Worst Rival Battle: Dark Link

Celia WagarLeave a comment

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

Dark Link in OoT.

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

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

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

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

Open World Design

Celia WagarLeave a comment

What’s with open world games and why don’t people make good ones?

Hmm, this is just a guess on my part, but I think it’s that when you make an open world game, the focus is on the open world, which maybe detracts from the focus on the other elements. Open world has some implicit assumptions in the development process that probably negatively impact the game’s design, because of a need to create a ton of content, even if a lot of that content is recycled. The implicit thought is probably, “What are we making, and how much value can we get from every piece of content we make?” How many times can it be reused? This is something that developers think of in regular games too of course, but in open world games it’s especially emphasized.
http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/JoelBurgess/20130501/191514/Skyrims_Modular_Approach_to_Level_Design.php
A lot of my thoughts on this matter are derived from this by the way.

In general I think that the value in a game lies in the core gameplay mechanics and level design more than the amount of content. Open world is a style of content presentation and level design that comes with expectations about the amount of content, so the main things tend to take a hit. In open world games, the assumption is that you can access most of the points of interest at any time without roadblocks. Progression becomes modeled based on whether certain events have been completed rather than whether you have physically accessed new areas, and left the old ones behind you.

Open world games, like Far Cry, Assassin’s Creed, seem to demand you search for a billion trinkets scattered everywhere to get whoknowswhat. MGSV’s side ops and animal collection were lousy with this. This type of stuff tends to exist to inflate the gameplay time, and leads to the game overstaying its welcome as you need to play through the same content over and over again.

On the fun side, you get Just Cause 2, which I think is one of the best open world games I’ve ever played, barring some of the story missions. Hell, story missions in a lot of these are kind of a blight, they set up specific goals typically and don’t let you do other things until you exit the mission, typically returning you to an in-mission checkpoint if you die, fail, or stray. In the case of the Far Cry games, assaulting the various outposts is way more fun than the story missions, which practically seem unrelated. However in MGSV’s case, the story missions were usually more fun than wandering around the map, because they changed the patrol patterns for those and gave them more thought.

Meanwhile Bethesda games don’t really have the same mission or collectible structure at all, and I guess that’s pretty nice on their part actually, just the level design kinda sucks, as does combat with enemies.

This mod has way more care put into its one room than any other area in Skyrim.

Lemme collect my thoughts a little:

Good open world games: Far Cry Blood Dragon, JC2, MGSV, Zelda 1, Infamous 1
Bad open world games: anything by Bethesda, Asscreed
Inbetween: Far Cry 3, Minecraft, Witcher 3

Elements I like: being able to freeroam anywhere, multiple angles to attack objectives from, route planning across the world to hit hotspots,

Elements I dislike: Collectathon style padding, big flat open uninspired level design, sandboxed mission structure (as in, forcibly made separate from the rest of the game, whether by actual geometry constraints, or rules forcing you to follow the mission)

MGSV did something sort of clever in the way they built the world, the mountains serve to funnel the world into these lanes, so you kind of have to pass by most bases in a sort of linear fashion, giving the designer a bit more control, allowing them to funnel you into their level design challenges, so you can’t always go around everything.

Far Cry 3 and Blood Dragon both have shitty story missions that are linear, but they both have really nice capturing of outposts.

It’s nice to have some element of collection driving you across the map, but if you split up the stuff to be collected too much it gets exhausting. It would be better to try to consolidate that aspect a bit so challenges could be a bit more loosely focused on locations instead of sweeping over and collecting literally everything possible. Set some limits on how many times you make someone return to the same place, maybe 1-3 times so they don’t get worn out on it. Try making the collectable elements more important. The places of power in Witcher 3 are pretty nice, a lot of the other collectable things on the map are trash. I enjoy going across the map collecting things, but I don’t enjoy finding out that all of it is just junk, that makes me personally get fatigued, because I’m out there collecting tons of junk.

Just Cause 2 had a cool way of doing it, you had to go around the map blowing stuff up, which caused the enemy to attack you and call in reinforcements. Awesome core dynamic. Then there’s a ton of little things to destroy that don’t net you much chaos (it’s like a currency that goes up and unlocks new stuff when you have enough, including missions), but they’re still sitting there. And it’s not like Katamari where small stuff in great quantities is awesome because you can roll it all up at once, it’s like picking up grains of rice with a pair of chopsticks, it’s time consuming for not nearly as much reward, but you feel obligated because it’s there. Take a hint from Katamari on that one and just totally stop having them once the player outscales them significantly.

The thing is, a lot of this collectible stuff is optional, it’s not designed to be important or necessary for progression, so no effort is put into creating it. Ostensibly, the game is designed so you can complete it without needing to engage with any of that collectible stuff. Why bar the player’s progression for them to collect things that aren’t part of the main story? So the rewards on a lot of them are really weak also, because they don’t want to upset the difficulty balance in the main story missions.

But on the other hand, a lot of these open world games just want to be big hamster wheel things, that’s why they have so many progression systems, they know that their main story missions aren’t enough to satisfy the player alone, because the level and encounter design isn’t very strong, so they add filler content and progression systems to keep the player busy.

So what should they do? Probably take a page from Metroidvanias, and Crysis Warhead, Far Cry Blood Dragon & FC3’s outposts. Keep the collectibles limited. Focus on the locations, the strongholds, make places in the world that are difficult to assault. Make level design across the world that is difficult to pass through unfettered. Metroidvanias are primarily about getting from checkpoint to checkpoint without dying, they set up things in your way that are difficult to get past without losing some health. In Metroid, save room to save room, same for Castlevania, La Mulana, Dark Souls. Exception is Ori and the Blind forest, but it has a really funky checkpoint system and really linear level structure overall to make it work.

The thing to get good at is probably controlling how players approach stronghold type structures, having enemies be better roadblocks in the wild, and a general study in good level design of terrain for moving around the map that allows free movement generally, but still restricts the player on an encounter level. The place to look for this is probably the original Zelda, which had limiting terrain all over the place. Figure out a suitable equivalent in 3 dimensions and you’re set, or start from 2d and work up to 3d.

The other big thing is, more elements in the open world should have more care put into them. A lot of stuff in open world games gets recycled, so the world starts feeling rather samey when you’ve seen that same art asset so much. Dark Souls is a fairly large game, and all of its areas are very deliberately crafted. Rather than aiming to make everything modular and reusable, aim for giving areas distinct touches. Plan how to make the most interesting areas possible. Probably work iteratively, building out from a central place. Quit trying to make a ton of filler content, focus on a smaller amount of more meaningful/challenging content in the open world format.

This was a bit rambley and probably not as straightforward as I could have written it.

Skullgirls Overview

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What do you like about the game mechanics of skullgirls?

I decided to field this one to my friend from the previous ask, seeing as he’s the best skullgirl in ‘Straya, “my tl;dr of why i like skullgirls mechanics is because it’s a balanced vision of an unbalanced game with good mechanics(mvc2), every character is functional and viable, there is a very high skill ceiling due to the wealth of relevant mechanics that is unfortunately invisible to most competitive players, and there are very little redundant moves on characters”

What I’d personally say is, the buffer, the flexible cancel system, the ability to cancel any move’s startup into any move it validly cancels into, these make the combo system feel extremely smooth, like everything slides into one another, like the actual endpoint of each move has a little leniency.

They have a cast of characters with tons of original abilities per-character, and weird combinations of moves that somehow fit together into a coherent gameplan. Some characters are clearly missing things, like there’s no character with a good zoning game that also has a good invincible uppercut, to force you to fit those characters together on a team. Even the conventional characters try new things, like Filia is supposedly a shoto, but she has a ton of weird normals, a weak zoning game, and instant airdashes, Peacock plays a zoning game with hidden missiles that you can control at different zones, 3 little bombs that lock space down and more conventional projectiles (one is on a normal for some reason too). Eh, I’m not gonna go through describing the whole cast, just trust me that they’re pretty crazy.

Also cool is how there’s so many ways to link things into other things. Just today I went into training mode, and was like, “Maybe I could tiger knee a hairball with filia?” then I did it, realized MK would work better, and airdash canceled that into a j.mp, lowering them to the ground, with an j.HK as a restand. Apparently this is practically good for almost nothing (less good as an approach than instant airdash, because it skips to stage 3 when you enter the ground phase), so whatever, but there’s a lot of stuff like this in the system, you just see a possibility and maybe it works. The Undizzy system and adjusted IPS have forced combos to become a lot more efficient too rather than just the same loops over and over, and optimized combos these days look really cool.

That’s about all I got.

Designing Games for Kids

Celia WagarLeave a comment

Since you said you don’t believe in factoring age as part of judging the quality of a game. I’d like to ask how’d you design a game for kids? What properties do you think could make good game elements while primarily appealing to 5-12 age demographic?

lol what. Wait, I think I meant age like how old the game is, not how old the audience is.

Okay, the strongest properties in making games for young children is probably keeping the core mechanics simple and high affordance. Affordance seems to be my theme word of the week here. Don’t require a lot of reading unless the reading isn’t really that important.

NES games are great for this, the NES only has 2 buttons. Some NES games have weird hidden information though, but those don’t tend to be the most popular ones.

As they get older, like I think 8 or 10, they can probably afford to play something complicated, because they’re a kid, they have plenty of time to figure out how the whole system works. I learned how to read from playing Pokemon, because it was a big deal back then and I wanted to get into the game so much. The game lays out the type weakness chart in the instruction manual.

If you want to make a good game that appeals to someone that age, it’s a process of sort of building 2 games. Sure, any kid can play a pokemon game, but there’s a lot about Pokemon that goes beyond just beating the gym leaders. There’s the EV system, IV system, STAB, and other subtle factors. Any idiot can play smash bros melee, I did as a little kid too, but there’s a lot more there if you dig into it. The game needs to be layered where people can function on an effective level. Sakurai talks about this in his statements on smash 4 as a game, and he’s remarkably on point there.

“The Act of Balancing” Sakurai’s Famitsu Column vol. 480


“Furthermore, if I went with what is fair according to advanced players, the beginners wouldn’t be able to keep up. For example, Kirby’s Stone attack probably won’t hit a player above intermediate skill level, but if I made it more powerful, it would destroy beginners. At the end of the day, I’m aiming for intermediately-skilled players to be able to properly enjoy the game.”

At least, he’s on point in identifying that there are different skill levels, and based on the way you design moves, things will be more or less successful or effective based on your skill level. The thing he’s not on point about is failing to recognize that seriously, project M made kirby’s down B more effective and it still doesn’t destroy beginner players, and smash attacks come out fairly frequently in Melee because they’re safer and you can move faster to position them.

Traditional fighting games, probably not for kids, because the basic tools in them are low affordance, it’s hard to figure out exactly what’s going on. On the other hand, kids have a lot of time to figure them out, and they have a tendency to get fixated on things, so it could work out in the right environment.

RTS, also probably not for kids, but MOBAs work fine, because it’s only movement and like 4 abilities at any one time.

Keep the options at any one time limited. Make them clear in primary function, add more subtle secondary functions.

MGS3 European Extreme Difficulty

Celia Wagar1 Comment

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.

1345519042675

Extra Credits on Difficulty

Celia WagarLeave a comment

I know you’ve talked about Extra Credits in the past, but what do you think of this video?
http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ea6UuRTjkKs

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.

And this video?
http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=MM2dDF4B9a4

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!

Game Soup’s RNG Vid

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What do you you think about this video about RNG? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNs8aB0huoc

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.

Better than extra credits though.

Deus Ex: HR Overview

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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.

Ori and the Blind Forest Overview

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How good is Ori and the blind forest?

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.

How I’d Make an RPG

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How would you make an (Videogame) RPG?

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.