NES Hard

Celia WagarLeave a comment

This question was asked by Jason “Dapper Swine” Brown, developer of Seedscape

General question; I have my own thoughts on this, but what do you think of the viability of “NES hard” modern games? Few games really kill you, or demand much attention anymore. I think overcoming adversity makes the player feel good, but it’s “medicine” the player doesn’t always know they like.‎

I think most of the modern games pretending to be “NES Hard” are pale imitations. You get stuff like I wanna be the guy, Super Meat Boy, Hotline Miami, etc, where you die in practically one hit and have really short checkpoint/reload times. I’ll give Hotline Miami an exemption here because it does have some actual depth to it, preventing its levels from being repeating the same string of inputs ad infinitum. A lot of these games tend not to feature lives, or care about checkpoints beyond the last one you passed.

Others like Shovel Knight take a different study of NES games, building every single one of its levels with introducing that level’s unique design feature in a safe environment, then slowly building in complexity on it. It’s less like a level intended to challenge you and more like a tutorial. If you read a lot of level design literature, you’ll notice that the majority of it is devoted to teaching the player silently through level designs, almost none of it is on how to actually challenge the player in different clever ways.

Raph Koster has a definition of fun that I think is appropriate, from his book, Theory of Fun. More or less, people respond to achieving something inconsistently. Achieving something inconsistently is more or less what we define as difficulty. We evolved in such a way as to receive a mental reward for achieving difficult things. We’re capable of creating goals for ourselves without reinforcing stimuli such as food, unlike most other animals, whose intrinsic motivation to complete a task quickly fades in the absence of a tangible biological reward. This is what enables us to pursue things like money or psychological stimulation to the detriment of our physical wellbeing.

When we achieve something inconsistently, we have fun. The more rare the success, the more fun we have, the more engrossing it is. If no effort of ours is expended in the process, if the process is randomized, the enjoyment is typically more in the form of desire, than an actual enjoyment of the thing itself. People don’t like it, but they want to continue to do it. Wanting and Liking have been verified to have separate neurological pathways. When you expend your own effort, and occasionally succeed and fail, you tend to come to like the act of doing the thing.
In this way, good games tend to have a lot of big and little things to succeed and fail at. You might not beat the level, you might not get as far through it as last time, but this time you bypassed that tricky part without taking damage, and your consistency at getting criticals or headshots was 40% higher. There are associated skills to master, and they balance against each other synergistically in the overall challenge of beating the level before you.

Games can meet a lot of other psychological pleasures, but of course this is a unique one. I don’t know if it’s medicine players don’t know they want, I think it’s an unmet want in an environment that doesn’t totally know what it’s making.

The point of difficulty is to bring out the depth of the game. The point of depth in the game is to make the difficulty interesting. The two work together. You want to limit the player’s options while also giving them ways forward. Kill the easy strategies, force them to be proactive. Give them lots of tools, lots of ways to use them. Almost never completely eliminate the usefulness of a tool. Just because you want to punish the use of a tool in some way doesn’t mean it should be perfectly countered. If the player wants to do only one thing, give them a reason to want to do multiple possible things. Give the tools themselves drawbacks. Go study Castlevania 3 if you want to go for the retro difficulty thing, that game is a master class in it.

As for commercial viability, I believe people are definitely looking for this sort of thing, however I don’t think you will reach much success piggybacking off those that have made success in this area already. Create an identity for yourself, probably skip trying to cash in on nostalgia. By all means make the individual game challenges difficult, though go ahead and include multiple lives and an actual health bar if you feel those things are appropriate. Most of the actual NES games had those. Demon’s Souls was literally found and saved by the western community by importing a chinese copy of the game because they recognized its difficulty. Beyond that, it’s a lot of guesswork and it depends on your individual implementation.

In a way, the success of NES games is that despite their simplicity, they used the elements available to them in order to give the player interesting choices in how they proceeded through the level, challenging them in the precise ways they executed those larger scale choices. Like in the above video, there was a skeleton below, the guy tried to throw axes, expending resources, but missed. Instead of finding a place to throw more axes, he took up the risky move of jumping down and whipping the skeleton as he went, which succeeded. As fish men popped up out of the ground, rather than wait for them to settle on the blocks, he would jump forward and whip them as they rose up. This certainly has a larger punishment for failure and is a lot more timing dependent, but it is allowed to him.

Jason posted a reply here:
http://www.twitlonger.com/show/n_1snfgkm#_=_

Those parts that are bullshit are some of the most memorable parts of the game for me. Like in Dark Souls, the dragon slayer arrow knights on the anor londo rafters. You’re right, the difficulty is in a big way what makes them rewarding. If you tone those parts down, then it’s no longer really an accomplishment or puzzle. We make these games as artificial impediments you could say, then to tone that down to the level where they’re cleared without effort, kind of ruins the point.

The way I’d relate this to fun theory is, fun is relative to the rate of success versus the frustration of repetition. If you succeed every time you do something, it’s no fun. If you succeed only sometimes when you do something, it’s a bit more fun. If you only succeed once in every 100 tries, it’s an amazing thing that 100th time it finally happens. If you do the same thing every time, it’s not very fun. If it’s slightly different every time, it’s a bit more fun, if it’s really different every time, then it’s really fun. To build on that, increase in consistency is related to fun. If you used to never succeed, but now you succeed 1 in 100 tries, it’s more fun. If you used to succeed 1 in 100 and now you’re 1 in 10, it’s more fun. If you stay at the same rate of success it becomes less fun. If you get to perfect consistency, succeeding every time, then it ceases to be fun. This is related to Depth and difficulty curves. Depth is in a way about giving players a lot of things to succeed and fail at, so they can slowly move up to bigger things after becoming consistent at the little things, which is also what difficulty curves are about. Depth is about creating variation in every playthrough, through the choices allowed to the player, and situations created by the interaction of their choices and the game’s systems (enemies, levels, etc).

A lot of modern games are concerned about accessibility. This tends to mean that the way the game is designed holds your hand, there’s no advanced functions or ways to play that might be hard to use. Western games and western gamers actually love hard mode. From what I heard once in an interview with a japanese dev, that’s something more requested in the west than east, where in japan they like being able to level up and get to the end as long as they are willing to put up with grinding. The thing is that typically hard modes are number buffs on the enemies, not making them more interesting in any way. One line a friend told me is that western hard modes are made for no one, and tested by no one. Despite having a hard mode, and it frequently actually being hard, it wasn’t designed purposefully and doesn’t bring out the depth inherent in the game.

There are of course cases like Portal where the game is playtested to death so nobody ever gets significantly stuck and the levels are always suggesting their solutions to you, which is pretty lame.

And of course, at the root of any story, there’s a conflict of some kind.

2D vs 3D, what the mediums are “about”

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What do you think of i-frame, auto-position, or dodge-in-place types of moves in 2D games? I’m thinking of stuff like Aces Wild and Alien Soldier here. 2D is about movement and positioning, so are these types of mechanics antithetical to the medium? I-framing and homeing moves are practically required in 3D because of wonky collision and imprecise viewing angles (2D screen and all), but what about 2D games? Also, Alien Soldier isn’t really the best example since the Zero Teleport isn’t exactly a true i-frame move and it’s not something you can mindlessly use, I was just using it to give you an idea of what I mean

2D isn’t “about” anything. Using invincibility in a 2d game is not antithetical to the medium in any way. Homing attacks are a problem in general if left unchecked. Don’t make statements on what a medium is “about”, it’s jumping to conclusions, presupposing an answer. There is what works, and what doesn’t work, and sometimes invincibility works. Smash Bros is 2d after all.

Homing attacks can be a problem in a manner similar to lock-on because they usually reduce depth in a scenario that has the potential for depth. I say usually because not all homing attacks are implemented the same, not all are guaranteed to hit, not all are guaranteed to hit at the same angle/time/situation, not all home in the same way. These differentiations can significantly affect the function of the homing attack.

Homing attacks work fine in some fighting games, like Melty Blood, and Dark Stalkers (the pursuit option on knockdown is more frequently used to tech chase rather than get bonus damage by using it slightly too late to connect).

If you have a use for these, then go ahead. If it works, if it has a valid function, then use it. If it can be used to create depth, then go ahead. There is no meaning or purpose to the medium.

Invincibility is not required in 3d games. Homing attacks are usually not required in 3d games. Invincibility is a design choice that makes sense for certain purposes, such as incentivizing waiting to dodge at the last possible moment, rather than getting out of the way at the first possible moment, or as an anti-grab option such as in smash bros, or as an alternate block option that allows you to whiff punish because you’re not being weighed down with blockstun. That type of wait til the last moment skill test is interesting in its own way, which is why Bayonetta went all out with it by implementing witch time.

Homing attacks in 3d games were a compromise in the early days of 3d controls when nobody really knew how they worked, since then people have realized how to implement 3d controls better, so they’re less necessary generally. Not that they were really that common in the first place. How many homing attacks are there? Sonic has one, who else? I’m drawing a blank. Lock-ons and snap-tos are still way more common.

Execution in PM vs Melee

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About simplifying inputs; Melee has harder inputs and everything feels so much more satisfying. On the other hand, as much as I like PM, people just throw out special moves without what feels like any rhyme or reason because they know they’ll connect. How many ‘hype’ falcon punches do you see in Melee vs. PM? Or even for moves that are easier to land like falcon kicks or raptor boosts. PM made these moves more viable, sure, but they also reduced the risk of using them (arguable more than these moves warranted). This disproportional (to viability) reduction in execution requirement makes PM less satisfying to play, less impressive to watch, and less hype. So, I would argue that high execution is still important. Sirlin’s idea that fighting games should be all about strategy is not helpful. These are action games first and foremost. Having high execution arguably puts more emphasis strategic play (should I risk it and use this hard move? or in a tight spot, thinking to use an unorthdox move). Also, high execution makes that cathatic release at the end all the more satisfying.

What? Special moves don’t connect more easily in P:M. In competitive play special moves aren’t any more emphasized than they are in Melee. At least, not on a general level. In competitive play we see about the same normal to special move ratio we see in Melee. Easier to connect implies they have shorter startup, bigger hitboxes, which most special moves don’t. Falcon punch has exactly the same number of startup frames in P:M as it does in Melee, the only difference is that you can reverse it now, which allows you to delay the startup a bit.

The risk of using Falcon Punch and Raptor boost has by no means been reduced. Both have the same amount of recovery they did in melee if I’m not mistaken. Raptor Boost is still just as susceptible to shieldgrabbing and counter poking as it always was. Falcon kick had its recovery time reduced and knockback growth changed to make it more useful, especially the air version, because it was a useless piece of shit before. This doesn’t make it easier to use falcon kick, but it does make falcon kick at all useful as something other than a recovery option or kill move.

Falcon was a character that was underpowered in melee relative to the top tier characters. He needed to be improve in order to be viable compared to them. The changes to Falcon were completely warranted with regards to his viability.

The thing making falcon in particular so much more consistent than his melee counterpart is really the removal of stale knockback. Brawl had an extremely horrible implementation of stale knockback, which the PMDT removed completely, thinking they were matching Melee behavior. Turns out Melee has stale knockback too, just more subdued. This makes combos a bit less consistent when percentage isn’t the only thing governing how far someone is hit. Falcon has some relatively simple combos that would otherwise be highly consistent, like his nair into up air string which some people call the air wobble.

The actual factors of execution that were changed in P:M were changed extremely slightly, like by a frame in the majority of cases. Backdashes were made easier by adding the frame of tolerance given to the forward dash input, the dash versus walk range was made larger so it’s easier to end up in the dash range. Shorthops were made easier by fixing the bug where the last frame of jumpsquat doesn’t count for determining shorthop versus fulljump. Various aerials were made easier by the 1 frame physics delay, also probably multi-shining, and chaingrabbing or grab followups. Samus’s super wavedash was given an extra frame on the window.

Then you get things like B-reverse which are still hard as shit, and DACUS which was made harder than in Brawl (2 frame window). Perfect pivots are still frame perfect. Project M decided to make all kinds of edge cancels possible that weren’t before, like Falcon Kick edgecancel, giving players new tricky things to master.

For the most part, the reduction in execution for Project M is extremely extremely tiny. You’re freaking out over nothing.

People still have that type of risk in P:M, like going for a down air as a launcher with Snake instead of Up Air, multiple hits where you need to stay on top of them for the last hit, versus one with more lag afterwards and less ideal knockback. Or Ftilting with just the first hit to get the sticky, which is hard to land, and hard to confirm. In general connecting C4 with Snake is tricky and basically means dropping your combo to do it. Or going for side B combos with Bowser now that there is no super armor on the move, slower than a regular grab, but definitely bigger rewards.

Execution is nice, but it isn’t everything. Something shouldn’t be hard to the point that nobody is consistent at it unless it is something that would ruin the game if someone were consistent at it. Sure Sirlin is crazy for trying to literally remove all execution from games, but saying these are action games or trying to assign a purpose to them or a way they are “supposed to be” is not a good conceptualization. Any sort of statement about how something is “supposed to be” is making assumptions without a basis. It’s like assuming some sort of designer intent without an actual designer. Things either work right, creating a specific effect, or they don’t. Action games don’t need to be about execution primarily, if anything, execution difficulty is a bonus on a decision-making experience. The primary standard of quality I hold for games is depth, and execution by itself doesn’t tend to translate into very much depth.

Having things that require execution to distinguish between outcomes enables a game to create more outcomes in the form of more possible actions that can be performed by the player. Eliminating execution requirements typically means simplifying the game, but frequently it’s possible to make executing easier without a sacrifice, as in the majority of P:M’s implementations of easier execution. Having something be like a 1 frame link instead of a 3 frame link doesn’t significantly impact strategy in the majority of cases, it doesn’t create new outcomes that wouldn’t otherwise exist, it just induces frustration over consistency. If it’s possible to cut corners there without compromising anything, then go ahead. We don’t need everything being as difficult as the super wavedash, because yeah, the guys on top would feel awesome when they pull stuff off, but the other half of the time they’d be frustrated that nothing worked, because nobody can be consistent when everything is that hard.

TL;DR: P:M doesn’t significantly decrease the level of execution necessary to play on anything except borderline impossible shit. None of this affects the possibility space, and thereby depth, of the game. It’s not a significant concern.

Disliking Good Games

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How can you dislike good games? Does not compute. Obviously, there are certain subjective criteria (e.g. acknowledging a game’s quality, but not playing it because the aesthetic seriously puts you off), but if a game is good and you acknowledge that, what’s to stop you from liking it?

I don’t view quality as being something consistent with my own preferences. If game quality isn’t something outside of myself, then my ideology is just me trying to enforce my preferences on other people.

Games are characterized by aspects other than their depth. And these things can be things that I or we don’t individually find appealing. In the case of Persona 4 Arena and Blazblue, I dislike that they’re arc sys fighting games that aren’t Guilty Gear. I dislike the style of Blazblue, and can’t find any character in it that I have any particular attraction to. For Persona 4 arena, I dislike its relative simplicity, even though it is technically more complex than a game like SF2. Turn based single player games I cannot stand the long action-less hours of sitting around commanding things to happen. RTS I don’t like the lack of kinaesthetic sensation due to the indirect nature of control over units. Bayonetta I’m turned off by the massive movelist that is largely similar, even though it seems to have a high level of complexity. There are probably a few other games I am forgetting.

I admit these reasons are perhaps a bit shallow, a bit unfair, a bit defined by my personal tastes and expectations, so I recognize that these games are good, even if I do not personally enjoy them much.

If I don’t dislike good games, then my philosophy kinda falls apart, y’know, otherwise I’m just saying that the games I like are good and rationalizing why they’re good to justify my taste. For any sort of concrete or objective theory to make sense, it needs to be something outside myself. We have to recognize that there are facets of games that can be evaluated and shared between people, that our experiences are not so individual that it is hopeless to label any sort of change as progression.

Otherwise we’re right back at the Sokal Affair and the part of history literally named The Science Wars. I know there’s something outside myself with art. I know that there is a thing called quality, and that producing certain effects takes a type of knowledge or technical skill that people do not possess by default. If these claims are not true, then my reason to pursue art is dead.

Best Way to Present Game Tutorials

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What do you think is the best way to present a tutorial in videogames?

Anyone can tell you that the best approach is generally structuring a level so that it suggests what you need to do and creates a barrier that you can only pass by demonstrating the skill you’re supposed to be learning. Much like Mario 1-1, or many Megaman levels.

Not everyone can read, not everyone wants to read. Sometimes reading is necessary to explain what the controls do, and it’s nice in those cases to present something that users can call up, and which can be called up again once dismissed, much like the soapstone messages in the dark souls tutorial. The downside of these is, they are not automatically activated, some are easy to miss, and many of the challenges in the tutorial can be bypassed without actually learning what the soap stone messages are trying to teach you. This is a good thing for repeat players, because it’s faster and less annoying, but a bad thing for new players.

Mirror’s Edge has a tutorial that holds your hand much more. I don’t really approve of its tutorial design, where you are constantly stopped for cutscenes or tutorial messages that take time to skip or cannot be skipped. It is programmed so you must do every step of its tutorial the way it wants you to do it, ensuring you actually learn the skill they want you to learn, consequently, it’s really easy to break the tutorial, making progression not impossible, but requiring you to go back to the last step. The Mirror’s edge tutorial can be skipped in the menu, which is very nice. The Dark Souls one cannot, which is kind of a pain.

The ideal is to have no tutorial, you want to get to the meat of the game as soon as possible, and the game itself is kind of a tutorial in a way, offering lessons and punishing you for messing up. Most level design literature focuses on the nature of level design as a form of teaching, which is what makes shovel knight, which listened to ALL of that literature, kind of a slog to play, even if it does teach you every level’s gimmick then iterate on it slightly really well, it means that late into the game, you have to endure that type of slow progression until the final couple levels actually try to challenge you. If you need to use a video, consider letting the player control the video, with a mouse and a play bar, much like youtube. Hell, consider this for all cutscenes maybe.

Even if having a wordless cutscene-less tutorial is ideal, sometimes there are concepts that players just won’t get unless explained to them, and even if it’s bad User Experience, you just gotta shove a video or a block of text in their face. This means you have to play test and find out whether players are actually understanding the concepts you’re trying to teach them. Making a good tutorial is a balance between allowing players that understand to pass through as quickly as possible, and making sure players that don’t get it will come to understand it quickly, and not get by without learning it. This is going to be different per-game.

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, how cool is that?

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.

What would you consider to be the absolute greatest aspects of melee’s gameplay?

Celia WagarLeave a comment

Note: Not one of the best asks, but keeping it on file for later

I dunno. There’s a lot of individual things it succeeds at.

It has a unique ground and air footsie type of game that resembles something between Street Fighter’s (poke, whiff punish, go deep/throw) King of Fighter’s (shorthops beating lows, beating high jabs, beating shorthops) with less blocking, and faster, harder to control, ground movement, with a grab option that’s used more similarly to a whiff punish, and dash attacks used in the place of a throw typically. The characters all have different dash dance lengths and the dash state locks out other options, which is cool. It has shield pressure that’s based primarily on scare tactics and frametraps with few true blockstrings, and no way to get + on block, so no true tick throws. This probably resembles 3d fighters based on what I’ve heard about them, but I don’t have enough experience to say. Like using the threat of a frametrap to continue spamming the unsafe setup for a frametrap so you can paralyze them long enough to let you just grab them. It has combos that vary by how much damage has already been taken, with new options opening up and old ones closing by %, Combo trees that vary depending on your opponent’s DI which you need to react to at each step and the possibility of hitting your opponent opposite the way they expect to trap them in bad DI for a longer punish. It has the dynamic of DIing to escape a combo versus survive the next hit, which can lead into DI traps, as rather than going for a linker attack, you can go for a kill move, where their attempt to escape kills them. In that way, there is also the mechanical skill of DIing as perfectly as possible to attempt to aim yourself at the corners of the screen, so you can sometimes survive longer at higher %s. Then there’s recovery, which is different per-character and usually involves mixups in whether you go high or low at each stage of the recovery, and hang onto your character’s air stall options to either avoid their offstage edgeguards, or bait them into letting go of the ledge, since you can only occupy it with invincibility for a certain amount of time.

I posted this to 8/v/ in the past, and I’ll repost it here:

Melee vs fighters

Pokemon Overview

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What do you think of pokemon games? I imagine you don’t enjoy them but I’d like to hear your thoughts

I’ve played, Red, Yellow, Gold, Silver, Crystal, Ruby, Emerald, Diamond, Platinum, Soul Silver, and White. I beat all of them except for White, where on victory road I realized I was so tired of playing Pokemon, and quit.

Pokemon Red was the first game I ever owned, though not the first one I ever played.
Of all the RPGs I’ve played, Pokemon is perhaps one of if not the most complex. You’re given a huge number of different characters you can capture, they all have different types, they all have different moves that themselves are of different types. Some of these moves are strong or weak against other types of pokemon, the moves get a boost if they’re of the same type as the pokemon using them. The Pokemon have 6 different stats that affect their moves, which are increased both through their level and EVs which are distributed by the pokemon they beat. Pokemon all have different abilities that occasionally affect combat. Pokemon can hold items that affect combat.

Downside, none of that shit matters for clearing the game. You don’t need to know the intricacies of the system, at best you need to memorize the elemental table. Most of beating the game is just grinding and picking pokemon that are super effective against enemies without letting enemies have anything super effective on them. Most enemies, especially in the newer games which are easier than the old ones, don’t carry 6 pokemon and tend to pick entirely the same type for their team. They also quit doing the end-game content like battle frontier or battle subway with tougher challenges that play to the competitive meta.

On the upshot, the multiplayer can tend to be rather complex, with team composition being rather tricky with all the crazy variables you gotta keep in mind. Down-side, EV training used to be bullshit (I heard it got better), and a lot of the battle system comes down to dumb luck. Chances of missing, chances of inflicting status conditions, chances of critical hit. Even though you can use a simulator these days to skip all the tedious pokemon training, competitive play is still pretty much a wash. I’m sure there’s more to it that I’m skimming over because honestly I never got involved in it, but it sounds like a pain to me. There is probably a fair amount of depth to it, but I don’t want to get involved enough in it to find out. In that regard it is probably the most successful RPG in the multiplayer department, and in comparison to most other JRPGs, it also succeeds in pure complexity/differentiation between game states, because even ones like Shin Megami Tensei have a ton of redundant spells that are just stronger elemental damage, where Pokemon made almost all of its moves unique from one another and a massive amount have additional effects. Shin Megami Tensei games succeed on the single-player level because they stress the strategic parts of their system a lot more and aren’t afraid of stacking the deck against the player, though I think they would fail if they ever had a multiplayer component.

Yeah I’ve always felt that they could really bring pokemon to the next level by adding a higher difficulty campaign that stresses the strategic part of the game. I was honestly expecting you to bash the game.

Hahaha, I love how they were asked about adding a hard mode by a fan at one interview, and the guy was just like, “What? But then nobody would be able to finish the game.”

You know I’m harsh on RPGs and kind of a hard-ass and cynic in general, but you also know I’m gonna tell the truth as I see it, and try my best to tell the whole story without distorting anything.

What did you mean by “Pokemon (lots of configurable parts, every monster you encounter is made from commonly accessible parts)”? From: https://critpoints.wordpress.com/2016/08/10/games-for-learning-about-depth

Every Pokemon has 6 stats, HP, Attack, Defense, Special Attack, Special Defense. They have a level. They have EVs and IVs. A Nature. They have 1 or 2 elemental types. They have 1 of 1 to 3 abilities. They have a gender. They have a happiness level. They have 4 moves, each of which has an attack power, an accuracy level, a certain number of PP, an attack type, an elemental type, and sometimes an additional effect. These moves can be one of a pool of moves that they either learn at specific levels or can learn from a TM or HM.

These are all the things that can possibly affect the outcome of a battle in even the smallest way.

Beyond that, and unlike most other RPGs, every single enemy you will encounter for the rest of the game follows the above rules. There is no enemy in the entire game that you cannot possess and make an identical copy of.

In Shin Megami Tensei, a lot of wandering encounters follow those rules, but then the bosses don’t, and of course there aren’t nearly as many configurable attributes as above. In Final Fantasy, you can forget it.

Beyond having so many different attributes, isn’t Pokemon shallow because encounters are just about optimization, it’s just that there’s a lot of knowledge involved in it due to so many parts? I think you’ve said this yourself? so is it a good depth example in that it shows how *not* to do it?

I’ve covered pokemon before. Yes, the direct act of interaction during a battle is kind of shallow. It’s mostly about deckbuilding. The standard campaign doesn’t force you to get good. However it’s still an example you can learn from, because few other RPGs do the same thing pokemon does. Few other RPGs have characters that are that complicated.

MGSV

Celia WagarLeave a comment

Is MGS5 any good?

I’m enjoying it so far. Seems to have a ton of stealth tools to fuck around with. Missing maybe a couple that were in MGS3, like you can’t keep animals in your inventory anymore, or food. Doesn’t seem to have the porno mag anymore. The controls feel really nice, but the Dive move sucks when it could be awesome. I wish that you could press or hold space to make the dive into a roll back up into standing or crouching position, and that the dive could go over obstacles. In MGS3 you could roll over low bearing obstacles, like a railing, or through a window. The jump command is also a bit weird, working like a zelda jump, except there’s also a button press too. It seems like the complete product, tons of missions, tons of people to kidnap, you can analyze their skill rank before you kidnap them, you can shuffle people around in mother base to open up different upgrades. They recycle some buildings within the same area though, I’ve run into the same prison building in Afghanistan like 3 times. They have a really clear differentiation between the benefits of lethal and nonlethal play. If you play lethal, then the guy will never come back to haunt you, but he’s dead, which is a waste of resources. Nonlethal tends to be quieter up front, so you’re not calling in an alert, but you have to deal with enemies waking up later on, and your resources are more limited, so you need to aim well. You can run super fast and never get tired, which rocks. If there’s a sandstorm going on, or rain, then you can even do it really close to enemies. The cardboard box was expanded excellently, and rain will destroy your box. A lot of the technology doesn’t match up with the time period, and seems really inconsistent with the later games, but I’m honestly happy they did this, because its given us one of the most expansive toolkits in any stealth game. And HOLY CRAP my first encounter with the new metal gear was crazy.

I once hit a guy with a tranq in his chest, causing him and a buddy to come after me on the rooftop, as they were climbing up the ladder, the guy I hit passed out, and fell, knocking out the guy below him, so they were both unconscious. There’s some stylish stealth potential possible, and a ton of ground to do it across.

In another part I had two guards really close to one another in a tiny room, I knew that if I tried to take them out, at least one would see me, and no matter how many magazines I threw, they wouldn’t budge. So I threw a smoke grenade at the door to cover myself, then tossed a stun grenade inside the room, stunning them so I could knock them out, and it totally worked.

Other major criticism is that many things require real time to build, like base platforms which can take 1-2 hours to complete, and later upgrades start taking 18 minutes, maybe longer as I get further in. There isn’t a way to pay to make it go faster, I don’t know why this feature is there. Also the timer only counts ingame time, so you can’t quit and come back later.

Is MGS5 have as many options gameplay wise as the thief series? Are the levels as wide open?

It has way more, it’s from the series that had MGS3 after all. Thief 2 has like, Blackjack, Sword, Broadhead Arrow, Water Arrow, Fire Arrow, Moss arrow, Gas Arrow, Noisemaker Arrow, Rope Arrow, Vine Arrow, scouting orb, Flash Bomb, Explosive Mine, Flash Mine, Gas Mine, Explosive Charge, Frogbeast Egg. You can also jump to make a loud noise, or throw environmental items.

The Phantom Pain has, just to focus on stealth oriented items, The tranq gun (which will vary how long it takes to knock someone out based on where you hit), tranq sniper rifle, the cardboard box (which you can now pop out of to toss items or shoot, also stand up or crawl in), unlimited supply of bullet magazines for tossing as a distraction, C4 which can be remote detonated as a distraction, smoke, which gives visual cover and stuns people, stun grenades which actually stun people, sleeping gas grenades/mines, decoys that are remote activated (enemies will start to use these themselves), the stun arm which allows you to electrically shock targets, your various choices of camouflage as usual, stealth action camo, you can do melee attacks to take people down, knock your bionic arm to make noise drawing people, or grab them and drag them around before interrogating them, then knocking them out, you can hold enemies up much like in older games, even CQC them to take their weapon and hold them up, and of course the fulton recovery system for cleaning up bodies. There’s even a squirt gun you can unlock, which is uniquely useful for silently shorting out electronics equipment and putting out fire based lights.

There’s a lot of options and a lot of ways to use them. Missing a few of the older options like the porno mag, but it’s whatever. Also cool is that if you overuse certain types of approaches, the enemy will begin to deploy countermeasures, like putting helmets on the soldiers you headshot, gas masks if you use smoke, higher grade body armor, deploy decoys in their base, night vision goggles and flashlights if you attack at night a lot, and of course more powerful lethal weapons.

The levels are all part of a huge interconnected world, so for many areas you can infiltrate from a lot of angles. There are cliffs and walls and other terrain features limiting you in some ways, and the areas used for story related missions are frequently on the edges of the map where they can make it more linear using the cliff faces, they’re still a lot larger and more open than prior MGS games, with more enemies. Pretty sure more so than Thief games too.

The Incompetence of Western Boss Fights

Celia WagarLeave a comment

Why are western dev’s incapable of making good boss fights?

Lemme make a list of western and cross check their various traits. I’ve looked up various “Best Boss” lists on the internet to source these. I’m going to try not to cherrypick bad bosses on purpose so I can pick on them, though I will include bad ones I find on multiple lists.

On analysis, I find the primary problem with the bosses I found was that there’s no risk and reward. Everything is defined in clear cycles You’ll notice that in most of these, there’s no movement while attacking, there’s no movement between attacks then stopping to pop one off at a risk to yourself. Generally the players do not damage the bosses while the bosses are attacking them. A lot of it is, “Do this simple skill challenge to avoid taking damage, then do this simple skill challenge to deal damage” A lot of western bosses throw in enemies, because their enemies are better designed than the boss is, but this leads to bosses feeling homogenous with enemy encounters. Bosses frequently get stunned after specific actions, prompting you to wail on them. In Eastern games, you frequently have to work to stun them as a bonus for efficiency and preying on difficult to abuse weaknesses.

Bob Barbas (DmC)

The one is extremely lame. Lasers rotate, you dodge them. Pound sign on ground, beat up stunned boss, fight some mooks w/ alternate camera.

Lady Comstock (bioshock infinite)

It’s an encounter with a mob of regular-ass enemies who revive, and a bullet sponge in the center of them. Boss moves around on cycles after taking enough damage, but it’s mostly to make you move through the other enemies, it’s not really a push and pull type of thing.

Alduin (skyrim)

The boss sits around doing nothing most of the time, there’s no hitstun, so who cares about tanking all the boss’s hits?

Baal (Diablo 2)

Standing still the entire fight just attacking, then moving when the boss teleports.

Vaas (Far Cry 3)

Shooting at a lot of targets rushing in, then a cutscene plays.

Solomon Grundy (Arkham City)

Dodge some attacks, lay explosives when over the 3 environmental points that deal damage and the boss isn’t attacking. Also attack the boss directly when stunned. Every cycle there is something very clearly expected of the player, it is the one right answer.

Hive Mind (Dead Space)

This one, you get a chance to shoot, then you gotta dodge something, very clear cycles here. Then you get to shoot with different controls that are harder to aim. Spawn some enemies, give them time to deal with them, back to the pattern, slam tentacles twice now before showing weak spot.

Poseidon (God Of War 3)

This one is a bit better. It doesn’t always have entirely clear phases, and it lets you damage during the attack phase, though it still has stun phases. Lots of scripted sequences and quick time events.

Raam (Gears of War)

This one actually has some risk. You have to pop out to shoot. Take too long and you get shot. Don’t pop out when he’s shooting. Move away when he’s too close.

Ceraph Warship (Crysis)

Massively shitty boss. Most of the alien encounters sucked because they didn’t utilize stealth in combination with the fighting/suit powers. Duck behind cover. Shoot at a largely stationary target.

Humanoid Reaper (Mass Effect 2)

It’s a cover shooter. Of course the boss is peekaboo. Peek out, shoot until you start getting shot at. Bonus mook included free!

And that’s all I care to go through. Why are they designed this way? Who knows. Lack of creativity? None seem to be pursuing an idea of depth, which in enemy design tends to mean shutting down options the player has in ways that make the enemy vulnerable too, so the player needs to respond to what tactics the enemy is taking, reacting accordingly. The player shouldn’t just get a punish for a dodged attack, they should need to be in position to punish it. If you don’t require the player to make the correct decisions to beat the boss, versus simply following patterns, then winning is a matter of time.

60FPS, Necessary for Action Platformers?

Celia WagarLeave a comment

Do you think 60fps is necessary for action or platformer games?

No. It’s nice, but it’s not totally necessary. It’s not something I’d mark a game down for, but I’d leave a demerit. The faster the pace, the worse low FPS is. If it’s something like Marvel versus Capcom or Smash Bros, then less than 60 FPS is actively hazardous. For RTS games, it can run at 24 FPS and work fine. Brood War ran at that. DMC4 is fast enough that 30 fps is a detriment too.

FPS is more important than resolution, neither are be-all and end-all. Both are more important than graphical fidelity, which I feel is the common tradeoff. We don’t need so many elements making draw calls. We can honestly live with less.

Having low FPS makes it harder to see what is going on when something fast happens. It hurts fast games the most. Higher FPS is always better, 60 FPS is what should ideally be the minimum, but the market does not respond to this, and developers generally do not care. Higher fidelity graphics tends to work better in marketing, because it is more clearly demonstrable. Most people claim they cannot see the difference between different framerates, and their purchase tendencies seem to reflect this.

An animator would argue that there are a lot of effects that are put into even 24 FPS animation that people cannot see, but they feel. For example this tends to be true of impacts, like punching people or crashing into things. A common trick is to have the object touch the surface of impact for a frame before the impact happens, to make it feel slightly stronger, or to have the object stretch to the point of impact the frame before it impacts to make it feel even stronger. The audience won’t notice this, but they’ll feel that there is more transition between frames, so the impact will feel stronger in a completely unrealistic way that never the less works.

I think it’s reasonable to extend this to the 60FPS phenomena, even if people cannot consciously perceive the difference, they will still have a clearer perception of what is going on over time.