Month: February 2017

Fire Emblem Guest Posts Ft. MLGF

Celia WagarLeave a comment

HEY! If you’re still with your friend. Tell him to further elaborate on Fire Emblem Awakening’s issues. It’s sad because I really like it, even after playing the others. I must know.

It’s rather difficult to say why I don’t think Awakening is a very good game. That mostly has to do with the fact that I think Awakening is rather mechanically decent at first glance. That isn’t to say that’s it doesn’t have flaws, it most certainly does (and I’ll elaborate how problematic they become), but I do think many of the changes work fine on paper. The change in the avoid formula fits the greater stats and rewards units with defense far better then older games, skills come at a good pace (if you’re not grinding anyhow) and whining about galeforce would just be repeating what everyone has already said. Continue reading →

When to Use a Guide

Celia Wagar7 Comments

Do you ever look up what to do to progress in a game if you have no idea what to do? Or do you 100% figure it out yourself?

A bit of both. It depends on the game. Sometimes I try really hard to figure it out, because the reward is really sweet when I do, sometimes I brute force it or look up the answer. If a puzzle doesn’t really fit the tone of the rest of the game then I’ll sometimes bypass it by looking up what I’m supposed to do.

I had to look up where to use the basement key in dark souls for example.

Very recently I played Dishonored 2 and got stuck in the very first room, eventually had to ask a friend who did the exact same thing as me how to get out. There were two windows that I didn’t realize could be opened, they looked like a part of the wall.

I think I looked up one of the light redirection puzzles in DMC3, at least the first one, because I flat-out didn’t understand what I was supposed to do.

I remember being really ecstatic about figuring out the video puzzle in Phoenix Wright 1 where you need to notice that the evidence locker light is still on. I had no access to internet and had to figure it out myself.

I’ve cheesed the dice puzzle in DMC4 almost every time (use devil bringer right when the die faces the side you want).

I beat the first 3 days of majora’s mask on my own, then basically used a guide for everything up to the water temple because I couldn’t be bothered to figure out what inane connections there were between everything.

I came up to the windmill in Brothers, and thought I had to jump from the windmill onto the raised bridge, not the other windmill, so I looked up a lets play to figure out what to do there.

I remember looking up the fight for the final boss of Doom 4, because I didn’t really understand how to avoid the blue mist and getting skewered on top of the platforms. The videos I found seemingly just had the guy get lucky.

Recently I played Dishonored 2 and got stuck in the very first room where you have control. I tried interacting with literally everything in the entire room, but couldn’t determine what the fuck I was supposed to do. I went out the open window, but there didn’t seem to be any way forward there. I eventually asked a friend who had played the game before me, and he pointed out I could open the other two windows in the room. I thought they were just set-dressing, not interactable.

In Nioh, I played one level themed like a bathhouse called, Trail of the Master. In that level, you need to find 3 tiles to open a door to the boss encounter. I found the first two tiles by beating one time encounters around the level, and slowly cleared the level out. I found all the kodama, I found a secret wall, I found one of those wall demons, I found paths on the banisters into other rooms. I thought there must be something I’m missing. The last tile was on a corpse I thought I had already looted, because if you loot a corpse and it has consumable items when you’re at max capacity, the corpse stays active across resets instead of the item being lost like in dark souls. So I scoured the level up and down and eventually looked up a walkthrough.

My stance generally is that if just knowing what to do ruins a section, then it’s usually not a very good gameplay challenge to begin with. You can’t make a dark souls boss any easier with a tutorial video (unless it’s bed of chaos, and even then). I’m not proposing this as a hard and fast rule, it can be fun to figure things out for yourself, but I don’t really begrudge using guides or such when you’re stuck and there’s really no clear way forward. Though I’ll also say that if the challenge is presented fairly and you do have all the pieces to figure it out, you should try your best to figure it out before resorting to a guide.

The Strategy in Edgehogging

Celia WagarLeave a comment

Can you explain why edgehogging has more depth than ledge trumping?

Basically, edgehogging is a part of a complicated rock-paper-scissors loop, and edge trumping lacks most of that dynamic. Edgehogging basically means, you can only hold the ledge for a certain period of time maximum, the combination of your ledge invincibility time, and your roll animation. So your goal is to maximize this coverage by grabbing the ledge as late as possible, and rolling right as they try to get up onto the ledge.

This is complicated because many characters have stalling options that can wait out your ledge invincibility time, or your roll. So you might press the button too early, because you expect the opponent to go up right then, but in reality, they had another jump or alternative air stall option left, so they can wait out your roll. You essentially need to predict the timing they’ll return to the stage. Early, normal, or late. On the early side, frequently they’ll attempt to directly attack you as they’re coming up, so you can’t get down to the ledge in time at all. This whole thing is a timing mixup.

It gets more complicated when you factor in that most of the time, it’s possible to return to the stage, you’re not forced to grab the ledge low. So then the mixup is, can they make it back to the stage or not? Will they try to make it back to the stage or not? If there’s a possibility of them making it back to the stage, then if you roll on-stage, then you’ll sacrifice the advantage time you need to send them back off again. So there’s this element of valuation: How far can my opponent go in their recovery? Are they being forced to recover low at all?

Then there’s the fact that you have two other ledge guard options you could be doing. Onstage edgeguards, or offstage edgeguards. These can be more effective than ledgehogging depending on the situation. Offstage edgeguards can mean you don’t need to guess about their recovery at all.

On-stage edge guards are particularly good in melee because melee has the sweet spot, and smash 4 has magnet hands. In Melee, to actually recover, you have this tiny space where you can grab the ledge and none of your body pokes up over the edge of the stage, so someone on-stage can’t hit you. In smash 4, you have magnet hands that catch the ledge if you’re anywhere in the vicinity of it, so on-stage edgeguards are useless. Doing an on-stage edgeguard takes less time than trying to set up the right edgehog, but it’s usually more of a crapshoot, since you’re relying on your opponent to mess up. It’s possible to use a falling aerial that pokes down into the sweetspot zone to hit your opponent, but this is again a timing mixup.

Also worth noting is that PM reduced the ledge occupancy time of the roll, which I think is appropriate. It was just a little too good in melee, allowing you to cover both timing options frequently, where in PM it can only feasibly cover 1 usually.

Marth’s Side B is an air stall, so I use this all the time to sneak up onto ledge after someone rolls.

Ideas for Unconventional Games

Celia Wagar1 Comment

You talked about in one of your articles that there some things that we haven’t begun to explore in terms of gameplay. Can you share some of those ideas?

Mang, I’ve been sharing those ideas. I drop ideas all the time.

Here’s some random ones out of my idea file (some are obviously repeats of stuff I’ve said before):

A game entirely (or heavily) based on whiff punishes to get damage.

FTL except remade to be about all the mathematics you would learn at a real naval academy, practically applied to randomized situations. Make sure the ship doesn’t sink, explode, capsize, etc

Moving checkpoints, instead if going back to the checkpoint you just activated, you go back 2 checkpoints instead.

Parrying system that somehow integrates spacing more, like different attacks need to be parried at different spacings. Parrying system that needs a setup from the other game mechanics before it can be used, so parries don’t/can’t become the dominant or sole gameplay system.

Dragon’s dogma style magic system based on charging spells for long periods of time. Imagine you have 3 strengths of spell, light, medium, and heavy. Lights can be used pretty quickly, mediums have some startup, heavy are long and you gotta charge them. Big deal is, while charging heavies, you can’t use mediums, but you can use lights, and you take a hit to your mobility. So picture a dude with one hand in the air charging, zipping off little magic missiles to keep enemies at bay as he darts around them, then unleashing a typhoon when fully charged.

An overpowered super mode that makes you take/deal more damage and disables your ability to dodge, and takes a while in that mode before you actually deal tons more damage, so if you want to cheese, you gotta do it the hard way and survive to the point where you can wipe the enemy out.

Option to forsake bonus powerup type rewards in order to unlock hidden boss fights, content, endings, etc

An RTS with an overall health meter that is depleted each time a unit is destroyed, and when units are destroyed they are queued up to respawn at a certain point for free.

Vertical oriented “platformer” where you “jump” out to the left or right from a central pathway upwards, with gravity pulling you back into the center. Could lock onto other paths out in space and those become center of gravity.

RPG game about pacifism, where all your dialogue options deal damage to the opponent’s “will bar” and cause your character to shoot a stream of bullets at the enemy. See MSPA’s Sleuth Diplomacy and Listening to Both Sides of the Argument.

Rhythm platformer, you jump in beat with the music uncontrollably, automatically, without input. Gotta platform through levels by timing movements with when the jumps come in songs.

A fighting game that, as an on-going experiment, only nerfs characters to balance them. Imagine nerfing all of Melee to Kirby’s level.

Top-down twin-stick melee combat game.

How is Ammo Different from Cooldowns?

Celia Wagar1 Comment

You’ve said cooldowns are uninteresting. Isn’t the stamina in SoulsBorne essentially that? just it’s shared between defense and offense, which makes it a more interesting dynamic, but it’s still about controlling your opportunity cost, which I think is the criticism you’ve made against cooldowns.

I said they were uninteresting because when you design with cooldowns in mind, you don’t typically design moves with good counterplay. Dark Souls attacks have very obvious counterplay in the form of startup and recovery times. You can counterhit people, and whiff punish them. So even without stamina, the system would work (except blocking would be OP). Beyond that, stamina in dark souls isn’t a pure cooldown, it’s a resource. Because it’s not made in that particular way, you’re not getting essentially risk-free chances to do a ton of damage that you either spend at the right time or don’t. You’re not being asked to essentially choose the optimal time to use the attack or lose the opportunity to do it then (this wording is weird, and might be a bit hard to understand what I mean by this). Cooldowns are essentially about saying, “I have to choose to either use it now, or hang onto it.” Dark Souls lets you attack twice in a row, the question is more, “Okay, I can attack and do moves now, but as I attack more, I’ll eventually have to pay the price unless I rein it in a little.” Continue reading →

How does Mirror’s Edge Stand Out?

Celia WagarLeave a comment

What do you consider to be some of the deepest games ever, or at least by you?

Considering depth is my standard of quality, you could just ask what I think the best games are.

I’d probably go with like, Guilty Gear AC+R, Project M, Starcraft Brood War, Quake, most of the best stylish action games. Probably throw Go in as well, that really stands out among tabletop games. Continue reading →

What’s Wrong With “Fail States”?

Celia WagarLeave a comment

What’s wrong with the term fail state?

It’s attached to the definition of game for many people, and it doesn’t mean anything real, so it causes semantic fuckery when people try to argue about what constitutes a “fail state” and whether a given game has one.

So what counts as a “fail state”?

Here’s an obvious one most people will agree with, game over. Meaning you reset the whole game, do it over from the beginning. You’ve lost the entire game. It’s all over. Multiplayer games have this as well. You can see this in tetris, contra, street fighter, and a bunch of others. Kind of went the way of the dinosaur except for short games and multiplayer. Continue reading →

Stealth Game Informational Warfare

Celia WagarLeave a comment

Do you think third person stealth games are inherently weaker than first person ones? Even when you get x-ray power in first person games like Dishonored, you still don’t have the same advantage of being able to see all the enemies around you, that a third person camera, inherently brings.

Depends on how important you think the game of information is in stealth games. early MGS and other top down or side-on stealth games don’t really prioritize this aspect at all (such as monaco or mark of the ninja). Though monaco and mark of the ninja (at least in NG+ mode) both hide where out of sight enemies are, only illuminating areas in your field of view (executed surprisingly well in mark of the ninja, not the type of thing you’d expect to work in a 2d game). Continue reading →

Deep Mind on Starcraft 2: Competitive AI in Real-Time

Celia WagarLeave a comment

What do you thinik of Blizzard’s collaboration with Google to developing sophisticated Starcraft 2 AI using Google’s Deep Mind?

I’m looking forward to it. I’m excited as hell. However I think they should try a version where they train it with the visuals on a 250ms delay, because unlike chess, this is a realtime game. Humans realistically operate with a delay between when something actually occurs, and when it reaches our brains. An AI playing a realtime game can frequently employ strategies that are not only better than human ones, but which are literally impossible for humans. My classic example is SFA Akuma, which will walk up to you, and if you press a button, shoryuken, if you block, throw, and if you shoryuken, block you and punish. It destroys the RPS loops that define the game. It’s effectively not even playing the same game arguably.

The AI in Starcraft itself is already way better than any human player (just way stupider), with up to 3000 APM depending on what it’s doing. It can operate every unit individually if it wants to, using units like Ghosts to hard counter mech builds with the lockdown ability fired from every ghost individually onto each individual unit, when in real starcraft, ghosts are practically useless because no human player can possibly micro like that.

You’ll notice that the lockdown ability didn’t return in starcraft 2 where ability units like the high templar are rigged to only have 1 unit cast the relevant ability when multiple of the same unit are selected, because it would have made the above tactic really really easy.

The point is, in realtime games, unlike turn based games like Go, computers are frequently able to beat humans in simple ways that don’t really reflect the way the game is normally played. A 250ms delay might produce something that looks more like optimal human play rather than play that is borderline rigged cheating.

Like, we want AI to beat us in playing roughly the same game we’re playing, ostensibly, but if you remove this human limitation, then it’s like you’re effectively playing poker without hiding your hand, not very interesting.