do that is non-replicable, even if competition does everything else right. And Niantic has that. Let's go back a little. Imagine you have an amazing idea for a an AR (augmented reality) game. You persuade other people about it, make the game a reality, make sure that the game has a lot of player interaction, release it...and it flops. Nobody plays it. Player interaction is useless then and lots and lots of development time has been lost if the player density is too small. (this is also why niantic has been careful about putting such features in for such a long time) Where's the problem? The problem is the target group. The people who care about specific qualities of the gameplay aren't the ones who'll be running around outside with friends. At least most of them aren't. Those are only going to bitch if things are missing, but if they are not, they aren't going to be playing the game anyways. The othe