Thoughts?
https://www.reddit.com/r/pcgaming/comments/42frky/a_potential_remake_of_gunz_1_and_gunz_2_rights/

Okay, Gunz Remake, cool. It would be cool if Gunz 2 had a good remake. Gunz 1 could use some filling out. So lets go over this.

“2) General Balance – Removing immediate block after slash They want to make the new user-friendly so they chose to remove BF, DBF because it’s too overwhelming on the new users.”
FUCK YOU.

“2) Weapon level rework – No level requirements for weapons There will be no level requirement to use weapons but will encourage leveling through max weight (higher level unlocks higher level rings that give greater max weight etc)”
Why even have levels? Why not just balance all the equipment around one level instead of letting some people have blatantly better equipment. This isn’t really a tradeoff per se, most of the higher level equipment is flat number buffs.

Oh, seems they have a classic server mode except they’re increasing weapon switch delay to nerf K-Style.

This is the wrong fucking approach, don’t nerf the thing that kept your game popular for like, forever, the big claim to fame. BUILD ON IT, AND ADD EASIER SHIT FOR PEOPLE TO TAKE ADVANTAGE OF THAT IS NOT OVERPOWERED.

Take a cue from like, I dunno, vanquish or some shit, cook up some new advanced tech for guns, give them a new dash or something. Like imagine if you could super run by double tapping with guns instead of doing the lame roll. You could maybe dash dance a lot like in smash bros, switching super run directions frequently to move around at crazy speeds in all directions. So then you get crazy air movement with shotguns, you get crazy ground movement with other guns. Have it so you accelerate more the longer you run, like maybe taking 2-4 seconds to reach max speed. Shotgun users need to switch off to sword a lot to get DPS, so they can’t take advantage of this. Also have dash momentum inherited into the jump, but you exit the dash state and do normal run when you land.

Another idea is maybe you could introduce a new type of stun for consecutive headshots with non-shotgun weapons, like the critical hit stun animation, then let people hit people affected by this to get the same damage as a critical hit. Remove the ability of the shotgun to headshot at all. Add more skill components to the spray weapons so that people with other skills than quick dexteritous button presses can succeed.

Also remove the fucking bullet spray, implement damage falloff for the uzi type weapons, and no falloff for rifle type weapons. Uzis are supposed to be close-range, rifles long range. You’re supposed to switch between them based on how far you are. Instead Uzis are just shit-inaccurate, which is fucking stupid and annoying.

Why do game developers frequently add random bullet spread to their games?

Because it’s accepted! Because in real life, it’s hard to aim guns accurately, the bullets seem to spray everywhere. Adding a randomized spread to the bullets is a cheap way to simulate this. Furthermore, the spread of the bullets seems to give the gun more force, as if it’s uncontrollable, so it makes sense from a game feel perspective.

People just include it in their games and don’t really question why they put it there. Over time people realized that it discourages people from using every weapon to snipe across the map, forcing them to get up close, or pick a specific sniper weapon.

In Gunz this is the exact design dichotomy, uzi type weapons do more DPS, but have a wider spread, rifle type weapons have lower DPS, but a tighter spread. The design intention is that you’ll use uzis for up close encounters, and rifles for further out encounters. The result is that uzis are shit-inaccurate and a pain to use.

What’s your opinion on Gunz 1 and 2?

Gunz 1, it was crazy getting into it when I was younger. I played in a basic way, performed well, and slowly heard about these K-style techniques, the butterfly step, and so on, and eventually picked up a few from what I saw other people doing. I never quite got down the butterfly cancel, but I was close. I didn’t think the way I do now about game states, so I saw people slashing the wall to climb the wall and thought, oh, there’s a wall hang move, so maybe slashing into the wall is similar to that. It’s more like slashing and blocking resets your air state allowing you to airdash or walljump jump again.

http://gunz.wikia.com/wiki/K-Style

The short of it is, the creators had no idea what they created, so they tried to remove it all. The cited reason being that it was too hard on new players (which is bullshit, because I remember being a new player, most players at the lower levels didn’t K-style) This has happened a large number of times throughout all sorts of games. If you do this, you’re a bad designer. This is the equivalent of removing combos from street fighter.

Gunz 1 is a fun, but simple shooting game. You don’t have much weapon variety, the melee attack system is a bit awkward, and not as good as guns in most scenarios. The basic movement techniques are pretty cool and levels are designed to allow crazy vertical movement everyhwere. Most of the depth comes from the K-style glitch. If you want to play it today, you’ll need to find a good private server. The whole game is open source by this point practically. I think they could have improved the base set of mechanics if they balanced wallrunning and wallclimbing around the K-style jump to give them more useful utility, like added speed, ability to control your lateral movement instead of being stuck on a specific trajectory, and so on.

I haven’t played Gunz 2, but from the get-go, they apparently wanted to prevent K-styling. There was like a gimped version of it in some test server at some point that was removed. Then they decided to add classes, one of which has a sniper weapon, which I think violates the type of close combat the series is focused on in the first place. That and having everything restricted to classes is rather limiting in comparison to the mix-and-match approach of the first one.

Looking at the gameplay video, it seems like it has some interesting ideas, and improved the feel of melee attacks. I think I’ll need to try it out to see what they did with it and if anything interesting came of it. I hear you only get 1 character free though. That’s pretty gross.

Only 63% positive reviews on steam.
http://steamcommunity.com/app/242720/reviews/?browsefilter=toprated

Do you think that the whole “2D is more precise than 3D” argument/meme that gets brought up primarily by nostalgic old guards has any truth to it? Tbh, having grown up with 3D games, I find 3D Mario much more precise and easier to control than any of the 2D Marios (except the New games). Granted the old 2D Marios had slippery movement and looser controls, but the point stands, that it kind of depends on which one you developed your muscle memory with. Plus, with all the scary-precise speedruns, I don’t think the argument holds much salt. I’ve never even seen anyone specifiy just what they mean by “precision” other than “I find 3D Mario difficult b/c I’m an old man, therefore 2D games are more precise”.

Precision is vague here. Does it mean that in 2d you’re able to more reliably replicate scenarios involving fine movement, or does it mean allowing one to express a greater degree of precision in operation? In 2d games, there are less variables involved in their operation. Especially old 2d games on pixel based platforms, because there literally was no unit of movement smaller than a pixel (even though a lot of these calculated movement in subpixels, the environments didn’t have subpixels anywhere, so it generally didn’t matter), where the same is not true for say super meat boy or Ori and the Blind Forest, where units of measurement can be infinitely subdivided.

3d games can be considered a lot like top down 2d games in most instances, except they place the camera behind the character. Then you have analog movement, due to the analog stick, which is polar coordinate movement with very large number of angles and intensities. Compared to an 8 way 1 intensity control scheme, this is a lot harder to manage. Even games like Super Smash Bros, that are basically side scrolling 2d games, have a lot of analog information in their handling that can’t be precisely recreated when you use the wiimote’s dpad. Lining up down to the pixel in a game like link to the past or the original zelda is a lot easier than the same in link between worlds due to the simpler input scheme. The smallest unit of difference is a lot smaller in LBW, both in terms of position and angle.

The other trouble is that it’s harder to judge position in 3d versus 2d because of the camera angle and use of perspective. In real life we have additional senses to help us out like proprioception and vestibular sense, but watching a screen, it can be tricky to determine how an input will move you relative to the position of the camera and the character’s position and orientation in space, much like learning to drive a car (thought there is also kinetic feedback helping you here too). In 2d games, position is absolute and much easier to determine. If you want to jump from one platform to another, you can directly measure the distance of your maximum jump, or visualize your jump arc on the screen. In 3d, you can’t really do that. What might be the correct distance at one angle, would change if the camera pulls out, or is oriented higher or lower. Your brain needs to make more complex calculations to judge the distance in perspective versus mere distance across the screen. I noticed this playing ratchet and clank recently. Normal jumps are like leaps of faith.

I think what started this trend is Campster’s video on Sonic, which didn’t use the word precision and is fairly clear in the way it is spoken.

At 8:00 and 15:45 he talks about platforming controls in 2d versus 3d. (his comparison of doom’s health meter to contra’s lives is totally erroneous though, that’s down to a difference in attack types and both could be designed to work the opposite way)

His talk about leniency in 3d games is kind of accurate, a lot of 3d games use snap-to mechanics for environmental interaction where a lot of 2d ones don’t, but more likely is that there’s simply been a rise in the popularity of those types of mechanics than 3d games implicitly requiring them. Like for example, if you want a character to catch a ledge, you’ll probably make a box near the top of the character’s head that causes them to snap to the ledge if they’re falling, like what’s found in smash bros, mirror’s edge, tomb raider, ratchet and clank, mario 64. You get things like grind rails in sonic, kirby air ride, tony hawk, ratchet and clank which use this as well.

Playing ratchet and clank recently I found that in the process of running around on platforms I would narrowly fall off a lot and get saved by the ledge grab. But meanwhile in dark souls there’s no such mechanic and I’m able to do things like run across the anor londo rafters much more easily than the equivalent would be in ratchet and clank. Similar happened to me in Link Between Worlds in Rosso’s Ore Mine, where they have some thin planks laid out to walk over. That would be trivial in a 2d game with 8-way control where your movement is perfectly aligned to the thing you were moving over, but in link between worlds it’s really tricky to hold the same direction steady, especially as the character moves up or down in height through perspective, in part because of the strength of the circle pad’s resistive spring.

Another thing worth noting is how in Link Between Worlds, projectile items like the hookshot or bow and arrow snap to the 8 cardinal/ordinal directions when held. In the original games you weren’t allowed to hold them and position yourself at all, In LBW, you can do it with almost all your items. The world is still largely aligned to a grid, so this allows you to reliably aim in the most useful directions. You can still aim at off angles if you’re careful in tapping the button, though that might only be true with sword beams. This type of concession is absolutely necessary for the game because of the angles you typically aim.

Lock-on isn’t a totally necessary concession for behind the shoulder 3d perspective games, I’ve certainly played devil may cry and dark souls at times without lockon by manually aiming attacks. The real trouble is the camera needs to be manually operated at the same time and you don’t have enough fingers to do that. OoT didn’t have any camera controls besides lock-on (neither do many later 3d zelda).

Then of course you get Marble Blast 3d, which Campster brings up, that doesn’t have snap-to mechanics of any kind. Though personally I’d compare to Super Monkey Ball, which was also made by Sega, and involves going fast. Both games don’t have any of that input leniency as a concession to it being more difficult to precisely angle yourself in 3d, and Super Monkey Ball doesn’t even have camera controls.

So what’s the difference between these examples of moving across narrow platforms I brought up, Ratchet and Clank, Dark Souls, Link Between Worlds, and Super Monkey Ball? Why is it easier in some of them and more difficult than others? I’m not really sure honestly.

My best guess is that it has something to do with the camera angle for most of these. Ratchet and clank has really poor camera controls and the angle faces so far forwards that it’s difficult to see where you stand. When you jump in many places, the camera will go so high up you can’t see the ground under you. This makes the ground appear like a sliver so it can be tough to see where you are on the surface. In Super Monkey Ball, approaching an edge has the camera tilt higher over the monkey so you can see the ground better. In Dark Souls, the camera tends to stick at a high or low angle more readily when positioned, and has a smooth automatic takeover when you are determined to walk in a specific direction. I already took a guess at LBW, it’s likely a different case than the others here.

In Ratchet and Clank there are additional concessions in the form of a soft-lock on your shots, indicated by an icon that appears when you aim close enough to an enemy, causing your projectiles to home in on that enemy. Most console shooters have some form of auto-aim, in the form of bullet magnetism, sticky reticules, or so on.

Mirror’s Edge uses snap-to for a large number of environmental interactions, vaulting, catching ledges, wallrunning, wallclimbing, springboarding, and so on. 2d games like megaman X or Zero or ZX actually don’t use snap-to for things like walljumping, they require you to press into the wall, but that’s not feasible in 3d, you need to use a snap-to range because you can be angled differently relative to the wall, applying force/momentum differently, where in 2d you always orients into the wall.

The oldest example of snap-to mechanics I can think of is the ladders in donkey kong (or megaman I guess). The ones in donkey kong are extremely rigid, where megaman’s are much more flexible. To say the least, they exist in 2d and 3d, and nearly all environmental interaction requires them on some level.

Yeah, it can be harder to move through 3d environments because judging distance and angle of movement is less easy, because the input device itself is more complicated, because cameras need to be carefully controlled too, and they alter the angle of movement when reoriented.

I guess the short answer is, yeah, 2d games are easier to move precisely in than 3d games.

Why do stealth games end up being so slow frequently?

Frequently stealth games have multiple speeds you can move at, like running, walking, crouching, and crawling. The idea is that the fastest movement speed will actively attract enemy attention, and the slowest will prevent enemies from noticing unless they look directly at you. Frequently crouching, such as in Dishonored and Deus Ex Human Revolution, will completely squelch your footstep sounds.

The trouble I have with this is, a ton of stealth games end up being about moving slow as balls most of the time, assuming you’re actually playing stealthy, until you memorize the level layouts and find fast ways to move through them. And who likes moving slowly?

The tradeoff here is really obvious, moving slowly makes you less noticeable, and incapable of being perceived without direct vision, at the cost that you’re staying within view for longer periods of time, tempting fate that a guard might turn around and stare at you.

The downside is, how often is this really played with in any way? How many guards have you seen that just face one direction, so you have to crawl on your belly to get close to them?

How can we fix this? Have guards turn around more often, maybe give them a little spider sense, feel the player’s gaze on their back. And importantly, establish some kind of tell before they do it so the player knows to get the hell out.

What about a game that reversed this? What if you needed to go fast in order to stay invisible? And the slower you go, the more noticeable you are. Dunno how it would all work out, probably based on the player moving so fast that they trip over something, lose all their speed and get caught, but hey, might be worth a shot. That or skipping the movement speed = noise thing altogether.

Alternatively increase the gamespeed, so the slowest form of movement is faster, but still proportionally slower. Adjust enemies so reaction time is still balanced.

This is probably something worth playing around with.

What elements make a great stealth game?

Good level design, good enemy spotting AI, good investigation AI, good distraction mechanics, good chasing AI, good movement mechanics.

Without good level design, you can’t move around enemies. You can’t really have a stealth game in a single hallway. Also if you don’t have chokepoints and good patrol patterns, then it’s either too easy or too rote.

The way enemies spot you, and the reaction they have to it is important. You gotta have some tolerance zones where they sort of detect you, otherwise everything is over when you enter their vision cone. I think dishonored broke this down in a neat way with eyes, head turn, body turn, though failed at investigation and sub-alert states.

Investigation is important for the distraction aspect. It’s also the primary interplay between the player and the enemies. It’s where the enemies try to actually find you, based on where they think you are, or other factors. Thief 1 & 2 did the best job of this in my opinion, I still remember a tense encounter in thief 1 of trying to avoid a guard in a pitch black room with a tiled floor. He couldn’t see me, but he kept moving around, getting close to me, and I had to keep moving aside on the loud floor, which clued him in on my positioning even more, but I’d get out of the way, and he’d lose me briefly before the cycle repeated.

Distraction mechanics prey on the enemy’s sense of vision or hearing, they’re able to help you pull enemies away from choke points, or get them off your back if they’re about to find you. They can be close range or far range. They can draw enemies directly to you, or pull them to a different point, and they induce risk because enemies then try to find you afterwards. MGS3 and MGSV are kind of the kings of this in my opinion.

Good chasing AI is part of what keeps the game fun when everything gets fucked up. Good AI here will try to close off exits, chase the player directly, get into position ahead of the player, or other such routines. Pac-man ghosts are good for understanding this type of principle, http://gameinternals.com/post/2072558330/understanding-pac-man-ghost-behavior and Monaco generally excels at this type of stealth, practically being built around it.

Good movement mechanics fit in any game, in the case of stealth games, movement is both a matter of traversal, and tradeoffs between visibility, noise, and speed. Some of the most interesting here would be Dishonored, though blink kind of broke the stealth unfortunately, MGS3, MGSV, and Mark of the Ninja (especially this one).

You’ve been asked numerous times about JRPGs, so time for something different: what are your favorite *W*RPGs (if any)?

Dark Souls.

Uh, none. I don’t really like any of them. I guess Mass Effect 2 sort of wins by default? Maybe Deus Ex? Least hated? Actually I liked Fable 1 way back when I was younger. Don’t know if I’d think the same now.

I’ve played at least some of Mass Effect 1 and 2 (beat), Dragon Age Origins (only started), deus ex, dxhr, Elder Scrolls 3 (started), 4 (beat), and 5 (started), Fallout 3 (started), Borderlands 1 (beat) and 2, Diablo 2 (beat), System Shock 2 (started), Planescape Torment (started), Fable: The Lost Chapters (beat), Risen 1 (beat) and 2 (started), Guild Wars, Jade Empire (started), Gothic 3(started), Dungeon Siege, Vampire the Masquerade Bloodlines (almost beat), Witcher 2 and 3, and Dark Messiah (beat).

Wait, yeah, Dark Messiah wins, if you count it. It’s kinda borderline.

If I had to sum them up, I think WRPGs have weak action gameplay, they’re a bit too bound to the concept of the character growing stronger rather than the player. The Witcher series improved at this over time, but in my opinion never really succeeded. Some attempted to investigate non-violent gameplay, pacifism, but it came down to just knowing the right dialogue options and sometimes having a skill level high enough, which doesn’t involve much interesting choice or dynamic. Either you can skip this fight or you don’t.

I think if Japanese RPGs are about the joy of growing stronger (grinding), Western ones are about the joy of personal expression (stat investing, character customization, or story choices). Both usually fail in my book, because neither try to really push interesting choices with short term consequences. They’re both caught up too much in the tradition their systems were born out of. Both were presumably inspired by dungeons and dragons and other tabletop RPGs in different ways originally, and since then have followed the tradition of the digital RPGs that came before them rather than really trying to make interesting combat systems, either from scratch (dark messiah), copying arcadey games (zelda, Ys), or using the format they had (SMT).

To me, stat systems like that are supplementary, they augment what you have rather than creating value in of themselves. They don’t have very strong short term consequences or much implication on short term consequence choices, so they’re not very challenging to work with. Sure, it’s cool to work out a new build, it’s cool to grow stronger and find stuff that was originally hard much easier, but both of those things are so far removed from the world of short term consequences, they’re almost outside the game.

Rival battles (Vergil, Devil Hand) are usually one of the highlights of character action games. But what would you consider to be the worst rival battle(s) you’ve ever played and why?

Dark Link in OoT.

Check out how lame this is, for what’s presumably the average player. At 7:46 or so.

Link’s moveset wasn’t really designed with any type of counterplay in mind, so it’s not surprising that if you face yourself, you’ll end up with a really boring battle, especially since your swords clank on each other, and he’s scripted to attack when you do.

So it’s better to use attacks he can’t copy to cheese him, if that’s even cheesing, it’s practically a puzzle. You just need to use an attack in a position where it will hurt him but not you, and repeat until he dies.

This is a more comprehensive breakdown of how dark link works.

What do you think of EE difficulty in MGS? I enjoy trying to deal with the consequences of getting spot, calculating your approach and playing well to get out of a tight spot. But on EE, all that tension disappears because the game ends right away. It feels extremely rigid, though it does makesense that you’d be finished if the entire base was alerted to your presence. 😛

Okay, the big deal is, MGS3 has a flexible enough spotting and investigation mechanic that a lot of shit can go on before you actually get an alert, and you can mess up a fair amount without getting totally caught. You can lead guards around, do all sorts of silly stuff. Watch those skill videos for MGS3 on youtube

Almost no alerts in this entire vid, only an alert when he wants there to be one.

MGS3 is a robust enough game that there is a massive amount of depth in the stealth systems, all the things you can do while undetected. Comparatively, if you get an alert, there isn’t as much you can do. Guards are at least mildly psychic, and can follow you around fairly well. Gun combat in MGS has never been amazing, running away and hiding can be a time consuming drag. You don’t get mid-combat stealth like in far cry 3 blood dragon or crysis warhead.

European Extreme trims that stuff out. You want to play the game entirely stealthy? Lets cut out the rest for you, don’t have to wait to get back in the action. Sure, it’s rigid, but that’s because stealth mechanics in general are rigid. In regular combat, you typically have a lot of health and enemies attack with things that can be avoided in a lot of games, but in stealth games, they “attack” with vision cones, which can be swiveled around quickly. It’s a bit like a shmup with more complex enemy behavior, you gotta dodge the vision cones using movement (from one manner of seeing things).

The other thing is, the rigidity of the system in that one particular aspect means you cannot progress without the use of stealth. Most stealth games are not played stealthy in speedruns, because it’s slower. It’s almost always slower in any game to engage an enemy rather than run away from them. In the case of most stealth games, it’s also easier to just trigger an alert and run past everyone, then wait until the alert dies down to continue if there’s a stealth-only door. I did it a lot in my more amateur MGS3 runs. EE prevents you from cheesing the game as easily.

Here’s a diagram that’s often cited in discussions like these. Unfortunately, no stealth game seems to really be an exception to this.

What do you think of i-frame, auto-position, or dodge-in-place types of moves in 2D games? I’m thinking of stuff like Aces Wild and Alien Soldier here. 2D is about movement and positioning, so are these types of mechanics antithetical to the medium? I-framing and homeing moves are practically required in 3D because of wonky collision and imprecise viewing angles (2D screen and all), but what about 2D games? Also, Alien Soldier isn’t really the best example since the Zero Teleport isn’t exactly a true i-frame move and it’s not something you can mindlessly use, I was just using it to give you an idea of what I mean

2D isn’t “about” anything. Using invincibility in a 2d game is not antithetical to the medium in any way. Homing attacks are a problem in general if left unchecked. Don’t make statements on what a medium is “about”, it’s jumping to conclusions, presupposing an answer. There is what works, and what doesn’t work, and sometimes invincibility works. Smash Bros is 2d after all.

Homing attacks can be a problem in a manner similar to lock-on because they usually reduce depth in a scenario that has the potential for depth. I say usually because not all homing attacks are implemented the same, not all are guaranteed to hit, not all are guaranteed to hit at the same angle/time/situation, not all home in the same way. These differentiations can significantly affect the function of the homing attack.

Homing attacks work fine in some fighting games, like Melty Blood, and Dark Stalkers (the pursuit option on knockdown is more frequently used to tech chase rather than get bonus damage by using it slightly too late to connect).

If you have a use for these, then go ahead. If it works, if it has a valid function, then use it. If it can be used to create depth, then go ahead. There is no meaning or purpose to the medium.

Invincibility is not required in 3d games. Homing attacks are usually not required in 3d games. Invincibility is a design choice that makes sense for certain purposes, such as incentivizing waiting to dodge at the last possible moment, rather than getting out of the way at the first possible moment, or as an anti-grab option such as in smash bros, or as an alternate block option that allows you to whiff punish because you’re not being weighed down with blockstun. That type of wait til the last moment skill test is interesting in its own way, which is why Bayonetta went all out with it by implementing witch time.

Homing attacks in 3d games were a compromise in the early days of 3d controls when nobody really knew how they worked, since then people have realized how to implement 3d controls better, so they’re less necessary generally. Not that they were really that common in the first place. How many homing attacks are there? Sonic has one, who else? I’m drawing a blank. Lock-ons and snap-tos are still way more common.