What are some good ideas from bad games that you would like to see more dev’s implement in the future?
I called Nier good overall, but something I loved about it was the way that killing an enemy grunt would cause it to drop blood, which refilled your magic. This meant that you could kill grunts during boss battles to get ammo to fight the boss back, or even kill them right before you started charging so it could overcharge your magic meter, allowing you to shoot more than your maximum of dark lances or dark hands. Also the regenerating health unless you hit a timed weak spot was a pretty good idea, and bullets you can shoot down integrated with ones you can’t.
Batman Arkham Asylum. Having the guards go back to back was a really great idea. Bombing the gargoyles wasn’t a terrible idea.
Dishonored, basically all the powers, especially blink.
Legacy of Kain, getting shunted to the spectral realm when you die.
Psychonauts, levitate, palm bomb jumping. Great abilities.
Zeno Clash, that fucking strong punch’s momentum. That was godlike.
Mighty No 9, weakening enemies to a certain point, then hitting them with a special attack (the dash) right there, and being careful not to hit them past the point where they’re weakened. (trying to just barely push them over the point of weakening and not one hit further)
Do you like TF2? Hats/gambling aside I think it’s a briddy good shooter
It’s alright. Not bad. Like 3/5 territory. Kinda simple. Some classes have some cool stuff like pyro’s reflect, soldier and demo’s explosion jumping, scout being scout.
I think TF2 would be better if every class moved twice as fast and there was a crit queue system, so as to make crits deterministic instead of random. I wanted to test it, but wasn’t able to mod the classes to move faster than scout. There’s like a hard speed limit. I think some people have gotten around it, but I couldn’t figure out how.
Otherwise, characters move at a reasonable speed. There’s no iron sights. Everyone has a couple weapons. Cool.
Now my crit queue system idea is basically this: kill someone, and a crit gets queued up for later, much like Engineer’s revenge crits off the Frontier Justice. Kill assists queue a mini-crit instead of a full crit. It will deploy after a certain delay period, like 30 seconds to a minute or even 2 minutes. I didn’t really work out a good timing. Once that time is up, your next attack will be a crit. You can speed this up by dealing damage. Ideally the system is tuned to dispense crits more or less at the same rate as they currently come out. The primary difference is that crit dispensing will be more regular, less sporadic, and you cannot crit without killing someone first.
Currently there’s some balance issues, demoman is a bit too powerful, medic is definitely too powerful. This stems from the high level of lethality in the game versus the movement speed. You can kill people really fast, so it’s easy to stymie progress. Medics can overheal (and just plain heal), making it harder to kill people, so they can actually push. The competitive format has restricted the number of demomen and medics for this reason forever. Overwatch has the same deal, medics are the best characters in the game with mercy and lucio.
This is why I think the characters could stand to move about twice as fast. It’s harder to kill people who move faster. It’s easier to play aggressive and bypass enemy blockades when you move faster. Maybe scout doesn’t need to be twice as fast, but whatever. It could solve a core issue with the game and maybe lessen the reliance on medic and demoman.
I tried making a TF2 Turbo mod, but eh, couldn’t get it to work.
Is the MGS series worth playing through? I am really wary because I hear they are heavily story/cutscene-driven but people with good taste seem to like them and I love the visual design.
Yes.
The thing is, however long the cutscenes are (and they get way too long with some of the longest clocking in at 90 minutes), there’s an equal dedication to the gameplay systems. Beyond that, Kojima has no problems with using gamey abstractions wherever he wants with no hint of irony. Characters will actively tell you to press the action button when needed. He makes up things like jungles in Russia when it suits him. There’s the Soliton Radar based on “currently existing technology”. MGS3 introduced the “Active Reload” system, which allowed you to reload a gun by unequipping it, also canceling that gun’s animation. This was mentioned in the manual. MGS games break the 4th wall frequently without making a joke.
Beyond that, they’re just good games. The first one is kind of rough and simple, don’t know if I’d really advocate it, but it has its moments like vulcan raven. The second one onwards is where it really comes into its own. The games offer an absurd number of options to the player in how to distract enemies, take them down, manipulate their AI, and even simply move around.
I’d personally consider Metal Gear Solid 3 the actual best stealth game ever made. You can capture animals, live or dead, to serve as food. They all help different amounts. Some can be released to distract guards. Some are poisonous. You can also poison guards by blowing up their food supply, then tossing them rotten food, which they’ll eat. You can knock guards out, shoot their limbs, then they’ll walk with a limp. You have disguises where you need to show your face to some people and hide it from others, camouflage based on floor tiles, a stamina meter that depletes based on how much you’re carrying at one time. It has bizarre things like spinning snake in the survival viewer to get him to throw up, which can actually help food poisoning. You can knock on walls, throw expended magazines, shoot guards in the foot so they’ll fall asleep later rather than sooner, timing it for the perfect moment, or in the head to take them out now. You can diveroll through windows or over walls. You can of course hold guards up, shoot out their radios so they can’t call for help, interrogate them, and throw them to the ground, knocking them out. You can plant TNT and remotely detonate it. You can fake kill yourself and come back to life. You can leave dirty magazines on the ground to occupy guard attention. All the bosses leave you special items if you can take them out nonlethally.
The Metal Gear Solid series is fantastic. It has this amazing dedication to simulation as a way of augmenting gameplay complexity, not for a sense of realism or immersion, and frequently has characters tell you to press the action button, or comes up with awesome abstractions that fit the gameplay really well.
It’s the bizarre perfect split between a story focus and a gameplay focus. There’s nothing else like it.
What are your favorite hardest difficulty modes from the games you’ve played and why?
Thief’s Expert Mode (made the AI smarter and added more objectives), and I guess DMC4’s Legendary Dark Knight (also heaven and hell, and hell and hell)? Revengeance might count too (I prefer Very Hard personally, but Revengeance had 1000% enemy aggression, plus powered up perfect parries). I remember Order of Ecclesia’s hard, locked to level 1 mode to be really fun (NG+, enemies had more health). European Extreme in MGS3. Crysis’s “Delta” difficulty deserves a shout-out for the soldiers speaking in Korean. God Hard in Vanquish is also cool, but really I just love the name.
One of my favorites though is one I was developing for Dark Souls 1. I called it, “Hokuto No Souls”. I made it by combining the enemy aggression mods, the permanent gravelord mod, NG+7, and a mod I made that edited your fist damage to kill any enemy instantly. I was going to edit the weapon swap mod to force you to only use fists (and a claw in your offhand, both for variety and because lefthanded punches are really fast). This would be packaged in addition to a God Hand hud that I made by ripping graphics from God Hand. I also wanted to edit the damage of the weapon so it would scale with level so I could have it so bosses need to be hit a couple times before dying, and later areas wouldn’t totally outclass you.
So the idea is that everything kills you in one hit. You kill everything in one hit. You have only your fists. There are more enemies, and they’re all aggressive.
I planned on doing an LP of that when I finished it, but I never got around to it due to not knowing enough about coding in Cheat Engine.
I love it when games do something creative with their difficulty levels. Imagine a game that had a slightly different gimmick on each difficulty level, so you actually wanted to replay them all.
Can you explain why DMC4 has more depth than Ninja Gaiden 2 despite NG2 having dramatically larger movesets and more weapons?
Y’know, I could pull out my copy of ninja gaiden 2 sigma (I don’t have a 360, I know sigma 2 sucks, but it’s all I have), and try out all the moves available and write down their unique effects, but I’m going to take a gamble and refer back to my bayonetta answer for this question.
Most of the combo sequences in Ninja Gaiden aren’t very different in function, because you only get access to unique moves at the branching points between the combo trees, which is usually at the end of the combo chain. This means that you get access to functionally unique moves at the point when you’ve already hit the guy into a combo, so it doesn’t matter as much that it’s functionally unique, because they’re not doing anything anyway. What’s the functional difference between many of these moves? The speed across which the combo takes place and the damage. You need to start with the same openers for the majority of these.
Beside that, many weapons overlap in movesets, having similar moves as the other weapons, except with the range, speed, and damage slightly modified. You also are not capable of changing them except by going into the menu, so you are bound to 1 weapon’s moveset at a time, meaning that the depth of these multiple weapons increases linearly, rather than exponentially. Depth ideally increases on a logarithmic/exponential scale, akin to how we measure sound amplitude in decibels. Increasing the amount of content leads to linear increases in depth, increasing the interaction of content creates exponential increases in depth.
What does this mean? This means that functionally, many of the NG2 moves are redundant or close to redundant. There isn’t a significant differentiation in states. Do you question which combo you will use when you play? Are there significant differences that draw you to certain combos over others situationally when they have the same opener? I did not encounter this when playing Ninja Gaiden 1, I do not anticipate this being different in Ninja Gaiden 2. Some combos were clearly more efficient, occasionally less efficient ones had a useful purpose (like guard breaking), but I found that only a small handful of the range of combos available was really useful.
In DMC4, there are very few combo chains. Most moves are activated in one button press. You have access to all of your weapons and styles simultaneously. This design style allows moves to be extremely diverse in functionality without having to all trace back to one root move. It’s like how fighting game combos work. Rather than just having pre-determined sequences that combo, characters in fighting games have a ton of moves they can use at any time that have a variety of applications in the neutral game, then rules for how they can be fit together in a combo. You can use the shoryuken at any time. You can super at any time. Ramlethal in Xrd has some preset combo sequences on P and K, but other moves that can be used at any time too. NG and Bayo lack this and suffer for it if you ask me.
Uh, wow. I’ve heard Icycalm once say that DMC is just about rotating the moves you use, but I didn’t think anyone else believed that was all there was to it. Sure, you can do that, and that is an efficient way to build up style points, but first off, that doesn’t always combo, and second, you don’t always want to rotate moves like that. Especially in DMC4, where you have a lot more options with Dante at once than the 4 or so necessary to avoid staling the style meter. Like, just because rotating the moves builds style meter doesn’t necessarily mean you want to just rotate the moves. I have beaten NGS1 by the way, and done half of NGS2.
The thing with DMC is, you don’t have many combo strings. You have a bunch of moves that you can use at any time. Every weapon usually has like 2 or 3 ground strings, but what makes it cool is that you have these moves you can access at any time, usually forward + attack, back + attack, and a modified version using a style, plus forward and back on the style too. Because you have all these moves you can pull out at any time, building combos in DMC is more a question of, “How can I get this move to fit into this one?” and “what other moves can I get this move to lead into?” Where building combos in Ninja Gaiden is more like, “Does this combo string launch at some point in it? Yes? Throw shuriken right then, and do a different combo string, or the same one again.”
So then you get situations like someone using million stabs, which normally launches enemies away at the end of the move, then canceling it with royal guard before it completes, so they can do another million stabs like 5 times in a row. In the air, you can use aerial rave with dante, but it has a natural ending to it which you can’t combo after. You can extend your combo here by switching to darkslayer style and hitting them once, but not twice because the second hit launches, and then switching back. Or with vergil, you can launch enemies, but time a summoned sword to hit them exactly after they’re launched, which halts their air velocity, so they’re not pushed too far away for your next move. You get situations where people literally fly through the air, never touching the ground as they fight enemies, purely through air dashes, teleports, and jump cancels.
Here’s 3 combo videos for comparison in the different styles of play between these players:
Rebellion: 14
Gilgamesh: 13 (not counting how you can charge individual moves of the standard ground combos)
Lucifer: 11
E&I: 5
Coyote-A: 6
Pandora: 7
Trickster: 5
Royal Guard: 7
Darkslayer: 4
These add up to 72 individual moves. DMC3 has a lot more, but no switching, so I don’t think it can be counted as neatly. It also has more overlap between moves. I don’t think there’s really any repetition between these in DMC4, except that the ground chains can be kind of similar across weapons.
DMC allows more ready access to individual moves, and more ways to interrupt moves with other ones, thus there is more interaction between elements, as per my 4th rule of thumb criteria for depth. I’d also personally say the moves are more differentiated, there is a reason to use all of them and none of them totally overlap. This is a bias towards the moveset design, the enemy design in the NG games is clearly fantastic, but I tend to focus on player character mechanics first because it is simply how I lean.
DMC3 has more moves total than DMC4, because it has more weapons and styles, and the styles have more options, some were outright removed from DMC4. DMC4 just has more simultaneously, which was rectified recently with the style switcher in DMC3. The weapon switcher is coming I hear, which will make DMC3 great, except for the simpler enemies. Can’t win ’em all.
I personally consider God Hand the best 3d action game in the canon just because it has the best balance of moves to enemies and no significant fuckups. DMC is where I’d like the character movesets to be, Ninja Gaiden is where I’d like the enemy aggression to be (though diversity in function could use a little work).
What do you think of this trend of making everything a RPG? I think it’s a excuse to make games with shit gameplay.
C’mon, do you think developers intentionally sabotage their own games? People do things because they think it’s the best course of action. It’s hard for people to bear the cognitive dissonance of intentionally doing something they don’t think is the best option.
It’s much simpler to say that they have a different set of values, that they look at it a different way.
On a base level it feels good to grow stronger. It feels good to find something easier than you did before. You can do this through legitimately getting better at the game and more consistent at executing, or you can do this through stats increasing. The brain registers these things in similar ways.
On the marketing end, adding hamster wheels to games makes them last longer. Players get a sunk cost in the games. You have regular reward scheduling. Simple stuff.
Beyond that, it kind of makes an intuitive sense to most people. You want your game to be more complex? Add more functions. You can’t really add new mechanics, so add bonuses that players invest into. Look at all the online multiplayer games like Call of Duty where you grind for things, and have loadouts of mostly identical weapons. RPG mechanics can be attached to anything, so they are attached to everything. Don’t know when to dole out new abilities? Make it an RPG, let experience points sort it out. Don’t want to overwhelm players with having tons of abilities from the start? Same thing. It’s progression and tutorialization in one package.
It doesn’t fit in everything, it’s kinda lame to grind to trivialize games, but people think it’s cool, and it appeals to some base human desires in a way.
Because it introduces interesting choices into the process of collection, and makes it arcadey and non-persistent. Instead of slowly building up tons of tiny chits you need to manditorily scrounge across the level, you’re given a massive number of objects and allowed to take whichever ones you want, progression will not be barred by not collecting everything. Katamari fundamentally changes the game from visiting every single node to attempting to weigh the value of each node and the nodes around it. Katamari is the traveling salesman problem on steroids.
Collectathons are typically subsidiaries of adventure games. They usually have a large number of collectables that are placed all over levels, that when collected get added to a persistent count of how many collectables you have. These are then later traded for access to areas, different collectables, or character abilities (which may grant access to new areas). These collectibles are positioned to basically lead you by the nose through every part of the level.
Katamari is not really related to collectathons at all, it’s more closely related to those flash games where you eat things smaller than you and avoid things bigger than you. There isn’t a definitive name for this genre, because there aren’t really many games in it. One suggested name is eat and grow. Katamari is fundamentally about evaluating, “am I bigger than this thing?” and, “how many things smaller than me can I currently absorb?”
Usually eat and grow games focus exclusively on the “Am I bigger than this thing?” part. Growth is relative to how big of an object you’re eating, so you want to eat the biggest thing that isn’t so big you die, or eat a ton of smaller things to make up in volume. In Katamari, you don’t die if you hit an object larger than yourself, though you might lose some objects from your ball. Katamari is less life or death than other eat and grow games in this way, but it makes up for it by adding a timer. You’re given a specific size goal to shoot for, and you have a limited time to do it. This means that the whole game is about opportunity cost. You need to constantly be absorbing objects smaller than you, and moving to areas with progressively bigger objects to succeed in Katamari. By adding the timer, they make the objects you absorb count. You can’t take your time absorbing everything, you need to prioritize.
On top of that, katamari has some wacky controls. You use both analog sticks to roll the ball, to rotate it, to dash. You can slowly climb up walls of a certain scale relative to you. They also include live objects that may chase you, move independently, or run away. And building the katamari lopsided will have it roll lopsided. These all add additional considerations on top of the core idea. Plus themed levels.
It will never be as appropriate to link a speedrun ever again. This is how the game was literally meant to be played (except of course for quitting out of the levels when you get a big enough ball). https://www.twitch.tv/doughyguy92/v/42497199
Would Vanquish be better without regenerating health?
Here’s a curveball answer: No.
You’d need to change a lot of things in addition to health to make it work without health regeneration. If you remove regenerating health and left the rest of the game as-is, it would not work, would not be playable. The reason for this is because the game is so lethal and enemy bullets are largely hitscan. If you remove regenerating health, then you won’t have enough health to survive the level, unless you’re extremely good at locking enemies down pre-emptively, which is a skill no one would be able to develop in a game like this unless they were doggedly persistent.
You cannot reliably avoid damage from enemy gunfire, you have no real defense against incoming damage, and the levels require you to move into harm’s way in order to progress. Despite Vanquish adding dodging, rocket boosting, and cigarettes, the game is still largely about intentionally absorbing damage in order to output damage to enemies, then healing your damage off before going another round. Enemies take damage permanently, unlike you, so you can whittle them down no matter what position you’re in or how bad it gets. Every enemy is designed to be able to kill you from full health.
Every enemy and level is designed under the assumption that the player has an infinite supply of healing items available to them everywhere. For this reason, even if you replaced the regenerating health system with health packs, players are likely to run out, or not be able to cross the gap to the next heal. It would generate a lot of random deaths for no good reason.
How could you make it work? One proposal I have is to treat hitscan weapons from enemies more like slow moving lasers, like the ones you avoid in DMC or other games. Imagine the player can see the target points where guns are being aimed at him, maybe the guns have actual laser targeting, and you need to avoid those as they close in on you. Going with more of a Nier-esque bullet hell route might also be viable, but not fit the theme as well.
The exact health system I’m unsure about. You could treat it like MGR, have a limited number of collectible healing powerups that are dropped from enemies/environment, maybe dark souls it up a little and require you to manually use them. So effectively you have what’s technically a longer health bar that has to be manually managed instead of infinite reservoirs of health waiting to be tapped into. I mean, this is what Ninja Gaiden did, and that was lethal as all hell.
I mean, if you were really careful and adjusted a lot of the game, yeah it could work and possibly be better, but as-is, it’s the best solution we have for the type of game Vanquish is.
what do you think of rouge-like elements in game (mainly just perma-death and procedural generation) ?
I prefer Beige-like elements. Rouge isn’t my color.
For serious though, I’m not really a fan of procedurally generated content or perma-death. I believe I’ve spoken on this before. Despite not being a fan, I recognize they have their place and deserve to exist.
I think proc-gen content, especially if it’s swapped out every time you die, results in an experience where all the content is dispensable. Like, there’s less of a shared experience between people, and on some level you may have only been lucky to win because you got an easier set of levels.
I feel like these types of games are less definitive experiences that I can finish and more just random content of questionable quality.
That and Proc-Gen, as of yet, can’t generate levels better than human creators. We already have troubles with level design. The art is dead among human designers; how could we possibly quantify our level design knowledge into precise sets of instructions for the computer to randomly vary and achieve something up to par when humans who think they know what they’re doing already have a tough time with that?
The upshot of proc-gen is of course that when you vary challenges randomly, it prevents memorization, and requires mastery of the actual skill. At least in theory. It also means that players can’t act with confidence, because they never know if they’ll be thrown a curveball, and that they can’t overcome a curveball that kills them.
Maybe a good design for a future roguelike is extra lives? And not letting you get more than 3 or 5, so if you mess up, you can learn from your mistakes when something curveballs you, but if you suck, then you gotta try again from the top, and the limit prevents you from simply stockpiling lives or grinding them.
Thoughts on the good ol’ tank control survival horrors of the past?
I never played any of them, but from a control and production standpoint it’s really obvious why they did it.
From a production standpoint, the original playstation 1 wasn’t really that powerful. To get around these limitations they employed the old trick of prerendering graphics using more complex computers, then drawing them as static backgrounds from fixed camera angles (which devil may cry later went on to imitate, being originally a resident evil game, except because it was on a more powerful system, the camera could afford to rotate). This meant that they could have really nice looking backgrounds and high fidelity character models at the same time, with the limitation that the camera could not rotate, it was stuck in the same position.
Previous to the playstation, cameras couldn’t freely rotate on older hardware. A lot of the 3d camera conventions we have today didn’t exist because they were just figuring out the rules. This meant they didn’t know the modern solution of preserving movement directional orientation across camera cuts by temporarily mapping the controller to continue moving the character in the same direction in world space as long as that direction is held on the controller (you’ll see this in the DMC series). This means if you cross a camera cut, and the angle is shifted 180 degrees or close to it, you might end up going back the direction you came, and going across the cut again, ending up in a loop of transitioning between the two rooms. In 2d games, they were usually strictly oriented to a plane, so this problem didn’t come up, your directional orientation was always preserved across cuts.
So what’s a solution to this? Having forward move the character forward in world space irrespective of camera orientation. ie. tank controls.
Of course in retrospect, that shit is jank as fuck, but it’s probably all that occurred to them at the time. In retrospect, it has the apparent benefit of making it hard to avoid enemies, but it’s debatable how helpful that is or how much that adds to the game. Having weird and counter-intuitive control schemes can sometimes help a game, like God Hand, but it depends on context. I haven’t played these games, so I can’t really testify as to whether it works for them. I doubt it does, but I don’t really know.
Celia Wagar's CritPoints 