How do you feel about 'level that changes everything' tone shifts in vidya?

How do you feel about 'level that changes everything' tone shifts in vidya?

Examples:

This includes story shifts in level based games and open world games where triggering a certain story event changes the entire overworld to suit the new story.

I think it's a great tool that some developers put to fantastic use. It's the pull of the rug that's hard to do. You can either flub it and do something cheap that changes your perspective. I think a few games would fall into that category of "hey you know those blue plants located all around the world? they actually have a useful resource for you to collect!" and all the sudden you're able to collect that resource 12 hours in.

I think Nier Automata is one of the best examples of this with how incredibly drastic the changes in the world map are. I was blown away after the engels fight in the city destroyed a third of the map and changed it forever, but in route c? I never saw that coming, that was absolutely incredible despite looking back and seeing how simple it was, the delivery was tremendous.

I love that shit. Dragon's Dogma shift of tone caught me off guard.

Can't think of more games that do it, though.

I agree, Nier Automata's tone shift is incredibly well done.

No. I would rather have the game's actual plot, setting and theme presented to me immediately because what a fucking trick, I hate getting tricked.

Does the first one actually exist

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Yes

Its great when done right but also shouldn't be done too often.

few examples

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Bloodborne, ???, Condemned

What the fuck is the second one?

Nice!

lets get all these games out on a tray.

The Sword level in Thief.

I was expecting a run and gun game like the first one. turns out every level is a gimmick.

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Area 51 was an FPS that did this really well, with halfway through the game you finding out everything you believed was wrong. Red Faction 2 relatively early on has you defeat the "final boss" looking dude only to discover your allies are cunts.
An example of failing this is Haze, which made it very predictable and the gameplay didn't change that much, even though you are supposed to feel like swapping from a supersoldier to a guerilla fighter you still feel like a supersoldier.

Can you elaborate on that a little more?

The only time I've ever experienced this without knowing beforehand was the original Guild Wars. I thought it was cool, but I'd liked the idyllic environment and was disappointed to be given a charred wasteland in replacement.

I guess I'm saying I like the idea, but it has to be handled well in a lot of ways to not just bait and switch the player with something they never asked for or wanted.

The ending to Trails in the Sky FC got me good.

Eversion.
Especially if you don't get the true ending.
And if you get it it's even better.

Survival Crisis Z

It's specifically referring to Bloodborne.

I like it, especially when it's a horror level out of nowhere. You have to know how to smooth out the rest of the game after that level, though. The "different' level should build up, then hit you like a ton of bricks–but the levels after that should scale back toward the "normal" side of things, with the "different" elements sprinkled in.

Look at this MRE Review thread in disguise. It's not even a good disguise.

Also, I'll be the first person to say it and risk the ridicule, but the original Halo does this pretty well with the Flood reveal.


Robots, I think.

You say that as if its a bad thing.

I discovered him this morning, pretty interesting stuff.
Nice hiss.

Anyway, on the topic of video games, I can enjoy this trope but only if done well. Sometimes it can go over the top and just be more annoying than anything else. I think Bloodborne and Dragon's Dogma did it well, but something like Undertale felt too hamfisted imo

Has there been any method of porting that to Win7 that actually works?

It'll be beleted unless you disguise them better.

In some games it drastically adjusts the scale. Best example being The Sword in Thief the Dark Project where it goes from an average clunky stealth game to a work of genius

I don't know, if making me want to kill myself is a good change, then this is a great candidate.

this was one of my favorite games

The Darkness has a moment I won't spoil but it blew me away at the time. My dark horse of that gen.

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Probably noone remembers Perfect Dark, since despite being a masterpiece of a game better than Goldeneye in every way, it got far less publicity and died with the N64.
The thing is, it starts as a futuristic 007 clone, infiltrating corporations and fighting humans, etc. Then halfway across the game fucking aliens out of nowhere, with their own weaponry and shit, suddenly you are fighting inside an alien spaceship and going to their home planet to genocide them all. Good times. RIP, Joanna.

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Condemned Criminal Origins did it alright. Indigo Prophecy shit the bed. I liked Star Ocean 3's twist but I'm in the minority.


The alien stuff was breddy gud, the ending was meh.

I like them when they're well done.
>giant tree trunks come down from the moon, unleashing a horde of angels on the world
>they start purging people en masse
>man in charge of your knight squad starts laughing maniacally
>gives a long monologue about how much he hates humanity etc etc
>reveals he's the first king of the kingdom, and has lived 1000 years through evil moon magic
>stabs the queen in front of you
>forced to fight unending waves of angels until the objective changes to "run"
>one of the guys you just defeated stays behind to buy you time
>turns out the moon was created by the latent suicidal wishes of a past civilization that was tired of constant war
>it uses the gems that enable magic to monitor humanity's emotions, and if we get too emotional it purges us
>the evil witch was turning people to crystal to suppress their emotions until she could kill the other witches and destroy their rocks so the moon can't monitor earth anymore
>you're actually a 1000-year old hero who was corrupted during an attempt to stop the moon and had to be put into suspended sleep to purify his soul
>the witch you repeatedly tried to kill, who you kept screaming "I hate you, I'll never forgive you" etc at was one of your closest companions
>she was so in love with you she waited 1000 years for you to wake up so she could be with you again, and turned herself into one of history's greatest villains to protect the planet for you
>the evil king attacking humanity is partly fuelled by his resentment that you're remembered as a great hero and he's a "vanished king" in the legends
>this is followed by a large chapter showing how all your teammates are trying to cope with the aftermath, some rebuilding the city, some planning to hide and wait out the apocalypse, some planning to die with a sword in their hands
I genuinely did not expect the plot twist. I was sure I was almost done the game. turns out the villain is the best girl anyway though, because if you get her ending, it shows her laying in a hospital bed holding a newborn baby, upset with you because she didn't want you to see her like that, but happy you think she's beautiful even that way

I'm lying. Condemned's ending ruined the whole fucking game for me.

Earthbound is pro-American propaganda and I wouldn't want it any other way

FarCry and Crysis are great up until the mutants/aliens show up. Interesting, reactive human AI vs dumb bullet sponge..

It's called the end of act 1 dummy, that's how story structure works.

Its fantastic when it gives you an alternate ending. Personally speaking I enjoy it when a game seems to be the standard I'm fighting the bad guy and all of a sudden it turns out I've got to fight demons some other bad dudes have sided with and if you're a shitty person you murder the fuck out of the previous games heroes and fuck the entire land up.

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I really like his music.

playing thief for the first time was a mindfuck

it was good, but the first time all of it seemed so fucking out of place

Isn't the case with all games set in Africa

Ominous Bequest Gold Thief 2 fan mission goes from regular mansion robbing into full spoopy satanic shit, not as crazy as Constantine mission layout, but turn of events is pretty cool.

>EVERYTHING IS FUCKED
>PEOPLE'S HEAD ARE EXPLODING AS BASKETS OF SNAKES
>GIANT ENEMIES THAT HAVE BEEN THERE THE WHOLE TIME ARE NOW LASER BEAMING YOU
BOSSES MADE UP OF DISCARDED APPENDAGES THAT KICK YOU WITHOUT TIHNKING
>A BRAIN MADE OF EYES
Bloodbourne is amazing

I played Thief Gold for the first time recently, and am now playing the second one.
The environments look like shit, yet they have more soul and atmosphere than most modern ones. One of the best games Ive played

humans were not native to gaia, the lifa tree was replacing gaians with terrans in the planets lifestream as part of its bioforming protocol. All the humans from the first few generations of them regardless of intelligence are all 'elite knights' because baseline terrans were far stronger than gaians due to higher gravity on earth. characters like steiner and beatrice dont know they are part of a first generation of invaders they just think they were born different and have natural talent since the only species on gaia are burmecians and everyone else looks random based on where they were born.
The only reason they dont stand out much is they look like the summoner tribe, only without horns obviously which becomes another story hook midway.

devs admitted its just about depression, shes in a hospital bed in a coma after falling from the power line at the start, its also why she sees everyone as animals.

OH SHIT.WEBM
it was a hell of an awesome change

When the hell did any of that shit come up?

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Everything after kujas palace? Remember going down into the crashes prototype spaceshift and talking with the core AI? then going through a portal to the dead ruin of earth to meet the homunculi humanity left behind?

The whole point of the story is Garland wants to continue it because he was ordered too, Kuja cannot deal with being a tool made to serve others like a black waltz and zidane just wants to live a quiet life and fuck girls. One has a sense of obligation, one has a sense of nihilism and the other has a desire for freedom. Chains, Risking everything to find a new purpose or destroy everything out of spite.

Its funny so many play disc one and drop it thinking its a nostalgic throwback like after 8 they decided to town down the eva tier crazy when its the closest final fantasy ever came to kojima tier.

I think you need to download the d3drm.dll, dx7vb.dll and dx8vb.dll files and put them in system and/or system32 windows folders

game was fucking tedious and shit

I'm more talking about Steiner and Beatrix being Terran transplants. Is that just implied or what?

No its told. There are no native humans. The giant life tree? thats entire purpose is to interrupt the lifestream, break down gaian souls to make Mist and force conflicts to keep happening to continue death on a mass scale and then replace those souls with terran ones.
One day just more gaians were born resembling each other than usual. There was some stuff that kind of suggested it was a waste since the humans were already degenerating into Qu as so fahnny stur trak reforanss but its a case of violence begetting violence and history repeating itself.
Pretty much every aspect is. Humans made homunculi like kuja to be their slaves before they died out so then kuja tells queen brahn "let me tell you about my black waltz idea" and makes black mages out of mist that ironically are the original souls of gaia being replaced by terrans.

Its worth replacing since so many didnt get that far or just glossed over it with the 'gotta save muh dagger' focus of these scenes but its all there.

It's too bad I had it spoiled for me. I'll play it eventually but already knowing the big reveal is mildly discouraging when I have other games to play.

But specifically how do you know Steiner and Beatrix are transplants? Just based on their looks or is there a specific scene that spells it out? I remember the IIfa tree and all that as well as the genome stuff but I don't ever remember anything pointing to the Qu degeneration or humans not being native to Gaia.

Very interesting, thanks user.

Far from it. You literally pray to God to get rid of the final boss.

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Its pretty much the whole plot of the final disc you want describing. The TL:DR is that humans come from terra, there are not and have never been humans on gaia, the summoner tribe was their equivalent. The whole point of the storys midway twist is that brahn wasnt originally evil and she cut off garnets horn so kuja would think she was just another replacement human as summoners were the worlds indigenous 'humans' and had to be wiped out by Invincible to kickstart the plan. Summoners just used magic while terrans used technology so summoners on gaia became frail casters terran engineers became physically strong from millenias of war and industry.

Its why the knights of pluto are fucking retards but still elite guards. Because even a dumb as a box of rocks human is still far stronger than everything but a burmecian.

Go look back at the part of the game. Zidane is a human made homunculi, steiner is a transplanted terran, vivi is a homunculi made from a gaian soul, garnet and eiko are summoners the humans magical equivalent and freya is a burmecian and quina is a malformed human qu. Amarant is the only stand out from the entire party that is probably just the baseline for this world. Everyone else is some form of ubermensch.
Go back and replay it, right from the 'why am i here?' blurbs in the movie that plays before the start screen the whole point of FFIX is "its not how you were born that makes you who you are, its the choices you make".

Its a shame its just written off as a throwback due to the comfort zone opening act.

Same. I gave up fighting the final boss because: 1) He was drastically more difficult and frustrating to fight than any other enemy in the game, and 2) It completely ruined the game's mood, which until then had been effectively spooky–fighting some spongy asshole over and over isn't.

I hate tone shifts. It's lazy writing, the game is rarely as fun after the shift, and even if it's executed well it sets the series up to have a gimmicky twist in every future title.

Tone shifts are not lazy. They're just incredibly hard to do, and easy to fuck up.

Let's just get these trips on a tray

Uncharted did that very well. From going from a nice little adventure-game you don't really have to pay attention to, to a fucking zombie-shooter in the last mission made me crap my pants. I wasn't expecting that.

On my first playthrough, I finished Chapter 17 of Kid Icarus: Uprising in the early morning hours, then went to bed.

I had a really fucked-up nightmare.

After waking up, although shaken, I was determined to continue the game. I was totally disoriented by the shift in the game's tone (Pit inhabiting a ring) and the fucked-up nightmare.

Halo 1

Actually user, NitW is about ghosts on the surface which turn then into cosmic horror, but it's got a sublayer of things being impermanent and people needing to move on. I love it, actually.

HE HATES IT

there's no cosmic horror, there's fucking nothing. there's no sense of looming insanity, there's no sense of something you can't understand, there's no sense of player and main character connection, there's no sense of losing control. There's fucking nothing.
The sublayer of things being temporary and there being no permanent solutions isn't even played well either. There's no sense that Possum Springs or whatever it was called is dying other than some dialog that barely matches the tone of the game. The opposite is true, in fact. The sense that family business is being run out by big corperations isn't there, the sense that people are leaving the town for work isn't there, if anything it seems like the town is growing. We can't tell, we don't see all of the town, we see a small amount of it and the mall. Malls are dying everywhere execpt for tourist cities, and having such a small amount of area to show change does shitting fuck. I could take pictures of any city's slum and say "this town's fucking dying".

devs confirmed its all a coma dream. They arent animals or old gods shes just fucked up after falling off a power line at the start.

Link or it didn't happen.

Arkane should have made survival horror games instead

nigga I ain't even following game development and I know that's bullshit

Almost as bad as the "You were dead the whole time" twist.

Pic related has to be the weirdest/biggest 180 I have seen.

Divinity II might have this. Suddenly you're the thing you were hunting, and all the enemy groups more than double in size.

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Mission 43 in The Phantom Pain.

Why did imageepoch have to die? I liked their stuff
Oh damn, the world is crystalizing and that weird country that celebrates it has a dragon that hero-san needs
She's the priestess of the crystalizing god
asks you to help her save the world
the crown Prince attacks Antrax
Flee, everyone wants your party dead
EVERYONE, every major faction
later learn the truth of the two gods, choose to go against both
crown Prince reveals he's you half brother as he dies to the second prince, who was your best friend
shit gets crazier
Like it wasn't earth shatteringly new, but I appreciated all the twists and turns the story took, there are a ton of other little details I don't think I can fit in here besides

Is this the new meme people are pushing?
I saw another thread with everyone saying this.

I played Ominous Bequest a month ago and recently i finished the sequel (Broken Triad), some thief FMs have that nice spooky atmosphere, i guess the dark engine has that and also the lowpoly models play on favour to that too.

that must have been reeeeeeeeaally bad

nice hiss

this is probably the first thing he didn't like

Holy shit you fucking faggots

Here's a clue lads, this game was for the Game Boy. Let's see if you can guess it.

Advance Wars?

Winner winner, chicken dinner.

ff6 went from having no tone to having a tone. that's a big change?

Wait what shift of tone?

Bloodborne

There's a definite point of change-over, i.e. balance to ruin, but i wouldn't say it was a complete tone reversal. Chrono Cross has more of a drastic shift than FF6.

When you beat Grigori and the credits roll. Post game I guess.

When you beat the game the story picks up and shot becomes serious all the way until the true ending.

I'm too scared to drink milk even one day past the expiration date but I've seen this mother fucker eat food that was literally from the civil war. I'm a disgrace.

Just fucking smell it.
If it stinks like it shouldn't or is a wet meat product that's old and not nitrated, or slimy when it shouldn't be, don't eat it.