Getting into Speedrunning

Celia WagarLeave a comment

What games are recommended for those who want to get into speedrunning?

The usual recommendation I see people give is, pick a game you’re into. People speedrun nearly every game under the sun, there’s almost bound to be a community for whatever game you pick.

What I can say beyond that is, it’s a matter of finding a game you want to learn more about and get better at. It’s good to pick a game that has good documentation on it because then you’ll have other people to ask about how the game works and you have readily available information on what you should be doing to try to get faster, like tutorials on how to perform various tricks.

Unless you want to become leaderboard style competitive it doesn’t matter if you’ll stick it out for 1000 hours or only 100 or 30. Speedrunning is just another way of having fun with a game. Speedrunning is a way of testing yourself, finding out new things about a game and working to do better. It’s a way of turning single player games into something you can do with friends in a comparable and measurable way, even competitive.

Good games to recommend depend on what you’re into, even though speedruns are collectively a community, it’s filled with subcommunities that can be rather divided. If you want an easy run, then Dark Souls 2 current patch and Deus Ex are both really simple and easy to learn. If you want something with more complex movement, try Mirror’s Edge, Half-Life 1 or 2, Megaman X2, or Mario 64. If you want something really focused on improvisation, try Minecraft, Binding of Isaac, Hotline Miami, or Animal Crossing. Lots of glitches, go 3d Zelda, castlevania sotn, dark souls 2 broken%, portal, megaman 1 and 2, or morrowind. Combat focus, go Dark Souls, DMC4, or Bloodborne. If you want pay2win, go Warframe. http://www.twitch.tv/celestics/c/6769673 If you want something technical, go for Dishonored, yoshi’s island, super metroid, metroid prime, F-zero GX, Shadow of the Colossus. If you want something somewhat straightforward and less glitchy, go for Super Monkey Ball, Portal 2, a Kirby game, Dark Souls 2 or Bloodborne current patch, Super Puzzle Strike, Super Mario Bros, Smash Bros Melee’s event and adventure modes. For stealth go for Deus Ex Human Revolution, and Metal Gear Solid 3 European Extreme. For something classic, try Contra, Gimmick!, Metal Slug, Ninja Gaiden NES, Castlevania 3.

Check some of them out, pick something for yourself.

To repost something older I wrote on this:

Picking a game isn’t just a matter of picking a game you like I think. It’s a matter of finding a game you want to learn more about and get better at. It’s good to pick a game that has good documentation on it because then you’ll have other people to ask about how the game works and you have readily available information on what you should be doing to try to get faster, like tutorials on how to perform various tricks.

That and unless you want to become leaderboard style competitive it doesn’t matter if you’ll stick it out for 1000 hours or only 100 or 30. Speedrunning is just another way of having fun with a game. Speedrunning is a way of testing yourself, finding out new things about a game and working to do better. It’s a way of turning single player games into something you can do with friends in a comparable and measurable way, even competitive.

Here’s how you get into speedrunning: Pick a game, grab a timer, work out the shortest route you can manage on the tricks you can currently do, have a playthrough. Don’t worry so much about getting the best times, just try to do better than you did previously. Check out the latest tricks, talk to other people working on the same game as you, make some friends who can help you out and who eventually you might help out. Try the route again, see if you can integrate some new tricks. Give the stuff you’re close to being able to do an attempt or two every run. Maybe even stick it out for an hour on the same trick if you really want to get it. Try thinking of it like a risk/reward type of thing. You got a good run going, and you could do this trick that saves 5 minutes or you could take the safe route instead of spending 10 minutes repeating a trick that doesn’t work.

Then do another run, maybe take this one slow. Go through the route at your own pace, try out the tricks you can’t do yet. Maybe this time you’ll get a few. Try working out how you did it on your correct attempt. Look at the other stuff around you that isn’t in the route you’re following. Since you’re probably not following the official route yet, there’s probably stuff that doesn’t make sense in a world record run that would still help you shave off some seconds.

For the timer, it’s there to both tell you your score as well as tell you how well you’re doing on each segment, help inform where your problem areas are and where you could save more time. Make up some splits based on what you think the major segments are or borrow some from the better players. As you do more runs it’ll be able to tell you how well you could be doing from your best split times.

Back on game choice I’m gonna relate a personal experience that lead me into speedrunning. I previously had an interest in it because I have an interest in glitches in all games, however I didn’t like the idea of resetting a billion times to replay what was essentially the same string of inputs until you matched the perfect string of inputs. It seemed to me like speedrunning was an efficiency race without a lot of the dynamics of the games when played more normally. So I enjoyed watching speedruns and learning about the glitches and tricks in the game and just seeing how cool the run was, but I thought I’d never do it personally since I loath repetition. (I’m not even the type to practice combos for fighting games, the few games I do have thousands of hours in)

What ended up happening for me was a friend challenged me to speedrun something, and we both happened to have mirror’s edge. He had beaten the game like 4 times and I had only beaten it once like a few years prior. Mirror’s edge is short and I figured it would be worth a go. I ended up getting lost a lot, and wasn’t even close to winning the race. We ended up also running crysis warhead and sonic generations, both of which I also lost because the guy knew the games better than I did, and then we returned to Mirror’s Edge. I looked up some strategies so I could win the race that time. I figured out I could go a bit faster with things like the fall break kick and the side dodge boost, as well as a simple short skip in chapter 1 I was able to pull off. I lost that race too, but my time was way ahead of where it was previously.

So I continued trying to play Mirror’s Edge and learn new strategies to beat my friend, and eventually I started really picking stuff up. In my older routes I used to use the kick glitch exactly once in this one spot where it was safe even if I messed it up and I seemingly always got it for some reason. I started watching more mirror’s edge streams and what I noticed was that every runner had their own strategies. Every time I’d watch someone play through I’d learn some new thing about the game. I watched OvenDonkey’s old videos, done on PS3, with advice for chapter runs, and those used ridiculously outdated strategies that were optimized for a controller. However in those old strategies, I found easier tricks I could use that would help me go a bit faster in the places where I couldn’t do the skip. I did slow runs of the game where I’d just look around for faster ways to do things and try out tricks until I could do them consistently and was sure I could use them in my route.

In the process I was frankly addicted, I loved every new thing I found out about the game, how the geometry worked in this one place to enable this thing, the proper way to get the most speed off this trick, how speedvaults weren’t random or based on geometry but something players specifically controlled. It was cool. I was never really into mirror’s edge. I thought it was a screwed up game from my first time playing it that didn’t really live up to its speedrunning promise with incredibly linear levels that limited all but really dumb and obvious shortcuts. As I learned the game and speedran it, I came to understand it in a way I completely hadn’t before. I thought the controls were kinda clunky, I thought the levels didn’t have much to use for alternate routes, and as I learned the whole game, as I saw all the little bits and bobs people used to get to new places, I realized that Mirror’s Edge was like, the perfect speedrun game. There was a beauty to the controls that I just hadn’t seen being unacclimated to them, and I loved how the advanced techniques expanded how everything worked.

So hey, for me speedrunning Mirror’s Edge changed it from a game I didn’t have all that positive an opinion on to being one of my favorite games. In large part because it was so well documented, because I think I took the right approach to it, and because it’s a game with such huge growth potential for a player.

So hey, don’t be nervous, think it over. Play your favorite games a lot, be open to trying something you see potential in, have fun.

DMC3 vs DMC4

Celia WagarLeave a comment

For the reader’s convenience, the thread in question is here:

DMC4’s enemies aren’t better than DMC3. Not at all. Some people even go as far as to say that they’re like DMC1 enemies, but that’s nonsense. DMC4 has so many problems that create the *illusion* of decent enemies, but really, the enemies are worse than DMC3 and have problems that arguably make them the worst in ‘notable’ brawlers. I wrote about this in the DMC4 thread on LTC (surely you’ve seen it) and its also an opinion held by the expert posters on the GFAQs DMC boards.

I don’t follow LTC, haven’t since I left.

Ey, maybe I’m being a bit harsh, but look over these lists:
http://devilmaycry.wikia.com/wiki/Enemies_in_Devil_May_Cry_3:_Dante%27s_Awakening_and_Special_Edition
http://devilmaycry.wikia.com/wiki/Enemies_in_Devil_May_Cry_4
I’m not doing a comparison to DMC1 here, I haven’t played it enough yet to judge (only beat the spider boss for the first time).

DMC3, most of the seven hells are the same, they’re alright fodder. Wrath sucks, greed and gluttony are alright and stand out a bit. Hell Vanguard is gold, dash attack, slashes, burst from under you, teleports. Enigmas are fodder, only good in combination with other enemies. The damned pawns have lame movement and only one attack, only fun because they’re so easy to jump cancel off of. Rook is simple, only dangerous in tandem with other enemies. Damned Knight is forgettable (does it even appear off the chessboard?). Bishop is alright, but again, needs other enemies to threaten directly with it. Blood Gargoyle is lame, shoot them, then slash them when petrified, avoid them when they dive at you. I liked the Fallen, except for their tendency to fly out of bounds, and the shields. Arachne are alright and unique, still on the simple side. The dullahans are really boring, can only be attacked from behind, in most appearances move in a totally fixed pattern. Soul eaters are simple too, like blood gargoyles, just a different gimmick to turn them solid.

DMC4 has the scarecrows, which are simple and nonaggressive, but have some different attacks, and mildly tricky timing. Not the best, but it’s alright. Frosts have ranged attacks, direct attacks, attacks from above and can juggle you, enter shields to regain health, teleport. Gladiuses are kinda basic and only work well with other enemies, have 2 different attacks. Assaults have a shield, ranged attack, melee attacks, burrow, dive attack, etc. Cutlasses are kind of simple and a pain, like 2-3 attacks. The Blitzes are awesome and have a bunch of nice attacks and teleports, and there’s tons of ways to take them down as Dante, between royal guards, ranged attacks, lucifer, so on. The basilisks are nice at a range, have melee attacks too. Chimeras are dumb and suck the fun out of things for not obeying hitstun rules. Mephisto and Faust have a bunch of cool attacks and are fun to fight as both nero and dante because both have a number of ways of decloaking them (less for nero, but can direct buster them). The angelo armors have unique juggle rules, shields protecting them, shieldbash attacks, melee attacks, rocket rush attacks, combination attacks. The faults are stupid, frustrating, and uninteresting. Mega Scarecrows have rollout, blade boomerangs, melee attacks, and drop the blade on death, Unique physics too.

A lot of the DMC3 enemies’ attacks work well in combination with other more direct threats, but are weak on their own, and only the Hells threaten Dante directly and effectively. Most of them only have one or two combat abilities. It would make sense to roll these abilities together into one enemy that was stronger.

The DMC4 enemies have ranged and melee attacks on the same enemy, allowing for direct aggression and ranged support interchangeably, they interact differently with the different weapons and different characters. They all have different interactions with Nero’s buster and bringer. They dropped some of the niches of the DMC3 enemies, which is kind of a shame, I wish those attacks like the Rook’s laser beam were carried on. However you’ll notice that most DMC3 style videos tend to be fights with the hells, which are rather similar. The armored enemies tend to get a bit samey with the charge shot on Nero, but Dante has tons and tons of ways of taking them down.

And honestly, DMC3’s enemies aren’t even that bad. They attack in large mobs, attack the moment they’re in range, hit hard, and you can approach them a dozen plus different ways (though this is more of a testament to the wonderful combat system). Anyway, the enemies can definitely be better, sure. Though I don’t see why weak enemies are enough to ‘reconsider’ the game. The combat and bosses (barring a couple stinkers like Doppelganger, Gigapede, and Arkham) are top-shelf, and magnitudes better than anything DMC4 has to offer. The reason DMC4 is even worth mentioning is because of how much it

They’re alright. They’re mostly just kind of one-note, and half the enemies you fight are some variation on the same moveset, the hells. I think they could be better, both in overall variety, aggression, team composition, utilization of the environment. I think DMC4 needs better enemies too, but a ton of the DMC3 enemies are totally lackluster (damned chessmen, enigma, blood-goyles, dullahan, soul-eater) recycles from DMC4 (and even then, it recycled poorly with stupid nerfs and gimps on practically everything).

True, it lost some weapons, it lost some style moves (poor wild stomp), had some gimps, Gunslinger sucks. However there are a ton of new combination moves between the tools that you can now use together (like the royal guard momentum tricks, and star rave). Lucifer is totally new, pandora in the air is alright, as is the boomerang function. They added just frames to gilgamesh.
DMC3, a bit like Melee versus P:M, feels better to my recollection, and has a bit more subtle complexity on a number of moves (crazy combos too), not to mention has nevan, spiral, artemis, agni and rudra, cerberus, and kalina ann.

There’s reasons to come back to each game, though I think DMC4 is the one that shines above at this moment in time. Not to mention, DMC4 Bloody Palace is pretty damn fun, more fun for me these days than the campaign, because it really binds together all the different systems of the game in a way that makes sense, and DMC3’s nobody really plays. (wonder why speed running Bloody Palace never caught on, it would probably be interesting).

I figured you still lurked over there, but in any case, here’s my post: http://www.learntocounter.com/forums/index.php?topic=7963.msg81307#msg81307 Please take a look and let me know which parts you disagree with.

I looked it up when you mentioned you made it.

I am fine with enemies having limited super armor, it means that you cannot aggress completely unopposed. Bayonetta enemies act like this for example. Enemies need super armor or something to that effect to be dangerous in a 1v1 scenario in a game where the player has as many infinites as dante does. That’s why the bosses all have it of course. Short of that, to remain threatening, there need to be multiple enemies so that even while you’re wrecking one, you have to worry about the others. If you see them about to attack, then royal guard. I’m pretty sure you can cancel most attacks into that when enemies hit you. And the attacks are properly telegraphed, far as I can remember.

Chimeras are kind of a bitch, but the interval isn’t actually random, I’ve definitely stepped away from them right before they do it (which is lame, drops the combo, they weren’t a very good enemy idea).
Blitzes are dull when you first pick up the game and get more interesting as you get better. Nero can wreck them rather easily and simply with his charge shot and ground buster into air buster, which is kind of lame because you have to wait for that shit to charge. DT burst also works.

Dante meanwhile has tons and tons of options for dealing with blitzes that don’t involve standing around charging, he can honeycomb shot them, fireworks, teleport, DT rainstorm, prickle them with lucifer, do ordinary attacks canceled into royal guard. Omen on Dante breaks any sort of shield enemies have, even if the disaster meter is totally uncharged. You can RG his lasers and royal release for massive damage.

Stinger RG is really easy, even I can do it.

Mephistos and Fausts you can fight in the air. Their cloaks can be removed easily by teleporting to them and DT rainstorm, or you can generally just do air combos like air rave mixed with yamato, with jump cancels thrown in for good measure. With Nero I like how the devil buster is more effective on their cloaks, which can only be used while lock-on is off, because then I need to manually run up to them and aim at them with it.
Dante can close distance easily on basilisks, he has a teleport, airdashes, stinger.

Agnus certainly can be jump canceled, I jump cancel all over him as both dante and nero. He’s really fun to fight with nero, I stay entirely in the air. You can even hit him while he’s flapping his wings hard while getting up, as long as your feet don’t touch the ground (it’s a quake-box).
E&I are useful for honeycomb shot and rainstorm.

The different styles all have useful moves that are in one style but not the others, like aerial rave in swordmaster/darkslayer, teleport and airdash in trickster, RG (which can cancel certain moves, and useful for aerial momentum), rainstorm honeycomb shot and fireworks in gunslinger

Then you get cross-style stuff:

EDIT: This was asked and answered later on

I replied to the DMC4 thread, if you’d like to read it. There isn’t much of interest, I was mostly just deflecting the other guys’ arguments, but yeah. I wanted to write up a pastebin reply to your ask when I linked my original post, but I guess that’ll come at a later date.

I read it.

DRI is OP, kinda sucks I guess. Should have either made landing it harder, or not had DT distortion. Or to have other things that are meter hungry. You can choose to not use it if you want, but I won’t deny it’s a mistake.

The stun doesn’t feel particularly inconsistent to me. I always thought of it like working as Poise did from Dark Souls (or bloodborne, which has really nuanced super armor rules for different enemy attacks versus different weapons), where specific attacks deal specific amounts of stun damage specific to the attack, and past a certain threshold enemies lose their armor for a period of time until it resets. I believe bosses work the same way. Super armor helps make it so you can’t just attack enemies without worrying about retaliation. Besides, Royal Guard cancels everything when you’re actually parrying a hit if I’m not mistaken (I might be, I don’t RG).

Disagree with agnus (hard to stay on top of him and he’s generally aggressive), Berial has good moves otherwise, like flame pillar and explosions + melee, Dante’s weird overall, but good if you don’t cheese him I guess.

Super Armor rules aren’t always about multi-hitting enemies, and I’m pretty sure no enemies have special hitstun rules for their attacks, unless I’m mistaken. I mean, in general you should treat it that enemies have super armor unless you’ve specifically broken their super armor or whatever, and remember which moves do and don’t have hyper armor (uninterruptable attacks) otherwise.

I agree with most of the artistic praise of DMC3, disagree with most of DMC4, especially the character designs which I thought were great except Gloria, and Lady. I think Lady’s change of character makes sense in the absence of her father. She’s allowed to loosen up, but be serious in a different way. I thought Dante and Nero’s character designs were pretty good. I think DMC1’s design is the worst there, with 2 coming in second (though it’s pretty alright, 1 is just silly).

Don’t think you’re right about cloaks, plenty of options work versus them.

Consider taking up speedruns of bloody palace mode, I imagine that will probably bring out the more interesting aspects of the game in a search for efficiency, like DRI wasting time except in boss battles, and I’ll be honest, I want to see what that would look like. I think BP mode in general brings out the best traits of the game. Would rock to get an enemy aggression mod.

Tetris, the Perfect Game?

Celia WagarLeave a comment

Do you enjoy tetris and would you agree with that it’s the perfect game?

I’m not a big tetris fan, but it’s cool as hell to see the GDQ runs.

Perfect game? I don’t think that can be quantified. There’s disagreements over even the implementation of its various rules, and the tetris company limits what experimentation is even allowed around Tetris with its guideline. There’s different ways to implement the random algorithm, different ways to treat wall kicks, different ways to rotate blocks, different ways to spin the various blocks into tight spaces (like T-spin), what levels you up, different implementations of wallclimbing, scoring, the entire concept of delay lock was only added later on to the games, which many people might not realize wasn’t in the original games. You get neat little things like piece highlights that show where a piece will drop when it’s all the way down, held pieces, the number of pieces previewed in advance, instant drop for less than 20G modes.

Look at all these crazy different rotation systems: http://tetris.wikia.com/wiki/Rotation_system
And the twists they enable: http://tetris.wikia.com/wiki/List_of_twists
Then consider variations like Bastet (bastard tetris), where it’s difficult to clear as few as 7 lines on very slow speed settings. http://fph.altervista.org/prog/bastet.html
My brother showed me 40 line clear, where you try to clear 40 lines as fast as possible. His record is 54 seconds.

That and I’m curmudgeony and don’t like calling a game literally perfect.

The Purpose of Long Combos

Celia WagarLeave a comment

What do you think of lengthy combos in fighting games? What purpose does getting stuck in a 90% combo in Marvel Versus Capcom or Guilty Gear or even Smash have?

I am not personally a fan of long combos. I think combo length in Guilty Gear and Smash is pretty reasonable on average. In Smash to get long combos you have to continuously read your opponent. In Marvel and Skullgirls it can get more drawn out. Skullgirls was designed with resets in mind which helps mitigate a bit of this, because to get real damage you need to reset continuously which gives people chances to break out.

The purpose of having combos in general is so that some situations can be punished with more damage than others. It creates this diversity between just footsies, wakeup situations, whiff punishes, jump-ins, or them whiffing a super or dragon punch. They can also vary depending on whether they are on the stage. Like in the corner in Skullgirls I can do this extremely beginner combo, s.HP (launch), j.HP, air dash forward, j.HP, j.HK (dunk) for a ton of damage. It’s certainly not the most damage efficient combo in the world, but it gets a lot more than my standard sequence midscreen (which replaces the third HP with an LK to catch them for the HK and allows for an OTG into another loop for ultimately more damage), however it doesn’t work anywhere outside the corner. If you whiff punish someone’s normal, you can’t link into another attack before canceling into special and/or super. If someone whiffs a dragon punch or super in front of you then you get a lot of time to perform a big attack that gets a lot of hitstun, and thus can be followed up into a lot.

There’s also this level of focus that goes into committing to a combo in a traditional fighter, and if you’re not punishing something, you don’t know if they’re going to block or not, so either you can confirm with low commitment moves, at the cost of damage, or you can risk going straight a combo which might be really unsafe on block.

If someone can get a 90 or 100% combo on you in a traditional fighter, it usually means spending a lot of your own resources in order to do so. This one Skullgirls introductory video showed how even though you can 100% a character on your opponent’s team with some effort, you end up expending all your resources to do so, and feed them a ton of meter in the process, which they can use to wreck you too.
Personally I’d like to see more work put into different ways that combos can be made more about reading the opponent in the future. This probably means increasing hitstun so combos require less tight timing, but allow people to react to what’s going on. Like making it so tech rolls in traditional fighters have a small vulnerability period at the end, making 2 juggle trajectories that have to be followed up differently, etc.

The purpose of getting stuck in a long combo is, you fucked up hard and really shouldn’t have done what you just did.

Fun Genre Combinations

Celia WagarLeave a comment

If you were making a game, what two genres combined do you think will make for some interesting mechanics?

I swear I answered this or something like this before. Regardless, here’s some borderline nonsensical answers:

Rhythm game and Real Time Strategy

2d platformer and First Person Shooter

Moba Stealth game

Bullet Hell Visual Novel

Endless Runner Open World Sandbox

Fun and Massively Multiplayer Online game

Roguelike sports game

Hack and Slash 4X game

Survival Horror Tactical RPG

Stealth sports game

Rhythm flight simulator

Beat em up racing game

Rail shooter metroidvania

Open World Combat (and Witcher 3)

Celia WagarLeave a comment

Witcher 3 first imps?

It’s leaps and bounds better than Witcher 2 is what I’ll say. The combat feels so much more solid it’s ridiculous, and the addition of the dodge option was very sensible. The spells have all been tuned to make more sense, the parry option works a lot better than the old block option did. The Witcher Sense looks a lot nicer visually. The quest lines do a good job mixing up the gameplay, between chasing people down on horseback, to stalking deadly creatures, to rescuing people from burning buildings, and more. The graphics are perhaps one of the most beautiful 3d graphics I’ve ever seen, and as I typically do, I’ve been screenshotting up a storm. Far as people have informed me and my experiences with the game, it’s like the perfect marriage of Skyrim and Mass Effect, being able to accomplish both the unique open world questing and choices with consequences that neither could achieve individually, let alone together.

So I think it deserves a 3/5.

Despite the combat being tuned a lot better based on visual cues and the like (I haven’t had anyone block any attacks while literally attacking me yet, thank hell), it’s still really simplistic overall, and I have no fucking clue what controls the swings geralt chooses, so frequently I try to move in close and do a fast swing for damage, and I end up with a REALLY long swing animation and get interrupted by the faster enemy. Other times I get a really fast swing, but it’s so short range it misses, so I try really quick to throw out another attack before the enemy can and I get smacked with a long attack. Also he swings at such angles, and the hitboxes are so accurate to the blade that it frequently flat-out misses. Often times I can get crazy combos off of one hit, then others the enemy just falls out of it and is able to attack me before I can dodge. Sometimes dodges and rolls seem like they have iframes, sometimes it seems like they don’t. Sometimes geralt swings in completely the wrong direction, which is aggravating. Sometimes he can fire the crossbow fine without reloading and sometimes you’re forced to reload. It’s frequently flat-out aggravating. That and I’m playing on death march difficulty. It feels more fair than hard difficulty of the prior game, mostly due to the newfound consistency in most of your combat options, but the game is still crazy amounts of random which drives me up a wall sometimes.

Beyond that, it’s not terribly complex so far. Dark Souls didn’t have a complex combat system either, but it was so much more reliable in every way that I could do things like intentionally swipe inbetween two enemies without using lockon and expect to hit them both. I could remember how long my slashes were to interrupt enemies. I could outspace enemies and punish their whiffed attacks as they did them.

They have a lot of content in the game, the content is very nice, but the fighting drives me up such a wall. And it’s so close to being a reasonable, sane system that it’s all the more maddening.

Could you expand on how you feel about Witcher 3’s open-world gameplay? I’ve always felt that as games strived for bigger worlds, the gameplay and design took a hit, became less focused, and couldn’t decide between a cool sandbox to fool around in or proper missions that just took place in different areas. If they did the latter, than you might as well have a mission-based structure instead of wasting money on a large world to explore, it would just be pointless. How do you think Witcher 3 succeeds at balancing this open-world ‘free time’ and actual missions?

Witcher 3’s open world gameplay from what I’ve played so far appears to have a large number of unique quests with unique focuses that usually tie in some way back to making you fight things. Like I get a quest to bring a goat back, they have me track it through the woods with a bell and witcher sense, then carefully lead it back with the bell, and of course a bear attacks and there are wolves in the woods too.

Rather than just having a single open world, they have like 5 big maps, and they have quests and little things you can do, like destroy monster nests, bandit camps, treasure chests, depopulated villages, etc scattered all around them. Unlike Bethesda games, I haven’t been able to identify reused art assets as readily and the dungeons don’t look like they’re put together in a formulaic way. They went a long way in making areas feel unique. All the missions have their own areas in which they occur that fit into the larger world, most don’t even use dungeons.

It honestly feels a lot like Far Cry 3’s theme park approach. There’s all these little things floating around that you can stop by and interact with for a bit, most of the quests are fairly short, and you’re picking up goodies all the time.

I don’t think the gameplay and design takes a hit from being open world intrinsically in any way. You can still make the primary interactions deep. It’s just that open world games tend towards having worse game mechanics because it isn’t the development focus, though I guess that’s what you were saying.

What do you think of denser cities or set dressing in games that involve some sort of adventuring? E.g. villages with buildings and NPCs that don’t fundamentally add anything to the gameplay and are just there to make the world seem ‘real’ or bigger with small talk and lore. By ‘what do you think’, I meant, would you dock a game points for having cities with only quest-related NPCs?

To answer the latter question, no. I don’t really give a fuck except in a tangential sense.

What I said was kind of confusing maybe, but think of it this way: could you have DMC/NG/Bayonetta combat in The Witcher? How about Quake or non-ADS gunplay in Far Cry? Vanquish in GTA? Probably not, or not without destroying something that lets those combat systems work so well.

Yes. You definitely could have that type of combat in The Witcher. A lot of the Witcher’s combat is just fighting enemies in areas without significant environmental interaction, much like DMC, NG, Bayonetta. More difficult would be Dark Souls, which is very level design driven. Quake style combat is harder in Far Cry because it is more environment dependent, but it’s certainly possible and there are a ton of fan maps that have compelling fights in more open arenas. I think Blood Dragon showed it was possible to have less ADS style combat in a Far Cry game. We got Prototype and Infamous, which is pretty similar to Vanquish far as freedom of movement goes in an open world setting, I don’t see what’s stopping something like Vanquish from working on that scale.

The primary issues to consider in porting those are the level design, progression, enemy types and their synergy with the main character’s actions and the environment. The primary thing that tends to get worse in the transition to open world is level design tailored to individual encounters. If a game’s systems would work on a flat empty space without much deficit, then it’ll be fine in open world. Maybe level design tailored to the encounter level is something worth looking into in the future for open world games?

In DMC/NG/Bayonetta, you’re generally in a closed off arena. Ok, not always, but you generally are and it should be that way to prevent the player from running off (of course, they shouldn’t run off by their own choice and fight like a man, for how else would they improve?). In an open-world game you can run off. Also movement options would have to be tailored to the environment. Though I supposed making enemies aggressive and persistent enough would make up for any major design issues.

In The Witcher 3 and Skyrim the player can run off too. So what? The prevention of the player running off in DMC/NG/Bayonetta is because progression is tied not to the accomplishing of objectives, but of reaching the next area. In an open world game, you need to kill the enemies usually, because progression is tied to advancing quest flags, so it doesn’t matter if you can run off really, you have to come back anyway. You could also take the Okami approach and summon an arena when the player engages in combat, problem solved.

You can run away in many encounters in DMC/NG as well, but that’s called cheesing the encounter, since the enemies are more spread out and not as threatening as they are in groups. Furthermore, spreading out the enemy doesn’t require any kind of calculated/tactical approach (i.e. mastery of combat and movement) since you can just take your time, move up to an enemy and slap it with whatever you want. The more ‘abstract’ options are basically useless. Summoning some sort of arena conflicts with the open-world design (I already mentioned this). The whole idea of open-world games is to have one massive, seamless world within which every action takes place. Summoning an arena is kind of antithetical to this and a lazy solution.

It’s called cheesing the encounter because you’re skipping it and don’t have to deal with it. The objectives are different in open world games, usually requiring you to engage the monster, so you can’t run past it. I said this already. Sure, you might introduce issues of being able to kite, but beat em up games have kiting issues already, the solutions that work there work here. If people are allowed to back off and take their time, have the encounter reset, or worse, grow stronger as a penalty.

I’m proposing summoning an arena in the cases where you absolutely don’t want dudes running.

I don’t see how introducing good combat systems equivalent to those mentioned makes running away any more prevalent a problem in these games than it presently is.

“It’s just that open world games tend towards having worse game mechanics because it isn’t the development focus, though I guess that’s what you were saying.” That is what I was saying, though to an extent I do think that open-world intrinsically harms gameplay. I mean, it depends. The larger worlds are often meant to simulate real-world elements like traffic or travelers. There’s nothing deliberate about this kind of design and developers can’t make any kind of interesting gameplay around them. You can have robust combat mechanics, but to make interesting encounters, you’ll have to do something to limit the environment, which will conflict with the open-world design. For the record, I don’t consider Dragon’s Dogma or D. Souls open-world per se. I mostly referring to GTA, Far Cry, Ass Creed, and the sort. combat and movement) since you can just take your time, move up to an enemy and slap it with whatever you want. The more ‘abstract’ options are basically useless. Summoning some sort of arena conflicts with the open-world design (I already mentioned this). The whole idea of open-world games is to have one massive, seamless world within which every action takes place. Summoning an arena is kind of antithetical to this and a lazy solution.

They don’t have to simulate things little unimportant things like that at all (though it is expected by this point). I’m purely thinking about open world as a level design structure, for one.

I’m pretty sure dragon’s dogma is more on the open world end than otherwise (even if it is a small open world).

You don’t have to limit the environment, because the objective isn’t based on getting from point A to B. If you make the objective to kill enemies then people can’t ignore every encounter. If you make fortifications on areas with chokepoints and enemies designed to keep you out, then location based objectives can still be tricky.

This isn’t complicated, this isn’t preventing you from delivering content in an open world style, from wandering all over a large map with tons of tiny objectives dispersed across it. I don’t really care if you consider summoning an arena a lazy solution or not, or whether it doesn’t fit an open world game because an arena means it’s no longer open for the duration of the encounter. It would still be damned better than the open world games we have currently, and that’s good enough for me. Make the enemies tougher if you run away, give them decent aggro ranges, make the character only good at getting close to enemies and not good at getting away.

Swapping out Aesthetic Themes

Celia WagarLeave a comment

Since you usually say that the theme and story is superfluous in relation to the game, would you say that, while keeping all of the combat systems, we change the theme of the souls games to be, say, My little pony: friendship is magic themed, they would be just as good games?

I actually discussed a sort of joke mod for dark souls of this variety with friends recently, except I said it should be themed like modern warfare with them swinging long barreled guns instead of swords, and stabbing each other with glocks instead of daggers.

I also discussed making a game where the cutscenes were literally cuts of Citizen Kane, or where they would introduce completely nonsensical or contradictory plot points, like alluding to things the player had just done that had never happened, bringing up central elements of the plot that previously did not exist, providing information contradictory to the layout of levels or the events in the stage. Remark on the player’s use of a weapon (recording the actual weapons the player used and always choosing the wrong one, such as saying you used an axe if you used a sword).

I think it would be a cute message. It would show how the game’s narrative isn’t necessarily consistent with events as they play out.

As long as it is clear what the current game state is, and all the elements of the game are consistently and identifiably represented, it does not matter what those elements consist of. If you represent poison (the effect which drains your health slowly over time) consistently as electrical sparks in all of its instances, it doesn’t matter if you name the effect “fred” in-game, players will learn it and remember it (and probably just call it poison), much like they do with poison in every other game its been introduced in. A lot of games name common concepts weird things and are somewhat remembered for it. There’s a TVtropes page for that. http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CallAHitPointASmeerp I still call any projectile in a 2d platformer game that moves in an upward arc an “Axe” after Castlevania.

When I first got into Brawl modding, I swapped out EVERYTHING, as many character textures and models as I could. I tried to have every character have at least one new thing to them, and tried to swap out every stage. I’ve done similar things in dark souls, oblivion, and skyrim. I don’t genuinely care.

At most I can say that using the MLP horse models in dark souls would look a bit awkward on the humanoid rigs. Otherwise, as long as everything is clear, it’s the same shit. Otherwise we might well have an existential crisis switching from higher to lower graphics modes and vice versa.

Have you actually watched Citizen Kane? For all you know its plot might perfectly fit a rhythm game.

I have seen Citizen Kane actually. I thought it was a good film, and it’s really obvious how it influenced the medium, even without a background in the topic. Of course I looked up its innovations afterwards, many are less obvious. I thought it would be funny to make a game, like a rhythm game, that blatantly had no relation to CK, but used CK’s footage as cutscenes. You could compare it to the Great Gatsby game someone made in flash. I think the “Citizen Kane of Games” to most people represents the breakout moment when a game will finally show everyone else how to tell stories using games that aren’t stilted and awkward, borrowing from film conventions, in the way that films borrowed from theater conventions originally. I think we’ve already discovered all the techniques for storytelling in games that we’re going to, what other means of conveying information in a game format are there? I think I’ve explained previously why I don’t think gameplay and story will ever be perfectly in sync.

Are there any games that you have changed your opinion on over time?‎

Celia Wagar5 Comments

Are there any games that you have changed your opinion on over time?‎

Plenty. Usually it’s either a factor of realizing that I was trying too hard to convince myself a game was good because I wanted to believe it was good (in the cases where my opinion worsens), or getting deeper into a game and realizing there is a lot of value to it that I wasn’t accessing before (when my opinion gets better).
I originally didn’t like fighting games. My thoughts on them from playing them were that you could just mash and win frequently even against fairly good players who had years of experience in the game. I thought that Smash Bros was superior because you actually had to think and move around, and a good fighting game AI just had to use the right move for the right range to always win, where smash AI would be much harder to develop. I believed this all the way up to high school. I didn’t like how attacking in fighting games would lock me in place, I didn’t like how you hit up to jump instead of having a separate jump button. I didn’t know shit about fighters. I had bought a few fighting games like guilty gear, king of fighters, SF2 on the virtual console, and only really liked Guilty Gear of them, because holy shit, I could mash buttons, occasionally use specials semi-strategically and the movement was awesome. Eventually my brother got a PS3, in searching for games to put on it, we got SF4, because it seemed like all that was available from the small selection. A friend challenged me to play it, so we both tried it out. Neither of us really got it, and my friend cheesed me with dhalsim’s long limbs or something. I reasoned that there had to be some reason people liked fighting games, I knew that people held huge tournaments like Evo, and I had seen evo moment #37 before, so I tried to figure out how the fuck that shit worked. I tried to understand how the hell combos were put together, and luckily had and internet friend who was into that stuff. I played netplay and got my ass kicked mercilessly, eventually starting to win, eventually starting to understand the logic behind all these different normal attacks I had. Learning that there actually was something of substance, that it was more than mashing or combo memorization, really flipped my opinion there.

I originally thought Mirror’s Edge was a kind of shallow but pretty looking game where you just follow the one or two paths forwards to get to the next part. Also that the levels were built in a way that makes it really irritating to find the path forwards (if you need a hint button, probably not built right) I never got that sense of flow that I expected from a movement game like this. It’s only chance that a friend challenged me to a speedrun race of it and I got into the game to beat him, because I was sick of losing in games he had an advantage in (and him refusing to play the games I might have an advantage in). Then of course when I stepped it up, he chose to play me in a ruleset where he still had the upper hand.

When I started Remember Me, I thought it was shit. Then as I got further in, it became clear there were a number of abilities, they all did different shit and many of them could be used to lesser or greater effect. So I decided it was a mediocre game instead of a totally shit one, because the abilities still weren’t great, they were the bare minimum of what a game should be doing at all. Better than Batman though.

I was kind of a bitch about darkstalkers and skullgirls at first, but I’ve gotten more into them as I understood their systems better too.

Now for the other side: Mad World I originally liked, but had an argument with someone over whether visual style really makes a game better or not, and they pointed out I liked mad world when it didn’t have much substance, and I reconsidered my opinion on it, because reflecting on what I did in the game, a lot of it was honestly repetitive, and the combat system wasn’t that great. It was more a presentation deal. I wanted to like the game because it came from the guys from Clover, had a unique visual style, nice music, and nice voice acting.

With No More Heroes I had a similar experience, only really realizing how shallow NMH’s gameplay was as I moved onto better action games. I liked the cutscenes and unique presentation more than my actual experience playing it.

Similar deal with Legend of Zelda, and Okami, as I realized that the puzzle shit didn’t really satisfy me, my favorite part was the pit of trials in wind waker/twilight princess. I wanted to buy into the hype since these were supposed to be legendary games. But I can envision ways these games could be done better now, that other games have done similar things better.

Deus Ex I reconsidered as I learned more about the game and thought over its actual systems and refined my perspective more on game design. It’s an amazingly intricate interconnected system, but holy shit is every directed action and skill test in the game boring.

DMC3 I’ve been reconsidering, because most of the enemies honestly suck. It’s not enough to totally dismiss it, but there’s maybe 3-4 good enemy types in the game that are differentiated from one another, not counting bosses. DMC4 is stronger on that front somehow. Needs stronger enemy aggression in both games though.

Probably others. I reconsider when there’s fair cause to do so. I don’t want to be a victim to consistency. “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds”

Dynamic Difficulty systems

Celia WagarLeave a comment

What do you think about dynamic difficulty systems? Particularly about whether or not to keep them behind curtains. I’m torn after watching Mark Brown’s video about it, because if a player wants to challenge themselves with higher difficulty to improve it’s not negative even if it might frustrate them, the only ones benefited by having the system hidden are those who would cheat themselves to make the game easier, but I don’t think it’s necessary to cater to people with that attitude. The transparent system of God Hand allowed me to constantly try to improve to push it further. Even just allowing players to change difficulty at will during the game seems superior to a hidden dynamic system, because it allows to adjust according to their conscious needs and disallows cheating to make it easier (it’d be easier by choice). So only a transparent dynamic system seems superior to me.

I think you can’t realistically keep them behind the curtains from everyone. I actually didn’t know RE4 had a dynamic difficulty system myself on watching that video, but of course someone speedrunning would notice it and abuse it if it was abusable.

I was involved in a discussion about dynamic difficulty systems recently by someone who took the stance that dynamic difficulty should be the only type of difficulty in single player games if at all possible, always adjusting itself to the player’s skill level so that players will remain in the flow zone tailored for them for the entire experience. It makes a degree of sense in an abstract way, but many people (including me) want to challenge themselves against a static difficulty level. If the game is easier or harder based on your skill, so that everyone is challenged equally, then it removes a lot of the push to improve, a lot of the selective pressure on your strategies.

The thing is, God Hand’s system doesn’t really let you cheat. It doesn’t have terribly forgiving checkpoints and dying costs you time. I don’t think God Hand’s difficulty is exactly a good comparison, because it’s designed in such a way that it fluctuates up and down very directly based on whether you are hitting other people or getting hit. There’s no way to perform efficiently and not have it spike upwards rapidly. This is part of what makes God Hand’s level up system interesting, not just that it’s transparent, but how directly and rapidly it’s affected by your performance. If you are dealing damage quickly and doing weave dodges, you’ll level up really quickly. If you take damage at high levels, you’ll die really quickly and get a major penalty to the level. It’s not just a challenge to keep your level up, it’s a struggle to survive, which is very directly tied to your level. People inevitably raise their level in God Hand, because they don’t want to die and start over again.

I think from a design perspective, there’s benefits to both approaches depending on how the game is structured. Most of the time I find dynamic difficulty adjustment to be a pain in my ass though, because I hate performing poorly, then being slapped with enemy handicap or something. Something might be too hard for me, but I want to stick with it until I win. I want to be pushed to figure out a solution, to figure out what combination of options will allow me to pass.

One funny thing about some games and speedruns is that the highest difficulty level is the de facto standard for speed running because it’s actually faster. Examples of this are Half Life and Jedi Knight 1. In Half Life, Explosive damage boosts you more on hard mode. In Jedi Knight 1, elevators move faster on higher difficulties. Both Easy and Hard are widely played for Quake Speedruns because the enemy positions are different, making them significantly different experiences.

The other thing is, Left 4 Dead has a nontransparent system that works rather well. Demon’s Souls has a cool dynamic difficulty system with the caveat that it’s a pain in the ass to get locked off from PWWT for the current playthrough if you die in body form too much. Dark Souls 2 has a cool one with the bonfire aescetics (except for those being too damn limited). Bloodborne has an alright one with insight.
If you let players change difficulty at will, then they can just turn it down for a hard encounter instead of being forced to stick it out. However people can’t evaluate which difficulty is really best for them without playing each one, so you have that problem. Good rule of thumb for western games is to go for the second hardest difficulty because the hardest was made for no one and tested by no one.

Really what we need to be thinking about are how we can make dynamic difficulty systems fun for the players to play with, to make them something that players are interested in manipulating. In most cases dynamic difficulty is something finnicky that I personally would prefer to turn off altogether (like in elder scrolls where it has been moronic since oblivion at least).

The key things to think about are, what does the dynamic difficulty actually change? (enemy behaviors? aggression? Damage? Number of Spawns? Health?) You typically want the type of difficulty augmented to introduce new dynamics to the play, which is why merely buffing damage and health usually comes off poorly. What actually changes the difficulty? (taking damage? dealing damage? Specific environmental triggers? skill tests for critical success? player decisions?) How many levels of dynamic difficulty are there and how quickly do they shift between one another? (are they static levels with clear divisions between them? are they a more smooth linear shift? Do they shift immediately in response to stimulus or only adjust themselves between encounters/levels/worlds? How much do difficulty shifting events each affect the difficulty level?) Can the system be abused efficiently to bypass the difficulty level appropriate for the player? (RE4) Is the system adjusting itself to a difficulty the players do not want? (enemy handicap, super kong, etc) Also it probably pays to keep it simple like God Hand. Too many variables and you get systems with unexpected results or that are impossible to fine tune.

I think it makes sense to not widely advertise dynamic difficulty systems all the time, because I think many consumers don’t want to know that your game adjusts itself to them via some “advanced” system or will be actively turned off by it. Though if this is the case, I think it’s worth questioning if your system really serves the consumer or not.

Sidequest design

Celia WagarLeave a comment

How would you make sidequests interesting since sidequests in games tend to be fetch quests or kill this enemy or the much hated escort missions?

Lemme think about it. I had some thoughts about this many many years ago before I was really into the whole game design theory thing, and they were so rudimentary it’s honestly not worth recording them. To say the least, they were basically, fetch quest, kill enemy, escort mission, and like 2 other types that were nearly the same. Kind of funny really. To be fair my old notes did say fetch quests were to be avoided like the devil.

I did a quick search on the best quests and the thing I notice they have in common is they introduce unique content, unique enemies, or unique mechanics/controls. In general it seems like the best quests are the ones that are solid content to play through more than anything. You could arguably say the best type of quest is something like the Painted World in Dark Souls, an entirely unique area with a nonlinear structure, unique enemies, and a boss waiting at the end. Kind of begs the question of, “is that really a quest?” though, because it’s more of an optional area. Many people would probably associate quests as being looser more story driven things, like how you keep up with all the different dark souls characters as they travel around Lordran.

So side quests under that definition end up inevitably being about bringing things from one place to another, or killing specific things because what other goals can you set up that make people run from one end of the world to the other? Side quests in this context end up being more about recycling content than anything else.

So what are some ideas for side quests? For optional content really? Here’s some ideas:

Try changing up the world a bit in response to activation of a sidequest or a phase of a sidequest. Add new enemies, change one of the areas, change the functionality of some enemies, try temporarily changing what the character can do, redefine their mechanics and how they interact with enemies in some way. maybe they jump twice as high for a bit, maybe they move slower but ignore hitstun, maybe they drive a vehicle around.

Have them take on optional bonus content. That’s always surefire.

Try having them interact with existing mechanics in a new way. Maybe you need to stealth through this area instead of fight, maybe you need to fight instead of stealth, maybe you need to lure enemies into a trap, maybe you need to separate entities from one another and deal with them when they’re all alone.

When assigning quests focused on visiting a specific node (like a fetch quest, or delivery), make sure it puts the player on an interesting path to get there, with interesting obstacles in their way.

Beyond that, the quests that seem to resonate most strongly with people are quests that have good storylines that involve enacting scripted actions that have no mechanics. That’s just a matter of coming up with an interesting story with interesting things happening in it really.

Coming up with a good sidequest is a lot like coming up with a good alternate game mode or good level design really. Look at Taunt Battle in Dan Salvato’s 20XX hack, you win by getting points from taunting as Mario, and capes can flip which team scores for a successful taunt. Look at the challenges in God Hand, and the arena challenges. Look at Witcher 3 sidequests. They introduce new mechanics with solid level design, enemy design, and enemy placement to highlight those mechanics.