Comeback Factors

Celia WagarLeave a comment

What do you think of X-factor in MvC3?

Comeback factors are weird in slippery slope games, that’s what I think. Hell, slippery slope games have a weird sense of fairness to begin with and comeback factors are weird.

Basically, as you lose characters, you lose neutral and combo tools, it’s a slippery slope. X-factor gets stronger in correlation to the number of characters you’ve lost. It’s character loss compensation. Though it does so by making your point character stronger/faster for longer periods of time, so it’s not exactly paying you back the stuff you lost, it’s not exactly counteracting the slippery slope. X-factor can frequently just flat-out win you the match by making everything you do better.

The trouble with comeback mechanics is that they make it so that the game is less consistent. In a game without comeback mechanics, a lead is a lead. If I’ve successfully won neutral on you enough times to to push your lifebar really low, you’ll need to put the same amount of work into winning neutral back at me to even it up. Comeback mechanics give you a chance to even it up without having to work as hard to do so as I originally had to in order to put you in that situation, making it so effectively, a lead isn’t a lead.

Another way of putting this is, there is no such thing as a true comeback mechanic, it’s only that who is in the lead gets abstracted as the game gets further in. If a comeback mechanism is powerful enough, then the game might very well become a race of who can take enough damage to get down to that point where they win. You might look at the guy in first place in Mario Kart and say he’s in the lead, but in reality the guy in last is holding a blue shell, a bullet bill, lightning, or so on. In games with powerful enough comeback mechanisms, you aren’t actually behind your opponents, you just can’t compute the actual state of the game. That’s part of what makes comeback mechanics frustrating, that the actual state of the game so clearly contradicts the apparent state of the game.

A classic example of this type of thing crops up in game shows like Jeopardy; early rounds are for only a few points, and later rounds are for a lot more points. So it may appear that you’re ahead early on, but in reality your current lead has almost no effect on whether you’ll actually win in the long run.

This comes from a corporate sort of thinking, “Everyone should have a chance to win! Games are more fun when they’re close!” But when you’re ahead and you get evened out by a comeback mechanic, it’s really grating. Comeback mechanics mean you need to respect characters more as they are almost about to kick the bucket. Comeback mechanics help strong experienced players, or mid-level players more than the noob trying to get into the game that might get scared off if they don’t have a comeback security blanket, because those mid-level players are the ones who can actually use it effectively, unlike the beginners.

http://xenozipnotes.blogspot.com.au/2013/03/comebacks.html

The trouble with comeback mechanics in my opinion is is, sometimes the worse player wins, and with comeback mechanics, that’s likely to happen just a little bit more. It can help you close the gap in a bad situation that little bit more easily. It makes the game that little bit more inconsistent, and that can be frustrating to deal with.

More so than this:

Thankfully SFV decided to keep its comeback factor toned down, as a simple cancel and a super mode that gives you either the one good move you need, or a couple more options. And there’s different ways to charge the meter besides being hit, like using your V-Skill successfully.

Kingdom Come: Deliverance Combat Review

Celia WagarLeave a comment

Do you think that Kingdom Come: Deliverance could/will be a good game?

It doesn’t seem likely from the initial videos they’ve released describing and showing the combat system.

Combat at 24:00

These are real life sword fighters. They know sword moves, they know stances, and so on, and they are trying to translate the complex system of how our bodies move into a control system with 2 buttons and mouselook.

So they went out and motion-captured a ton of animations, and tried to fit all these animations of actual sword stances and maneuvers into a 5-way strike/guard system. So you end up with things like “combos” of 3 moves you perform on someone’s block, where the third hit is a guardbreaker.

You have these “real medieval techniques” of up attack, left attack, down-right attack. All with animations totally accurate to how soldiers fought on the battlefield in like, the 1400s or something, but systems resembling some person’s conception of competitive Simon Says.

Rather than try to connect with the simulation of space, or the dimension of time inherent in these animations, they have no idea what to do, and made a completely different system that doesn’t reflect any of the animations they captured, because there’s no way you can get that level of finesse in a control scheme like a mouse and keyboard, or a controller, or even a motion controller.

Games like Chivalry, and Street Fighter are very unrealistic representations of combat, but they are able to capture a significant depth by giving their animations significantly different physical properties, like range, hitstun, startup, cooldown, pushback, and so on. In this they have largely uniform properties, except a variable that goes from 1 through 5 for the hit zones.

So sure Chivalry is Spin to Win at the highest level and utterly ridiculous compared to how medieval fighters used their weapons, Dark Souls too, but they’re making the best of their medium to capture a type of depth, a combat dynamic, that isn’t present in real life confrontations, and isn’t present in this even more shallow imitation of real life confrontations.

In short, they probably can’t really do better than this. This is probably the limits of what you can do in attempting to mimic real life fighting styles. It goes to show what the limits are of trying to achieve authenticity, instead of merely deriving inspiration from real life sources in pursuit of something a bit more abstract that will be deep on its own even if inauthentic. They seem to be influenced by an immersion-based mindset judging by their other statements on what the final game will be.

I feel like there’s a lot of unexplored space for first person mouselook melee combat, but it’s limited by the number of buttons on the average person’s mouse, and we need to think a little harder about reasons to look in different places than directly at our opponents and movement.

Elemental Weaknesses

Celia WagarLeave a comment

How do you feel about elemental weaknesses? Whether it being individual mons/armor having specific weaknesses and strengths or mons of a type all having the same resistances. I’ve always felt that they were pointless in single player since you can just look up what to bring.

Alright, lets think about it. What are some situations that can occur here? RPGs are games of specialization typically, so you could end up specialized into a team that has their strongest moves resisted, but it still makes sense to use those moves because they do the most damage. You could deliberately construct a team that resists, reflects, nullifies, or absorbs the types they’re going to go up against.

By themselves, these factors are kind of flat, they’re factors of preparation chosen before the battle that apply number buffs to damage without altering how the moves fundamentally work. They’re not as much a counter as most megaman boss weapons are to bosses weak to those weapons. Probably something to consider more from the knowledge perspective is how advance knowledge of your opponent’s strengths against you or resistances shapes the moves you avoid using.

However we could borrow a principle from RTS here. In RTS, some units hard counter others, just the way they’re built, and on the surface it looks like that sucks, except it’s possible to overwhelm lesser numbers of units with a lot of hard countered units, and to mix units together to create a more flexible composition.

If you only had to fight with one pokemon each battle, then yeah, type advantage is pretty sucky. Consider Devil May Cry 3 which surprisingly enough has a type advantage system for its devil arms. You can follow the type advantage system, but it’s just flat number buffs, it doesn’t feel that strategic. Once you’re trying to mix together different types into a coherent composition that needs to maximize its output versus other compositions it gets more tricky.

Add to that the way Pokemon has Same-Type Attack Bonus (STAB), which adds a 50% boost to using the same type of move as your pokemon’s type. I still remember as a kid fighting Erica in pokemon red and having all my pokemon get beat except a low level bellsprout I happened to have. Its poison type helped it avoid getting poison powdered and its grass type resisted other moves and it had a non-grass move on it, so by itself it turned the tide.

Over in SMT3, type weakness has another role of earning turns, not just maximizing damage, and each character has different elemental and buff/debuff moves in the lineup, so hitting enemies with their weakness can potentially not only mean more damage, but more healing or buffs/debuffs depending on your party composition. And given that the enemy teams are mixed too, different characters can share in this potential.

Type weakness is generally so simple that it might be a good dynamic for kids. Match like to like. Probably one of the worst examples is Golden Sun, which had one of the most boring elemental systems ever (hit enemies with opposite element always). SMT does the classic four elements thing better just by having them be arbitrarily weak per-demon, even if it’s confusing to keep track of.

Gunz 1 to 2

Celia Wagar2 Comments

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

First Person Fraud

Celia WagarLeave a comment

How can you write fps articles without having played the seminal contemporary fps series? Or at least the more popular or better games in the series. You need to play the BLOPS trilogy, MW1, MW3, and maybe Advance Warfare so you can be more thorough in laying the smackdown on these games. Or, are you perhaps afraid that you’ll think these games are not as bad as you’d like to think they are? You might even find them… decent. :O

Okay, lets see, I’ve played Modern Warfare 2, CoD 2, Bioshock Infinite, Takedown Red Sabre, Metro 2033, Deus Ex Human Revolution, Borderlands, Borderlands 2, Far Cry 3, Far Cry 3 Blood Dragon, Crysis, Crysis Warhead, Planetside 2, Battlefield 2142, Brink, Singularity, Halo 1, Halo Online, Metal Gear Online, Spec Ops The Line, Mass Effect, Mass Effect 2, Vanquish, All Points Bulletin, Section 8 Prejudice, FEAR, Just Cause 2, Prey, Peter Jackson’s King Kong.

I’ve played a fair number of contemporary FPS games (and not all of the above list is bad, only maybe like half or two thirds of it). I don’t think I need to go back through Call of Duty. Sure, they might have neat little things like the exosuit and laser weapons in advanced warfare, but that’s not enough for me to put up with the rest of the bullshit I know this series involves.

The better question is why I haven’t played/finished the following games from my priority list:
FPS: Blood, Serious Sam 1 & 3, Doom, Unreal, Duke Nukem 3d, Jedi Knight series, Bulletstorm, Tribes (ascend and starsiege), NOLF, Wolfenstein: The New Order, another Wolfenstein?, Gears of War, STALKER, the Action ______ mods of various FPS, Descent, Wrack, The Darkness, Max Payne, Kingpin: Life of Crime, Socom?, Riddick, Mafia,

These are much more differentiated and mechanically interesting games than most of the contemporary ones listed above. The FPS section of my priority list is the longest section. How can I dare to write about FPS games without finishing all of these? I honestly feel like a bit of a fraud not having played these, enough to shy away from some FPS questions I’ve been asked, and I feel maybe the slightest tinge of regret for not trying out the CoD AW Exosuit.

I’m not afraid, I’m dismissive. I’m also too lazy to play the games I genuinely want to play. Why would I go into a series of games I know I despise, having already sampled that series? Gears of War is on my priority list despite being something I’m not looking forward to because I’ve never tried it before, so there might be something I’ve genuinely overlooked. Call of Duty hasn’t been a thought in my mind.

Critique of Dark Souls Critique

Celia Wagar2 Comments

What is your thoughts on this guys video series on his critique of Dark Souls?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3VJCDYtR9B8

I started to do a level-by-level critique of dark souls myself. It went unreleased due to audio level issues. I had different criticisms than this guy, like the way that the door out of the asylum demon’s room isn’t more obvious, leading many many players to try to fight the asylum demon instead of realizing they can run away (like sean malstrom). Also the kick/jumping attack instructions could have been more clear, and there could have been a shielding enemy that allowed the kick instruction to come across better. And the room explaining how to put on armor and equipment is easily missed too. I also think they crowded too many messages around the boss fog. I didn’t miss these things, but a lot of other players did from the LPs I’ve seen. I like the dark souls asylum tutorial way better than the dark souls 2 tutorial which has branching paths without any real flow, Though I like the way the dark souls 2 tutorial can be skipped.

I think the big fault with firelink is that the way you’re supposed to go is at your back, and the two ways you shouldn’t go are both roughly the way you’re pointed towards when you land. He’s wrong in that he claims you need the master key to go to blighttown, you don’t. I’m glad we were afforded options here, but the presentation of firelink in terms of guiding the player leaves a lot to be desired.

He’s pretty close to correct about the hellkite wyvern. I think that something like the scorchmarks are a bullshit argument too, considering it’s a visual tell that isn’t established earlier. The dragons in Demon’s Souls were much more fair about their bombing runs. I was expecting the hellkite wyvern because I had played demon’s souls previously. A lot of people die right there, few people figure it out beforehand, it’s like a kaizo block.

His remark on physically consistent level design being good level design is a little shortsighted. It’s good in the context of dark souls, not universally.

Butt stabbing the boar isn’t inconsistent. He shows a ton of clips where he’s too far away. It’s the same range as any other enemy’s backstab.

Complaining that the combat system becomes awful when you have to fight >1 enemy is complete scrub talk. Attacks don’t layer in unpredictable ways, you can see the startup of both enemies. In my opinion, 2 on 1 is when the combat system of dark souls actually becomes interesting, and 1v1 is simply cheesetown for most enemy types. Dude needs to learn to whiff punish, not dodge or block.

Yeah of course the combat remains interesting despite few mechanics, that’s because of good enemy/level design that push the system in different ways and need to be uniquely learned.

I think he could have done this video better by pointing out simply all the common mistakes beginner dark souls players make, then tonally consistent changes that could be made to the game to prevent said mistakes.

Very detail oriented critique. Very gameplay focused. Great description of the game.

What do you think of some of the multiple enemy based encounters in Dark Souls 2?

I remarked in this post that I thought that was one of the best upgrades to dark souls 2 over the original, as I think multi-enemy encounters are where the system of dark souls truly shines.
https://critpoints.wordpress.com/2015/03/20/74/

In single enemy encounters you can easily dodge and attack at rather set times, but multiple enemies make it so you need to judge asynchronous cycles and AI patterns to find opportunities to fight back, which is really fun. With individual enemies, you can parry them or circle strafe backstab them rather easily, multiple enemies cover for each other, making these strategies still useful, but much harder to find opportunities for. There is a similar principle to this in doom and quake (and hell, most other action games).

It’s disappointing to me that this was panned by so many people.

Reading the Dark Souls Critique of Paul Anderson you just mentioned. What do you think about the other parts of his critique. He has five videos total. What are your thoughts on the other four?

I saw. I’ll get around to it. They’re long. I approve of this guy’s style, even if I don’t agree with all his points.

Part 2

I myself have said that the basement key being used to go to the lower burg is probably the weakest point of connection in the whole of dark souls 1. Uneventful door, uneventful key, almost no connection between the two.

The game doesn’t teach you to block the dogs then counterattack. This is probably the absolute crux of my issue with people remarking that any time you’re thrown up against something for the first time the game is teaching you something. It’ll probably be the example I point to in the future for the mistake of this sort of thinking. The thing he demonstrated in the last video was that he didn’t know how to whiff punish. The best way to beat an enemy isn’t to dodge or block it, it’s to press no buttons at all. Dogs get locked in position when they lunge, you can move away from them to bait their attacks, or circle/run around them. Also 1.5 seconds is far beyond average human reaction time, the sane response is to roll.

I think the capra demon is a hard fight, maybe it’s a bit of a gotcha, but absolutely less than the hellkite wyvern, and it’s a spectacular use of level design and enemy combinations, with the weak point probably being the safe zone at the arch above the bridge. There needed to be a high ground of some type, but it being so abusable for plunge attacks and safe from dogs/capra is lame. I think Capra is one of the best parts of the game because of the dynamism of the capra/dog combination. I recently beat this fight using a character at default level with an unupgraded default class weapon, and it was very fun.

So lame that he complains about the channeler in the gaping dragon fight. That was a great touch, similar to the dual dragonrider battle in dark souls 2.

I’m fine with the toxic dart blowers considering the dung pie trick, and that they’re positioned in areas with lots of cover, few enemies, and projectiles are easily avoidable. Also your shield doesn’t have 100% block for status effects, dongus.

Yeah the claw monster on the wall is odd. Clunky design.

He should have recognized by now with the poison mosquitos that flying or jumping enemies don’t actually jump. Their bones are still attached to the ground. This is true of the player as well, which is why you take damage from sources underneath you even if you jump, and activate those switches in sen’s fortress even if you jump over them.

unrelated but love his remarks on the estus flask in the first video and the stamina bar in this one compared to LoZ and SoM. The remarks on the general combat system are great too during the quelaag fight.

He’s right about the undead dragon, I never considered that before. Same with it being poorly designed as an encounter.

Love the slow motion footage of havel’s weapon clearly connecting when he claims it doesn’t.

Damn straight Sen’s is fair.

I noticed the elevator went up an extra level after arriving at the intended destination from the chains I was watching while waiting for it to come down. I intentionally stayed on it to see if there was a secret up there and got killed. I also detected the mimic on my first try and just hit every chest from there on out before opening it. Another tell is that mimic chests breathe slowly.

I found the hidden bonfire to be thrilling, because I thought that the lack of a bonfire was weird, and eventually I looked over that edge to see what was down the side, noticing the bonfire platform.

I eventually found the cage platform, but not on my first playthrough.

I found the first enemy of anor londo to be troublesome because aggroing it by itself was scary as fuck on my first playthrough. I didn’t realize its aggro range was reduced to let you run past and I was scared carrying all these souls with no nearby bonfire. I managed to barely beat it before finding the bonfire.

I agree that the roof you need to run up in anor londo to the rafter room is hidden as hell, not standing out very well. I had to look up how to progress online for this part. The later roofings and rafters are much better designed visually to lead the eye. It’s a good piece of level design in its challenge otherwise.

He’s reiterated this a lot, but yeah, ranged attacks break souls games. Glad they did away with that in bloodborne. They should have had more anti-ranged options on basically all enemies, and less stun/damage probably.

I was disappointed too at the gargoyles in dark souls, considering the same in demon’s souls could fly.

I like the archers, I like the gargoyles before the archers. There’s no surprises here, there’s plenty of space to fight them, you can see everything coming, it’s fair as fuck, just hard. I’ve gone over this before in a previous ask. Also speedrunners have a guaranteed strat for the archers, the second archer was repositioned to prevent it from shooting your back when you get close enough to the first one, and you can parry.

I’ll agree with ornstein’s buggy dash attack being crap, but the rest of his complains are unfounded, except the magic and summoning one. Boss AI (all the game’s AI) handles multiple players poorly.

He says he never dies because he backpedals all the time and waits for safe openings. You can do this with nearly all the bosses, but it’s not as efficient. There are plenty of opportunities to take risks to speed up the fight which aren’t purely backpedaling. Watch a speedrun, they don’t have the luxury to backpedal, and most routes use a melee weapon, even if it’s an extremely strong one.

As usual, I disagree with every instance where he says you should introduce enemies 1 at a time.

You can attack through walls, just only partially.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/416986/webm/Dark%20Souls%20through%20the%20door.webm

Solid observation with the nonlinearity making for an uneven difficulty curve relative to level/upgrades.

I don’t mind the ghosts in new londo, You’d be dumb to let them all rush you. They’re all clearly shown and you’re given chances to avoid them.

I disagree with the implementation of making the player be weaker as necessarily a bad thing. I think the only one of these areas that’s really poorly designed is lost izalith with the T-rex butts.

“you are meant to avoid nito’s spear by sprinting away so it thrusts where you were just standing” What? I thought you were meant to avoid it by timing your rolls in sync with the audio cue.

What I did with the elevator for new londo is simply push the button each time as I run off. It’s an interesting dynamic

The traps in sen’s fortress don’t actually reset when you die or leave. The arrow switch after the first boulder encounter turns the boulder launcher offscreen, which you can hear an audio cue for. The elevators being in a set position instead of magically at the top or bottom when you arrive is not the same as things resetting to their original state on death. Having a 2-way elevator might be less time consuming.

I’m surprised he called 4kings a good fight, doesn’t fit his MO.

lost izalith is terrible and I make no apology for it.

I second that it’s lame that the late areas of dark souls don’t have the same interconnectedness of the world, and lament that no souls game has had that same type of connectedness since.

The forced death against seath is indeed bullshit and shouldn’t have been in the game.

Come on, he should have noticed by now that you can attack through thin walls. I did this against the darkwraiths in new londo, and a ton of other places.

I second that the crystal caves are a boring gimmick. I think the duke’s archives in general are a good area though. Dude has too much trouble with ranged attacks + melee enemies, which I consider an extremely reasonable bread and butter combination.

The critique of the mace versus sword is dumb. Also the sword doesn’t weigh more than the character. The dark souls weight units are pounds or kilograms, and most swords aren’t actually that heavy. They animated the thing that way, accept it. You might as well criticize the stutter on not having enough dexterity.

He doesn’t realize with the backstab that you’re not allowed to backstab when your shield is up.

You’re allowed to roll the instant you get up, it even buffers so you don’t need to be good at timing.

I disagree with his statements on the story, there’s very clearly meaning to a lot of it, and I like the presentation style because it’s so out of the way of the rest of gameplay.

Overall I think his critique is extremely well presented even if I disagree with a lot of it. I’m amazed it doesn’t have more views, he knows what he’s doing and I’d like to see more analysis in this style from everyone.

The Witness Overview

Celia WagarLeave a comment

What do you think of Johnathan Blowhard? I hear he recently released a new game called The Witness and it looks pretty pretentious.

I think I’ve remarked on him before.

https://ask.fm/Evilagram/answers/132208276757
https://ask.fm/Evilagram/answers/125015226645

Anyway, I’ve been playing The Witness, because I felt like playing a puzzle game and this intrigued me more than Braid did. It’s alright. The biggest issue I’ve had with it so far is that the rules for overlapping shape symbols are not adequately explained in the swamp area, first that the overlapping shapes can be connected to each other, next that as long as the symbol is contained, the shape represented by that symbol can be anywhere within the contained area. Not to mention that a lot of puzzles in that area which have multiple solutions will reject a large number of valid solutions. The blue square subtraction puzzles are a similar issue, with the hardest puzzles of that type having solutions that honestly don’t make any sense compared to the puzzles that came before them, or after them, seemingly violating their own rules. Oh, and I wish you could sprint faster and the acceleration weren’t so slow.

The Witness is honestly kind of a curiosity to me. It’s literally a game about drawing lines, yet so much effort was put into making a fancy island with a unique visual style, really striking environmental design in terms of landscaping and color design throughout. You find audio logs that are far as I can tell, all just quotes from famous people, particularly scientists. Then there’s the $40 price tag. Does he think this game is really the same as other $40 games on the digital market? The 10/10 is also striking from IGN, because while I think it’s an interesting game, I don’t think it’s worthy of a 10/10, there’s not enough there. I’d give it a 7/10 personally.

What do you think of this?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hDxxwFLs0d8

This actually really pissed me off. I haven’t finished the game yet, I’m on the final area, and I’ve taken far less time than he has. I did all the work in my head with no accompanying notes and almost no hints. throughout the video he attempts solutions that I can tell are wrong, probably selected on purpose to convey his dissatisfaction with the game.

The thing I disliked about Braid was that the puzzles were too easy, and when they were tricky to figure out, it was because they relied on an interaction of the mechanics that was difficult to extrapolate from the earlier puzzles. I have a similar issue with Portal’s puzzles where the thing is playtested so hard that all the corners are carefully sanded down to prevent people from getting stuck.

The Witness was a big step up from Braid in my mind as a puzzle game because it introduces base concepts, then expects you to solve for them in a larger problem set, where the possibility space is big enough to make brute force prohibitively expensive.

Then it combines concepts, like two per area, areas needing to be a certain shape and excluding colors, plus connecting circuits and correcting 1 mistake, and because you know all the simpler rules you can figure out the trick to making this one whole puzzle work. Then there’s a bunch of observational puzzles and it’s like, yeah I can look at the environment or make this thing line up in perspective, give me a real one.

Part of what pisses me off is the way he criticizes it for not having more mechanics relating to the manipulation of simulated space. I thought it was an oddity frankly that jon blow decided to make an island at all, but frankly it’s neat to have nonlinear connections between areas and puzzles. I just wish sprint was faster and you could fall off more cliffs and the like.

Blow is trying to do something really elementary here with game design, with using basic abstract symbols for game rules. He managed to create a ruleset with these simple things that has a massive combinational complexity, then he leveraged it to make a massive fucking number of pretty good and difficult puzzles that almost always have good simple demonstrations of the base mechanics.

SBH whining that he’s not making use of the medium is ignorant, especially given portal 2 removed all the realtime execution components, and could probably be formatted to be solved like a crossword puzzle too. There’s no other game on paper, or otherwise, with rules like this, to my knowledge, and it being digital allows the system to check your answer against the correct one without revealing it to you in the process. Not to mention it allows multiple correct answers when applicable.

Demanding there at least be some sort of narrative thing to justify it is like the ultimate insult here. If you don’t like the game for what the game is, you don’t need this additional narrative thing to try to justify its existence to you, give up! Go back to puzzle games made specifically to coax you through any point you might get stuck or need to think.

Punch-Out & AI Scripts

Celia WagarLeave a comment

What’s your opinion on the Punch out series?

Okay, I had a short conversation about Punchout on Twitter fairly recently, I think with Jason Brown. It was after I watched the punchout vod from AGDQ. I played the original Punchout for myself, made it up to the third league, about halfway through.

Like, Punchout is weird. I don’t totally know what to make of it. On first glance, it appears to just be a glorified rhythm game with some puzzle elements thrown in. I remember seeing an explanation of all the different fighters’ weak points where punching them would yield a star, so at first glance it appears fairly obvious that to win you just gotta punch them when they won’t block or dodge, then punch them at the critical moment to get a star. But then it gets weirder.

For example, take the early game enemy Great Tiger. His ruby shimmers right before he does a big attack and if you punch him at that moment, you get a star. So the obvious strategy is just to punch him whenever that blinks, then use the star to uppercut him. This can let you win in 56 seconds, which is alright, not great. The actual fastest stretegy is to jab him, triggering him to counter jab you, then you wait and do a body blow just as he does to get a star. Do this 3 times in a row, do 2 uppercuts, then do the counterjab strategy again, wait a little for the ruby to blink, can jab him again, wait a bit longer for his ruby to blink again, then uppercut to knock him down. he’ll get up two more times, but can be uppercut on each of these to instantly knock him down.

That’s actually fairly complicated, there’s a lot going on there, and I honestly don’t entirely understand why the above strategy works, knowing the whole thing would require more knowledge of how Great Tiger’s whole AI is programmed, and I can’t find any documentation of that (or any other punchout AI, if you happen to know of or find this, forward it to me please, I know luke miller has some tutorials on youtube for speedrunning punchout, regular and blindfolded, I have not watched those yet).

A recent subject of research for me has been boss cycles and phases, specifically how to deal more damage on specific cycles, how bosses modulate the amount of damage they take, how players can use the mechanics under their control to deal more damage, and when they switch phases and cycles. I think it’s something I’ve overlooked until recently, and punchout seems like the ultimate game for this type of thing.

Punchout AI follows scripts over the course of the fight related to the timer, RNG, and internal variables. They have reactions to actions you take. They go down based on different amounts of damage in relation to different parts of their script and reactions. So there’s a lot more going on here than just a regular rhythm game. The issue perhaps is how well this is explained or telegraphed, but I don’t have any final conclusions on this stuff. I just think there’s a ton of potential research here.

Less Dexteritous Smash Bros

Celia WagarLeave a comment

How would you change the mechanics for melee so it would require less dexterity to play but still keep it’s depth?

There’s a lot of ways you could potentially do that. For one, you could fix the bug where the last frame of jumpsquat won’t count in determining whether you fulljump or shorthop. You could allow Shorthops to be bound to a button instead of needing to release within the jumpsquat time. You could extend the valid dash range during dash dancing, add an extra frame of leniency to backdashing. Make it so jumping during normal turnaround still has you turned around. A lot of small input leniency changes that Project M made. You could make shield directly cancel into up smash or up B instead of needing to cancel through jumpsquat first. You could probably make L canceling automatic, and not lose that much (I just resent the idea that such a thing is totally pointless, especially when you have characters like ice climbers, who are very difficult to L cancel against, and who have a valid use for L cancel in the L cancel desync). You could add a small buffer period, like 2-3 frames. You could make Meteor Cancels mashable. You could remove the restriction on IASA frames to not allow dodges or B moves out of them.

And that’s about it. Beyond that, you’re changing the options the characters have or how difficult they are to perform in a way that affects game balance (due to strong options being too easy), or the distribution of options players will pick (due to certain options being over-centralizing).

The resulting game would still take a massive amount of dexterity to perform at, but you can’t really pare it down any more without giving something up about the identity of the game, in some ways this already is compromising some of the identity of the game.

Random Encounters

Celia WagarLeave a comment

What do you think of random encounters?

I like the undertale/zeboyd solution of having a static number of random encounters per area. Undertale has them occur after a static number of steps too.

I’m generally fine with random encounters, as long as they’re tuned well. The bigger issue with them is they basically give people unlimited resources to grind than their random nature, which is totally acceptable for this implementation in my view.

Perhaps the other issue is that you gotta walk to trigger them which is time consuming. Zeboyd also made the right move here, adding a menu option to deliberately trigger a random encounter. Chrono Trigger and Tales games have a great implementation too, especially the Tales games, which get their implementation from Zelda 2. Chrono Trigger all being static encounters prevents the lame states of having to walk for an unspecified thing to happen, and prevents the scenario of just doing 10-20 random encounters through the menu then walking through an empty area. Tales has the enemies respawn when the screen is switched, so it prevents the chrono trigger scenario of clearing an area then it’s just empty. Tales also has movement patterns for the enemies, and randomly generated enemies on the overworld, and you can shoot these enemies to freeze them and go around them too, so it’s a mini gameplay challenge to bypass enemies.

The Pokeradar in some Pokemon games is also really cool, showing you which patches of grass have encounters.

The key thing is making it so their time moving through areas is populated with encounters inbetween, sometimes allowing the player to have a say over which encounters they go through, but not allowing them to bypass all of them easily.

I mean, random encounters aren’t critically unfair most of the time in most games, and don’t have very strong potential to be unfair because for some reason it occurred to designers a billion years ago to generate them relative to a step counter, rather than just flat-out random chance each step.

re: random encounters. I was mostly asking in the sense, do you think they do a good job of testing the players planning/strategy? E.g. I’ve left a town, have I planned accordingly, brought in potions/items, created a well-rounded party, have enough tactical skill to defeat all the monsters I encounter? I mean, I can think of any games that do this well b/c you can usually just backtrack or in cases like Pkmn, just avoid tall grass. But that’s what I was getting at (in some hypothetical game).

Okay, testing planning/strategy is actually a tricky topic. It kind of comes down to, how much should long term choices affect the outcome of a scenario? In my opinion, testing planning/strategy isn’t really that important, especially in singleplayer games, because the feedback loop, the iteration loop, is so long that it doesn’t really make sense to have players lose an hour from now because they messed up in this moment for something they can’t readily see they messed up until an hour from now.

This question isn’t really about random encounters at all, this is about any type of game where you set a loadout and venture out into the wilderness. Slight randomness, not knowing what you might run into, can promote building flexibly, so you are prepared for a lot of scenarios instead of just dumping all in. Though good encounter design can do this too.

I don’t think backtracking ruins this, because backtracking typically means going back through more monsters instead of pressing on ahead, unless you expend resources to get like, escape rope or something.

Though one scenario that comes to mind out of the blue is that situation in the FOE video where they forgot to buy warp rope. Instead of screwing the player for not having something, always give them an option to come out on top, but maybe it’s a trickier option than otherwise afforded. Suddenly realizing you fucked up a long time ago can be a funny situation, but if you have no form of recourse, then it sucks.

On that note, that video is hilarious, here it is: