What do you think of EE difficulty in MGS? I enjoy trying to deal with the consequences of getting spot, calculating your approach and playing well to get out of a tight spot. But on EE, all that tension disappears because the game ends right away. It feels extremely rigid, though it does makesense that you’d be finished if the entire base was alerted to your presence. 😛
Okay, the big deal is, MGS3 has a flexible enough spotting and investigation mechanic that a lot of shit can go on before you actually get an alert, and you can mess up a fair amount without getting totally caught. You can lead guards around, do all sorts of silly stuff. Watch those skill videos for MGS3 on youtube
Almost no alerts in this entire vid, only an alert when he wants there to be one.
MGS3 is a robust enough game that there is a massive amount of depth in the stealth systems, all the things you can do while undetected. Comparatively, if you get an alert, there isn’t as much you can do. Guards are at least mildly psychic, and can follow you around fairly well. Gun combat in MGS has never been amazing, running away and hiding can be a time consuming drag. You don’t get mid-combat stealth like in far cry 3 blood dragon or crysis warhead.
European Extreme trims that stuff out. You want to play the game entirely stealthy? Lets cut out the rest for you, don’t have to wait to get back in the action. Sure, it’s rigid, but that’s because stealth mechanics in general are rigid. In regular combat, you typically have a lot of health and enemies attack with things that can be avoided in a lot of games, but in stealth games, they “attack” with vision cones, which can be swiveled around quickly. It’s a bit like a shmup with more complex enemy behavior, you gotta dodge the vision cones using movement (from one manner of seeing things).
The other thing is, the rigidity of the system in that one particular aspect means you cannot progress without the use of stealth. Most stealth games are not played stealthy in speedruns, because it’s slower. It’s almost always slower in any game to engage an enemy rather than run away from them. In the case of most stealth games, it’s also easier to just trigger an alert and run past everyone, then wait until the alert dies down to continue if there’s a stealth-only door. I did it a lot in my more amateur MGS3 runs. EE prevents you from cheesing the game as easily.
Here’s a diagram that’s often cited in discussions like these. Unfortunately, no stealth game seems to really be an exception to this.
I think it’s funny how they assume that the average player of the 80s on the NES was young and male. I’m going off Sean Malstrom’s depiction of the market back then, but in a lot of the commercials and TV spots from back then regarding the NES, there were both boys and girls. It was typically shown as a children’s product, but I think a lot of adults played the NES too. I mean, we had Robin Williams name his daughter Zelda, and Steve Wozniak top the high score charts for Tetris.
That and I wonder why they mentioned male considering they’re trying to push the games inclusivity thing, given the market actually was gender diverse back then. It also seems to imply that games were challenging in the way they were back then because the audience was male, and a male audience would be the one to enjoy challenging games, which is subtly sexist on their part. Maybe it’s to lay down a basis that things used to be all male, and therefore bad, and now they’re more female and therefore good? Sorry, nitpicking a small detail that stood out to me.
Coin op meant they were difficult, but also short to complete the whole thing and it didn’t take much time to get back to where you were struggling. Pokken tournament recently failed in this, allowing you to play for like an hour if you’re as good as a games journalist at the game, guaranteeing it couldn’t raise a large profit relative to the time people played the game. The games had to succeed profit-wise whether players won or lost, being simple enough that anyone could play them, hard enough that few could beat them, and deep enough that those who could would come back to try again or that players who couldn’t win had another tactic they could try.
The first console games were similar to arcade machines in that they couldn’t save. The average NES game can be beaten in a couple hours from beginning to end, to compare to a youtube longplay. However the punishment of getting a game over in console games was lessened, because when you got a game over, you didn’t need to start the entire game over, just resume from the beginning of the world usually. Games later in the NES’s life got save features or password functions, like legend of zelda or metroid, and became much longer games as a result.
Games shifted from the difficult model of arcades because players could afford to sit down in front of them for extended periods of time without fear of losing their money. Notice that computer games of the time didn’t follow the arcade model of difficulty from the get-go because they evolved in this environment to start with. Players could be expected to learn more complicated control schemes through more involved tutorials, and put up with more boring long cutscenes and not cost the arcade profit for their time. Not to mention that arcadey type of game wasn’t what most people aspired to create, so the developers shifted, a lot of people wanted to push a more narrative/immersive experience that wasn’t possible in the arcade.
The biggest trouble here is, they don’t clearly define up front what the actual difference between, “punishing” and “difficult” is. Something I learned early on was that there’s a difference between a game simply being hard, and being “challenging.” We’ve all played I Want to Be the Guy by now, Kaizo Mario, or Super Meat Boy, so it’s pretty obvious that these games are hard, though not the most enjoyable of games. The conclusion I came to is, they don’t have a lot of depth, a lot of range for expression, because of the way their difficulty is constructed. They force players through a funnel.
It’s not just about consistency of rules, obviously if you change the rules there’s trouble, but it’s about giving the player a chance to find out what the rules are and experiment with them. The most annoying examples of inconsistency I can think of are in Witcher 2 and Limbo. In Limbo, there’s one section that is a spike trap where you need to avoid stepping on the wrong section of ground or be killed by spikes. They raise one section of the ground as an obvious tell, so instinct for most players is to avoid it, but surprise, the areas around it are what’s actually trapped and you need to step on the raised ground to stay safe. Then immediately after that, they have a small raised section of ground, so considering you JUST learned to step on the raised part, you do and surprise, it’s actually a button, and you get stabbed by spikes. This is a dick move.
Witcher 2, fucking everything is inconsistent. I couldn’t make heads or tails of the combat system. Sometimes I slash with a pirouette that deals damage quickly for 3 hits, sometimes I get a long slow attack that has crap for range for no real reason. Sometimes I slash quickly in a combo, sometimes the enemy blocks attacks, sometimes they don’t, sometimes I can dodge away after hitting their block, sometimes not, sometimes they can block EVEN WHILE THEY’RE ATTACKING. I have no fucking clue with that game.
I don’t think they chose the best example for consistency with dark souls. They probably should have pointed out one ofthe parts of dark souls that people think is inconsistent but actually isn’t? Though if people think it is, then it might as well be inconsistent maybe.
They mention giving the players different tools, this lines up directly with depth as I mentioned above.
No, I don’t remember games where 90% of the pits would kill me, and a few would have hidden bonuses with no sort of telegraphing. That stuff was usually telegraphed in some way, even in older games.
I think they really chose the wrong terms with punishing versus difficult. Challenging versus Frustrating would be a better dichotomy.
Lowering iteration time also lowers challenge by testing consistency less. If there is a checkpoint immediately after something, players don’t need to be consistent at it, they just need to beat it once (maybe this is why checkpoints come after bosses, we’re not expected to be consistent at them)
The Warframe example I find funny considering I used to wavedash everywhere in Warframe with shift > control > W and repeat, or do a jump at the end for the dragon kick move.
Difficulty spikes can be memorable moments, like the anor londo archers, or like undyne in undertale genocide. They tell you that shit just got real and you gotta learn to deal. Though I’ll generally agree that it’s true that ramping up the difficulty too soon will drive players away because they haven’t gotten good enough yet to overcome that, even though difficulty is ostensibly what players are chasing after.
And I’m running out of stuff to say, and I’m practically being a contrarian at this point, so I’ll move onto the next one.
Technically correct. A lot of people in the souls community called this “organic difficulty.” The idea is essentially you can self impose a challenge to make the game harder in a way that’s not very difficult or arbitrary, or you can choose nonarbitrary ways of making the game easier. I haven’t really come to a consensus on what I think about this yet, because I have a few different factors motivating me here.
On the one hand, I believe the player should attempt to break the game and the game should resist being broken, or at minimum that the means of breaking it should be inefficient, slow, etc. Players should do all in their power to win by any means necessary and the game should work to thwart their efforts.
On the other, I recognize the value of a self-imposed challenge, or a mod, and the value it can add to a game. Self imposed challenges can avoid centralization of the metagame and bring out aspects of the game that normally wouldn’t be stressed.
On the other, such a thing is outside the original constructs of the game. Should we judge a game based on a rules construct that isn’t even a part of the game? I know there’s a certain, “Oh, that’s bullshit” feeling to someone telling you that you only didn’t have fun or experience challenge because you played the game wrong.
Is it really an aspect of good design to allow the player to set the difficulty through imposed challenges rather than explicit pre-game modes? Players have a natural motivation to seek the strongest weapons, positive feedback is essentially anything that makes the game easier. Why should they be expected to forsake more powerful weapons to tailor their own experience in a game that is ostensibly about growing stronger numerically to meet numerically harder challenges? (because RPG).
And in this video, they encourage the viewer to play dark souls 2 in the least fun way possible, even selling it as intended. The spell limits in the later souls games were put into place because using mana, with mana regeneration, was too broken and allowed one to cheese all the bosses slowly but surely.
That and the statement about James Portnow, a game designer ostensibly, or game design consultant, “Now many people play Dark Souls for the difficulty, but James likes the Lore and the World.” Welp. What a shocker!
Aaaaaaagh! I watched like half of this guy’s videos like a month ago, and this one was the one that was bad enough I wrote up a long comment on it, then my browser crashed and I lost the whole comment, because even my comment saving extension can’t save fucking youtube comments because their text boxes are so fucked.
The entire early diatribe about true randomness is unnecessary! We should know that computers aren’t really random, getting true random numbers doesn’t actually matter that much. Pseudorandom numbers based on modern algorithms are entirely suitable for most purposes! If a person cannot determine why a particular thing is the way it is, then it’s effectively random from a game design standpoint, even perfectly deterministic things like something being purely based on framecount, like item drops in darkwing duck on NES, or the items you get in Mario kart 64, which are based on the frame you press the button to stop the roulette.
He then props up pseudorandom number generation as a better fit for what we want out of games than true randomness, which is misleading. Pseudorandom number distributions could still be based on a true random seed and be exactly as useful. I myself think that pseudorandom number distributions that are weighted to certain outcomes are preferable, however most games don’t use this, and the distinction between true random numbers and pseudorandom numbers isn’t actually important to discussing probability distributions. Pseudorandomness versus true randomness is practically a theological topic from the perspective of game design, it’s only important to cryptographers!
Conflating true nondeterminism with skewed probability distributions is really fucking dumb. The real topic should be even probability distributions versus skewed ones. https://www.random.org/randomness/ Here’s a rundown of true random numbers versus pseudorandom numbers.
And he mentions pac man, which is deterministic, not random. And Extra Credits. Please.
I’m going to ignore his initial conflation for the sake of sanity.
He asks if fair randomness is oxymoronic, bringing up poker hands, saying that if your opponent pulls out a 17 of spades, you know something’s up. His claim is that you know the full range of possibilities and they’re constrained within a certain set. However this has nothing to do with whether a distribution of random numbers is fair or not. You might know all the possibilities, but your opponent might simply get a better draw than you all the time or at all the critical times.
Competitive Tetris, Super Puzzle Fighter II, and Chess 960 are all games that involve random elements, however all of them are fair because their randomness is equalized between the players.
And he continues to reiterate that games don’t want true randomness, despite them effectively having even probabilistic distributions in a vast majority of cases, including ones he brings up himself.
The differences in RNG structures between per-call RNG, or RNG using the system clock or framecount as a seed largely don’t matter, because they don’t operate in a predictable enough manner to be controlled by a live human. The fact that TASers can manipulate RNG, or even that speedrunners can manipulate RNG is largely useless from a game design standpoint. We aren’t building games in assembly anymore, you can use Math.random(); all you like and it’s going to return a satisfactory non-deterministic result in most languages.
Most of the video doesn’t cover specific game design applications of RNG, just methods of building pseudorandom number generators and how rarely they can be abused. In my opinion, this isn’t useful to players, even if the game is competitive.
Late into the video talks a bit about actual probability distributions finally, like the distribution method used by Valve for Dota 2, which has small odds on events occurring twice in a row, but larger odds for each time they fail to come up, until it becomes certain that they occur. This skews the distribution to conform better with gambler’s fallacy, the illusion that when something hasn’t happened for a long time it becomes “due” or that it’s unlikely for something to occur twice in a row. http://dota2.gamepedia.com/Pseudo-random_distribution
Also, it doesn’t matter in my opinion if clever players are capable of manipulating RNG, even in competitive games. If a player is clever and skilled enough to exploit that, then they deserve it. Game systems don’t need to be obscured from the player for the sake of keeping up the illusion of randomness. Games are supposed to be challenges. Overcoming the RNG is another challenge. It only makes sense to keep odds even in gambling games to guarantee that the house makes the majority of the profit. Why do you think card counting is against policy?
That item in golden sun that’s a reward for only the most dedicated players, if someone can figure out how the algorithm works and create a deterministic setup, they ARE one of the most dedicated players.
You don’t need to balance drop rates for rare items, you need to stop having rare items that unbalance the game. If you have a rare item that is extremely powerful, then you’re not balancing it by making it a rare drop. Think about the lucky player who gets that item, their experience is ruined because the difficulty curve has been upset. I’ve heard that story a few times about players who have gotten the black knight sword in the undead burg in dark souls. Super powerful item drops, now they’re all-powerful and the game is easy. In a competitive setting this is also true. Think from the opposite perspective, you have a rare item that outclasses all the others, but players discover a way to deterministically grab it, so now everyone has this rare item. What’s actually wrong in this scenario? Everyone is of the same power level. The idea of a rare item dropping making a single player more powerful because of luck in a competitive game is even worse than the deterministic abuse of PRNG patterns. The problem isn’t that the game can be broken, the problem is that the game breaks itself. An additional problem of the original scenario is, you’re asking players to seriously grind for hours to get a stupid virtual item.
A key thing he doesn’t discuss but lightly alludes to is the use of random numbers to generate a percentage chance that something occurs, versus using a random number to determine when the next event occurs. The difference between a step counter and a pure random chance per-step. I first learned about the differences in this when TF2 idling was a big thing, because it was originally a percentage chance for every unit of playtime, and it became something that occurs regularly after a randomly generated length of playtime.
The thing this all comes down to is, RNG is frustrating, players find it frustrating, players keep trying to find patterns in RNG that don’t exist, making them frustrated, or harming their ability to judge situations accurately.
About the only interesting point in the entire video is that the RNG in hearthstone is crucial to the game’s longevity, essentially the claim that fully deterministic games exclude people, and people are more drawn into games which aren’t totally deterministic, where the distribution of favorable to non-favorable outcomes is less even against the same players in similar circumstances, but not so much that it completely defies expectations.
The trouble is, this claim has no backing evidence, and ignores RPS type interactions (or interactions with hidden information), which are not strictly deterministic or truly random. Chess is still popular the world over and has been for a long time despite being a deterministic game of perfect information. Hearthstone, or an equivalent like Magic could function perfectly fine if you allowed players to specifically arrange the order of their deck in advance, or even draw whatever card they wanted to at any time.
Though if you let people draw whatever card they wanted, it would limit the usefulness of cards that let you draw specific other cards.
Even if you make these random elements deterministic, then you’re unlikely to upset the balance of the game, because players still can’t see each other’s hands. Any way you can build a deck would have another deck that counters it. You might have to insulate the game against early win cheese tactics a bit, because they’re likely to become centralizing (meta’s likely to centralize on decks that have cards up front that either win the game early, or prevent an early win, and if there’s too many ways to win the game early, versus ways of preventing it, then it’ll become an all-out guessing game), but honestly they’d be broken with lucky draws in a non-deterministic format too. I think combo decks are based on that idea anyway, loading the whole deck with early wins, so you’re guaranteed to draw one.
In this scenario, players can’t afford to settle into patterns, or risk getting countered by opponents. Similar goes for every fighting game ever. Dash dancing in smash bros is a great way of lowering your commitment and avoiding attacks, but if I see you doing it and nothing else, I can just hit you with something that sweeps across the whole DD range. You’ll never see a fighting game match repeat itself in general (though one time a gamecube froze, and we decided to replay a tournament match from scratch and ended up on pokemon stadium with the same lives, same percentages, on the same transformation of pokemon stadium. I was in a losing scenario and trying to get a chance to turn it around by resetting that one game which technically is within my rights to request in that situation. it didn’t work.).
Maybe it’s true that by removing RNG, bad players will never win, and therefore your audience shrinks because you have no bad players. That’s the thing that really hits home for me, that maybe games need to compromise themselves, allowing worse players to win over better ones, or correct decisions with correct execution to not pay off. There’s no empirical evidence behind this, but it’s a scary thing to think about that this guy portrays as a positive value of RNG. And we do already have the highly skilled playerbases of fighting games, arena FPS, and RTS that all have dying communities.
n his closing statement, you could reverse each of his statements to mean the opposite thing and make an equally valid case for it. There are already wrenches in the gears of how people ideally play games, as an infinite number of completely deterministic games could demonstrate.
Overall, I don’t like this guy’s videos, and did not find much value in them. I know not all the information in them is common, but it is entirely information I already have, except poorly communicated with conflations of terms, and a large number of mistakes in explaining technical details. I have this nagging voice in my head at all his statements, “What if you did the opposite of this thing? How could you make that work? If it does work, what’s the real underlying principle?” A lot of these videos involve repeating conventional wisdom without questioning it, and in my opinion, a lot of conventional gaming wisdom is incorrect.
His invocation of artificial difficulty in the difficulty video is especially frustrating. I had to make a comment about that.
What are your thoughts on Deus Ex: Human Revolution?
Okay, I played the original Deus Ex first, and I think I’ve covered it before. When we saw the original trailers and gameplay for DXHR, I was convinced it was never going to live up to the legacy of the original (which I thought was good at the time, mostly because I was going with the crowd and not really thinking for myself yet). I was convinced it would be a hollow empty gesture towards the original.
Then the leak happened.
I played the leak, and it had basically all of detroit. The first mission was kind of boring and tutorial-like, but once I got into the city hub, it got fairly crazy. There were a ton of sidequests I could do, they were all over the place, there were a ton of ways to do them, my paths were affected by augmentations, I could use objects in the environment to make stuff work. It was pretty crazy. I was sold. I replayed the leak like 3 times, including a cheated 3rd playthrough where I maxed out all the augs to see what they could do. I played it totally differently all 3 times.
And in comparison to the first game, the stealth was a lot better, the shooting was a lot better, the hacking puzzles were a lot better. Sure it had dumb regenerating health, but pound for pound, all the things it did were much more solidly executed than the original. I felt like there were a lot of ways to approach every individual situation, even with the same tools, and it was genuinely challenging to overcome. It was missing some features, like a number of augs, melee weapons, and had more cramped level designs, but it had more complex enemy AI, more consistent weapons, and better designed levels. The tranq finally works the way it should in comparison to the original game where it alerted the guard and slowly dealt nonlethal damage.
Though trouble is also that the game isn’t as deep as other stealth games or action games. You don’t have a terribly large number of stealth tools, all things considered, and the combat is basically generic modern military shooter combat unfortunately. A lot of the stealth challenges end up coming down to timing challenges because the stealth is as simple as it is, though you do have a limited ability to lure enemies using sound or thrown objects, and the invisibility aug lets you get through guard’s vision for limited periods of time. That and stunning guards wasn’t as involved as the original, where you needed to hit guards on their backs or waste ammo. Knocking out commandos was even harder, having to hit a specific spot on their belt, and having the take downs be so specific was a cool thing.
The other trouble is, the game was clearly stripped down. From what I heard, there were 5 city hubs planned, Detroit, Lower Heng-Sha, Upper Heng-Sha, Montreal, and India. We got 2. They also made some errors accounting for playstyle, especially on the bosses, though they left materials in each fight to guarantee you could deal enough damage to take them out.
And the sources of XP ended up encouraging silly things, like taking out every guard unseen non-lethally, or hacking every computer terminal even if you know the password, or crawling in every vent to get the exploration bonus. Also because guards never woke up from unconsciousness, unless woken up by another guard, there was almost no reason to ever use the lethal takedowns. I don’t know why the lethal takedown option is in the game considering it’s loud, costly, and doesn’t have any upside.
I think the missing link DLC was a great addition in terms of level design. They really nailed the boss at the end, making something that fit the concept of Deus Ex a bit more. I also believe it improved the guard AI, but it’s been too long for me to remember in what way, except that it was subtle, more of a tuning change. Level design was generally a lot tighter too.
The cover system worked amazingly well honestly, you could flip into and out of it just by holding a button with no slow transition or anything and the tuning for how it oriented jensen relative to the wall worked pretty damn nicely. Also it was great that it opened up options for hopping across gaps in cover. Very fun to use when stealthing around.
Oh, and it’s really fun to try to go through the game fast on the seat of your pants and limit the save stating if you can.
Despite everything, the game was a solid showing, and I’m looking forward to the next one, especially because they seem to be introducing some cool new augs, making the shooting gameplay less shit, and so on.
Oh, and sorry for being kind of vague with this answer, it’s been a while since I played DXHR, so I did more of an overall summary.
Really good. I think I wrote about it before. All the different parts have interactions between each other that enable you to do a lot of crazy things. The Bash skill in particular is a work of inspiration, the ability to grab any enemy or projectile and boost off them, sending them the opposite way. Then they let you cancel downward momentum from it with double jumps, and keep horizontal momentum from it by releasing the control stick.
My main qualms about it are that the metroidvania structure is all segmented off into these little areas that you deal with for a while before moving onto the next one, and there’s no warps. They expect you to go back and forth across this place focusing on areas at opposite ends of the map intensely, but don’t provide fast travel. It’s more tolerable in a game like symphony or super metroid, because your objectives are all over the place, so you get lead around a lot, and you don’t need to get too focused on any individual region, but you practically exhaust areas in Ori in one go, and individual areas can be rather linear, even if the world structure as a whole is nonlinear. Then they hide ability orb caches in places you need powers from later on to access, so you gotta backtrack across the whole world for 100%.
That and there’s not much of an end segment where you can use all the powers, hell, there’s not much of a middle segment where you use all the powers. I felt like I just barely got the superjump and already the game was ending.
Oh, and the speedrun really highlights the depth of interaction between the movement mechanics and level design. Like watch older runs first, then move up to newer runs. It’s really astonishing how much the game changes between them. http://www.speedrun.com/ori
There’s also some clever things like having door keys not be specific to areas, but general things you can use anywhere, so you can pass door keys from some areas to others, and I think even duplicate them under some circumstances. It’s interesting how the pace at which you gain energy cells is controlled in the early game, allowing them to use those as doors, and how it counts from the usable cells, so you can spend all your cells on a door, kill an enemy, then spend the cell you get from that. The cutscene system is interesting in the way it actually manipulates objects in the world, or sets triggers for them. And the shockwave from stomp works in the air off enemies, bash resetting jumps, charge flame reflecting projectiles. The whole savestate system that costs an energy cell and has a cooldown. Barriers that can be broken with charge flame, stomp, or enemy projectiles.
There’s a massive number of subtle touches that create depth between the components and allow for alternate solutions. The game can be fairly challenging at times too and tries new things all the time.
You know I literally have a design for a tabletop RPG (that could also work as a video game) that I’ve been working on, right? I got stuck because I couldn’t figure out how exactly the design space should be laid out, meaning, the ratios between different moves, the average damage and speed, the number of skills a character should have, the types of skills that should exist in the first place. I decided to work on the setting and come back to all that when I had a clearer idea of where I wanted the whole thing to go.
Though that’s technically a Tactical RPG.
One idea I’ve had forever was to basically rip off the penny arcade RPG (ATB charge all the time, menus allow you to queue attacks while anything is going on to essentially combo enemies), with Mario RPG style timed hit mechanics thrown in and more interesting options with more real tradeoffs.
Basically pillage every good JRPG idea ever, so probably the press turn system from SMT3 (gain extra turns for exploiting enemy weaknesses, passing turns, killing enemies, critical hits), the way you take less damage at low health from undertale, but heal the same amount always (and maybe pacifism, but a bit more involved, better feedback, some stats and perhaps strategy?), team order and attacks related to team order from dankest dungeon, the way enemies power up over time in Breath of Death VII & Cthulhu Saves the World, fixed number of encounters and encounters being tied to the step counter directly from a bunch of games, have bosses autolevel you to the correct level if you fight them underleveled, XP tokens distributed so you level up to recommended level by killing every enemy in the level slightly more than once per enemy (these two inspired by Ys, though fixed enemy count might make it pointless), wandering monsters in dungeons and on the overworld that can be avoided with skill, and encounter type determined by land tile (a lot of games, but mostly zelda 2), let people stun or otherwise affect those overworld enemies chasing them (Tales series), speed affecting turn order and number of turns each character gets in turn order (so ludicrous speed could literally choke people out of turns if not stopped, which happened to me once in sands of destruction, my characters were all ludicrously OP, but one boss buffed his speed to infinity), skip on having a standard attack option and then MP costing spells completely (inspired by pokemon), spells that cost HP will only drain temporary HP that you get back after x number of turns if not hit (Persona 4 arena, SMT)
A bunch of those are conflicting, but whatever. I like making lists of these types of things so I can have them on hand.
Oh, and the tagline could totally be, “The RPG game where everyone has to die.” Have pacifism be the bad ending. Steal from Nier where in NG+ you can hear the thoughts of the enemies and it turns out they’re the bad guy all along & you did the wrong thing sparing them. Just for kicks.
Has some stealth that isn’t horrible, but also isn’t really amazing, mostly just a timing puzzle, but you can distract guards with the first person projectile. The combat is nonsensical mashing. Has a bunch of lateral thinking puzzles, which I’m not that fond of. Lots of contextual interaction points, which I think were considered fairly new back then. Tries to be like zelda in a lot of ways, like the automatic jumping on reaching the edge of a platform. Has some collectathon elements I’m not fond of. The boss battles are all rather rote in the usual way. No risk/reward element. Has some alright boating sections, some use of physical space in a mildly interesting ways for the various obstacles. There’s some slight overlap in certain mechanics, like the shooting in first person view allowing you to solve certain puzzles and enemy encounters in alternate ways, from points where you normally shouldn’t, like sniping enemy’s cannisters on their backs or picking off small enemies from high ground, but it’s not terribly significant.
It’s been a while since I played it. My standards were lower back then. Isn’t it kind of funny how a ton of 6th gen games, even ones attempting a semi-serious theme like Beyond Good and Evil, went with a cartoony mascot type of theme? The Propaganda song is great though. A game like this, with its theme, definitely wouldn’t be constructed the way this one is. Games in this vein all had a very strong “telos” for absolutely every element in them which limited their depth. That’s part of what makes interactions feel puzzle-y rather than game-y. Like, every enemy is less like a combat encounter of risk and reward, and more like, follow this sequence and you won’t get hurt and the enemy will die. Like the enemies that shoot lasers at you that you need to push into electrical barriers. The pearl collectibles don’t really seem like an optional powerup currency nearly so much as something you need to get all of in order to complete the game, which feels limiting to me. They’re not measures of progress or optional challenges with positive feedback for completing them or something like a currency at all. It’s like, yeah, collectibles are nice, until you need to collect all of them to finish the game.
Probably the strongest thing that it can be complimented on is managing to create so many alternate enemy types and obstacles that are unique in function, but without a deep foundation, deep interactions with any of them individually, or interaction between the parts, it’s ultimately shallow overall. Much like Zelda, it spreads itself too thin trying to accomplish too much.
It is actually one of the best stealth games ever. I was working on a style video for it, but I never got around to finishing it. As I got better at the game, I kept trying to bypass every area without being seen, using only the bamboo dart. The final level is weird though, they put out some of the hardest level designs in the whole game, but give you a ton of grapple points that let you just skip all of them without effort, very high affordance.
It has a really great detection and investigation algorithm, and a large number of tools useful for distraction, including environmental features as well, like lights, gongs, and more. The levels simultaneously create challenges for you, and provide different options for progression. It’s really beautiful how the vision cones of the guards was made to be just barely small enough that you can jump over them in the dark without being seen. Many of the smaller options, like the hover, have a great feel to them.
The feedback about where enemies can see and how far sound travels and your last known location is great for understanding how the system works. I love the NG+ mode that obscures a ton of that information, because by that point you’re already familiar with how all the systems work, which is something I think other stealth games have something of a problem with.
I found that the noise maker tool was a bit overpowered, which is why I eventually did nearly all bamboo dart, because it draws enemies to me directly, it can stun them temporarily, and interact with certain environmental setpieces, as well as being easily usable without needing to focus. There’s a lot of depth to that simple bamboo dart in a way that is also challenging. I also overcomplicated many of my paths through the level for the sake of making it interesting.
One negative remark I’d like to make though is the game really encourages save scumming for perfect stealth. They make it really easy. That and the scoring system isn’t terribly interesting. Also many areas could stand to not give you easy ways out of confrontations, and I don’t like the sleeping gas upgrade of the smoke bomb, which moves it from a rather balanced distraction item to practically OP.
The DLC is great, as well as the DLC character, better level design than much of the main game and I always like nonlethal.
Here’s the rough cut of my best mark of the ninja tricks (I wish I paused a little less to consider my options):
I want to go back to the game some day and get more footage of the later areas.
Any thoughts on the adaptive difficulty of Resi 4?
It’s dumb that it’s more efficient in many places to simply kill yourself to despawn enemy mobs. I’d prefer consistent difficulty at that point. Adaptive difficulty that isn’t God Hand style most frequently feels patronizing to me. God hand is like, “You gotta work your way up, don’t get wrecked while it’s still easy”, where other games are more, “Oh, you died again? Let me give you an easy way out.” In God Hand, getting to the harder difficulty is an inevitability as long as you avoid getting hit, where in most others it’s not something that adjusts rapidly over the course of one life, but rather on how well you avoid death.
From a user experience perspective, it’s really annoying to want to play a game on the maximum difficulty and be told that when you die, you can’t do it anymore and if you really wanted to play on max difficulty, then you should restart the whole game and not die this time. Yes, enemy handicap in DMC4 really pissed me off and the levels are long which makes replaying the whole thing annoying. I want to grind my forehead on the wall until the wall breaks down, don’t switch the wall out on me, don’t make me repeat a ton of shit just to get back to the same wall again.
On the resi 4 devs not mentioning it in any way, it’s security through obscurity. Since almost no one picked up on it, I suppose it worked. Was it a good idea or not? It might have positively affected many casual players in an experiential way (get frustrated at hard thing, keep at it until it’s easy enough to beat it outright, don’t realize the game is rigging it, feel accomplished). Though it’s still a cheap trick in my opinion, and the experience gets wrecked for anyone with a motivation to abuse it or who gets knowingly fucked over by it.
How important do you think tutorials or instruction manuals are? I guess it would really depend on the genre/game. Case by case basis and all.
Nobody reads instruction manuals anymore, and instruction manuals suck these days. The MGS3 instruction manual had a goddamn comic book in it.
Anyway. They’re really important, come on. The more you have to teach people, the more important they become. If you don’t teach people anything and your game requires them to know things to play it, then what the fuck are they gonna do?
Yeah, it does scale by genre/game, because some have more obvious characteristics and less complicated/more intuitive controls, so you don’t have to teach as much directly, but if something isn’t reasonable to intuit, then you gotta teach it.
Fighting games are in a big way brought down because they don’t have good tutorials/single player modes.
Smash Bros has a better single player mode than 99% of other fighting games. The Skullgirls tutorials are kind of fun in their own way because they set up some mildly tricky tasks and have clear completion markers for all of them. Combo trials in other games end up being way too difficult/invariant to represent a solid single player mode for most people. Guilty Gear Xrd has some interesting trials that are similar, and a good grading system on them too, grading for consistency, and their missions mode was cool in AC+R.
Give that a bit more structure, maybe some branching paths between mission unlocks, a bit of story perhaps, and you approach something like the Soul Calibur campaigns in terms of polish. Figure out how AI can be geared to teach players specific fighting game fundamentals (like the blockstring bot in skullgirls), and it will help introduce players to the multiplayer mode, and give them a framework for understanding how the fuck things work.
re: instruction manuals/tutorials. I don’t think those things are important per se. I can only speak for myself, but outside of basic controls, I rarely ever read instructions or watch tutorials. Skullgirls has a great tutorial section, but it’s not like my gameplay is entirely based on it. It’s a decent primer, but what I really prefer is simply having a training room where I can test and figure things out on my own. The character tutorials, for example, are waste on me. Like, it’s nice to see what roles or central strategies the different characters and their abilities/moves might lend themselves too, but actually applying it in battle? Training room + actual matches are far more useful. I mentioned it earlier concerning TEW, but the definition of exploration in games shouldn’t be limited to scouring every nook and cranny in a massive environment. Systems can be explored too.
It’s just that it’s really time consuming for me to teach people how to play these games. I’ve sat in matches with people and acted like one of juicebox’s training dummies before just to help people learn how to play.
There are better ways to teach this stuff, and I really want to see some evolution in that area.
For instruction books and tutorials generally, it depends on the game and how hard it is to figure out all the functions of the game by pressing random buttons and seeing what they do. I watch a TON of tutorials for smash bros and other fighting games personally, and for stylish action games and all sorts of others.
When I say tutorial, I also don’t only mean explicit tutorials, silent ones like in all the valve games are included too. If you don’t do this sort of stuff, then more subtle concepts are likely to escape player notice, and you want that sort of thing to be played with.
The skullgirls tutorials themselves note a lot of things that aren’t immediately obvious, like squiggly’s one inch punch being strike invincible, Robo Fortune’s spin attacks being throw invincible, Eliza’s Osirus Spiral doing a ton of block damage, Big Band’s sound stun effect on certain moves, etc.
You know this better than anyone. People complained that games like RE6, practically the entirety of TW101, or even D. Souls don’t explain anything, which is true, but it makes that “eureka!” moment when you figure something out after experimenting and exploring the systems all the more satisfying.
Yeah. Though there are some things that should have been explained that they didn’t, and some things that are best left up to player experimentation.
Those games still have tutorials in them. I’m not going to suggest that games should totally throw out tutorials, and I think that Dark Souls for one could certainly have a better tutorial than it does, and make the connection more clear for a few things, like the key to the lower undead burg, or location of the entrance to the lower undead burg. That one really stands out to me as the weak link in communication for dark souls. That and I’ve seen a ton of LPs where people have no idea how to kick or when they do figure it out, what kicking is good for. Even intelligent ones like Geop’s LP.
For kicking, should we explain on the tutorial note that you gotta press forward and R1 at the same time? Yeah. Should we stick an enemy with its shield up immediately after the kick message? Yeah. Do you need to explain that kicking breaks enemy’s guards from there? Not really.
Those types of criticisms seem to be predicated on ‘fun’, that having to figure things out and fail in the process is ‘not fun’. And these aren’t necessarily bad players. It seems many appreciate challenges provided they know beforehand each and every rule, and they have no problem failing dozens of times as long as they know the exact manner in which they can manipulate the mechanics to finally reach point B. But god forbid having to experiment and figure things out. There’s obviously a difference between exploration/experimentation and something legitimately obtuse or ambiguous, like a context-sensitive action with no clear instruction. But I don’t think you need each exact action spelled out for you in tutorials or manuals. Just give me a safe area, an open space where I can freely press buttons and try things out before I go ahead and engage in combat.
I’m not proposing games explain everything, but you need a certain amount of knowledge to make informed decisions, to play some games on a basic level. Some types of information are difficult to determine about moves just by doing them, and that information can be really critical sometimes.
If someone doesn’t know how to do special moves with a charge character (or any character for that matter) they’re not going to have a lot of fun at street fighter. On some level, you need to tutorialize, because if you don’t then some players will completely miss out. Letting players experiment with moves and find out new low affordance tricks is a cool thing. I’m not suggesting that players be told from the get-go in dark souls all the different paths open to them from firelink, because that ruins the experience of trying the different paths for themselves, though I would say that they should be pushed a bit more towards the burg because it’s so easy to go the wrong way there.
Being set up to fail because you didn’t know something critical to success isn’t very fun. It’s alright to not tell players everything, but sometimes you just gotta hand them a move list. It’s dependent on the type of information and how easy it is to intuit. You can set up challenges to encourage players to test things to figure them out and that is valid, but if it’s something like pressing the button all the way down while holding an enemy in CQC will make you slit their throat, then that’s something you’re gonna have to explain somewhere, because who the hell is going to recognize that this one game is actually using the pressure sensitive buttons in the controller?
A lot of these criticisms are off point. A lot of them are stupid. There is still a time and a place for tutorials and concepts that should ideally be explained through tutorials. Teaching the player the non-obvious elements of how to play the game are still necessary. And I have had a friend that immediately on starting the demon’s souls tutorial ate all his grass after I shouted at him to stop doing that. I have seen this multiple times. I think I even accidentally ate grass when I didn’t mean to myself because I was expecting a different function there back when I was new.
re: tutorials. I don’t know why you’d ever want to ‘train’ another person in a fighting game. Like, what’s the point? What exactly are you going to teach them that they wouldn’t be able to learn from a basic online guide or playing around in a training room? More nuanced and technical elements can’t really be learned via instant memorization, they’re things that have to be learned organically and are ingrained into your mental knowledge base over time. In other words, you need to practice by playing the game in a natural setting, e.g. against other players. When I first got into Melee, I wondered why players didn’t use this or that move more often. But I only realized why once I played against AI and other players. Not in a controlled setting, however. Sure I lost, but I had a better understanding of what works and why, and I could build upon and use that info for future matches.
I want them to be able to get into fighting games without needing to sit down with an actual human being carefully teaching them concepts for hours in order to understand things. That and if they are taught these things hands on in a setting that is interactive, they will probably learn it better than if they simply read about it without applying it. Practicing things like whiff punishing in the training room is difficult to set up for a beginner. Practicing things like footsies in general is difficult to set up for a beginner who is not familiar with the training room tools or how they can be used.
I have sent people copious tutorials in the past to teach them fighting games, and they do not read these tutorials because they’re fucking long. Skullgirls tutorials? Easy. Blazblue tutorials, easy. Even my little brother who does not really play fighting games was able to complete the persona 4 arena tutorials.
This is why I propose interactive tutorials for fighting games with visual cues like glints that allow players to simulate the act of getting the read on their opponent, with AI crafted to pick between specific options to emphasize how those things work. Skullgirls has you learn what hitconfirming is, how to block high/low mixups, how to defend against tick throws as well as perform them. These are concepts that can be expanded to envelop more of the fighting game experience, including things like frametraps, and footsie scenarios. You can teach players about how to figure out what types of moves are good for what types of things and common move archetypes to watch out for, like dragon punches, pokes, anti-air, crossup, moves with frame advantage, moves that are unsafe on block. When I started out, I thought unsafe on block was a mystical property of some moves, I didn’t understand it was related to frame advantage, which was why I was confused when someone answered that nothing is de facto unsafe on block, it’s a matter of how unsafe it can be. I didn’t know about the relationship between the range of moves versus their startup times and frame advantage (or disadvantage), which is typically imposed as a point of design. Then damage and pushback are other factors on top of that.
Beginners don’t know what to look for, so they won’t be able to identify whether an aerial is a good air to ground, air to air, crossup, or fulfills several of these roles. These are things that can be included into the games themselves. Being so advanced in these games, having had so much time to study and practice we might think these things are intuitive, but they are not. We can intuit them because we have experience in those areas. At minimum we can have interactive overlays on the screen, much like the custom assist selection menu in skullgirls, pointing out which notches they need to hit in which order and what the system reads their current input as.
This isn’t a matter of teaching the more nuanced and technical elements, this is a matter of establishing basic literacy. Most of the information on how fighting games work is scattered to the 4 winds. If we stick this stuff directly in the game, and make it a challenge to be overcome, then we’re a step closer to allowing anyone who picks up a copy of street fighter being able to actually play the game on a basic level without having to consult 9 different websites and extensive google searching.
What’s the cancel rule for normals into specials in street fighter 2, 3rd strike, and skullgirls? In SF2, you can cancel any normal that has 5 or less frames of startup, either during hitfreeze, or during the startup period. In Third Strike, you can cancel any normal into a special on the first frame of the normal, and during hitfreeze if that move is labeled as being special cancelable, regardless of startup time (though this is typically reserved for faster startup moves as a point of design). In Skullgirls you can cancel a normal into special at any time except when it’s active and recovery, unless it hits, then any time.
How do combos actually work? When I first got into fighters I was perplexed by this. I didn’t understand in SF4 that I needed to move the stick simultaneously to the normal attack that was going on so that I could press the button activating the special attack right when the normal connected. I only found out because a video from Eventhubs happened to show the inputs onscreen and explain it the right way.
How do charge moves work? The listings for them show one arrow going back, then another arrow going forward, so I press back forward, and I don’t do the special move. What’s up with that? I eventually learned that you have to hold it back before pressing forward in order to do the charge move. I had to explain this to someone in text that wanted to play as big band in skullgirls recently. He had a bit of difficulty doing it. I once tried to have a girl do it in person and she was genuinely incapable of timing it correctly. She would always hold back, then press forward followed by punch rather than forward and punch simultaneously, as if it had to be in steps. She couldn’t perform fireballs with Ryu either (tried that first, figured charge moves might be easier but they weren’t.)
A lot of people’s problems with performing these are they do not have a clear mental picture of what is going on inside the game system. Many beginners, rather than learn what their characters can actually do, or how to perform moves, just mash until they find a method that produces a special move with reasonable consistency, even if they do not know what the actual input is, or can explain it in any way decipherable to other people, they will repeat this method. I have one friend who told me if he wanted to do shoryuken, he just did 2 QCFs.
I beat King of Fighters 98, Guilty Gear AC’s story mode, and a bunch of other KoF games before I really learned anything about fighting games. I only owned the games because KoF had the most beautiful sprites I had ever seen, and Guilty Gear is fucking awesome (no idea how I came to own it or what drew me to buy it).
AI opponents don’t act like human opponents do, they behave truly randomly and unpredictably. This is a good thing if all their actions are capable of being reacted to, but fighting games and other multiplayer games are built on the basis that it is impossible to react to many actions, so that players can act simultaneously and must predict each other. Additionally, AI opponents don’t behave adaptively.
Against a skilled real life opponent, if you mash, they can simply perform a move that requires a specific counter and repeat it until you die. This is probably why beginners complain so much about fireball spam. If you try to spam, they will continually execute the counter to that spam. The Brood War AI competitions are currently dominated by AI that do not behave adaptively in any way, simply executing strategies that require extremely specific timing pushes to beat to a high level of perfection, then sending units at each corner of the map in order.
In short, if you play an AI, you’ll usually pick up bad habits, they’re only really good for specific types of practice, like doing combos under pressure rather than just in the training room.
However AI can be tuned to provide more a more controlled and limited experience so as to learn a specific aspect of fundamental play, much like the parry basketball trial in third strike, or the tutorials in skullgirls I keep fucking mentioning (sorry, there’s really nothing else like them besides juicebox’s very carefully set up training room recordings).
And a lot of games, including the ones I mentioned before (RE6, TW101, D. Souls) can be played and completed without learning the ins and outs, through sheer brute-forcing. I mean, anyone can bungle their way through these games, gorging healing items and playing in the least efficient way possible , but the great thing is that you don’t have to play the game like a little monkey. You can learn various tactics and experiment with your moveset in order to make the game a much more thrilling or enjoyable experience. Comaplaining that all of that isn’t outlined in a manual is nonsense. Sure, SMB had practically every detail illustrated in the manual, even stuff like infinite 1-ups, but that’s a different story. That was probably because home consoles were relatively new and they wanted to make sure people understood this new technology that were banking on becoming a household product.
And all of those games are a lot more simple than fighting games. They have less moves with less complexity, and require less of the inter-move tactics that fighting games do. Things like block strings and frame traps with tick throws? Forget it! Just hit them with the biggest combo you know and be done with it.
Playing against a live human player is a totally different experience, and establishing basic enough literacy in fighting games to actually play them competently is a lot more complicated. It’s like trying to play Go without a concept of what a living shape is, or what can potentially become a living shape, and having someone who actually knows their shit kill 6-point eye shapes (I painfully had this happen to me once, thinking, “oh, I know 6 point eye shapes are unconditionally alive, so anything he plays I’ll just flush it out,” leading to it becoming a different eye shape that wasn’t unconditionally alive, I think bulky 5, and I had the entire thing completely captured because of my carelessness or at least lost territory).
Moves in these games are a lot more clear in what they do to the uninitiated, because they are a lot simpler in design, or because the reasoning (opponents are over here, lets hit them with something going that way) is simpler. Moves in Melee are a lot simpler to understand compared to fighting game moves in terms of their neutral function, because they all basically just hit in a direction, and everything is unsafe on block if it isn’t spaced properly, barring a few frametraps.
In Devil May Cry 3, you have stinger to close gaps, 2 basic slash combos, one hits an area around dante, one is faster. You have a dive attack in the air, and can shoot guns to keep people in the air or deal damage from afar.
In Street Fighter, you have to learn to not jump, you have to learn how to anti-air people. You need to learn the differences between normal anti-air and special anti-air moves in relation to reaction time on them. You need to learn the difference in function between at least c.LP, all the versions of MK, c.HP, Hadouken, dragon punch, and throw. You need to know that blocks beat attacks, throws beat blocks, attacks generally beat throws.
Even if you know all that stuff, I can simply go up to you and sweep you to death because you still don’t know how to block or the concept of the okizeme game, where I essentially get to throw any attack I want against you and your only option to retaliate is an extremely tight window, assuming your character has an invincible startup move at all.
Chances are even if you do know how to block I can still beat you that way, because I’ve done it to tons of beginners who should know better and instead start mashing as if that will really do anything.
Fighting games have much harsher setbacks on the path to literacy than other genres. I can tell someone who has never played Quake 3 before to hop into a match and we can get something going. If I tell someone to play me in SF Alpha 2, then it becomes a lesson. Many people I know actively avoid fighting games, say it isn’t their thing. I was one of those people until I actually worked to understand them. However I have an atypical personality, I’m very research oriented with a lot of games, and I was that way before getting into fighters. I’m slowly becoming the framedata guy who can just list off however many frames anything important is, as noted by a recent conversation where someone needed to know how fast the startup on something or another was, or maybe some character’s jumpsquat frames and I happened to know offhand and they were all, “of course you’d know that.” Not everyone is willing to scour the web for basic-ass information on how to play fighting games. This is all information that could be reintegrated into the product itself, and “gamified” (to temporarily ignore the negative connotations of that term), in order to help people get an understanding for how the game should be played at all.
To talk about other games with advanced techniques for a second, I’m not complaining that not everything is listed in the manual for every game, however lets be honest, a lot of us find out about these advanced mechanics from instructional guides that other people made outside the game. We’re not discovering everything for ourselves. I’ll admit there’s a certain appealing aesthetic to putting to use things that are “secret knowledge.” Being someone who is as research oriented as I am, I certainly enjoy finding out hidden information on games and being able to apply it. (shoutouts to HM04, who I told about a trick I found where Marth could repeat his side B to lock ROB in the air, but it didn’t work in the current patch, then I was able to pull it off for real on his Mewtwo in tournament bracket recently, also Seagull Joe who I locked in that trick for real back when it still worked, seriously confusing him until he realized he had to airdodge out). It’s cool to find out something that isn’t well known about your favorite game, it’s cool to find things through experimentation instead of being explicitly told about it, which can feel rather patronizing. However if there is a trick like this that seriously augments the enjoyability of the game, it should be something offered up to those who aren’t totally willing or able to experiment, to those who it doesn’t occur to.
I’m not proposing that every consequence of every mechanic be laid out, however sometimes you have concepts that are central to your game that cannot be expressed without simply explaining them (or players willing to stick with it & understand the scientific method on some level).
If simple unobtrusive steps can be taken to ensure people “get” the product, that don’t limit or annoy experienced users, then that is probably something we should do. I mean, I shout every time I see anyone play Mirror’s Edge because they aren’t using the side boost or wall boost and are actually engaging the enemies and they’re going the wrong fucking way.
I’m kind of surprised the mario manual would explain infinite 1ups, that’s one I’d leave in the realm of urban legend. BM canceling I’d have someone mention in a codec call (“try activating blade mode during long moves, sometimes it lets you get out of them sooner, experiment with different moves and timings”).
Or in Ori and the Blind Forest, you kind of need to explain that the super jump from wall can only be done from a wall run/climb, not wall slide. How’s anyone supposed to figure out the triple jump in mario bros if it’s not explained? I figured out the slide flip on my own, and I think the spin jump in sunshine, but the triple jump I’ve never been very good at. I’m glad Quake Live had a bunnyhop tutorial, and rocket jump tutorial.
Yes it’s a concession, but some concessions may be necessary to help people get into the game. The majority of consumers are not very observant, and placing a totally optional tutorial prompt for some things isn’t a serious UX issue for experienced users.
That and seriously, I’d like to get more people into fighting games and they’re not going to learn it from just CPUs, random online play, and training mode. They need a tutor, a tutorial, or to read a huge wall of text, and that last option isn’t very appealing to most people.
Celia Wagar's CritPoints 