I suppose the biggest difference I see is the imbalance between financial success / popularity, and discourse about many phone games. Compared to how many people apparently play some of those phone games, I never hear anyone talk about them. Because they’re simply not worth discussing, not even to the people who play them.

There are so many things in our world where we need to take a step back and rationally analyze our behavior. Things like gambling or gaming, eating habits, social media, commercials… they can all create the wrong urges and gut feelings. Sadly, we can’t trust what “feels right” in the moment, because we’re driven by dopamine and endorphine that gets released even by pointless activies, regardless of what we neglect. It should be taught at schools¹ how to recognize when bad influences create self-destructive habits, and how to recognize and overcome them.

¹Seriously, schools teach so much information, when all the information is now at our fingertips, but we face so many challenges with how to approach life and society and so on that schools don’t help us with… (After all this, I just had to leave a footnote here as well)

I’d probably feel sorry for the protagonist who was being tricked, but not feel like I was deceived or fooled. At least not if there was no other option for me as the player, except not to play.

In the Oblivion quest you mentioned, do you know if there’s another way to solve it? A way to not get fooled? Because I think as the player, the big difference is whether after the reveal you feel like the quest forced you into doing something, or if you think “I should have seen that coming”. The latter case will probably make the player feel foolish as well.

This is pretty much how I (tried to) handle it. And also talking about it openly. Luckily the players are all mature enough to just laugh it off. (That strong character was a bit lacking in the mental department, and since it wasn’t such a combat focused campaign it also evened out somewhat. The great merits of tabletop being more than the hack & slay that most of its computer game adaptions are. :)

In the skull/lizard person example, can you extrapolate on why “this creates so many questions” is a bad thing? Is the goal to have no mystery in the games, and somehow this makes the game better?

Mainly it can be overwhelming during character creation, when you have so many things you’re not familiar with. It might be that you don’t know what your characters race is about (i.e. the skeleton guy), or when a game gives you cryptic stats where you have no idea how they influence the game. Things like that.

I’d say a good type of mystery is, when you’re familiar with a setting and its characters, and then something unexpected happens and you’re wondering why. But that requires a baseline to be established. Which requires either that the player spends some time with the setting, oooor: if the setting is so generic that it’s familiar to begin with, it has its merits too, which I’m arguing for. :)

A good example, though not a game, is the manga / anime Frieren Beyond Journey’s End. It basically starts where the most generic fantasy story would end: A party of heroes, including your typical cleric, elven mage, dwarven warrior have defeated the evil demon lord and are returning from their journey. Because it uses so many established tropes, you immediately have an idea about what the story leading up to the first chapter would have looked like. The interesting things are then how it goes on from there.

Divinity has always been a niche series, partially due to the small studio’s lack of advertising and smaller budget, but when you piggy-back off an already highly successful series, you would expect a higher adoption rate; which is exactly what we see with BG3.

Valid points with the lack of advertising. BG3 also had little advertising, but it got such a lot of word of mouth, it overshadowed all of that. It’s hard to say what would have happened if it had been almost the same game, except without the DnD license. I’d tend towards saying that if it wasn’t Baldur’s Gate 3 and not DnD either, but something very close in rules and setting, it could have piggybacked—not of the established name, but off the tropes that these names (DnD, BG) have established.

this is super problematic when you’re DMing for a tabletop campaign. I had a campaign where one player’s character was a good deal stronger than all the others. Maybe it wasn’t a result of min-maxing alone, but also of good stat rolls and it just so happened that the build this player picked was very strong. But it was always super difficult to come up with enemies that could threaten the strong character while not being at risk to 1-hit kill the weaker ones.

I sort of saw it coming when I looked at the character sheets, but didn’t want to make players change anything about their characters. But maybe a good DM (or good game designer) can anticipate this really well and make it so the strongest and weakest characters aren’t that far apart?

Ah yes, Morrowind! I’d say Arena and Daggerfall felt a lot more generic in how they presented their world. So Morrowind was the third game in the Elder Scrolls series or 5th if you count the two spinoffs. To me, Morrowind feels a good bit different from established fantasy tropes, but it also builds heavily on the prior, more generic games and their established world and mechanics. If you look at the Elder Scrolls series from that point of view, it gradually eased its players into the more exotic setting of Morrowind. I’ll make the claim here that if the previous Elder Scrolls games didn’t exist, Morrowind would have been even more of a hidden gem than it already is.

Yes, Morrowind is a good example of an exotic setting done right. Such simple things like having giant mushrooms for trees are effective at creating a foreign atmosphere without having page long explanations of dark elf gods and rituals (even if these can be found in the game as well)

That’s a good example. Do runestones exist in any game? I’m not familiar with the term, so from the word itself I wouldn’t think of a consumable item. I’d say if you want consumables, make them potions or scrolls. It’s probably pretty clear that potions are one-time use items, but you would expect them to have an effect only on the one who drinks quaffs them. Then we have scrolls, and without any gaming knowledge you probably don’t expect a scroll to vanish upon using it…? But so many games, like everything DnD based, or the Diablo series, have scrolls as consumables for spells. It has become like a shorthand, so I’d say that whenever possible it’s better for games to go with these things.

I agree with you that world building is a fundamental part of storytelling, and if done well it can be entertaining. But when I try to think of examples, I’m thinking about Disco Elysium and such, i.e. not fantasy settings. I guess the risk is high that it starts to feel like a load of exposition (if done wrong), and in many games it’s ultimately… pointless? For example in Dragon Age, if I remember correctly, elves were kind of an opressed minority. But the game never had any nuanced takes on the idea, other than “racism is bad”. So I wonder what’s even the point of changing this up.

For exampe Larian’s game before Baldur’s Gate 3 was Divinity: Original Sin 2. In that game you had starting characters like an undead, with a skull for a head, or a lizard man. This creates so many questions, like if there’s maybe an entire population of skull head people, or if they’re some sort of lich that regular people will be suspicious about etc.

BG3 is of course set in the Forgotten Realms itself, which you could see as something of a “baseline” for western fantasy, and many people are familiar with it. Calling the setting “unoriginal” or generic might sound like a devaluation, but it’s not meant as such. (I guess it’s debatable wether the NPCs and story are original, but most people seem to agree they’re interesting and well made.)

In reality it’s of course a matter of license, and not a 100% creative decision. But Original Sin 2 is critically acclaimed and yet it often seems overlooked. I can’t help but think that if it had been set in the Forgotten Realms but had otherwise been the same game, a lot more people would have played it, because they would have instantly felt at home in the setting.

If you’re asking why the games’ options are like that, it could be so the console and PC versions can be as similar as possible. As people have mentioned, it makes more sense on a controller, with a thumbstick, to set both axes to different sensitivities. PC / mouse version probably just mirrors these config options.

Also I have to say I can’t think of a game that does this off the top of my head, but when it comes to shooters I’ve mainly played older PC games, before the PS3 era. I think only setting sensitivity as a single value is common in those games.