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?
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”
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.
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.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/iv/the_futility_of_emergence/ In the comments, the author asks: what *isn’t* emergence? Some people have contested his definition (or rather, his understanding of how some people define emergence).
I’m going to limit my explanation here to games, I believe emergence is a phenomena that exists. I believe it’s a phenomena that is critical to understanding depth. The quintessential engineering goal of games is to produce a large number of distinct outcomes, while keeping the apparent structural complexity of the game low.
For example, I’d cite visual novels as having a low factor of emergence, because the number of outcomes relative to the number of choices is usually 1:1 (though some of course carry over variables, and modify parts of the script based on circumstance). Point and Click adventure games similarly have a low factor, because the majority of interactions between objects are invalid, relying on you to find the valid ones.
To give a simple example, you have rock paper scissors, which has 3 essential elements, that can produce 6 possible outcomes. Interaction of elements to produce a large number of differentiated outcomes is a thing that can reliably be planned for and evaluated. A term used in a similar context is Possibility Space, referring to the range of possibilities created by a system.
The product of a sufficiently complex system is that among the outcomes that emerge from it will be outcomes you could not necessarily foresee. If a system is simple enough that the designer can foresee each individual outcome (at least those significantly differentiated from one another), then as a rule of thumb it is likely to not be a system that will hold player interest for long.
I would personally avoid conflating emergence with unpredictability. I think trying to judge a facet of an object for intention or foresight on the part of the designer is pointless, and emergence is a thing that can be engineered for by creating mechanics that affect variables inherited by or shared with other mechanics.
I actually discussed how this article from Less Wrong made me feel uneasy with a friend fairly recently. It’s primary purpose is to prevent people from using a buzzword as a substitute for a specific explanation, which is sensible. However at least in the field of video games, there is a clear delineation between things that are apparent results of the combination of mechanics (like wavedashing) and things that are arbitrarily implemented (like the properties of a Forward Smash attack). There isn’t an underlying mechanism that determines those according to a more fundamental set of laws (like the laws of muscle composition, organic chemistry, chemistry, newtonian physics, quantum physics as these all apply for a person throwing a right hook), they’re determined arbitrarily by the designer/animator and have none of those underlying rules operating behind them.
You’ve stated before that fuzzy, rather than discrete, variables in games usually make for a deeper experience, because of the range of possible outcomes. But what about when something is made discrete, so that the player has more fine control over it, and greater challenges be presented? For example, in Aban Hawkins and the 1000 (or 1001) Spikes, rather than the usual “control your jump height by holding the button”, they have a button for short, and another for long jump, which allows challenges that would be unreasonable without the precise jump control.
Something I picked up from Monaco’s developer speaking at a conference is that when you have really simple discrete states that they’re easily distinguishable, and easily selected between. That can be helpful for making things clear, having nice and obvious signals of what everything is instead of having it be fuzzy. Depends on what you’re shooting for or if people can even reasonably work with it.
When something is more discrete, it’s not that the player has more fine control over it, they have less fine control over it. It’s that they can more consistently hit the values they need to. That and it becomes less about hitting the range necessary (timing skill test), and more about choosing the right one from the options presented (decisionmaking skill test).
I don’t think I can present an overarching rule of thumb here though, it probably depends based on context.
The other thing is when you separate options discretely you can make tradeoffs that can’t be naturally communicated over a wider value range. Like jumping high versus jumping far (see mario 64), it’s tricky to program an analog system that trades off between the two, but simple with a digital one.
I haven’t played 1001 spikes. I don’t think that the challenges would necessarily be unreasonable with variable jump height. I believe it’s more that they wanted to constrain your options so you need to work around situations where it would be helpful to have a different jump height than the ones you’re fixed with. As well as place a premium on picking the correct jump height for the situation over being able to jump any height between the min and max. This is a valid approach as long as there’s a reason for it and the levels test it.
On the topic of controls, do you think certain tactics like L-cancelling should be automatic? Being manual obviously punishes weaker players, but there are already a lot of hard techniques in the game. Even just short-hopping or wavedashing require quite a bit of practice (they did for me, anyway).
I’m ambivalent on the matter. I think that “automatic L canceling” is kind of a misnomer, because it would actually be more like all the moves being made with landing animations that are half as long.
Regardless of whether L canceling is automatic or L canceling exists or not, the default standard of landing lag should be a lot shorter than in smash 4. What L canceling does is, there are essentially 4-ish speeds of landing lag, the normal 4 frame landing lag which is really short of a standard landing, 6-12 frames for L-canceled aerial attacks and the 14-24 frames for non-L canceled attacks. The big deal with these is, autocancels, float cancels, and missed L cancels (no cancel). Autocancels, such as on marth’s nair, get 4 frames of landing lag, meaning they’re plus on block or neutral, same for float cancels a la peach. This means that they’re pressure setups, much like the shine. Most L canceled aerials are negative or neutral on hit, meaning that you can never grab the other person before they can grab you, but you’re usually safe on block because their grab takes longer than your escape options. No L cancel means you’re usually unsafe on block unless you’re fucking sheik.
The key thing here is, there’s a certain amount of landing lag that is balanced and fair, and allows for combos while not making everything bullshit on shield.
Bonus round, why is it (sort of) cool to have unsafe landing lag? (and therefore, cool to be punished for not doing this tight execution thing) Because the amount of hitfreeze you get is different based on whether you miss, actually hit them, or hit their shield (the last one being the longest). Seeing as the window for L cancels is only 7 frames, you need to actually know roughly whether you’ll hit, miss, or hit shield in order to get the safe and combo-able amount of landing lag so you can capitalize on a hit or keep yourself safe from reprisal. There are plenty of stories about people who can L cancel really great on whiff, but then play people and can’t combo (because they’re not used to hitting people and L canceling).
This means there’s a light element of decision-making there, because if you shoot to L cancel for whiff, you’re really gonna get fucked if they move forward into your attack at the last millisecond and shield. However that’s still mostly a situation where there’s pure advantage and always a correct decision. What can the defender do? The defender can actually tilt their shield up or down to make you go into hitfreeze sooner, so you miss your L cancel timing when you hit the ground. It’s an extremely slight and situational element of strategy, but it is there, so that’s kinda cute. If you make the window wider, the only element of strategy inherent in L canceling disappears.
Beyond that, it feels kinda nice on a kinaesthetic level every time you do it, you get a little “flag” of when you actually land present in your mind to help you remember when you can actually act out of landing. The other thing is when you hit a tiny window and get one motion flowing faster into another that’s the type of thing that naturally feels good, like a link in Street Fighter 4, it feels totally unlike a frametrap.
Overall, I don’t think it’s right or wrong to have L canceling in the game. I think if you just had shorter landing lag, short as typical L canceled landing lag, that it’s not really that big a setback, the strategic element is extremely small, and it’s not really that big a deal to have something like that in the game considering it almost never comes up. The thing which I honestly really hate is when indie developers try to make it easier rather than just outright removing it. It’s missing the tiny tangible benefit of even having it, just so they can pay lip service to melee fans that are used to it. They don’t know why it feels nice that it’s there or what it even adds to the game, as insignificant an addition it is, so they trivialize it, yet leave it as a vestige. It’s dumb business.
What do you think of people asking for advanced techs like SHFFLS and wavedashing to be put back in Smash 5 but have them bound to a button? e.g. hold LB and if you jump you shorthop, continuing to hold it causes a fast fall, flick the Lsick with LB held does an air attack. L cancelling would be left as is though. another e.g Holding LB and then pressing left or right along with shield causes a wavedash, etc…
Seems like it would be awkward, counterintuitive, and missing the point. Project M making those things easier is contentious enough, outright changing the inputs, especially to introduce a new macro modifier button, is over the line. Shorthopping, fast falling, and l canceling are all individual actions that can be performed independently. If you change the input then the metaphor for shorthopping breaks down, same for fast falling. If you change the left stick to attack when modified by left trigger instead of move the character then you remove the utility of the move almost entirely versus grounded attacks. A key component of shffls is you can move forward or back while doing them.
Really, don’t reinvent the wheel, just stick with what works.
Leaving L canceling as it is just makes the motion complicated in a different way.
Having a grounded wavedash function is similarly dumb, because wavedash is useful for braking during a dash dance and different angles relative to the ground travel different distances, depending on how parallel to the ground you’re traveling.
This also ignores wavelanding. When you land, you’re actually partially embedded in the ground, so you can wavedash perfectly parallel to the ground for maximum distance and speed, same when you rise up through a platform. There’s a balance there obviously, which most easy wavedash control schemes ignore.
How do you feel about auto L-cancelling being implemented as an option in the upcoming PM 3.6 ?
I haven’t gotten the chance to play it myself yet, but if it’s like 20XX’s implementation, it’s alright. In 20XX, you can set L cancel to be automatic, but pressing the button will still trigger the white flash, so you can practice getting better at the input while also practicing the correct followups from a successful L cancel.
It probably will not be allowed in tournaments, like input assist is not, so it will not affect the game at large. We have already agreed in our local scene to not use it.
Gonna repost my schpiel from facebook:
What I’ll say with L canceling is, for the most part it requires you to know whether you will whiff, hit the person, or hit their shield. If you thought you were going to whiff, then suddenly they move up and shield your aerial, you’re in for trouble. People can intentionally angle their shields higher so the hitstop delays you a bit sooner before you hit the ground. There are these situations in which the longer landing lag will come into effect, allowing for things to become punishable.
Not to mention it feels good, from a kinaesthetic perspective.
If you have L canceling, then you have this additional reminder, a “flag” you could say, of when you hit the ground, to better keep track of when you’re actionable out of landing.
L canceling isn’t something that needs to be in the game, but it’s not devoid of strategic elements.
The real point is that the amount of landing lag you get from L canceling is the amount that should be the standard, so if L canceling was removed, the length of the animations should be in the 7-15 lag frame range.
How WOULD you feel if auto L-cancelling could be toggled on a player by player basis? Kinda like a handicap.
Just don’t make it the standard.
I mean, we could potentially do this for a lot of things, why have it so short hop requires you to release the button quickly? why not allow people to bind shorthop to another button? Why not have a B-reverse/wavebounce button? Why not have it so you dash all the time? Why not add auto-sweet spotting to ledges? automatic meteor cancel? automatic perfect shield? automatic perfect pivot? Automatic multishine? How about a 10 frame buffer?
You could do all sorts of shit to make the game easier, but people don’t want that. People want to succeed and fail at these things because it is fun to succeed and fail at them. Arbitrary execution requirements are fun to have here and there. They just need to be appropriate to the action in question.
Extending the question about automatic l-cancelling, do you think wavedash should be mapped to a single button? It’s essentially just dash with awkward controls. I meant it’s just a dash when Melee is compared to other FGs like GG. I don’t see the point in the jumping input before the actual wavedash. What’s the point of awkwardly angling yourself against the ground? It’s just unnecessary inputs that make it harder than it should be.
No, because it isn’t.
Dash doesn’t have a startup time of your prejump frames + 10 more landing lag frames where you can’t act. Dash doesn’t allow you to perform ground actions that aren’t specials or dash attack, or move backwards while facing forwards. The initial dash animation doesn’t allow you to cancel into crouch until it ends.
The wavedash is essentially a short burst of speed, slower than a dash, that allows you to move in a neutral state after paying some startup time.
Not to mention that with the current control setup, you can arbitrarily wavedash any distance based on the angle of your air dodge, making it a valuable way to brake yourself during dash dance.
Because the wavedash is a jump first, it means that anything that cancels into jump also cancels into wavedash, which allows people to wavedash out of shield which can be important in some matchups, like versus marth, you can punish fsmash on shield with WD out of shield.
Because the wavedash works the way it does, there is the much harder perfect waveland command, when you waveland perfectly parallel to the ground when coming up through a platform or falling onto one. Perfect wavelands have more distance than wavedashes, which is important for some characters like ganondorf, for invincible edgedashes, and for generally adding more variety to the game. Also wavedashes can inherit speed from regular dashes because dash momentum carries over into jumpsquat.
If you change the way the wavedash command works, then you change the game.
That and honestly. It’s not that hard. I’ve sat down with a number of people who have never played smash bros melee much at all, and they asked me, “How do you wavedash?” or “What’s wavedashing?” And I show them, they try it with like Samus, Luigi, Ice Climbers, and eventually figure it out, and go, “Oh, that’s it? I thought it would be harder.”
It’s something so easy that I do it across the stage as a victory lap when I take a stock, that I’m mixing it into my dash dances, and I do it potentially risking death if I fuck up to get off the ledge. It’s easier than a clean dragon punch, and the motion to do it feels really nice to me.
The angle determines how far you will go, and you don’t always want to go the maximum distance. You jump so you can airdodge. The inputs aren’t unnecessary. If you remove the angling bit, then people can’t use wavedashing to brake themselves or control the distance the dash goes. If you remove the jumping bit, then wavedash out of shield and waveshine become impossible, not to mention that characters with long jumpsquats suddenly get way better wavedashes (when they typically rely on wavelands)
If you remove the inputs, then the functionality and flexibility of the motion is lessened. If you pare it down to a single “Wavedash” button on the L or R trigger, that you just press left or right during (and it defaults to the direction you’re facing) then you’re killing the entire functionality of the move. It’s significantly less useful. That and people will likely end up facing the wrong direction more often because they’ll press left or right on the control stick before the wavedash button is pressed. If you no longer have to angle it, then perfect wavelanding is pointless.
If they mapped wavedash to a button and designed the game around it, don’t you think it would lead to some interesting design? Combos in FGs, rocket-jumping in Quakes, and skiing in Tribes were all turned into ‘legit’ mechanics in sequels with modified, more convenient inputs.
Except what you’re describing never happened in ANY of the games you mentioned, and the phrase, “designed the game around it,” is vacuous. (I dislike vague statements like this categorically. I hear “they designed the game around X” without supporting details too often.)
Combos in fighting games are performed and operate the same way in modern fighting games as they did back in street fighter 2. They didn’t add a “Combo button” that does a combo for you. You still need to hit them with a normal, buffer directional inputs, then press another button for a special attack during the hitstop of the first normal making impact, just like you did all the way back in Street Fighter 2. The only difference is that the Kara window isn’t 5 frames anymore, it’s 1 frame, and the cancelable property for moves is determined arbitrarily by the designers now, because it’s intentionally put in there rather than being rollover frames from the kara-cancel that are extended in real time by the hitfreeze.
Rocket-Jumping in Quake and every other game that has rocket jumping is still performed by looking down at your feet and firing a rocket. If there’s a shooter with a rocket-jump button now, please inform me so I can avoid the abomination.
Skiing in Tribes is a trickier case, and arguably the only legitimate example you have here, because the original way skiing was performed was mashing jump, until players wrote a script for the original starsiege tribes that automated mashing space bar. In Tribes 2 and Tribes Vengeance (far as I’m aware, I admit that I don’t have first hand experience here), Skiing was reimplemented on the level of the physics engine, however the developers didn’t give the players a ski button, they gave them another macro button for jump. It’s only in Tribes Ascend that the engine was built from scratch and a dedicated ski function that modified your friction was implemented. However in all of these games, you ski the same damn way effective, you hold the space bar. The control method from a player perspective isn’t really any different. You still need to aim for downward slopes, and jetpack up upward slopes.
They don’t need to map wavedash to a single button, mapping it to a single button would be actively detrimental to the game. This is stupid like saying Quake needs a bunnyhop button rather than swerving to the left and right. When you change things in the name of making them simpler without very carefully considering what you’re doing, you end up removing operational constraints that players normally need to work around, and the flexibility of the option, ruining it for everyone.
It works the way it works, it’s better off being this way, get used to it.
I don’t get the appeal of post symphony of the night castlevania (granted, i haven’t played order of the ecclesia). In older castlevania games enemies took precise positioning and timing to kill, while in the metroidvania games you can slice through enemies like butter. Care to elaborate?
You’re entirely correct, a lot of the post-sotn games did feature weak enemy placement and flat-out weak enemies. I personally feel like the levelup component is almost completely pointless.
The appeal is primarily in the process of figuring out how the whole castle connects together and routing between areas. There are a number of points on the map that contain items you want to pick up, or which trigger events elsewhere, so you want to pass through those points, hitting as many of them in as short a path you can. It’s essentially the traveling salesman problem, which is fairly interesting to solve over and over again as you make treks across the castle. Sometimes you’re just exploring new unseen areas, sometimes you’re connecting new and old areas, sometimes you’re finding a way you can use a power to gain access to a new area, and with new shortcuts the map’s topology practically changes.
The other thing post-sotn games introduced was more complex/varied movement mechanics, like the wolf form, mist form, bat form (wing smash), double jump, divekick, backdash, crouch slide, super jump, and so on. And more complex/varied attacks, like the short sword that can be canceled by landing, fireballs, and a number of other things. These obviously add interest by giving people things that they can master, and which are tricky to use, introducing interesting choices and additional considerations into simple movement.
I felt like Order of Ecclesia was the strongest of the post-sotn games personally, it had a very solid combat system like the others, but generally more linear level design. This arguably lead to it having very solid enemy placement, with enemies that actually blocked your path forward and couldn’t be bypassed very easily. Nice bosses too. I 100%’d the game, and beat locked level 1 hard mode, without death ring.
I feel like there isn’t much preventing metroidvanias from having good enemy placement, except as Egoraptor pointed out, once you get through a tough enemy placement, do you really want to have to redo that every time you go through the area? This is actually where levelups come in. By having levelups, you can make earlier enemies that are previously tough a lot easier. If you can beat enemies in one hit, then it doesn’t really matter if from an execution standpoint they’re really tricky to dodge, damage, or bypass.
Obviously this leads to balance problems, you can get overleveled, underleveled, need to grind, or feel like grinding and just ruin things. The post-SOTN games generally have good level curves that have you at the right level at all times, I honestly haven’t needed to grind once in them except to grab rare drops, which I think are an issue in their own right.
As an alternative to this, I propose that when you grab an orb from a boss, instead of you getting stronger, all the monsters in the area that boss governed get weaker (same thing honestly). This means you can enter ANY AREA and always have the enemies be the appropriate difficulty for that area, and getting through enemies you’ve already beaten is easy. For bonus points, have it scale based on the number of boss orbs you’ve gotten.
I once asked you about reaching the end of creative possibilities and you responded that there is still so much not being done. You used the example of palette swapping a small picture and receding spikes in a IWBTG mod. Ignoring the fact that that mechanic has been used in Mario games…
I didn’t say palette swap, I was talking about every single possible 100×100 picture. It was a metaphor. Think about it. Every picture you’ve ever saved has a thumbnail, about 100×100 big. You can frequently identify pictures just by their thumbnail. There are a tremendous number of pictures possible that are still identifiable from their thumbnail. Math says there’s a massive number of possible 100×100 thumbnails. The concept I was trying to get across was that if there are so many visually distinct thumbnails, then surely the number of visually distinct full size pictures is many orders of magnitude bigger. The number of different possible thumbnails is so large that it’s impossible for them all to simultaneously exist in the same universe (more permutations than particles in the universe by several orders of magnitude for something as small as a 100×100 picture).
The implication here is that if something that small can have such variation that we’ll never exhaust all the possible permutations of it, then surely something more complex like games won’t run out any time soon.
You got me on the Mario games, I forgot that there were those platforms that switch when you jump. I could be picky and say, “but it’s not spikes,” but that would be dumb. I’ll include a new mechanic in the next post, I thought a game idea up recently that hinged on a mechanical idea.
(and probably other games), I don’t see how you those are proper examples. The picture might have millions of different colour combinations, but at the end of the day, it’s a simple picture and the only combinations that will matter are those that are very distinct (e.g. a red pic vs a blue pic), but being a different shade of red of blue won’t separate it from the original red and blue version of the picture. Similarly, some platforming gimmick that is done slightly differently than another platform gimmick isn’t a very strong example of creativity.
As said, it was a metaphor. There’s a billion ways you could code something, I’m pretty sure we haven’t made up every possible mechanic yet.
Here’s one that I’m pretty sure has never been done before:
I had a thought for an antigravity racing game recently. What if there were 3 thrust modes, regular, one that had you suspended low off the track, and one that had you suspended high off the track? And these thrust modes would change the handling/top speed of the vehicle. And when you switch between the thrust modes from a lower to a higher one, you’d get a jump proportional to the change in thrust. So low thrust to normal thrust would be a small hop, normal thrust to high would be an average jump, and low directly to high would be a big jump.
Courses could have obstacles you can jump/hover over/under and of course crash into, so players need to use their thrust modes wisely to avoid trouble and of course go fast. Beyond that, if you move onto higher elevation terrain just as you jump, it could boost the jump even further, sort of like the same effect in dark souls and bloodborne, adding another skill component.
In low thrust mode I imagine you have better handling, maybe switching into low thrust as you do a turn lets you drift. In high thrust mode you could have a higher top speed, but worse handling since you’re so far off the ground. So if you want to go fast, high thrust is the way to go, but of course in high thrust mode, you can’t jump without going to a lower thrust mode and back first. Naturally obstacles like high rises could be put in the way that need to be gone under in low thrust mode or jumped high over so people who go high thrust all the time crash.
My thought was that racing games have courses that are fairly easy to clear by themselves, leaving the real challenge to time trial. If you had more hazardous courses and more means of traversal then maybe you’d end up with a more interesting single player experience, or maybe just a more interesting game overall.
I don’t have any new platforming gimmicks on me right now, but well, how many games are similar to Gimmick!? You can create stars that bounce and ride on them.
or Fire n Ice? Where you can create and destroy ice blocks, but only downwards diagonally.
or Bio Miracle? where you inflate enemies to use as platforms or projectiles that you push.
Obviously, as the work in question gets more complex, the potential for creativity increases (a simple picture will exhaust its creative potential long before a game will), but there is still a finite space for ‘meaningful’ creativity. And this goes for settings as well, not just mechanics.
Sure, there’s a finite space, but that space is larger than there is room to express using the entire universe as a canvas. Realistically speaking, there’s no limits on creativity relevant to humans.
How often have you seen settings with a hindu or buddhist influence? Or anything eastern that isn’t japanese? What about aboriginal? African? We’ve only had a few instances of arabian, including like prince of persia. If you’re limited to only recombining the world’s existing cultures, you still have a wide-ass palette.
If a simple 100×100 picture can have so many different possible variations that we literally cannot express them all, then what have we to worry about games or art?
What’s the difference between X fantasy setting and Y fantasy setting? So obviously, at some point humanity will enter a stasis until a great cataclysm wipes out almost everything and we have to start over. Or we can keep playing Melee.
What’s the difference between Shin Megami Tensei Nocturne and Digital Devil Saga (which actually does use hinduism as an influence)? Between those and Persona or Strange Journey? How different are Kingdom Hearts, The World Ends With You, American McGee’s Alice, Bloodborne, and Final Fantasy 7?
Looking back further, you have a ton of different D&D campaign settings, forgotten realms, eberron, spell jammer, dark sun, ghostwalk, ravenloft, and planescape.
There’s tons of variation possible. I’m working on a setting that I think is fairly unique for a tabletop RPG I’m developing. People just need to get creative.
Do you think 3D is more complex than 2D (or that 2D will be exhausted before 3D)?
There’s a lot of things limiting 3D that tends to keep the complexity about the same. When you’re constrained to a 2d plane, and have gravity pulling down on you, it tends to allow for certain interactions that don’t work as well in 3d. Like fireballs in 2d fighters. In 3d, you can strafe around that shit. That’s why the souls games have projectiles home slightly.
The other thing is, 3d is limited by our controllers. Most of the best 3d games tend to format the game to 2d in a way, then add in subtle 3d interactions. I’m sure you’ve seen the bloodborne video that makes it play from a top down perspective. Of course you can’t play the game the best that way, but it almost works. You could easily flatten a souls game and have something almost as good that would work without the jank (like if you flattened the hitboxes so nothing could go over or under anything else, much like hotline miami or GTA), except they definitely have some z-action going on in the original game, so you lose a bit.
Devil May Cry is sort of like this too, then they add jumping and things with height, but the fixed camera angles help show the game from a semi-top down perspective, almost isometric (except obviously not orthographic).
Also, this is why mortal kombat 9 can feel a bit janky with the hits. The hitboxes are in 3d and at the angle it’s portrayed at, it’s not easy to tell what the hell is going on.
In my opinion, 2d will never die
I’m kind of confused now, are we talking about mechanics or aesthetics? a picture is aesthetic. the way it looks can be infinite, but the painting technique is finite. likewise, ok, I guess there can technically be infinite settings, but mechanics will have to be finite (or infinite, but with negligible differences). there are people who claim that games will culminate in first-person VR, but that idea hinges on genres (i.e. mechanics) exhausting and then all that will be left if the aesthetic. but while you provided many different fantasy games, all of those settings have been done before in literature, film, or visual art. it’s only new for games because games are a new medium. and many of them are not really ‘original’ per se. DMC did Bloodborne first, KH is a crossover, SMT games all have thematic/aesthetic similarities, TWEWY is pop Japan with fantasy. like don’t get me wrong, I do think that there is tons of untapped potential. but then is it mechanical or aesthetic? like D&D has incredible lore, but that’s b/c there are a ton of games and they’ve developed everything so much.
Both. I was using pictures and aesthetics as a parallel.
I don’t think mechanics have a finite number of permutations then they’re kaput. At least none in close sight. Look at all these different abstract strategy games for example.
Only 2 fighting games (that I can think of off the top of my head) have normals that pull opponents in (for the grappler characters), Potemkin in Guilty Gear, and Big Band in Guilty Gear. Lucario (PM) and Slayer (guilty gear) both have teleports that make them invincible which can be canceled to retain the invincibility period.
Are these not different enough for you, or are they only negligibly different and you want wholecloth creation practically? Mechanics are going to be about as diverse as your ability to add, subtract, multiply, and divide numbers as well as any derivative thereof. They’re going to be as diverse as your ability to define cross-sections of space and their ability to change over time. Going to be as diverse as the states defined for objects and what conditions will change or modify those states.
Those people who place such trust in VR as an ultimate solution are stupid. I don’t think the idea of eventually exhausting genres hinges on that, I think the idea is ignorant of mechanics. It’s like a form of blindness, to not recognize that you can’t get the same possibility space in an FPS game as an RTS or a 2d platformer.
The primary reason games have similar mechanics is because AAA doesn’t know how to innovate. EA admitted they have no idea how to innovate or roll out a new IP. We continually see the use of Batman Arkham style combat or QTEs because those things can encompass nearly any action from an aesthetic perspective. People don’t have a mind for modeling representational simulations, people don’t have a mind for how to construct a system that tests a particular skill. People don’t have a mind for what skills they can test in the first place or how to create a system of strategy between those skill tests that creates a large number of equally weighted possibilities, which is the real killer.
Far as the settings I mentioned go, I’m pretty sure TWEWY is rather original. Everything we know of fantasy had its basis in something. Invention is the recombination of information. Where else has japanese hip hop graffiti spiritualism happened? Same for the Vortex world of SMT3, literally Tokyo wrapped inside a sphere with a spirit sun at the center, and the Hindu Junkyard of Digital Devil Saga, even if the same artist was behind both looks.
Similar for Star Wars too in my opinion. Where the hell did Jedi come from? They seem like an archetype with no natural origin. As a sci-fi universe, the Star Wars universe always stood out to me.
And as I said, there are a ton of cultures and religions that have not really been explored in games or in media very much and I’m sure there are a ton of ways to twist them.
All the different tabletop RPG settings are like that honestly. Look at White Wolf RPGs. The recent Demon The Descent rulebook outlines a rather unique setting all by itself. It’s not a product of just time alone, they know what they’re doing. Most of the settings I mentioned last post are underdeveloped compared to their more mainstream settings.
When you say D&D has incredible lore, all I can say is, which setting? They all have different lore, and some of them are really out there too, like spelljammer.
I’m using the aesthetic potential out there as a parallel for the mechanical. I know there’s potential in both.
If you think that 2D has so many possibilities even compared to 3D (though that might be because games aren’t designed very much with 3d interactions in mind…), would you say that even… 1D has many unexplored possibilities, that haven’t even been considered? I’m being serious here.
There’s probably a fair amount you can do with 1d. A lot of 2d games could be represented in 1d, like karate champ, or berzerk (old game, think of flatland here). A few 3d games could probably be represented in 1d, like a lot of the Dragon Ball Z fighting games, especially the split screen ones, and the more recent naruto fighting games (kidding here, they aren’t actually one dimensional). There was Senor Footsies a while back which was essentially 1d. I’d say rock paper scissors is basically 1d, or nondimensional. What would Poker be?
I don’t see nearly as much potential for 1d though. I bet there’s a lot we haven’t done, but I don’t see as much we could do with that harsh a limitation. Like, you need to have a few variables that can be varied in some way, otherwise you end up with no means of differentiating options from one another, there’s no tradeoff.
Also also, line wobbler is an actually 1d game (not 2d with 1d vision), though I don’t know if it’s too interesting. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZ_5ol_kyL4 I guess more interesting concepts could be explored in 1d, if anyone tried.
That’s cool. Definitely goes to show some stuff can be done in 1d, but as said, I think a lot of what’s possible in 2d just isn’t in 1d, you’ll be a lot more constrained than even the transition between 3d and 2d, because you need a certain minimum number of variables to get a decent sized possibility space.
Also related to that 1d question, there was this 2d first person game (so a 1d display) ages ago on the web, from a 7dfps, but I can’t find it, though I did find this seven dimensions one that displays in a series of one dimension lines (and a point) http://www.marries.nl/games/seven-dimensions/
Ah yeah, that’s like flatland. Cool stuff. I honestly can’t make sense of it from just the video.
How should developers handle balancing in fighting games?
Prior to first release, it’s almost impossible to put out something balanced. The best you can do is playtest internally with skilled players. Try to set a baseline level of power on the character that is felt to be the one most representative of the spirit of the game, like Ryu in Street Fighter 2. Sirlin has a number of good balance related articles:
Beyond that, it’s about identifying which characters are the most or least powerful. This is tricky, because frequently you’ll find that noobs determine one thing is overpowered that isn’t really overpowered, like Ike in Brawl, Little Mac in Smash 4, all sorts of things. Having a bunch of experienced players try to make up a tier list from playing the game a lot with different characters is as good a start as you can get, then beyond that to focus on each individual matchup and why one character wins over the other, altering the characters so they will fight evenly in that matchup without screwing up the rest, like a gordian knot. On the flip side, they will all be a bit biased by their choice in character and try to influence you to do things that help their character. Probably. Pro players have a conflicting motivation from the game designer, they want to win more frequently.
Another key thing that I see a lot is, when an unintended exploit or something comes up, what most frequently happens is it gets nerfed into the ground, or removed outright. What I’d like to see more of is trying to preserve that type of thing, but make it fit into the ecosystem. The key thing to emphasize is that all the parts of the character have a use for something and they all get used, and they’re all distinct from one another. On a larger level, all the characters should be good at something, and they should all be used, and they should all be distinct from one another.
An easy way to balance is to homogenize the characters by nerfing their strengths. The battle in balance is to create diversity. If you have a bunch of totally radically different characters, then one of them is likely to beat most of the others, so low diversity overall. Your job is to ensure that all the characters and all the options are being used, but it’s also to ensure that they all are distinct and unique. If something is underutilized, you need to give it more utility, or nerf the things that block its utility.
Project M and Guilty Gear are perhaps the two most successful examples of balance I’ve seen yet, with Project M currently having all the characters viable except Olimar and Ice Climbers, and those only inviable because of some minor faults, and very open about it.
Celia Wagar's CritPoints 