We Shall Wake Critique

Celia WagarLeave a comment

What do you think of this?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RqA-mXFbaCM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCpLbMPcwBk

I already commented on another of their videos, quoted below. I think the movement system and combat systems don’t compliment each other at all.

I feel like the game has a really poor sense of momentum. You got a few people complaining about the speed, and you say you played Sonic a lot as a kid, so you’re not changing it. Eh. The thing about Prototype and Sonic is, both have the character accelerate in order to move quickly, and both have the character slide to a stop. The exception is if you use a trick of some sort or an environmental feature to gain speed or to stop quickly.

The attacks you have here all start abruptly, allow no movement input during them and travel in completely static patterns. Compare to DMC, Mirror’s Edge, Smash Bros, King of Fighters, Guilty Gear, Prototype. The animations and movements in this game lack oomph. You’re animating like ninja theory (I hope you remember the article where Capcom had to seriously tell them about timing and spacing in animations to give attacks a sense of impact). None of the animations flow into each other, they’re all abrupt, most of them lock you in place, they start and end suddenly.

End result is a game that’s super fast and super janky. I know you’re not going for this. You’re going for something fluid like prototype, but with combat that is worth a damn and I don’t think your current approach will get you there. Your animator and your programmer should be working together to try to blend the animations and the movement of the whole character together into a cohesive whole. All the animations seem to play mostly in place or on a completely static motion track. Consider how the acceleration builds and declines through the animation. Consider how the moves change based on directional input and facing direction, consider how they change based on the momentum of the character at the time. Consider arcs, gravity, emphasis. The teleport and rising kick animations are especially weird because of how abruptly they move in a totally different direction than you were previously headed.

That and the jump is seriously fucked up. The dude just pops up with no anticipation, so it feels like a really weird jump. There’s force but it comes from nowhere. The jumping animations themselves are really weak too and don’t reflect the massive change in acceleration.

I’m a bit biased, but I think an important inspiration here would be smash bros. Smash bros, unlike other fighting games, and very much like your game, is all about momentum. Especially aerial momentum. Players can control it all the time while they’re in the air, and on the ground they’re also dealing with momentum. They transfer momentum from the ground to the air, they need to employ various tactics to keep their options open on the ground, in the air they can use attacks that move them forward and back, while also finely controlling where they’re going at the same time. Attacks are based on doing damage, but also on pushing the enemy around. This style seems very similar to what you seem to be going for. Your combat system is currently very much about timed inputs in close quarters to locked on targets. It just doesn’t fit with the larger system. You’re exploring the wrong design space there. Try thinking up different attacks that sweep through space differently, and are affected in different ways by your momentum, or which can be leveraged in different ways by your momentum. A better angle to go than the current system might be to focus on the player avoiding attacks by weaving between them, instead of just getting away from the enemies, and to in turn try to use attacks whose paths intersect with the enemies without exposing the player in the process. Coming back to smash bros, here’s some inspiration, jigglypuff has short ranged attacks, but awesome aerial mobility, so jiggs constantly dances right outside the enemy attack range, gets them to commit to something, then slides in, pokes the guy, and slides out. It’s a constant back and forth dance in the air. Marth meanwhile is all about attacking with the very tip of his blade the instant an enemy is in range, so he tends towards finely adjusting himself to always be at that perfect distance. Other characters of course have other tactics, but everyone has different attacks that make use of space differently and have different applications from one another. Most of the ground attacks here, except those with more explicit functions, like gap closing, seem really samey. Get the game designer on board and work out attacks that use space and momentum more effectively, that’s what meshes with the movement system you’re trying to build, don’t waste it.

Also, the way the character turns is completely silly. There should be a turning animation there, but it shouldn’t change the character’s position as they turn. This makes walking around in any slightly precise way really irritating.

The combat system feels haphazardly put together, like they just chose random components for it rather than something that resembles combat. No thought about the neutral game, just punishes, and sure you can get some fast flying air combos, but the properties of the moves are so similar that linking them together doesn’t really feel that special, especially given that you have a universal cancel in the form of the auto slash, much like Vergil’s DMC4 SE air trick. Also heavy reliance on combo strings is lame.

I don’t think they really thought about how to create a system of interrelated interactions and a multitude of viable strategies, I think they were just tossing in some random combat mechanics that they thought would look cool and would function in a sort of unique way. Good on them for making a working prototype, but I don’t think the final product will have much longevity.

The Weakness of Adventure Games

Celia Wagar5 Comments

How do you feel about adventure games? Is there anything in them thats good or that we could learn from?

In case my prior posts haven’t made it clear, I feel negatively about adventure games. Looking abstractly, I think the structure implied of adventure games is lock and key. This is why Zelda was originally considered an Action RPG, and over time people have come to place it more in the adventure category. Adventure games are games where there are barriers placed in your way that can be opened by application of a key item retrieved from elsewhere. The more such barriers and keys you have, and the less other mechanical elements you have, the more the game matches the adventure game template.

So Doom, with its red, blue, and gold keys as well as myriad switches, has slight elements of this, but the first person shooting is much more heavily focused on, with those elements not functioning as the primary source of interaction or challenge, but rather as staging elements for the primary conflict, elements that make you sweep the level over, encountering the enemies in all sorts of different contexts, from different directions as walls open up or more are warped in to replace the ones you’ve killed already, or to surround and ambush you as you attempt to pursue objectives.

Zelda by contrast has become more and more about matching key to door over time, as almost every element in the game has become subservient to overall progression, and all of the challenges inherent in say the combat or movement systems have become funneled into using the right item on the right enemy, door, switch, or grapple point. You NEED to get Epona, not because you’d like to traverse the overworld a bit faster, or take down monsters in an alternate way that might be more effective on some monsters, but because at some point there’s going to be a gap or a wall that only Epona can jump over.

From a depth perspective, the trouble with adventure games is that none of the elements are interrelated, have much interaction with each other, have multiple uses, can be pushed for a stronger/weaker/variable effect using skill or based on the context of application, and there is little potential for alternate viable strategies, only flat solutions. You can introduce these types of things into adventure games, allowing barriers to be bypassed or unlocked in a variety of ways, improving the adventure game structure, but also making it less focused on the unlocking of barriers, but instead more general mechanical and critical thinking skills, such as in metroidvanias, which use the adventure game structure as a staging mechanism for their platform challenges, but are not usually associated closely with pure adventure games.

The ultimate trouble with adventure games is that when your only mechanic is matching keys to doors, your only means of introducing challenge and critical thought into the game is obscuring the locations of keys, the order in which they must interact with environmental objects, which environmental objects are barriers at all, and so on.

Professor Layton practically isn’t an adventure game for its structure (it still is, it just lacks a lot of their lock/barrier structure for the most part). Advancing the plot in the Layton games is primarily about going to a location, talking to someone, and solving a puzzle. Sometimes the sequence in which people must be talked to is a bit funny, but if you just talk to everyone available, you cannot avoid progressing (assuming you’re good at puzzles). The game is extremely straightforward about what is required to do next, because it’s not trying to hide any information from you, or require you to guess at anything to progress, it just uses the basic adventure game structure as a way to push you into solving a lot of puzzles, which are the core of the game. It’s ever so barely a point and click adventure game, it’s just trying to give you more options in the order you solve puzzles, and create a hint-coin finding metagame that influences how easy the puzzles are, while also creating a definite sense of progression through the game.

Psychonauts by contrast is shackled to its adventure game design. It could have been a great platforming game, instead they decided you should go around collecting all this shit scattered through the levels. You need to collect 5 arrowheads to pay off two kids to progress after basic braining, you need the oarsman badge to go learn levitation, you need the arrowhead dowser to find enough arrowheads to buy the cobweb duster (which means collecting a ton of arrowheads twice), you need to have telekinesis to complete the milkman conspiracy (which means collecting a ton of psi cards and cores, and you also need to do a whole trading sequence in this level), along with the cobweb duster (which is necessary overall to beat the whole game), you need invisibility in Gloria’s Theater (more figments, psi cards and cores). And so on.

The key items/abilities in adventure games should have a variety of uses. That’s what is the case in (good) metroidvania games. You don’t just get the morph ball bomb that can blow up specific blocks, it can also let you jump in morph ball form, depending on the game even multiple or infinite times. The ice beam is used to freeze enemies, allowing them to be used as platforms, which is really involved mechanically, as opposed to just opening ice doors. The high jump boots are cool, but you can also walljump in many places, bypassing the need for them.

Dark Souls has a strictly lock-and-key structure, no new abilities, but there are a ton of low affordance means or alternate means of reaching places. You can pick the master key at the start and go directly to blighttown, you could also go through new londo, killing ingward. You can hop into the lower burg immediately. You can fight Sif early through the back way.

Adventure games by themselves are weak.

Making Good Horror

Celia WagarLeave a comment

What elements make a good horror game?

I swear I answered this a long time ago, or something like it. I was definitely involved in a podcast on it. My view is, you need to create an environment of high risk, selectively limited information about incoming threats, and rules consistent enough to get used to, but inconsistent enough to surprise you. Playing Penumbra, I wasn’t scared by the dogs, I was scared of when the dogs did something I didn’t expect. The dogs established tension, but it’s like a joke, not knowing where the punchline will come from is what creates fear and terror. I went through a wooden door early on, leaving a dog behind me, then I pushed a barrel in front of it so the dog couldn’t get through. What scared me was the dog pushing the door open along with the barrel, I never saw it coming.

So first, players need to be familiar with the threat, this is the setup. They need to know how dangerous the enemies are, they need to know how tight their chance is to escape, they need to have a sense of when they’re in trouble. A lot of horror games try to do this with dialogue, text, scenery, etc. Spray blood on the walls, it’ll be fine. I have no heart, so I don’t really care about any of this stuff. I played a horror game once that measured my heart rate, making the rooms do more and more spooky shit as my heart rate went up, and killing me if it went high enough. I never got to see any of the effects of a higher heart rate. http://store.steampowered.com/app/342260/ (here it is on steam if you care) I know nothing is really going to hurt me as long as I’m calm, even within the game world, so I’m unaffected. In-game cues of danger only work if you have an association between that thing and actual danger, so a spooky diary entry by itself doesn’t work unless the association has been built up.

I was a LOT more spooked by the Sa-X in Metroid Fusion as a kid, particularly this encounter. The Sa-X is set up in prior encounters really well, it will murder you if you step into sight, and it has a very distinct audio cue associated with it, as well as a spooky theme, so even though you haven’t dropped down to encounter it yet, you know it’s waiting for you down there.

You need to train the player to recognize cues that there is a threat, and associate those with an actual threat. Like Witches in Left4Dead. Then you need to make the cues less consistent with the presence of a threat, so that players can’t predict correctly anymore, and become scared of the cue in absence of the threat, which makes the threat itself scarier when it actually is present.

Good horror is using mechanics to make the player afraid, creating expectations and subverting them. Blindside them, and force them into threatening situations they don’t want to deal with. Use RNG to mix things up, especially when backtracking. Let them have weak tools that cannot completely halt the threat, like the ice missiles on the Sa-X. Also fuck Dead Space.

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.