Is it possible to make a good game with elements of survival horror, stealth, and action? (something Resident Evil 6 poorly attempted to do)
Conventional wisdom says, “Sure, just switch between them.” If you want Stealth + Action, easy, you have Crysis and MGS GZ. If you want Stealth + Horror, that’s already practically the basis of horror games. If you want Horror + Action, you run into some trouble.
Closest thing I’d say is that the original Doom is honestly a bit scary in ep 2. Like they have dark sections, then invisible enemies in the dark sections. So I’m already freaking out from turning a dark corner onto barons of hell I’m not sure I see clearly, but then I have something I can barely see stalking me and I’m just like, “The level designer is a DICK.”
I’d say, take a page from Doom E2M6, impose some ammo limitations, limit the ammo overall, add some actual stealth, and you probably have something of a foundation to work with.
Horror as it pertains to games is based on uncertainty of information, like level layouts, enemies approaching you, uncertainty of whether you can dispatch them, uncertainty of whether you can avoid them, uncertainty of whether they’re even there. Also the threats should probably be really highly lethal, because otherwise there’s not really any sense of urgency when they’re in your face demanding your attention. This means random number generation can be handy if used sparingly at the right times. Random number generation makes it more difficult to figure out how a mechanism works, because it prevents people from making hypothesis and getting deterministic results. Horror games stop being scary when people figure out how they work well enough to know when a scare is going to happen before it does. There needs to be that tension with an uncertain payoff. If it’s all action all the time then there’s no time to build tension. Also considering that games are built on repetition, you repeat sections when you die, a horror game, or section of a horror game, will naturally lend itself to becoming less scary over time unless something is done to break the tension only at moments the player cannot predict.
Also probably consider how Left 4 Dead isn’t really scary, despite having a zombie theme, poorly lit levels, and random number generation all over the place. It’s not really doing anything to build tension on uncertainty, or making this horrifying sudden threat to the player. It’s just waves of enemies that are handled in a rather standard fashion, with occasionally stronger enemies at regular intervals. They aren’t intensely lethal except the Witch, who can be kind of scary and unpredictable sometimes.
So in short, highly lethal threats, get hinted at a lot before they show up, ideally in a way that is mechanically sound (like silent hill’s unreliable radio static), rather than aesthetically or narratively sound, appear suddenly, are hard to detect before they appear, hard to predict their appearance, difficult to kill, slow down, or escape from. Some filler enemies inbetween might be appropriate to build tension before the main attraction.
Would you say that a deep system in a game is not enough, the game must appropriately push it? thinking about this while playing Bulletstorm, which has great weapon variety and ways to defeat enemies, but encounters don’t really demand it, and you get points for doing combinations to compensate and in DMC series, often you can just get used to the attack patterns of enemies to avoid them, and spam a basic attack, and you can get through even Dante Must Die with that, and the game basically becomes God of War, despite having far greater possibilities. Whereas Quake for example ammo depletion forces you to change weapons, and enemy positioning forces you to use movement options and level geometry more fully, so you necessarily get a more complete exploration of the system’s possibilities through the game itself, and those possibilities are actively being tested.
To an extent yes. I have two measures of depth, absolute versus relative. Absolute is the amount of differentiated game states in the game as a whole. Relative is the number relevant to the playerbase. There might be a huge depth inherent in a game, but the playerbase will only access a certain portion of it. To that extent, the game developers must be cognizant of how the game will actually be played. Creating depth relative to the playerbase is a matter of balance. If you have one weapon for which ammo is abundant which does the highest DPS to enemies in all possible situations, then the amount of depth relative to the playerbase will shrink in relation to the absolute depth of the game. If you have enemies which can be dispatched easily regardless of weapon choice, then the game loses the depth of strategic weapon selection as the situation demands it. If you have a ton of weapons that are each only good at killing one enemy, options that only do one thing and don’t even slightly overlap, then you lose all the scenarios when you use a normally suboptimal weapon for an optimal situational purpose (and a lot of alternate solutions, the game becomes more puzzle-like). If you have a ton of options that all do the same thing, then they lose differentiation, which also is a lack of depth.
Designing for depth is about making it so as many different components of the game are relevant in as many different situations as possible. That’s why I have my 3 criteria shorthand, a given option should have it’s own niche (different role from other options), it should have multiple uses, and create different outcomes based on manipulation of the option or circumstances (like allowing jumps of different heights, getting more distance from different timings, more damage for better timing/positioning, inheriting properties from other variables). It occurs to me that I should add a 4th criteria, for whether an option has an interaction or synergy with another mechanic.
From a design perspective, I feel it’s stronger when a ruleset is enforced by winning or losing, by barring progression or recognition of victory until you actually succeed. It’s one thing to have scoring or time as a supplementary objective, but for most people, that feels really weak. Most people don’t care, I usually don’t care. Difficulty can act as a selective force, pushing players to try different things out to optimize their play, which is what brings out the depth of the game.
Yes, I’ve considered how you can just get by spamming a basic attack before and discussed it with a few different friends. I didn’t like how multiplayer games push us to master everything about the game, but single player games seemingly lack this capacity to always push us higher. How do you even grade high level play in DMC? It’s a matter of style and creativity? How could you make a pass/fail system for that type of thing? The truth is, you can always win literally any beat em up game by spamming the weakest attack and not getting hit. This isn’t true of another human opponent, because they adapt. You can’t spam the same thing forever because they’ll just start doing the thing that beats your spam every time. Though theoretically, you could win a match against a human opponent by spamming if you just always did it at exactly the right time.
If you push for scoring systems, then more often than not, solutions become incredibly rigid and repetitive, rather than vaguely allowing anything that manages to get through.
Yeah, you could probably beat DMC3/4 by spamming nothing but stinger, but I don’t imagine it would be particularly easy to beat it that way. Ninja Gaiden can be beaten with flying swallow, but it’s slow and harder than using other moves.
NG is arguably a good case study here, you shouldn’t always use flying swallow because it doesn’t have the best damage output (though it can insta-kill many smaller enemies), and it can be blocked and punished. You shouldn’t always run directly at opponents because many have ranged attacks that will punish a straightforward approach. You shouldn’t always block and counterattack because enemies have guard breakers or throws, which require you to either reverse wind away or dodge outright. You can’t always spam powerful combos because other enemies are around to hit you, and some will block and punish you (though this is only really true of enemies with super armor in NG1, I noticed the chapter 2 boss of NG2 will do this, requiring hitconfirming). Even without an adaptive AI, if you throw in moves like these which incentivize using some moves for some situations, it influences the decision-making process of the player. Oh, and you should always use the ultimate technique, it just may be tricky to find an opportunity.
Another good case study is DMC4’s bloody palace, which has not only waves of enemies, but the timer which you need to defeat enemies quickly and efficiently in order to earn more time for (with only the loose bonuses for enemy deaths, and no damage). Where in story mode you can win with anything, bloody palace is far more selective, pressuring players to not only deal damage without taking it, but to continually do it the most efficiently they can. Though if you play well enough, you can earn a ton of time and not care how much you waste. Might have paid to set a cap on the maximum amount of time you can earn, to like 15-20 minutes or something maybe.
Regrettably even Quake doesn’t require everything from you. I’m pretty sure it can be beaten with nothing but an axe. (Don’t quote me on that, a vore + shambler like in the final map might be trouble). Still yeah, Quake does a lot to make sure all the components in the system are used through ammo limitations (otherwise lightning gun or rocket launcher would wipe everything out).
Still it’s a pretty good example. Custom Gamer goes over rather frequently how even though one enemy, like a Shambler, might be easily beaten with just an axe (which he does) by itself, if you have two enemies, they can fill in for each other and prevent you from just repeating the thing that kills one enemy dead easily. If you throw in a fiend, then you can’t move into melee range for the shambler, then out again as he attacks, the fiend will hit you. You need to dodge both the fiend and the shambler at once, and the optimal pattern for one doesn’t overlap with the other.
But yeah, difficulty, in particular challenges that stress the different options the player has, requiring them to prioritize some over others, making it difficult to pick the one necessary to survive on a moment-by-moment basis, and giving each a chance to shine, is a big deal for depth.
How are you enjoying the new characters in DMC4: SE?
Only played Lady and Vergil so far. I’ve been avoiding grabbing any health powerups for the challenge. Lady is hard to use, has trouble getting in close to enemies, her controls are a bit tricky to manage, but I feel like she has some potential, because she still does have a varied moveset, she just has a very different approach from the other characters. Like she has the extremely slow, but heavy hitting kalina ann attacks to interrupt enemies up close, shotgun stinger and back blast for big damage, a dedicated long distance launcher, launcher on her pistols, charge shots on all her weapons. A bomb type of super attack that makes her temporarily invincible.
Vergil meanwhile is fast and super destructive. He’s more or less just his DMC3 SE self, except with more moves and some minor changes. I’m a fan of the new air trick teleport, using the sword as a device for it, however I’m not a fan of how you cannot trick up if you have that sword in an opponent, and in general how the trick up command has been deprecated. To trick down while fighting an opponent you need to enter DT mode, it’s oddly restrictive to only offer Trick down at the cost of meter, considering it’s not a very useful move to begin with. Vergil can rapid slash like crazy in DT mode, which looks cool but in my opinion is too powerful and free, even compared to dante’s similar stinger ability. Not a fan of Judgment Cut End, the new super ability either. Lady’s super ability is at least restricted to an area, and costs all her meter. It’s weird how he can’t use summoned swords during taunts anymore. Cute is the decision to make Rising Sun DT only.
I like that Vergil can cancel things with his darkslayer teleport now, but I feel like it cancels way too much. It’s especially nice to cancel rapid slash on yamato with the teleport, but being able to cancel attacks in midair with it is overkill, especially with the emphasis the game typically places on jump cancels. Instead of doing the more difficult and limited jump cancel option you can now teleport straight to them even if they’re out of range. Its use as an alternate dodge type attack is still appreciated though. It would be smart if they limited the number of things he’s allowed to cancel with darkslayer to a more specific set that don’t entirely overlap with jump cancels, like more ground options maybe to retain the feeling of commitment most attacks have. Like limit it to things with long recovery times, like rapid slash, or things with low commitment that aren’t performed within JC range in the air. Or maybe it could uniquely cancel things with high commitment like judgement cut, drive, or round trip? I dunno, just pick a theme, make sure it doesn’t overlap with JCs too much.
In a fighting game, should an OP character receive nerfs or should their weaknesses be amplified to balance out their strengths?
It depends on circumstance. Nerfs make the audience angry. Buffing the characters below them is sometimes more appropriate. Which is appropriate depends on circumstance.
The key thing is, it should be identified which matchups the character dominates in and why they dominate those particular matchups, then those elements of the character should be tweaked so those matchups are 5:5. If characters below them are having that type of trouble, then their options should be reconsidered as well. You really want to preserve diversity while giving every character a way to beat every other character’s options. Part of a way of preventing imbalance in advance is to give characters defensive options across the board that can be used to nullify most options you can give a character, for example Guilty Gear’s myriad array of defensive and movement options tends to allow characters to at least nullify their opponent’s offense.
For example, Bowser in Project M has a really great getup attack from ledge, it’s hard to punish in conventional ways because it’s so fast and far reaching and leaves him pretty safe. However it can be beaten easily by any character just by shielding near the ledge and grabbing him when the ledge attack is done. Characters have these universal defensive options, spot dodging, rolling, air dodging, that help give them options even in bad matchups. Obviously this isn’t going to solve everything, a bad matchup is still a bad matchup, but it can help. Even if your character doesn’t have some of the more specialized tools that another might have to win in a matchup, you can fall back on these universal tools frequently to at least prevent the opponent from gaining too much of an advantage.
Part of it also comes down to the direction the game wants to go in. Sometimes a character’s moveset combines to create a playstyle the development team doesn’t want, which happened for a LOT of characters in Project M 3.02. If you keep going too far in the awesome offensive direction, you end up with a game where everyone has such great combos that people become afraid to aggress, or you get Hokuto No Ken, and that isn’t always what you want.
On paper it sounds good to always buff the underdog, because people hate nerfs, but it’s a question of getting the game into the playstyle where you want it to be. On the other hand, don’t just hand out nerfs all the time or your playerbase will feel punished for improving with characters only to see them get nerfed, especially true with lower tier or lesser played characters.
Amplifying weaknesses to balance out strengths is a concept that only makes sense on paper, with a very one-dimensional understanding of character balance. Weaknesses tend to be situational to the matchup. The matchup tends to determine what counts as a weakness in the first place. Yeah a character might be vulnerable to up throw chaingrabs, but if their opponent doesn’t have an up throw chaingrab or a good followup on their up throw, then it doesn’t matter much. Sure a character might be susceptible to shield pressure, but amplifying that weakness will lead to them getting crushed in shield pressure matchups, but run unopposed in matchups where the opponent can’t do much shieldpressure.
If all the matchups are 5:5, then no character can be S tier.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
Celia Wagar's CritPoints 