Open Thread is where Waypoint staff talk about games and other things we find interesting. This is where you'll see us chat about games, music, movies, TV, and even sports, and welcome you to participate in the discussion.
I get this feeling during XCOM WotC sometimes when the boss decreases my funding for a month. Like, my dude, Iâm sorry I got a soldier killed and failed a mission, but we didnât even know those sorts of aliens existed. How was I supposed to know they exploded on death?
Going by the article title, I thought Rob was throwing some serious shade Austinâs way. 
When I first tried Not a Hero a few years ago, I found Bunnylordâs dialog funny. When I played a mission or two last year, it made me feel a little sick to my stomach.
Warframe. There are quite a few you can pick but this one always gets me:
Lotus, this is the 600th survival mission weâve been on. If you âsuspectedâ they were going to suck all the air out of the place (which they do every time) why donât you just give me a bunch of life support to start with?
I genuinely felt stressed out when playing the FIFA story mode when I would get reprimanded for not playing position or going offiside. No thanks.
If Jeff sent me that email in real life, he would for sure be about to catch these hands.
I always liked the 2K MyPlayer mode. I am uniquely terrible at those games and they have a variety of strategies to let me know it in the most realistic ways possible.
Hah! Trust me, some of the feedback is infuriating even if you are good. If you throw a pass and it becomes a turnover because your teammate Butterfingered it, still your fault. Opposing point guard scored a bunch of points while you were on the bench? Coach will yell at you for letting him go off at halftime
I have hundreds of hours exclusively in mycareer mode every year but some of that stuff gets to me.
(as an aside, the 2k19 demo is out now and that game has good ass hair customization)
MLB The Show '17 was a bit like that. I had an amazing pitcher rookie year who threw over 200 strikeouts with a few perfect games and no hitters, but no matter how good I was, it was a team sport and the Royals just plain sucked no matter what. I got rookie of the year, but didnât get paid or traded for the next year because the manager expects âmore from the team.â It was completely out of my control because MLB The Show wants to teach us the hard lessons, apparently. I bumped up the difficulty to give myself a little more challenge when pitching, but this just made the opposing team randomly hit more of my pitches, and I felt like I couldnât skillfully get around that fact. It felt out of my control, and my player was stuck on the Royals. I was not playing worse, but the outcomes were worse, so he was just stuck in a rut and there was nothing I could do other than stop playing, so I did. Iâm guessing MLB The Show gets better, and maybe an opportunity to be traded to the Cubs would come along in several seasons, but I really didnât enjoy the âharsh realitiesâ of the baseball business in my video game.
When the inspector in Papers, Please gives you shit for putting up the poster of the football team, thatâs exactly like all the times I got reprimanded for doing something I thought would be harmless fun which was deemed ânot corporateâ. And of course pointing out that it was all clean and harmless and did not reflect negatively on the company at all didnât work; it just wasnât âcorporateâ.
Thatâs almost exactly whatâs happening with Jacob deGrom, pitcher for the Mets, whoâs having one of the best seasons of any pitcher in Major League Baseball, but since his team is awful, heâs got a relatively middling W/L record and probably wonât get the recognition he deserves. Itâs unfortunate that this fact of life gets emulated in a game, no matter how well itâs done
I think there is a place for it, depending on what youâre reason for coming to sports titles are. I play these games the same way I play dwarf fortress or crusader kings and failure and experimentation are in built in to the experience
TBH Iâd throw my controller at the screen if this happened to me in F1 2018. So do race events not impact teams perceptions of you post race??
Unfortunately they donât. Itâs the one realistic aspect they need to start looking into, though thereâs probably a lot of diplomacy with the manufacturers and sport. I did a race the other night in Catalunya. Gearbox was nearing its limit but it wasnât enough to swap it out and take a penalty. Lo and behold, I lose gears or get stuck in gear during qualifying and the race putting me in 17th on both and missing my objective for 15th. Of course Jeff wrote telling me he was disappointed and even when I picked the option in the post race interview that âwe werenât as good as we should have beenâ lost me a good chunk of reputation with my Sauber team (Yet it increased with Ferrari, go figure). All because I had to stretch that gearbox out
Now if it was real F1 and gearbox problems were apparent, the team would just say to âbox the carâ (Go to the pits) and eat the race loss because letting the gearbox go on that long could damage other components or the Race Director would black flag you and get you off the track if you were too slow and a danger to other racers. And itâs a weird bit of going against realism in F1 or even motor racing in general where Part failures are common and can strike at random (like the two Mercedes cars developing faults in Austria this year where the cars just shut down thanks to the new engine spec failing). I get they want the player to experience the gameplay and have a multiplayer experience to manage as well. But itâs part and parcel of the experience. Itâs the only thing really at fault where even the game failing is put on the player because itâs too linear instead of saying âIt happens. Thatâs F1 for youâ especially when you have Team Directors who will go on TV after and say âThe car was at fault, not the driverâ. Itâs at odds with the sport its potraying
Manufacturers are a bit more loose when it comes to these games that what I would hope is that in future F1 games, Codemasters would maybe make dynamic objectives instead where if the car is having issues, you get brand new objectives and the game doesnât punish you for something the game does like the car failing. Itâs a weird quirk of making a sport into a video game.
Some of the after-action reports you get after completing quests in The Secret World are like this. Less so with The Templars, but more so with The Illuminati and The Dragon.
