I don’t get the hype behind Rising Thunder. Simplifying inputs? And you like Divekick, yet you’ve said that complex inputs are more rewarding (when I asked about PM’s input leniency compared to Melee, or when discussing wavedashing in Melee).
Divekick explores a unique strategic space. It’s fast, and there are things to learn about the game. I played one friend in it and seriously beat him every game for like 20-30 games in a row. I perfected him multiple times during that. One of my friends actually figured out a new way to advance safely, by jumping, then kicking near the end of the jump, which I would normally do at the beginning of a very shallow jump.
There are actually some advanced techniques in divekick, like performing special moves requires pressing both dive and kick at the same time, but there’s a short leniency period, so you can kara-cancel into a special move. For example, Mr N can kara-cancel his kick into his hover, allowing him to effectively kick for a frame before hovering, kicking with less commitment. And of course he can keep doing this as long as he has enough meter.
Rising thunder has unique character designs, like Crow, who is so unique he couldn’t exist in another fighting game because of his invisibility power, or Vlad who has a weird air dash with a meter you can expend as you like, or Dauntless, who has some really amazing combos and unique special moves, along with one of the rare normal anti-airs. I like that with Chel I can cancel sweeps into fireballs (which I almost never get to do in SF, it’s only possible in SF2), and the combos are reasonably interesting. It’s cool to be able to see someone else do a combo I’ve never seen before, then start doing it on them. The kinetic advance system is also cool, it’s like FADC, except you can also jump out of it. Not to mention that combos do get rather execution-heavy at a high level. There are even link combos, usually from M into L.
In its own way, it’s interesting that all the special moves are on single buttons because it very much changes the amount of time you can execute moves in. I remarked on picking up Chel that it was like every character with an anti-air special was a charge character. I mean this in that you can instantly react to jump-ins with just a button tap. I was so trigger happy at first that I even reacted too soon in some cases to jump-ins, whiffing completely, because I expected my fingers to be slower. And the cool-down periods, much as I dislike the use of cool-downs as a balancing measure, do actually add a strategic element to the game, so if your opponent whiffs an anti-air, you know jumping in is safe for the next few seconds. Chel’s projectile has the cooldown negated if it hits the opponent too, meaning that you can keep up fireball pressure as long as the fireballs are hit or blocked, clearly pointing to neutral jump as an answer to Chel’s fireballs.
The other thing is, and I admit this isn’t speaking to the game’s favor, but it’s a proof of concept that even if you simplify the inputs down to the minimum possible level, scrubs won’t magically get good at the game. This is a moral victory for me.
Having inputs that are hard isn’t something that’s strictly speaking a good thing. I don’t think any fighting game needs a pretzel input ever again. I think the move away from FRCs for GG Xrd was a good thing and made the system more interesting, even if there were some OSes that worked in 1.0.
I think that the difficulty of an input is something that should correspond to how helpful the result is. It’s not something that can easily be judged. The difficulty of a given input should be relative to how rarely it needs to happen, so you get easy inputs most of the time, hard sometimes, impossible rarely.
The bigger compromise here is the depth of Rising Thunder in part because of the input system they chose. There are less options, less ways to modulate options, and thus the game is more strategically flat. Having movement commands act as a modifier on top of normal button presses allowed for a larger range of moves to be accessible at once.
Also seriously, wavedashing isn’t hard. You can learn to do it in 30 minutes or less.
I’ve played Castlevania 1 and 3. I beat CV1, and I’m stuck on this river/waterfall part in CV3. What I’ve gotta say is, there is no game I’ve played that requires quite as much intense focus as CV3. The game is constantly throwing things at you as you go, and requiring you to commit extremely hard to every button press you make. You need to jump at exactly the right points, you need to jump at exactly the right angle, at the right times, or you will fall to your death. You need to whip exactly when enemies are at the right range. You need the right powerups, need to use them at the right times and absolutely not whip a candle and just grab whatever comes out, because you might replace your level 2 bottle with a level 1 cross, which sucks.
Classic Castlevania finds its depth through level arrangements that force you into enemies in ways that synergize with their movement and attack patterns, giving you slight chances to overcome them. It has enemies work together in ways that are tricky to deal with, often exposing you in the attempt to fight off one. It’s almost always throwing multiple things at you. Like in the early levels of Castlevania 3 you get medusa heads and platforms which flip if jumped on. You get stairs you need to walk down onto skeletons throwing bones up at you (stairs which lock your movement much like a ladder you cannot jump off of). Sure, you only get 3 jump paths, but the level layouts stress the difference between those 3 much more than most games with more flexible jump arcs. The distance of the jump is tuned to require you to walk partway off of blocks as you make the jump, then they’ll throw in a ghost following you around to make the jump even harder or more stressful. Many of the bosses and enemies are simple, but because you spend so long on each attack, it’s a strong commitment in order to deal damage. It’s a question of whether you can get that hit in or it’s unsafe. Because of the restrictions on movement, enemies frequently came at you from places that were difficult to hit, such as above your head or from below you, or in the case of medusa heads, both. One arrangement has an enemy on a platform one block lower than you, requiring you to find a space in its back and forth movement and sword thrusts to move down in order to attack it, but then they stick crumbling blocks at the point you need to drop down. The whole game loves to be an asshole in this way.
It is VERY MUCH like a 2d form of Dark Souls, and I don’t do the Dark Souls comparisons lightly, the games feature very similar characteristics, strong commitment to actions, aggressive level designs and enemy placements. Later games in the Castlevania series even got a nonlinear structure like Dark Souls, but unfortunately their level design had grown thin, and the concept of commitment wasn’t held with as much regard anymore. I feel like Order of Ecclesia was the game that finally got the whole newschool and old school castlevania formula together in one game
It’s a proof of concept. That melee combat works and can be interesting or even unique in the first person.
I first heard of it when trailers were made for the standalone version demonstrating how swords are actually tracked in the engine, and how facing direction affected where the sword was.
A few years ago I picked it up for myself in a sale and was lucky enough to get a huge group of people to play with me, including Allosaurus Rex, Ryan Perez, Devi Ever, Mark Ceb, and some other people from GYP.
At first I didn’t really get what the fundamentals were, I was just swinging and more often than not I got butchered. The sword swings are all slow. You have 3 types, one that slashes across (most area coverage and active time), one overhead (most damage, weird hit angle), and one thrust (most range, least active time and area coverage). You can cancel a swing as a feint before it becomes active. Blocking with a weapon is time specific, but the swings are so slow you can usually time it fairly well. Shields let you block as long as you want, but they block your vision. Kicking pushes people around, and deals a ton of stamina damage and no recoil on shield. Almost all actions require stamina.
The obvious things I picked up were to either swing first to catch them before they caught you, or to wait their swing out and hit them while they were recovering. Or of course block and catch them during the stun inflicted on them. Kick acts sort of as a poor man’s throw option, much like Dark Souls, as do stamina limits in general. So to succeed, I found I needed to read when they were going to swing, and do it first,
Beyond that, I found feinting would fuck up people’s attempts to guard, so I would start a swing, feint, they’d time their guard for when I’d swing, but when the guard let up, I was coming in with another attack. People in shields couldn’t see what I was doing, and they would block in similar patterns. Of course the counter to someone feinting is just to swing at them, because you get a massive time advantage.
At other times, I would swing deliberately early, but in a position where they couldn’t punish it, just barely missing them, so that when they did try to punish, I would be able to punish them for trying.
Another trick is turning myself so I’d hit opponents with my sword sooner, then turning the camera the opposite way the sword was going to keep it pointed at them as long as possible, making the active time effectively longer. You could even slash around people’s guards, over their head, at their feet, etc. Turning helped hit people sooner for a bigger advantage on pre-empting their swings. Turning could give thrusts a wider area of coverage, and help overhanded swings hit over people’s blocks.
The different weapons swing at different speeds, so you’d need to swing sooner to beat out a faster weapon, or could afford to swing later if yours was faster. Archers with knives could get in close and fuck your shit up by continuing to interrupt your attacks if you weren’t careful.
Overall, it’s not the most complex system, but it’s unique.
How would you approach a person who believes that games are a waste of time and that there’s no difference between a mindless ‘clickr’ game and any other game, other than different and more difficult ways of clicking?
They are a waste of time, relatively speaking. They’re things we aspire to waste our time on.
For one, different games affect us differently, put us into different mental states. Clickr games are made to create an addiction more than genuine enjoyment. http://sirlingames.squarespace.com/blog/2012/8/22/addiction-diablo-3-and-portal-2.html
We play different games and different genres of games for different reasons, obviously. This is why similar tastes congregate in similar demographics.
I mean, sure both cookie clicker and whatever other game eat up your time, but not all recreational activities are created equal.
You don’t necessarily have to approach them with the intent of convincing them that games aren’t a waste of time, but how would you explain what separates, say, Quake or Melee from Cookie Clicker?
The games operate fundamentally differently. What separates programming from essay writing? What separates playing a guitar from guitar hero? What separates weight lifting from sports? Painting from note taking? Even though something might have a similar or identical input system, they’re not the same thing. The difference is created by context.
Cookie Clicker and games like it are built specifically to prey on extrinsic rewards, which tend to grow weaker over time, which is why they keep up interest by steadily exponentiating your income, so you don’t just earn move, you earn orders of magnitude more, like the entire thing is steadily accelerating, and the amount you’re earning now dwarfs what you originally earned, so things that were troublesome to buy a second ago are now simple.
Quake or Melee are based more on intrinsic rewards, feeling good for something that you did, as opposed to something you got.
Also, do you think there is only one way to truly press a button? Do physical factors such as pressure, speed, and even position make button presses different? Or is there really one fundamental way of pressing a button, with the *pattern(s)* in which you press the button (and why)?
For a digital button, most of those physical factors don’t matter (though the PS2 and PS3 had pressure sensitive buttons, almost nothing took advantage of them). It depends on what type of game is receiving it. Most game functions don’t really care how long a button is held for or when it’s released, but they do care very much about when it’s pressed. Some games do care about these things, and they care a lot about what other buttons are currently pressed or have been pressed recently.
Melee is a game that can go up to 300 Actions Per Minute. Each of those button presses is relative to a specific situation, in conjunction with other buttons. That’s what separates a ground attack from an air attack, from a smash attack from a tilt.
Then you get different mouse movements for shooters and for strategy games, even within those categories: https://imgur.com/a/FoMNy
Have you ever dealt with a desync in an online game? If you are out of sync with your opponent, even by a single frame, the entire game is ruined and both your actions become nonsense to each other.
There’s a lot of ways to press a button or buttons in conjunction. These help add to the kinaesthetic feeling of games which differentiate their button presses.
Reminds me, I was thinking recently of how cool it would be if some of the advanced tech Snake can do in Smash Bros were possible in The Phantom Pain. Like jumping at someone and doing Snake’s back air. Or doing the DACUS. It would probably look weird and not really fit into the game, but it’s fun to think about. It’s really cool to hit people with reverse back airs in P:M, feels nice.
I don’t understand the appreciation for that animation (or the one I linked a while back that you said you’d use as inspiration for magic in a tabletop). I guess the technique is praise-worthy, but they just seem like showpieces (like the animation equivalent of a tech demo), rather than ‘proper’ art. I mean, when I see people praising these things and talking about how amazing they are, it’s always so vague and nebulous, and I don’t understand what it is I’m not seeing. I might sound dumb for saying this, but it comes the same as those peepz who stare in awe at paint splatters.
I like seeing things fluidly move. It doesn’t need to have a purpose or a meaning, though I can certainly appreciate those things.
And I’m going to attach some cool looking vaguely abstract pictures to this.
Depends what paint splatters. Sometimes paint splatters look really nice. Abstract imagery can frequently be aesthetically pleasing as a result of composition, color theory, and some natural part of the way the shapes are made. It’s like typography. Everyone hates comic sans and papyrus, even though letters themselves are completely abstract and based in no way on the natural world.
I think there are less vague and nebulous ways to describe abstract imagery that is successful, but I don’t know if I have the words. That’s something really deep and fundamental about human psychology, the sense of aesthetic itself, which I don’t think I have enough background knowledge to tackle.
Like, there are certain types of lines that we find appealing, textures, patterns, etc. I don’t really know what defines the whole trend, only parts of it in relation to rules of composition or color theory, golden ratio type of stuff, and so on. These abstract things that appeal to our sense of aesthetics are themselves found in representational works of art. In the process of drawing, frequently people abstract on what they see to create something more visually appealing in line with a higher ideal that is connected to an evolutionarily formed sense of aesthetic. That’s what makes a particular drawing of a subject more beautiful than another of the same subject, not simply a more close depiction of what’s observed, but appealing to that sense of aesthetic.
This talk taps into some of that:
I mean, can technique alone make it worthy or great praise? There isn’t any story or any obvious meaning. I mean, it’s abstract enough that you can derive meaning, but that can be done for anything. I feel like I’m missing something, so would you recommend any pieces I should watch/read to help understand this concept?
I think so. It doesn’t need a meaning if you ask me. Technique in of itself is something we can appreciate. Not all games have a meaning, not all animations have a meaning. In a way, the highly technical representation of moving objects is a meaning, it’s information. It’s like, “Oh, so that’s how he did that?” or “Holy shit, that’s so smooth! Such a great and complex motion!”
Watch The Thief and the Cobbler. It has a wreck of a story due to a lot of meddling, so you might want to watch the recobbled cut, which is the next best thing.
re: meaning/stories in art. Yeah, what you said makes a lot of sense. I guess I just get confused by people who think, for example, that those abstract animation shorts are masterpieces, but something like Ponyo can get points docked because parts of the story don’t make sense. I guess I was approaching these views without context though. Maybe you can criticize Ponyo in that manner because it’s a feature film? Maybe it’s in the intent of the work and everything should be judged relatively? I still think Ponyo’s one of the best Ghibli films.
I believe people (including me) criticize Ponyo for that, because it’s not an excuse plot. It had some type of actual ambition with the plot, much like Spirited Away did, but it ended up being kind of immature. It’s not just a simple or absent plot, it’s a plot that is actively unappealing. It lacks conflict in a lot of ways, and has the existing conflicts kind of just get swept aside like they don’t matter instead of truly resolving them or coming to catharsis, which is unsatisfying.
I’ve seen well animated films that have no plots and honestly it gets boring around the 9 minute mark if not sooner (like a lot of Bill Plympton films, though they more have nice drawings than nice animation per se). Even a simple plot at that point is better. Something purely visually interesting isn’t enough to keep people engaged for extended periods of time, which is why Ghost in the Shell 2 falls out for me. That and there’s less actual animation and more gawking over pretty scenery.
It’s like, yeah, I want a gif of all the best parts of that, but I don’t want to sit down and watch the whole thing.
I’ve been sending you a lot of messages about movies (and by extension art), I guess I’m just trying to find the best way of approaching these mediums. Game criticism and analysis is a lot more scientific in nature, but with movies, it’s difficult settling on an opinion because there are both compelling pieces both for and against a given work.
Film critique can be very analytical and precise. I learned a bit about it in college, and obviously you have Every Frame a Painting demonstrating it on youtube.
Like I heard this one story from my storytelling teacher, about how he had a student who dismissed 101 dalmatians, claiming it was simple, and you knew from the first scene that Cruella was going to steal those puppies. His counter was that yeah, because they beat you over the head with it by including all these different types of messaging about the type of person Cruella is.
First thing, you have a muted background, with Cruella’s car being bright red and driving like a madman, Perdita calls her, “that devil woman”, Roger indicates how he’s not willing to stand up to her directly by going into the attic to play music about her, the song mentions a spider and she’s framed in silhouette in the door like a spider. She doesn’t allow the door to be opened, but instead bursts in, then takes up residence in the rectangle near the center of the screen framed by the orange curtain, taking up the majority of the screen, only occasionally moving out of it to do things like snub her cigarette in Anita’s cupcake, or blow evil looking green smoke on the painting of the dalmatians. Cruella owns the scene, pushing everyone else out of it and making it extremely clear she’s going to do rude or evil shit to everyone.
These are all things that were carefully considered and set up in the shot, and that is in a way scientific. The rules of game design aren’t about telling people what kind of game to make, they’re about showing people the way to make the game they want the most interesting it can be, in a very similar way to designing shot compositions, or expressions of character in a film.
I don’t have any sort of metric or criteria as simple or unambiguous as depth for a film, that can be evaluated as close to objectively, but there’s a lot of stuff you can be precise about in conventional artistic criticism.
Just don’t ask me about music.
It’s like, who to listen to? I suppose you can settle on your own opinion, but there’s always that niggling thought that you might be wrong for whatever reason. But that w/e reason is always hard to pinpoint, because none of this stuff is fact or observable theory like in science or game criticism. So for someone who’s not particularly egotistical or narcissistic, and believes in rational thought and the scientific method, it’s maddening to approach film criticism.
Listen to what makes sense. I didn’t come into evaluating games with a scientific approach. I didn’t know what a scientific approach was. That’s something I had to find on my own through research, trial, and error. Believe in yourself and change your mind when appropriate. A lot of people say I’m close-minded, so of course they’re surprised when I change my mind or admit I’m wrong. I believe what I do because I think it’s the most appropriate thing to believe, and if I didn’t, then I’d believe something else. I know what it’s like to get caught in a state of cognitive dissonance, where I think I believe one thing, but I realize that it can’t really work that way. So I try to stay honest. Even if I seem attached to my beliefs, they’re things I’ve arrived at for a reason and I’m not against changing them to suit what’s true.
I learned the 12 fundamental principles of animation through Richard Williams’ book, The Animator’s Survival Kit, which is a really technical guide to how to animate in general. That, as well as a rejection of anime style and a desire to go realistic spurred on by Gone With the Blast Wave, drove me to learn a lot about how to draw. And they served as a basis for my investigations into games. There has to be fundamental principles of some kind for any sort of entertainment media, there has to be something that makes it tick that is common to the purpose of the media universally, and which iterates itself to suit genres within the media.
Good art criticism can recognize why something is put together the way it is, why it works to create the appeal that it does, when something fails to live up to that, and how it can achieve its goal, or adopt a goal that would lead to appeal.
Their attempts to talk about gameplay are really shallow. They tried to claim that candy crush is brilliant and deep and has a lot of thought put into it and encouraged us to “think like designers” by asking everyone to sit down and record how many points it takes to go from level to level in order to painstakingly demonstrate that yes, there is an exponential increase in the number of points it takes each level, something that isn’t particularly remarkable.
They routinely get facts of all kinds wrong, like thinking that a reversal in a fighting game is done as a means of beating a move that is coming at you, rather than a way of getting yourself out of a bad situation, or preaching about how cool it is that a door is framed in the center of the screen, thereby obeying the rule of thirds, sitting in the middle third, which should make anyone with any knowledge of photography or composition cringe (rule of thirds means avoiding the center of the screen and putting things a third of the way across it).
They don’t think through any of their statements. Like they come up with all these half baked ideas that anyone considering them would be like, “No, that’s dumb, please don’t.” They ignore existing solutions and reinvent the wheel in poor ways, or pick the worst existing solutions whenever possible.
The person backing them with supposed real design experience is a dude who far as I know, has never published a real game, worked on a failed call of duty game and maybe some mobile stuff, consults on who knows what, and is generally reviled by students of digipen for being a pretentious-up-his-ass teacher who doesn’t actually teach them anything. I have no credentials either. I don’t expect you to trust what I say because I’m an authority, which I’m not in any real way. I expect you to reject it when I’m wrong, and hope you’ll accept what I get right.
They’re not just random idiots doing shallow and shitty game reviews, they’re people who don’t know about game design, and who actively champion bad game design and bad approaches to game design, attempting to teach other people about game design, and who have come to be regarded as experts. They’re not a failed attempt, they’re actively dangerous. They’re influential enough to get listed as one of the best resources out there for game design knowledge, or to be integrated as parts of curriculum.
What types of bad game design and bad approaches to game design does Extra Credits champion?
This video encourages randomness in esports. Watching it originally, I was like, “Are they serious? The only way you can mitigate random factors is by increasing the number of trials until the law of large numbers effectively evens out the results” Then of course they suggested exactly that. But the reason we don’t do that is of course because it’s prohibitively time consuming, not to mention it’s dumb in my opinion to deliberately lessen the importance of any individual game, and make it more difficult for players to determine if their successes are genuine.
I’ve covered their fighting game video before, it’s just wrong on multiple levels, not to mention how they hold MOBAs up as a standard for how to do balance well regularly.
The magic circle in games isn’t about escapism, it’s about contracts. There’s a magic circle in decidedly non-escapist contexts, like rock paper scissors, chess, poker, go, basketball, hockey, tetris, etc. They’re bastardizing an established anthropological concept that I believe goes back to the book Homo Ludens.
Talks about how assymetric games create teamwork http://www.sirlin.net/posts/episode-2-cooperative-games
Sirlin again talks about why this is kinda bullshit, around 24 minutes in. I’ll second this because in these games, a lot of the individual skill and interesting decisionmaking is reduced. A lot of these modern teamwork games become about doing your job which is really limited and simple to do, and decisionmaking is done on the whole team level, not really any individual player level. Sure, having the team forced into different non-overlapping roles forces people to work as a team, but that doesn’t mean these games necessarily feature any team strategies beyond players doing their job, like healing, laying down sentries, spychecking, etc.
Here they describe mechanics like the writing style or the palette of the game rather than the thing that comprises the game itself. They’re a means to an end in setting the tone, not the tone complementing the mechanics. It shows their priorities and lack of vision.
This video on villains is a 2 parter, and this part is about “mechanics villains”, whereupon they cover how these villains should be simple in motivation, match the game’s tone, seem like they’re powerful so they’re rewarding to defeat, and make the player feel like a hero for defeating them. Then a justification for why you can’t fight them immediately. Then he spends the remaining minute of the video talking about how we’re worse at making narrative villains, and the next video on narrative villains is 2 minutes longer than this one, and without the introduction.
They champion bad design all over the place. I chose random videos and found it in each one.
Fucking FILLED with mini-cutscenes constantly fucking grabbing your control away.
I bought this at the same time as Dark Souls, and was playing both of them back and forth. I found myself playing Dark Souls more, and was like, “Why am I not playing skyward sword? I was majorly anticipating this?” Before release it seemed to me like they had seriously opened up the game, they added a sprint option, you could sprint up walls, you could finally slash using the Wiimote and not just as a replacement for the A button. You had a realtime weapon switch menu, you had a real outlet for all those rupees you’re constantly collecting in the form of upgrades and shield durability.
I didn’t get why I was only playing it for short periods of time and got tired of it so quickly. One of my chairs is still leaned over from the way I used to sit in it more to the left side while playing a lot of the slower paced games I used to play, including twilight princess. It was like a chore that I was waiting to be over with.
I read this piece by Tevis Thompson roughly when it was originally published: http://tevisthompson.com/saving-zelda/ I thought it was ridiculous at the time, how could you say Zelda’s bad? However it planted the idea, and as I continued to play, I saw a strong parallel between the lock-and-key design and generally everything in zelda. Zelda doesn’t tend to provide you with anything like Beowolf in DMC3, you don’t get a new weapon like a dark souls zweihander. When you get a new item in a Zelda game, it is good for this one specific thing. When you see the hookshot symbol, that is the place you can hookshot. When you see a pile of sand, you can use the gust jar there. When you see an eye, shoot it with an arrow. It’s not a question of what’s your playstyle? What items do you prefer? What is this item good at doing versus other items? Nothing overlaps at all. Sure, everything has its own niche relative to everything else, but things have no interaction between each other, things have no multiple uses, and they do not allow you to obtain varied results through the application of skill or in differences of context.
Of course, when going back through Tevis Thompson’s work, I found he was really really pretentious. He intentionally uses descriptive adjectives or onomatopoeia in the place of describing things because he thinks it’s stylistic instead of annoying. Beside the point.
Skyward sword is probably the most rote and formulaic zelda ever made. It’s filled to the goddamn brim with tons and tons and tons of things that take away your control to tell you this unnecessary thing. Even the stamina system is limited by running out quickly and essentially forcing you on narrow paths to pick up regenerating fruits.
Watch this shit, look at HOW MANY GODDAMN CUTSCENES PLAY EVERY 5 MINUTES. I question how long this would be without the cutscenes. And that “secret” tune that plays so often it’s practically patronizing.
Okay, I’ve thought about this a bit. The obvious answer to a lot of people seemed to be “go dark souls”, but that has a bit of a different character to its combat. Zelda should probably be closer to Witcher 3 (in pace) or the 3d Ys games, except with deterministic sword strikes that vary somewhat in function. The double obvious answer is to go back to 2d and build on link to the past/oracle of seasons/the original, but that’s too easy.
Things that I would consider characteristic of Zelda’s combat up to now include the spin attack, jump attack, down thrust, and basic combo. Additionally there’s the roll, back flip, and side hop. L-Targeting/Z-Targeting have both narrowed the way combat works down to a more one-dimensional type of thing. Enemies also rotate really fast and generally stay locked on to you, rather than really committing to swinging in a specific direction. L-Targetting needs to have drawbacks added into it which make general movement more attractive as an option. Obvious one to start is reduced movement speed, which I think it might already have.
Sidehopping/rolling are the primary defensive options, so they need to be a high enough commitment that they can get out of the way of attacks, but rarely get the chance to get an attack in safely. In order to get an attack in, you should need to do these early enough so they recovery sooner than the attack you’re avoiding is even done, otherwise you’re committed to the act of dodging instead of attacking, you’re giving up your chance to attack in order to be safe. Otherwise they should come out about even with the attack you’re avoiding. Giving the roll iframes may help increase its viability as a combat option and give people reasons to not lock on (because you need to remove lock-on to roll in directions other than forward). The point of making dodge versus attack a tradeoff is to reduce reliance on dodges as a “solution”, dodge then attack. This means that in other to punish enemies, players need to move out of the way of enemies’ attacks, which is harder with the reduced movement speed of L-target.
Shields don’t work in Zelda. There’s no drawback to holding it up while locked on (except you can’t sword attack), and most enemies can’t get past it. Enemies either rebound off it, or are unphased by it, not really pressuring it in any way. You are allowed to side hop and even back flip while blocking, and enemies hitting you during these will still be blocked. Dark Souls has stamina as a regulating measure, Witcher 3 has chip damage. I feel like chip damage is a lame solution in a single player game, but stamina isn’t something that really fits in Zelda. Skyward Sword experimented with shield durability, but this isn’t a strong moment-to-moment reason to not use your shield. In my view, shielding should be another option to negate damage that has less commitment than dodges. So shielding is easier to do, but a dodge will get you further.
To make this work in Zelda, I think the obvious thing to do would be to make shields negative on block. You’re holding off the attack, but the advantage is surrendered to the enemy (and some enemies should probably be designed to take advantage of this). Beyond that, I think it makes sense to have guard breaks, like garou, dark souls 2, etc. Take too many hits on shield, you maybe glow red or something, then you get blown up.
Another potential solution is having shield glue you to the ground practically, and require you to aim in a direction, much like shield in L-Target currently does. Shield defends you practically for free when you’re locked on, and I want to capture more of the movement across and around objects on the 2d plane. Having threats come in from multiple sides and needing to defend them by orienting yourself in that direction is an obvious way of doing this.
The core point of design here is, there needs to be reasons to choose one option over another, and to not have any option be a perfect solution for any given situation. Shield and these dodge options are probably indispensable to what 3d zelda is at this point, these design decisions and good enemy design should help balance them.
Beyond that, I feel like the core of the 2d zelda structure is moving out of the way of enemies, moving to a position where you can orient to face them, and attacking. The darknuts in zelda 1 are probably the embodiment of this design idea. They walk randomly in a way that is biased to face towards you. You need to get around to their sides or back in order to attack them, as you cannot attack from the front. You need to not let them move into you in the process, because you are stuck to the ground while attacking, but they can still move. This is something 3d games are capable of doing, but which they haven’t really tried, because lock-on keeps forcing their hand, and dodge-type moves are used as an easy out. (later 2d zelda didn’t do this as well either due to enemy designs)
2d Zelda is kind of shmup-like in this way, with the additional constraint of facing direction. You can move out of the way of things, with the additional constraint that you must turn to face towards what you attack.
Part of the reason this doesn’t work as well in 3d is the camera systems. If you pull the camera in too much and tilt it too up and behind the character, it’s difficult to see the floor as a 2d plane, and difficult to perceive both that there are threats around you, and exactly where they are positioned relative to you. Fixed camera angles like in Devil May Cry help alleviate this, but they also make siderolls really awkward. For this reason, the camera should be tilted downwards more, and pulled out a bit, it would also help to design areas to be more open and to handle choke points rather carefully. Most Zelda games already have really open environments, so this isn’t too much of a problem.
The camera should ideally not follow the character too hard, sort of like Super Mario Sunshine’s camera. It should immediately be responsive to lock-on and camera stick movements, but otherwise not worry too much about framing the action behind the character’s back. The object of focus is his movement around the enemies, so the whole scene is more important, up until the player decides to lock-on and focus on a single enemy.
I considered the idea of different attacks. 2d Zelda only has one sword attack, it only really needs one sword attack. The depth of 2d Zelda is conveyed through the motions of the player around the enemies. In 3d Zelda, for whatever reason, sword attacks were kept largely the same as in 2d games, they’re really fast to come out and recover and all have straightforward attack areas. There isn’t a lot of differentiation between them or commitment to them. However because touch of death enemies were largely veto’d in 3d zelda and 3d action games categorically, and the number of enemies and their movement complexity around the player dropped, 3d Zelda games don’t capture the same type of combat depth as other games.
I checked out Majora’s mask (because I had it on hand) really quick so I could tell what attack types there were (and I hope this holds true for the other 3d Zelda). In unlocked mode, you have horizontal slices with no direction held, and overhead with a direction held. While locked on you have overhead slices by default, and horizontal slices when moving any direction but forward, and thrusts when moving forward (poor arc on the thrusts if you ask me). All of these have the same range and general framedata. When locked on you can press forward and A to do a jump attack, Link’s only unique attack besides the spin attack (which needs to be charged in majora’s mask, OoT, and WW, poor transition from 2d there, has a cooldown in TP, and costs stamina in SS).
TP has a number of unique attacks, shield bash, back slice, helm splitter, ending blow, mortal draw, and upgraded jump/spin attack. Each of these has a specific function which they’re uncontested at in dealing with specific monster types. Shield bash beats enemies with shields, back slice beats enemies with shield + armor, Helm splitter beats enemies who have shield + armor and move out of the way of back slice. Mortal Draw is a gimmick charge attack, like a better and more gimmicky version of the spin attack. Also interestingly, TP lets you attack while running without stopping your run. This is closer to what I’m going for, though I don’t know if it entirely fits in.
My instinct is to differentiate out into a bunch of attacks that serve different roles, having attack variety when locked on, and less when not, but Zelda isn’t really a game about varying levels of commitment, either in 2d or 3d.
I think a better direction would just to be focusing on the minimum number of attacks necessary to make it work. Don’t worry about the 3d action game standard counterplay of faster attacks versus well timed attacks versus outspaced hits and just focus on avoiding getting hit and getting hits in. Make it so you get all horizontal when not targeting (more forgiving for attack angle), get higher commit and longer range overhead swings when you are targeting, skip on the thrust attacks entirely (or I guess keep them in as a variation on the overhead attack much like they already are), and keep the jump attack as the only slower higher commit move. Keeping the damage the same between the locked/unlocked options should help emphasize the lower-commit unlocked options more, and thereby emphasize moving around enemies more. Honestly the attacks could even stay fast as they are probably, I probably over thought the whole attack business when it’s really more about the enemy designs. Though the issue with keeping them fast is that it becomes that much safer to dodge and attack, which isn’t something I want. Slowing down L-Target attacks at least discourages this behavior with sidehops.
Slightly more startup/end lag on the sword attacks would probably be sane, along with something limiting your ability to slash at an enemy endlessly, like pushback. Darknuts in TP can be beaten by running up to them, slashing them once with the run-by slash to get them to guard, then slashing at their exposed backside, until they arbitrarily put up their guard to repel you, then you can repeat the cycle. In WW they can be beaten by running around to their backside and slashing them repeatedly to death. These are obviously things to be avoided, and they don’t work in the 2d games because of pushback, which is a bit less arbitrary than the darknut just cutting you off in TP. There’s some in TP, but not enough to prevent you from getting heinous amounts of damage in.
Like, this is kind of the type of thing I want to see, no lock on, moving around enemies, though in this way it looks more like abuse, perhaps that’s because of the limited enemy count. I don’t want the system to break when there’s only one enemy, as it clearly does in this video. Perhaps the best answer to that is simply to not have hitstun for enemies, or to go with a hidden dizzy/poise meter much like dark souls or DMC? Do enough damage quick enough, and you can interrupt an enemy attack, and get a free shot or two. Imagine moving around the darknut, but rather than it simply taking the punishment, it keeps actively attacking as you move around it, with attacks that are a step ahead of where you need to move sometimes, so you need to watch out and adapt to where it’s attacking, or back off to where it’s safe.
Of course there’s the issue of enemy design and enemy placement. Darknuts practically design themselves. Their primary issue is their sword swipes have a kind of unclear hit area due to a poor arc in the animation (though it’s always in the front, so mystery solved), they’re not very aggressive, and they auto-block from the front. Darknuts could use attacks that cover a shallow sweep around their front (can be avoided by running around to left or right), sweeps that cover their left and right sides move (avoided by moving around to opposite side), slower wider sweeps in front, and block/dodge for variety. At mid ranges they could have attacks slow enough that the player can see exactly what they are an how to avoid it (25-33 frames), and at closer ranges they could be faster so the player only has time to see it and avoid it (16-20 frames). Mixing up between these will make the player feel unsafe to come too close to it, or press the advantage when they are not punishing a whiffed move.
I want to have blockstring pressure of some kind, otherwise the dynamic of holding up the shield versus getting guard broken doesn’t really work, but I am uncertain of how to implement it fairly. Like, there’s multiple decisions the player should be making there, but all of these decisionmaking processes are hard to implement in a way that are fair in a singleplayer game context and don’t have a clear solution despite being fair. Fair here means that the player must be able to react on some level to the information coming at them in order to make a judgement. They shouldn’t be forced to guess, otherwise whether they get punished is basically RNG, there needs to be a tell. In a multiplayer game, players can be allowed to make hard reads, so things don’t need to be reactable. Kind of a dilemma and a paradox in a single player game though, but whatever. The first decision involved is between blocking versus avoiding the blow entirely. The next is between continuing to keep the shield up, out of fear there may be another blow versus escaping. The last is a hope to punish the opponent for overextending.
My thought for this is to focus on the breaks in the blockstring, when they are, and how long they are. You can have a tell in the form of a glint in the enemy’s eye or a subtle thing at the end of an attack animation to let the player know they have a chance to escape on the next attack. These attacks that give the chance to escape should obviously deal more guard damage since they’re the ones the guy should be breaking out on. On these attacks, the player can jump out without being punished if they react and time it correctly. Then there should be other breaks that have a longer windup to allow the player to drop their guard completely and attack back at the enemy.
So maybe you have a sequence of 5 attacks, so the breaks could potentially come at 4 points between those. Lets say you always have at least one escape attempt, and at least one chance to fight back. If they don’t know when these are coming, then they could miss their opportunity when they do, though the trouble is I don’t see much reason why someone would get caught trying to get out when their opportunity didn’t arrive yet, and I don’t really have a way to fix that flaw that doesn’t result in unfair RNG on some level, so whatever.
Though to be honest, it’s silly to have blockstring pressure in a zelda game, it’s really not what zelda’s about, but that shield taunts me and I can’t think of another way to make it really mesh. If you have guard damage just last for a long time and regenerate slowly, then it would probably work fine as a tradeoff without any silly blockstring nonsense (though it also wouldn’t put people in direct threat of getting guard broken often). But hey, here’s a system that could be used in some other game probably.
The broader issue with most of 3d Zelda’s enemies is that it’s a battle of the quick and the dead. Link is quick, and the enemies are dead. Most of them you don’t really have to think about, you can lock on, their friends aren’t too keen on attacking, and you can wail on them unopposed. Enemies come straight at you, and you can slash them when they’re in range by locking onto them. Refer back to that cave of ordeals footage. A lot of it is seriously just mashing A.
In the original Legend of Zelda, you can have 5-6 enemies all on the screen at once moving around, hurting you if they touch you. You have restrictive terrain boxing you into enemy encounters. You have enemies that appear out of the ground and come at you in the desert, you have lots of enemies that shoot projectiles in addition to approaching up close. Some rooms have turrets that shoot fire in the corners that go off by themselves, some have blade traps that run along the edges of the screen. Some enemies rush at you if you’re in their line of sight, some can only be hit from their sides. Most of them move erratically, some jump faster than you can walk. You have all these threats coming at you from different angles, and you can’t mash A to deal with one without being hurt by another.
Some obvious things to emphasize are movement patterns other than moving straight at you, having some enemies be inclined to try to surround you by moving to a position that is on a side of you where few other enemies are, but also be drawn in to attack you as they get closer into that position and closer to you, maybe teleporting around you, and liberally applying projectiles that aren’t just flaming arrows. Slower windup on the sword and removing hitstun will probably reduce the issue of being able to interrupt enemies before they can attack you, so the player is forced to avoid attacks before attacking rather than hit first ask questions never.
The goal is to keep the player moving around the enemies and finding chances to hit them.
Items like the bow and hookshot could probably be integrated better into combat and the like by not requiring you to go into first person view to aim them. Imagine if holding down the button projected a red line off from the direction you’re currently aiming, and releasing the button fired it off in that direction. You could require the player to stop when doing this, or let them move around freely, it’s your call. If they’re allowed to move around freely, then having the items lock on to targets near the line of fire (by drawing another line indicating the corrected trajectory) would probably be more forgiving. The hook shot could probably see additional use as a movement tool if it could latch onto more walls to pull Link quickly around. Allowing the hook shot and boomerang to be one of the rare ways to stun enemies, interrupting their attacks, would probably help differentiate them, as long as safety measures were set up to prevent stunlocking and easily killing off more powerful enemies (like biasing them towards faster attacks in the short term, and not having the hitstun be very long). It could be tolerable in encounters with weaker enemies if there are multiple of them. Maybe allow people to cancel firing these by pressing another button, maybe have a first person mode by holding a trigger button.
Overall, I’d pare the item selection down to bow, hookshot, bombs, boomerang, roc’s feather/cape, power bracelet, bottles, pegasus boots/pegasus seed, candle/ember seed, and deku leaf. These are the only items that really stand out to me for unique functionality. The magic rod/fire rod is also nice, but it overlaps with the bow a lot.
To give a brief overview, the bow is directed long range projectile damage, the hookshot can stun and be used as a quick movement tool, bombs can be thrown and explode, propelling the player and enemies as well as dealing big damage, boomerang can deal hitstun, and be directed around in funny ways, roc’s feather could add a command jump (missing from 3d zelda, dunno how it would be integrated into the broader system), Power bracelet allows items to be picked up and thrown (passive ability, more related to environmental objects than the player character), bottles function as healing/magic/extra lives, pegasus boots allow you to move faster after a startup period, and rebounding off walls works as an impromptu jump, candle/ember seed can both make fires on the ground that deal sustained damage within an area, deku leaf can hover and push enemies around.
The ranged weapons and bottles present some minor issues in their prior implementations. Bows, boomerangs, and hookshots all hit their targets for free when locked on in previous 3d zelda games. One easy way to solve that is to have the lock-on button be the same as the first person view button for these weapons. Also bottles need to be used in realtime or they’re free healing. The whole dynamic of being able to predict enemies far enough into the future to find a chance to heal from Dark Souls should obviously be the one to aim for here. Long startup time, if interrupted you get nothing and lose a healing item too.
On the UX side. Make all text boxes instantly complete with the B button and progress to the next one with the A button. Maybe have a delay of a few frames to help people read what’s in the box while they’re mashing B and A. Allow any cutscene to be paused by pressing start, and skipped by pressing A after start. Make the pause screen come up a lot faster (seriously, it’s slow in EVERY zelda game, even the 2d ones, I don’t get it). Shorten and eliminate as many mini-cutscenes as possible. Players do NOT need to see that their hookshot connected for the one billionth time. Rupees, have a flag in the goddamn save file remembering if people picked up a given rupee value, and if you’re so damn concerned about them forgetting it, have +30 rupees or whatever pop up over the rupee counter. For that matter, skip the rupee cutscenes altogether.
You could very easily follow the existing control scheme even with my proposed design changes.
B = Sword
A = Dodge/jump attack when locked on, environmental interaction/roll/pegasus boots when not locked on
XYZ = Assignable items
L = L-Target/First Person View
R = Shield
Dpad = Maybe a quick item change menu system?
Bosses could take a cue from the better 2d bosses like Gleeok, Patra, Moldorm, helmasaur king, Mothula, true Agahnim, Onox, later phases of Veran. I admit that even some of these aren’t terribly great. Could probably take cues from Ys bosses too and maybe bloodborne bosses, in particular their varied attack patterns with the randomized fakeouts, since we’re having the whole block and dodge thing in place like a 3d action game.
Invent a random drop algorithm similar to the one from the first game, that let people force certain drops by killing multiple enemies in a row without being hit.
Damage on later enemies in the game doesn’t need to go up significantly as long as enemy patterns remain tough. 3d Zelda has a problem with you getting 20 hearts because they don’t ramp the damage or enemy counts up, so you’re fighting the final boss and it’s like, “damn, that attack only does 2 hearts?” Similar to Metroid, Zelda’s supposed to work by attrition, slowly wearing the player down. Later in the game the player has bottles that can replenish hearts, these probably shouldn’t restore the whole thing, fairies should probably restore less than red bottles, and if actively used, there should be a risk of being hit, losing the bottle completely, stressing that the player can look far ahead enough into the future to find a place where they can heal and nothing will hit them.
I’m too tired to think of a good world structure that incorporates the best elements of open world nonlinearity from zelda 1 and LttP dark world with the sequence breaking of the 3d games. So that’s all I got. Plot could probably follow from that valley of the flood hoax, because I liked that idea. He’s a fake hero, but maybe the spirit of the series might get reincarnated in him, even though he’s not the hero hyrule needs, and the tragedy is he’s doomed to fail? Could potentially be interesting from a meta-narrative point of view if you don’t push it too hard. And you could end with a supposed-to-lose boss fight that you can actually win, or attempt to turn that trope on its head by making the losing process actually engaging or strategic in some way, much like how undertale makes pacifism interesting by requiring you to survive anyway. Perhaps you could have 3 endings, where the easy way out is dying because you think it can’t be won (hell, have a decoy ending cutscene here that can be skipped to go straight to the main menu, but don’t save the game so people can reload and retry), the medium way is to kill the boss, conquering fate and all, and the hardest way is to endure into sacrifice, and come up with alternate uses for some of the weapons.
Would be a fun fan-game idea. Wonder how close the story/characters/setting/naming could get without infringing on copyright.
It’s a third person cover shooter that actually takes advantage of being on console to use third person motion well, which is what the controller excels at where mouse and keyboard fall behind. They put a lot of work into making it so every part of the system has some function, many of them interrelated. Similar to FEAR, you can toss grenades, go into slo-mo and detonate them in the air. Grenades can be tossed from a rocket dash to get a lower angle. You can cancel reload animations by switching weapons. They have the cigarette to distract enemies and give you a chance to act out of cover. In general the game is really tuned around letting good players get out of cover, making cover more a crutch for players that let themselves get hit. The dodge function is brilliant at this, especially because you can dodge boost for more distance and staying mostly invincible. They let you jump out of cover, go into slo-mo to shoot while rocket boosting. The game really wants you to play the offensive.
The enemy designs are excellent in the way they’re tremendously varied and have a number of attack options. Even the basic enemies sometimes go into suicide mode to try to detonate on top of you if they’re low on life, which is an amazing behavior. They have bigger enemies and smaller enemies, some can fly, some roll around, some stand up and have weak points behind them. They have all different bosses that attack in different ways. Some literally unfold into mobile cover. The final boss battle has all this cover that comes out of the ground, and changes over the fight. They actually have good boss battles for a shooter game, which is rare by itself.
Beyond that, they actually offer a fair range of weapons with differentiation between them. Sure, the assault rifle, heavy machine gun, and boost machine gun overlap each other, but you also get the Shotgun, which rips apart anything at close range, the LFE, which is a slow moving orb of death which kills any lesser enemy, and stuns greater ones, rocket launcher, big damage, low ammo, disc launcher, has its own melee attack which doesn’t overhead you, can dismember multiple enemies close together, lock-on laser, can hit a bunch of targets at the same time, sniper rifle, snipes, Laser cannon, draws from the suit power for big damage, anti-armor pistol, slow accurate, low ammo, big damage, and the two types of grenades.
My only gripe is that there isn’t more vertical play. You can’t jump (except with the wallboost trick), can’t fall off ledges, don’t really have any air physics. It doesn’t need it, but it would be nice. Also melee attacks completely drain the suit’s power, leaving you close to enemies without much way to defend yourself. Would have been nicer to drain like half, or all of it without overheating.
Thoughts on shadow of the colossus?
I could have sworn I did in the past, but I can’t find anything on my blog?
I’m gonna be brief, sorry. The primary success of SotC in my opinion is the balance between grip versus the bucking of the bull. It’s like a bullriding simulator, except you need to climb across the surface of the bull between its buckling. Beyond that, the movements of the colossi can propel you forwards by holding and releasing at the correct times. I think the weaker sections of the game are the more puzzle oriented colossi, like the one in the lake, or the two tiger shaped ones.
I believe the presence of the time attack mode means that the developers knew there were more elegant ways to beat the various Colossi. That’s why the time attack mode is in Braid for example. I think in general the presence of a time-attack mode usually means that a game is either race oriented, or the developers want to push the players in trying for more elegant solutions, because they know there are easy and high affordance, but slow, solutions, and more elegant low affordance solutions which are faster.
I think the game took one of the most developed parts of Ico, the climbing and pendulum physics, and applied them in a context where there is genuine risk and reward for those things, making a rather static and dull type of action into a dynamic one. You can jump over the bodies of the colossi to avoid them shaking you, you can advance a bit further at the risk of being thrown, you can stab them to change up their AI cycles. You can climb up slowly at the expense of the grip meter, while playing it safe should the colossi try to buck you. You can lure them around, or use their own attempts to throw you off in order to propel yourself higher. Occasionally on a first or second playthrough, you’ll need to find the next weak point while standing atop them, adding more sources of risk to the challenge. It’s possible to jump stab them too, and charging to stab itself is a risk/reward thing. How much can you risk to charge before inflicting damage. You want as much damage as possible, but the whole time you charge you’re also losing grip, and the colossi could shake any moment. The grip jump works the same way.
It helps show one of the elegant solutions the creators were probably intentionally pursuing with the game, and at minimum it’s something that can be learned from. Avion’s attempts to buck you by spinning in the air can itself be used as an opportunity to go from wing to wing because they’re so close together in that moment.
In short, cool game. Great experiment in use of physics to create risk and reward systems. Weird that it would come from the guys who made Ico.
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Celia Wagar's CritPoints 