How would you go about reviewing a game like Super Mario Maker?
That’s tricky. Ordinarily for reviews of games, I’d say that user generated content is off-limits, because you’re ostensibly supposed to be reviewing the content of the developer, not the users, because user content can be variable depending on the userbase. However Mario Maker brings that contradiction to the forefront because there’s almost nothing but user generated content. The thing is, Mario Maker technically isn’t a game, it’s a tool for making games, or rather, making levels for a game. The ontology gets a little weird there. Should we consider each level its own game? Should we consider there an abstract generic “Mario Maker” game of which there are many user generated levels, each an instance of this concept of a mario maker game? We can definitely say that the 10-man mario challenge, and the 100-man mario challenge are games within the broader mario maker software. 10-man uses pre-made levels that Nintendo themselves created specifically for you, so if you wanted to evaluate the game of Mario Maker entirely from the perspective of developer generated content only, you could evaluate these pre-set levels and nothing else, and you might end up with a fairly poor opinion of Mario Maker. They’re not very impressive levels. If you wanted to evaluate 100-man, then that gets extremely variable. It’s possible to make tons and tons of different types of levels in mario maker, from auto levels, to kaizo levels, to puzzle levels, to troll levels, to creative themed levels, to more general mario-style levels. That and unlike say Devil May Cry or Ninja Gaiden, Mario is a game that is heavily defined by its level design. There isn’t a generalized set of options you always have access to and enemies don’t have a wide set of options they exercise against you, your options are very heavily defined by what’s present in the level and the interaction of various level elements. Continue reading →
What do you think of fakeout attacks? (Both when enemies use them in single plaher action games, or other genre’s, and in multiplayer fighting games)
Enemies using fakeouts in single player games:
I can’t think of a reason to use this off the top of my head. From the player’s perspective, it’s like the enemy randomly attacks or doesn’t. This creates the situation where the enemy uses the fakeout attack, and the player can safely attack them, but randomly sometimes they’ll actually do it, so they’ll trade hits with the player. Beginners might get scared by the fakeout attack, but intermediate will realize it’s basically just an animation where they do nothing important, so they can be attacked.
Maybe it would make sense in a game where enemies attacking requires an action that costs something from the player, and there’s a tell between the real and fakeout attack. Like in Furi, fakeouts would mean you can’t parry the next incoming attack, so if you made a system similar to this you could have the mixup between fakeout or not, then maybe a small reaction period for you to realize you’ve been faked out to let you dodge or something. Similar was used in the Mario and Luigi RPGs, where enemies would sometimes fake you out, so you’d jump over incoming attacks that weren’t coming, setting you up to be hit by the followup. Continue reading →
I don’t think it serves a real design purpose. It weakens repeated attacks, which can make the effect of attacks subtly inconsistent, changing the amount of damage, knockback, and shieldstun. The thing is, there’s really no need to make repeated attacks weaker. Making repeated attacks weaker doesn’t prevent any type of degenerate play, it doesn’t encourage any specific tactical plays that are beneficial for the game overall, or add a significant situational factor that can be taken advantage of in the moment like stun.
It mildly discourages using the same move a lot, a tactic that many people would call spamming, but the thing is, there’s nothing wrong with spamming. If using the same move works versus your opponent, then you should keep doing it, not be forced by the system to use other moves to keep your useful moves powerful.
And stale moves can interfere with a lot of things, like it changes the knockback threshold on moves that will cause knockdown versus not, it can change shield stun, making safe on shield moves unsafe.
Thankfully the effect of stale moves in Melee is so small that it can largely be ignored, and PM had the good sense to remove the knockback component of stale moves completely. In Brawl however stale moves had a more extreme effect on knockback, enough that if you played a character like fox, it was recommended you only hit with the second hit of up air to kill, because the first hit would invoke scaling, reducing kill potential. Smash 4 has reduced the effect of stale moves, sitting it somewhere between Melee and Brawl, so it’s probably more tolerable in that game, but in general I don’t think it’s something that has a place in Smash Bros.
In a good fighting game, there doesn’t need to be a regulatory system preventing you from using duplicate moves, because in a good fighting game, using the same move repeatedly is a bad idea because it opens you up to be countered by your opponent.
Notably, Skullgirls has a mildly similar system in its game, the IPS, preventing you from using the same move to start a combo more than once, but of course this doesn’t mean that any of the moves in that game are situationally weaker in the neutral game, it just prevents you from doing infinites and practically nothing else. Using systems like this makes a lot more sense for limiting the length/strength of combos in traditional fighters than anything in Smash Bros, which doesn’t have issues with combo length.
Stale moves just feels like a design loose end trying to fix a problem that didn’t need fixing.
What do you think of fighting characters that have special moves that change based on RNG (Like Luigi’s missfire, Peaches turnip pull, or anything else you can think of)?
I’m not really a fan, because sometimes the opponent just gets a lucky draw and you lose and oh well. Random stuff basically always does this unless there’s fore-knowledge of when it’s gonna come up ahead of time, which doesn’t completely negate the random effect, but mitigates it somewhat.
There’s a few other fighting game characters that have random effects like that, I can think of Faust, Teddy, and Zappa, from Guilty Gear and Persona 4 Arena. Phoenix Wright too, but the randomness screws him over more than his opponent. Game and Watch has a random effect in smash too, on his judgment hammer.
I mean, I just think all instances of randomness should be replaced by something that is deterministic and can be kept track of relatively easily, but which still looks random to the untrained eye, and has about the same level of frequency in outcome.
Barring that, there’s ways to build more consistent randomized systems, some of which you can see in Project M, some of which you can see in Dota 2.
One thing Project M did with Peach was make her Fsmash totally deterministic, it rotates the 3 possible items each time it’s used. Another thing is making it so Luigi’s next misfire is guaranteed to show up within the next 6 times it’s used, and allowing you to hang onto it. And with Game and Watch, they made it so the judgment hammer cannot repeat the last 2 numbers, and it has a light over it indicating whether the next number is even or odd, so you can stack the odds in your favor
Zappa in Guilty Gear has an ability to summon a ghost, and this is actually dependent on what second the timer is on. Some seconds still produce a random result however.
DotA 2, and a few other games, use what they call a PRNG (Pseudorandom number generator). Technically all games use a PRNG if you want to get really technical, because computers can’t generate random numbers, but that’s beside the point. Basically, when something says it has a certain odds of success, like 25%, instead of it actually having those odds each hit, it starts at a much lower chance of success and that chance increases drastically for each time it doesn’t succeed. This is set up so an ability with a 25% chance will occur roughly 1 in 4 times every time. By doing it this way, they reduce “floods” and “droughts” of a result coming up or failing to come up. People don’t actually have a very good mechanism for understanding random chance, we tend to fixate a little on the odds in the short term, and expect more uniformly distributed results than are actually likely to occur. This system makes it so a 25% chance effect will only very rarely occur twice in a row, and will only very rarely fail to occur after 6 attempts. http://dota2.gamepedia.com/Random_distribution
My general recommendation is, don’t include random effects if you can avoid it, it usually doesn’t add a lot, even if it’s funny some times. If you feel it’s necessary, find an RNG algorithm that works for you instead of flat % chance.
What makes Dark Souls 2 the worst game in the series?
A lot of things. Lets ignore the downgrade and everything involved in that.
Like, a lot of the shit with dark souls 2 was just people being disappointed because they were shown a better product than they actually got.
Probably the biggest thing I’d fault the game for is the return of healing items and Soul Memory. Giving a practically unlimited source of grindable healing was a terrible idea. Upgrading the flask over time made sense, but starting with only 1 flask was also terrible, meaning you’d have almost no healing in early areas where you needed it the most.
Soul memory was an attempt to prevent people from “twinking”, meaning collecting high power gear on a low level character, but it ended up making power levels even more disparate between PVPers, and it punished bad players who replayed areas a lot and lost a bunch of souls. Plus it eventually pushed everyone into the same soul memory tier on top, regardless of how powerful they actually were, and it made co-op with friends way more complicated. Invasions almost never happened (I literally did not get invaded once), it was a total mess.
The netcode was abysmal, somehow worse than the already bad netcode of its predecessors.
For some reason, if you used up all your stamina, you were not allowed to run until it all regenerated to the top, and then some, and if you used up some before it filled all the way, you still couldn’t run. In the other games this debuff only applied if you used up all your stamina by running and in games after this it only lasts to 75%. In DaS1 and DeS, you can undo the debuff by rolling or attacking.
I thought giving mini-bosses multiple lives was a good idea, but then it turned out you could kill any enemy repeatedly to despawn them, so being persistent through a tough level would slowly make the level easier, which is lame. This also acts as anti-grind, since you have a definite limit to how much you can grind, which is sort of good, but in all practical terms it sucks if you just need a few more souls to buy healing or want to get a specific rare item drop, and doesn’t realistically limit people enough to prevent grinding.
Fall Damage is calculated differently. Instead of the distance correlating to a percentage of your HP in damage, instead fall distances just scale a static amount of damage. So you always take the same amount of damage for a given fall distance, regardless of whether you have enough HP to survive it or not. I think this change was made purely to gate off the pit until you’re stronger or can afford the cat ring.
Recovery time relative to IASA frames in Dark Souls 2 is also highly skewed, so that on most attacks, you were negative on hit if you waited the entire recovery time, and positive if you canceled into a dodge or another attack. It’s just kinda weird.
Attacks for some reason have no hitstop, making them feel a lot weaker, and making it harder to tell whether they hit or identify the point of contact.
The adaptability stat was a wash, since it would invisibly add more iframes to dodges.
Then they had poison behave like toxic and drain health quickly, and they still kept toxic for some reason.
Mytha the Baneful Queen was just miserable, both that they decided to make an arena like that in the first place, and that you had to take a torch from the bonfire and set fire to the metal part of a windmill to get rid of the poison. That literally makes no sense.
Some enemies had hitboxes that made no sense, like the grab attack on the ogres, mimics, and a lot of different attacks on all the different giant enemies and bosses.
Vendrick and the ancient dragon were just poorly considered. They have like, infinity HP and will kill you in one hit. Plus the ancient dragon has a few attacks that are pretty much guaranteed to kill you if you’re not careful or if you’ve never seen them before, like him flying in the air and torching everything beneath him. Because of the massive amount of health they have, this fight goes on forever and you can’t take any damage during it.
The way dodges are implemented is really offputting. Instead of having different dodge animations of different speed and different iframes, equip burden affects the distance the dodge will move across, which isn’t actually that useful, since you usually want to have a lot of iframes, but stay reasonably close to enemies while moving around them. Instead, low equip burden in dark souls 2 doesn’t actually affect your iframes at all, it only changes the animation, and now with low equip burden, an attempt to roll around the enemy can move you really far away from them in the process, making it harder to punish enemies with dodge rolls at lower equip burden than at higher equip burden, unintuitively.
An additional weirdness of dodges is that the frames immediately after the iframes have hyper armor, so you can take damage during them. Since there’s no hitstop in this game, it doesn’t clearly register as a hit, it’s sort of like a phantom hit or something that you take damage for even though it seems like you avoided the attack. And the hyper armor makes it seem like you phased through the attack as if you were invincible, but you take damage anyway. This is especially disconcerting versus grab attacks, since you can appear to dodge them, then it catches you on the hyper armor frames and you teleport into the grab animation.
And the way you move around is just weird. You can sort of spin in place without moving, unlike the other souls games, and you won’t run if you’re up against a wall. I have no way of summing up how weird it is.
The jump is also kind of weird, but it has tradeoffs. Unlike in the other games, it’s actually a jump, but it’s a really small jump, but you can get way more distance off it. The downside is that sometimes you can get a “baby-jump” that doesn’t go anywhere. Nobody knows what causes this, people just know that it’s not random, but it happens without any known cause.
Beyond that, the game is just underwhelming in terms of its content. It didn’t really go out of its way to deliver masterful levels or enemies or bosses, they’re just average generally. It doesn’t have Dark Souls 1’s lows, but it also doesn’t have its highs. It’s more consistent, avoiding gimmick bosses, but the bosses & enemies aren’t amazing all around, just average.
Sure a lot of Souls question lately huh? Jumping on the bandwagon by bumping an old question of mine (DeS’s strong points and if it does something not completely outdone by its sequels) and asking more insight on DaS2’s animations and why people call them clunky, floaty and other buzzwords.
Sorry, I’m pending a replay of DeS to answer that one. Intuition tells me it holds up, I’m 90% certain, but I doubt my recollection.
I’d say primarily the issue with DaS2’s animations is that attack animations have a really long recovery compared to other games in the series. I just tested it and their IASA frames kick in really really late, and unlike the other games, don’t vary the IASA timing based on whether you hit an enemy or not (in Dark Souls 1, many weapons would take longer to recover on whiff than hit, in DaS2, they take the same amount of time regardless). Also it all feels kinda weird because it’s the first time From experimented with animation blending instead of just canceling the animations, so there’s an unnatural smoothness to the recovery as one animation leads into the other instead of a snappy instant response to let you know it’s totally done.
The other weird thing is that with a lot of weapons, you’re actually minus on hit. Your recovery animation is longer than the enemy’s hitstun animation, which is really weird feeling. So if you hit them, then try to walk away, you can actually get punished for that. This means you need to either spend stamina on dodge rolling out of the way, or use the weapon’s combo cancel point to do the next hit in the weapon’s combo, which will then put you back in the same situation of being minus on hit again. It’s weird, doesn’t feel right.
I think the reason they did this was to make whiff punishing more viable in PvP, just a guess, but it has weird consequences on the PvE.
That and the animations just aren’t as high quality. They’re serviceable, but not great. Not as much exaggeration as the other souls games, which is part of what helps sell the weight of the different motions. During the roll, your character moves at a constant rate and seems to glide across the ground, augmented by how the roll distance scales depending on your equip burden, so it’s playing the same animation scaled to different lengths than it was originally animated for.
Plus the way you accelerate in general is just weird. I can’t even describe it. Like, semi-rapidly rotate your stick, and instead of running around in a circle, you’ll be stuck in one place spinning around a central point. They changed something about the way walking itself works, and there’s so many possible ways they could do that, and it’s such a subtle thing, I can’t tell exactly what it is.
Can you explain how the backstab mechanic is different in the Souls games and why you think 3 has it best?
Easy.
Backstab works basically the same in Demon’s Souls and Dark Souls. If you’re behind the enemy, standing within a certain area, and press R1, then at that moment both you and the enemy will play a joint animation where you backstab him. During this animation you’re both invincible. It’s sort of like a 0 frame throw in old versions of street fighter. Oh, and you can’t backstab if your shield is up.
This meant that backstab, no matter what weapon you had, was essentially instant and inescapable. Your only defense was preventing the enemy from getting behind your back at all. Backstabs were more powerful than regular attacks, so a lot of PVP was just about backstabbing and avoiding backstabbing.
In Dark Souls 2, they decided to mess with backstabs a little. Instead of instantly going into the combined animation where you’re stabbing them, they gave you a little punch animation first. This punch was unblockable and would cancel on hit into the full backstab. If it missed then nothing else would happen. This is a bit more like a modern fighting game throw. You have a chance to roll out or walk away before getting hit by it. This significantly reduced the role of backstabs in PVP, while keeping them viable. Backstabs were still really powerful in PvE however. Also from a thematic standpoint it’s kind of weird that you punch the guy then stab them, didn’t really match the prior games.
In Bloodborne it seems like they REALLY didn’t want anyone to fuck with backstabs at all. In order to get a backstab, you needed to charge your R2 attack all the way up and hit the enemy in the back with it, much like the positioning for backstabs in the other games. Then they’d become vulnerable and you’d get to do the 0frame throw thing for a ton of bonus damage. So overall you were getting a lot more damage out of successful backstabs in bloodborne, but it was a lot harder to set them up mid-combat, and they were now basically completely irrelevant to PVP.
In Dark Souls 3, they clearly wanted to have backstabs match demon’s souls and dark souls 1, and to do this they assembled a mechanic that’s practically a work of art. Basically, when you press R1 within the activation range, instead of directly entering a joint animation with the enemy, you’ll instead play a specific backstabbing animation. If the enemy stays close to you, then at a certain point in this animation, there’s an invisible unblockable hitbox that comes out that forces them into a joint animation with you, canceling whatever they were doing, and canceling your lone backstabbing animation into the joint backstab (using animation blending). If they aren’t in range of this hitbox, then you’ll just continue to play the lone backstab animation, which functions as a regular (slower) attack basically. So you smoothly either get a backstab or just stab without needing to punch them first like dark souls 2, and without an instantaneous startup like DaS1 and DeS.
What do you think of enemies that can block or dodge your attacks?
It can be kind of tricky to get this right. Dodging especially. Like, the question is obviously, when should enemies dodge? Should they dodge when you attack? How often? If they only dodge right when you attack, then the dodge is kind of guaranteed, but also kind of like, “Okay, we feel like you shouldn’t get damage this hit because we felt like it, rolled some dice and you didn’t come up lucky”. So for all effective purposes, sometimes your hits just don’t deal damage. This is lame naturally, but this is how dodges in say Dark Messiah, and God Hand work as well as maybe a few other games. It does from a superficial standpoint make the enemies look more intelligent however.
The Souls games have enemies that can dodge too, but it is a randomly utilized part of their moveset rather than something they choose to do in reaction to the player. So they can dodge at bad times or good times and their dodges can be punished.
Curse of Issyos did a similar thing to this with blocking (look up footage and you’re bound to see it). Many enemies have shields that can block you, and when you hit them it’s decided randomly whether they are gonna block or not, so it’s as if they have way more health than they’re actually supposed to have. Sometimes you kill an enemy in 2 hits, sometimes it can take like 10 even though the enemy only has like 2 health. This is total nonsense.
Halo 1 did a SUPER clever thing here. They have enemies that dodge out of the way of your bullets, but they only do it in response to you successfully shooting them first, and they’re vulnerable for the entire dodge. So rather than enemies just deciding to dodge a bullet right as you shoot, they’ll dodge after being shot a little, so your first shot is always successful, and then you have this minigame of trying to trace them as they dodge.
Souls again has the correct solution on blocking here, enemies are programmed to block for periods of time or when they’re not attacking, and you’re given anti-block options like kicking and usually get a ton of damage if you do this successfully.
Basically, make blocking and dodging behaviors consistent and predictable, and give players a way to counter them.
What do you think of counter moves in fighting games? (Those in the smash games, cross counter, ect.)
I believe Mike Z made a good statement about those, counters shouldn’t have a distinct animation to them, because nobody’s gonna hit you if they see you in the stance, which is why Valentine in Skullgirls has a counter with no animation until she’s hit.
Counters are kind of like a worse dragon punch. They will beat any attack that hits them, but only if you do it at the same time they attack. The difference is that a counter will not attack afterwards like a dragon punch will, so it will not hit an opponent unless they attack. A dragon punch can be used to beat things like jump-ins or dash-ins, but a counter only works in those contexts if the opponent attacks afterwards. A dragon punch can punish a commitment that isn’t necessarily an attack, but counters only punish attacks.
And because you strike the counter stance, you are telegraphing to your opponent not to hit you, so to be effective with it, you need to go for that hard read that they will attack and not do something else. And if you can read them every time, that works great, but versus good opponents, they’ll realize after you do it twice that you’re trying to counter bait them, and start moving in without attacking, or using grabs instead of attacks. Dragon punches require tighter timing and are more punishable than counters, but they’re much more reliable as a tactic in high level matches.
The actual counter attacks work differently per-game. Sometimes they nullify incoming damage (Marth, Kolin, Valentine, Hakumen), sometimes they take incoming damage as super armor (Dudley in 3s & SF4), sometimes you’re given temporary health versus incoming attacks (Alarak in HOTS).
Sometimes you’re given full invincibility to any followup attack (Marth, Kolin, Valentine, Hakumen), sometimes you just have hyper armor during the counter attack (Dudley in 3s), sometimes the protection is only partial (Marth’s iframes wear off rather quickly, beating multihits, but not projectiles followed by melee).
Sometimes the counter hits a massive area to guarantee it beats long pokes (Leo Whitefang, Hakumen, Valentine), Sometimes the range is more limited and it can be baited out with the right hit (Dudley, Marth), Sometimes it pulls the opponent in like a hitgrab (Zangief in SFV S2.1, Kolin).
Sometimes you have an actual hitbox that catches enemy attacks (Marth has a large shieldbox for his counter that doesn’t cover his feet, Kolin’s V-Skill catches based on a hitbox, Hakumen has a catch hitbox for his D moves), sometimes it counters if the character is hit at all (Valentine, Dudley SF4, Leo Whitefang), sometimes it only catches certain types of attacks (Kolin, Rock & Geese, Zangief, Dudley 3s)
Sometimes you get followups off it (Hakumen), or it just does a lot of damage (everyone else).
The differences in implementation can make these counters more or less effective depending on the game. Marth’s is still useful for edgeguarding certain opponent’s up B moves, assuming they don’t sweet spot.
Since BOTW is fresh on your mind, how would you go about improving its climbing system? Do you think climbing should have combat sections as well (Say spiders that can threaten to knock you off or whatever)
You’re not mobile enough to avoid spiders, so that would just get annoying.
The primary thing I’d do is just speed it up twice as much and have jumping consume maybe half as much stamina, enough that it’s still significantly more than climbing the same distance, but not so much that you only get like 3 jumps, thereby letting you scale things a bit faster.
Add the skyward sword stamina regen fruit, make them move in some way. Continue reading →
Care to do a writeup on what makes certain enemy encounters janky? (Or what jankyness is in general for those who don’t know about it?)
Okay, I think I’d identify Jank as an event that significantly mis-matches expectations of what will happen that happens in correspondence to actual interactions between actors in a game where the cause of said event can’t be easily identified before or after the event has taken place.
Meaning, Jank is not RNG, but you can’t tell what the fuck caused it, or reasonably predict it will happen before it does. You usually can’t reliably reproduce it. You can at best know it’s there from prior knowledge and avoid it.
When I say the Hydras are janky, I mean, sometimes when they attack, they will just straight up go around your shield. Sometimes they’ll miss you. Sometimes they’ll be rotated a bit differently between attacks so that either of those things will happen when it didn’t last attack. Sometimes they’ll decide to shoot a water bullet when they’re at melee range. Sometimes that water bullet will go over your head, sometimes it’ll hit something behind you and splash on you. Sometimes you’ll block it, sometimes not. It’s not strictly RNG, though RNG may be a factor, but you can’t really tell what the fuck is going to happen.
These two videos showcase a lot of situations where stuff happens that nobody could have predicted.
Another thing that’s janky was that one giant crystal you need to run across in the crystal cave with the giant golem at the end of it. You’ll randomly like, slide off it if you’re not careful for no discernible reason. Having the golem there makes it even harder to deal with, but thankfully it’s gone after it dies once.
The hitboxes in Dark Souls 2 that sometimes randomly hit beyond the range of whatever the attack is (like the ogre grab or a lot of attacks on giant enemies), and you can’t tell if you’re really gonna get hit or not, that’s jank. Or the way that hitboxes for attacks in BOTW will sometimes be larger or smaller for perfect dodges, or how the camera can prevent you from doing the right type of dodge sometimes, or pretty much everything about thunderblight ganon.
Celia Wagar's CritPoints 