Because it's really fun to just barely get through a fight, and then have to reload a save to do it better because the game throws a fight you can't survive at you afterwords.
Health Packs actually do require a lot more work to program, because you have to make sure that the average player will find enough of them to survive but not so many that they'll grow complacent and never be in any danger, and you have to design combat sections and save systems with the assumption that a player may run out of potions at any time. With regenerating health, all combat sections can assume that the player is starting off at max health, making them easier to balance across the game, along with making autosaving risk-free and making health management easier on the player.
It's not a bad thing - the extra effort that would have been put into balancing health will most likely be spent elsewhere, possibly in an area that will improve gameplay - but it is a deliberate choice. And it's only good if that extra effort is spent on, y'know, actual game play and not making sure that Nathan Drake's boring haircut looks perfect in HD, and with most modern AAA games, you can't assume that.
...okay, i understand that there are some people who have basically absurd opinions or at least spout what seem to be absurd opinions when they are merely trying to talk about their own tastes, but can we stop with the shadowboxing already?
My point is that the crouch button gives a wider range of actions to use cover for.
What actions?
I can crouch behind cover and that minimizes my visible model (and hitbox). I'm not exactly sure what a "get behind cover" funtion really adds, aside from the fact that we could have head-tilting which isn't a ubiquitous FPS feature.
If getting behind cover can convert FPS into TPS and give us extra perspective of what's ahead WITHOUT revealing ourselves, then that's maybe an interesting thing. But if it's a TPS in the first place then we can already play with the camera to see around ourselves.
...okay, i understand that there are some people who have basically absurd opinions or at least spout what seem to be absurd opinions when they are merely trying to talk about their own tastes, but can we stop with the shadowboxing already?
My point is that the crouch button gives a wider range of actions to use cover for.
What actions?
I can crouch behind cover and that minimizes my visible model (and hitbox). I'm not exactly sure what a "get behind cover" funtion really adds, aside from the fact that we could have head-tilting which isn't a ubiquitous FPS feature.
If getting behind cover can convert FPS into TPS and give us extra perspective of what's ahead WITHOUT revealing ourselves, then that's maybe an interesting thing. But if it's a TPS in the first place then we can already play with the camera to see around ourselves.
Ooh, more Cavyhouse. Also going even weirder. I guess I won't be buying this unless it has a non-VR implementation though.
In Gears of War and similar games, you can pop out to fire at enemies while maintaining a lower profile, or blind fire your gun to discourage enemies while being even harder to hit
Okay technically this is more of a TPS thing, but the two genres generally get talked about in the same breath
That site is...a pain to read because it's way wide though I see now that the Specs page isn't extra wide. The Dräkblog also mentions it. Though they call it a "cinematic mode" which is a term I haven't seen before but I have basically ignored the whole VR scene so maybe that's a common term in that scene for non-VR gaming.
I would also be totally okay with it if this means Dark Souls clones are becoming a thing like Monster Hunter clones but I can't imagine that happening really.
One thing I'm hoping is they sort out hit impact by the time it comes out, because it kinda looked like attacks were just going straight through things without any resistance?
Trailer for Prepare to Dine Code Vein, Bamco's new vampire ARPG.
DYRE's comment about this being a Dark Souls clone made me a bit hesitant at first, but if the game has music as awesomely rich as that which is used in the trailer, I'm interested in this.
I think GMH's comment is more because he isn't interested in Dark Souls itself (apparently mostly(?) because it doesn't have music most of the time).
For me, as far as Dark Soulses go, I do actually hope that it either does go all the way and just completely rip off Dark Souls's gameplay or else stop trying to look like it is so much. Imo, Nioh had the sort-of-problem of copying a lot of superficial stuff about Dark Souls but not actually any of the main gameplay and it made the whole experience a little weird (ie I keep wanting to compare it to Dark Souls even though it's not really all that similar outside of how leveling up works).
I think GMH's comment is more because he isn't interested in Dark Souls itself (apparently mostly(?) because it doesn't have music most of the time).
Yes, this.
Also the fact that the gameplay seems a bit slow for my tastes, thus making it more of a chore to do the exploring part, which I DO like. To be fair, I haven't ever played it myself, but I've watched friends play a good amount of it. I've also seen him play Bloodborne, which seems to play faster than Dark Souls, and seems a little more up my alley, though that's sort of offset by the fact that it's about eldritch horrors and (more importantly) that it's stuck on PS4 rather than on PC.
I've sort of been on the fence on Dark Souls, though leaning toward the "not interested" side. But at least it's on my radar enough that I think about buying it when it's discounted.
I have thought about what you said, and I have come to the conclusion that 'Dark Souls, but fast' is a terrifying concept.
I mean
Look, remember the New Londo Bros? Imagine how much worse that would be if it was fast.
Dunno what New Londo Bros is, but basically when I'd say "Dark Souls, but fast" (which i actually haven't said before, but I guess that's something I could use, thanks), what I mean is a bit of a combination of two things: 1. increasing the pace of gameplay a bit, the way Bloodborne is faster than Dark Souls 2. faster movement, with the gameplay changed to accommodate it. This might be a bit more complicated, and admittedly to some extent I'm speaking hypothetically about Dark Souls's gameplay (specifically its combat), so feel free to correct me if you think I'm mistaken at any point, but here goes:
Basically, something that involves using more of positioning/movement, rather than blocking or a choosing from a variety of different weapon techniques (or generally, more complex combat action controls), to succeed in combat. My vague understanding is that Dark Souls has either a rough balance between the two or emphasizes the latter, though the balance is dependent on the character build the player chooses. (Again, please correct me if I'm wrong.)
My idea of really fast, smooth gameplay, within the bounds of the same sort of game (an action adventure game with some exploration/free-roaming elements), is the seven "castletroid" games. They're not all equally "fast", to be fair, but the best examples by far are the two Sorrow games, where the player-character can dash through rooms, as well as dash toward and away from major opponents that they are fighting. Now, I don't expect anything with Dark Souls's lineage to come anywhere near this, because that wouldn't really make sense, as from what I understand, Dark Souls's very specialty is slow, deliberate combat.
Perhaps a more relevant comparison -- 3D platforming, and also a reputation for difficulty -- might be the Ys games of the '00s. In those three games (with the possible exception of Ark since I haven't played it), the gist of the combat is a game of learning the positioning to avoid taking too much damage, and then taking advantage of openings to attack. Your controls are one button to swing your weapon, one button to jump, one button to use magic (which can be held to charge the magic), and one or two buttons to switch between three magic spells, and it is only later in the game (or with advanced challenges, e.g. time attack) that you may need to switch frequently between the spells, so the combat can be characterized as being straightforward, but intense and fast-paced.
That sort of combat might not quite be fully suited to a Dark-Souls-style game, to be fair. Note the size of the player-character relative to the screen in the Ys games -- the player-character is quite small, compared to the relative size of the Dark Souls or Bloodborne player-character, which shows that the latter inherently puts more emphasis on the details of combat and provides less visibility of one's surroundings for dodging by positioning.
But so I guess the impression I get is that I might be bored by the repetitiveness and slow pace of Dark Souls combat, whereas I'd prefer to be able to fight through things a little faster and in a simpler way. Note that "simpler" need NOT mean "less difficult" or "less dangerous"; instead, what I'm interested in is something that involves more dancing around things and circumventing things (and doing so more intuitively, at least for me) than banging my head against them.
(That description reminds me...I have been meaning to play the thief games, but I haven't yet.)
What I meant was the Super Londo Bros. Manectric and Slaking. Tazey and Smashy. Those two guys.
@Glenn: Point taken, but if you mean fast in that way, then you can definitely play Dark Souls fast. Blocking is one way (albeit a very useful way, if you have the stats for it), but in terms of complex actions, it doesn't get that complex. You have a dodge button. You have a parry button, which only works on a handful of enemies so pffft. And you can occasionally backstab people, if you're really quiet. That's about it. You can definitely get through the game with a character built for speed with only the occasional hiccup. Or you could even go with a poise-heavy, armor-heavy build, in which case you have two settings: smashing face and getting a hit of Sunny-D so you can smash more face.
yeah i've known for a while now that i have a tendency to use fewer tools than i am given, when a gameplay system gets sufficiently complex.
e.g. castlevania harmony of dissonance, where i'm offered several subweapons and several spellbooks, or circle of the moon, where i get some number of cards to make magical combos with them, yet all I end up doing is going through the game with my whip and one subweapon because they're just the most conveniently available and consistent thing to do, figuring out how to use a few tools in lots of ways, as opposed to using more tools
i'm just a sucker for familar/simple control schemes lol
incidentally i also tend to be a bit lazy about character building haha
Alpha Protocol is incredibly mechanically focused and nuanced game for how complex its interlocking systems are, and it's an absolute shame it's undercut by a lack of polish.
The balance is kind of weird though? Like everyone is level 90 or so, but all their spells are first tier, so you run into the weird problem of not really having any effective heals because you have 10,000+ HP but your best heal spell heals 2000
It does mean that Tita makes for an incredibly effective healer at the moment though, because she's got a 3,500 HP instant heal + cures status effects and debuffs
No Olivier yet but the second I do he's going in my party 24/7 because <3
Now I'm thinking of how the original release did the "being evil gets you better rewards" thing, and then carried that on all the way to the ending.
Kill your sister, you get the strongest sword in the game, spare her, and you'll get a pat on the back for not being a massive ass. (Also you allow for the events of Fable 2 to happen, in which a whole lot of people die. Good work on that.)
Mass Effect 1: Best worldbuilding, lots of ethically complex sidequests, focus on exploration (for better or worse), clunky RPG mechanics that made the okay combat frustrating, okay plot, good cadre of villains
Mass Effect 2: Best NPCs (even with frigging Jacob dragging the score down), sidequests and exploration pared down to add more character development, combat becomes more streamlined at the cost of becoming more generic, overall story is bearable but a footnote to the focus on teammates, worldbuilding basically spits in the face of ME1's worldbuilding unless it's directly related to an NPC's character development.
Mass Effect 3: Best combat in the series, made choices matter more than the average Telltale game, good to okay sidequests, cut out exploration almost entirely, bad overall writing, added nothing of value in terms of worldbuilding or new characters. Especially Kai 'Cereal Lover' Leng.
This is the inarguable and unassailable truth. I will brook no dissent.
As someone who did their first run with the Engineer class, the combat sucked in Mass Effect 1, especially if you decided that you didn't want to be biotic and had to get by without the ability to stun enemies at will.
Mass Effect 1's worldbuilding was inconsistent. It's a lot of good mixed with a lot of embarrassing white nerdisms. Mass Effect 2 was goofy pulp but it was supported by some strong thematic through-lines (like the contrast between Illium and Omega). Mass Effect 3 is tonally very odd but I love it and think it finally worked out a cohesive approach to the series mythology that ironed out some of the weird "whatever, it's scifi" stuff.
Also. The Mako sucks. Not because it controls poorly- which it does. And I think the clunkiness of it isn't really a problem on its own, because it adds to the space explorer feeling, and for that reason I'd be a staunch advocate of the Mako.... if Mass Effect 1 was a game about space exploration. Which it's not. It's a space military drama.
Any ethically complex sidequests are undercut by dumb morality mechanics. A potentially interesting choice is almost always ruined by the knowledge that you can get the optimal path by holding up and right and pressing A through the entire thing (except when you see a Charm option, at which point you always choose the Charm option). 2 at least had few pretenses of ethical complexity, and 3 presents what is to me the most coherent and sensible version of the Paragon/Renegade system yet, but too often succumbs to half measures in trying to feebly assert that both of them have their advantages.
Kex, I know that arguments about Mass Effect have literally never ended well between us, but I'm going to disagree on the point about the Mako. The first Mass Effect was, if not by virtue of plot focus then by virtue of game mechanics, about exploring a world that a bunch of sci-fi geeks went out of their way to create. Sure, a lot of that exploration was via Codex, but a lot of that was explicitly through mechanics. You get rewarded with extra XP from digging into every nook and cranny of the Citadel, and sidequests like 'scan all the keepers' support that. The Mako sections make exploring non-essential planets interesting by letting you actually experience the unique environments (to the extent that the game engine and dev resources could support unique environments) rather than getting to read boring blips while you scan for eezo in ME2 or getting told how Reapers are fucking things up while scanning for sidequest MacGuffins in ME3. Hell, the fact that ME2 and ME3 kept the planet exploration mechanic in a vestigal form (despite its increasing irrelevancy) is a testament to the fact that it mattered at some point. And a good chunk of the side missions were based around those Mako sections, with the hub worlds offering info on which planets had sidequests rather than the usual fetch quest format. Even the ones that did do the fetch quest format usually accounted for you having explored that area beforehand and done or gotten the thing.
Yes, the plot is about dangerous AI and precursor races and Lovecraftian horrors from beyond the galaxy, but a large enough chunk of the game is focused on landing on strange worlds and figuring out how to get from one place to another that it counts as a primary part of the game. Mirror's Edge's plot is primarily about estranged sisters and rebelling against a dystopia, but the game is, above all else, about exploring the capabilities of the parkour system.
Comments
Apparently.
Assassin poems, Poems that shoot
guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys
and take their weapons leaving them dead
It's not a bad thing - the extra effort that would have been put into balancing health will most likely be spent elsewhere, possibly in an area that will improve gameplay - but it is a deliberate choice. And it's only good if that extra effort is spent on, y'know, actual game play and not making sure that Nathan Drake's boring haircut looks perfect in HD, and with most modern AAA games, you can't assume that.
Assassin poems, Poems that shoot
guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys
and take their weapons leaving them dead
...okay, i understand that there are some people who have basically absurd opinions or at least spout what seem to be absurd opinions when they are merely trying to talk about their own tastes, but can we stop with the shadowboxing already?
anyway What actions?
I can crouch behind cover and that minimizes my visible model (and hitbox). I'm not exactly sure what a "get behind cover" funtion really adds, aside from the fact that we could have head-tilting which isn't a ubiquitous FPS feature.
If getting behind cover can convert FPS into TPS and give us extra perspective of what's ahead WITHOUT revealing ourselves, then that's maybe an interesting thing. But if it's a TPS in the first place then we can already play with the camera to see around ourselves. Ooh, more Cavyhouse. Also going even weirder. I guess I won't be buying this unless it has a non-VR implementation though.
Assassin poems, Poems that shoot
guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys
and take their weapons leaving them dead
Trailer for Prepare to Dine Code Vein, Bamco's new vampire ARPG.
I would also be totally okay with it if this means Dark Souls clones are becoming a thing like Monster Hunter clones but I can't imagine that happening really.
Assassin poems, Poems that shoot
guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys
and take their weapons leaving them dead
For me, as far as Dark Soulses go, I do actually hope that it either does go all the way and just completely rip off Dark Souls's gameplay or else stop trying to look like it is so much. Imo, Nioh had the sort-of-problem of copying a lot of superficial stuff about Dark Souls but not actually any of the main gameplay and it made the whole experience a little weird (ie I keep wanting to compare it to Dark Souls even though it's not really all that similar outside of how leveling up works).
Also the fact that the gameplay seems a bit slow for my tastes, thus making it more of a chore to do the exploring part, which I DO like. To be fair, I haven't ever played it myself, but I've watched friends play a good amount of it. I've also seen him play Bloodborne, which seems to play faster than Dark Souls, and seems a little more up my alley, though that's sort of offset by the fact that it's about eldritch horrors and (more importantly) that it's stuck on PS4 rather than on PC.
I've sort of been on the fence on Dark Souls, though leaning toward the "not interested" side. But at least it's on my radar enough that I think about buying it when it's discounted.
Assassin poems, Poems that shoot
guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys
and take their weapons leaving them dead
1. increasing the pace of gameplay a bit, the way Bloodborne is faster than Dark Souls
2. faster movement, with the gameplay changed to accommodate it. This might be a bit more complicated, and admittedly to some extent I'm speaking hypothetically about Dark Souls's gameplay (specifically its combat), so feel free to correct me if you think I'm mistaken at any point, but here goes:
Basically, something that involves using more of positioning/movement, rather than blocking or a choosing from a variety of different weapon techniques (or generally, more complex combat action controls), to succeed in combat. My vague understanding is that Dark Souls has either a rough balance between the two or emphasizes the latter, though the balance is dependent on the character build the player chooses. (Again, please correct me if I'm wrong.)
My idea of really fast, smooth gameplay, within the bounds of the same sort of game (an action adventure game with some exploration/free-roaming elements), is the seven "castletroid" games. They're not all equally "fast", to be fair, but the best examples by far are the two Sorrow games, where the player-character can dash through rooms, as well as dash toward and away from major opponents that they are fighting. Now, I don't expect anything with Dark Souls's lineage to come anywhere near this, because that wouldn't really make sense, as from what I understand, Dark Souls's very specialty is slow, deliberate combat.
Perhaps a more relevant comparison -- 3D platforming, and also a reputation for difficulty -- might be the Ys games of the '00s. In those three games (with the possible exception of Ark since I haven't played it), the gist of the combat is a game of learning the positioning to avoid taking too much damage, and then taking advantage of openings to attack. Your controls are one button to swing your weapon, one button to jump, one button to use magic (which can be held to charge the magic), and one or two buttons to switch between three magic spells, and it is only later in the game (or with advanced challenges, e.g. time attack) that you may need to switch frequently between the spells, so the combat can be characterized as being straightforward, but intense and fast-paced.
That sort of combat might not quite be fully suited to a Dark-Souls-style game, to be fair. Note the size of the player-character relative to the screen in the Ys games -- the player-character is quite small, compared to the relative size of the Dark Souls or Bloodborne player-character, which shows that the latter inherently puts more emphasis on the details of combat and provides less visibility of one's surroundings for dodging by positioning.
But so I guess the impression I get is that I might be bored by the repetitiveness and slow pace of Dark Souls combat, whereas I'd prefer to be able to fight through things a little faster and in a simpler way. Note that "simpler" need NOT mean "less difficult" or "less dangerous"; instead, what I'm interested in is something that involves more dancing around things and circumventing things (and doing so more intuitively, at least for me) than banging my head against them.
(That description reminds me...I have been meaning to play the thief games, but I haven't yet.)
Assassin poems, Poems that shoot
guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys
and take their weapons leaving them dead
e.g. castlevania harmony of dissonance, where i'm offered several subweapons and several spellbooks, or circle of the moon, where i get some number of cards to make magical combos with them, yet all I end up doing is going through the game with my whip and one subweapon because they're just the most conveniently available and consistent thing to do, figuring out how to use a few tools in lots of ways, as opposed to using more tools
i'm just a sucker for familar/simple control schemes lol
incidentally i also tend to be a bit lazy about character building haha
The Metroid-style Castlevanias always give you about 500 weapons or power combinations or whatever, but I only use about 3 or 4 of them.
Even More Olivier
As if two Sky games was enough Olivier.You also can't gift a Steam game to someone who doesn't already have a Steam account.
http://steamcommunity.com/games/593110/announcements/detail/1301948399254001159
Assassin poems, Poems that shoot
guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys
and take their weapons leaving them dead
It was also a thing in Fable, so I wonder if maybe they should have immediately realized it is a silly idea.
But like, it's (partially) a comedy game, and Mass Effect 2 is not.
Kill your sister, you get the strongest sword in the game, spare her, and you'll get a pat on the back for not being a massive ass. (Also you allow for the events of Fable 2 to happen, in which a whole lot of people die. Good work on that.)
Assassin poems, Poems that shoot
guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys
and take their weapons leaving them dead
Assassin poems, Poems that shoot
guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys
and take their weapons leaving them dead
Also. The Mako sucks. Not because it controls poorly- which it does. And I think the clunkiness of it isn't really a problem on its own, because it adds to the space explorer feeling, and for that reason I'd be a staunch advocate of the Mako.... if Mass Effect 1 was a game about space exploration. Which it's not. It's a space military drama.
Any ethically complex sidequests are undercut by dumb morality mechanics. A potentially interesting choice is almost always ruined by the knowledge that you can get the optimal path by holding up and right and pressing A through the entire thing (except when you see a Charm option, at which point you always choose the Charm option). 2 at least had few pretenses of ethical complexity, and 3 presents what is to me the most coherent and sensible version of the Paragon/Renegade system yet, but too often succumbs to half measures in trying to feebly assert that both of them have their advantages.
Assassin poems, Poems that shoot
guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys
and take their weapons leaving them dead
It was dusty rock, another dusty rock but a slightly different colour, there was grass a couple of times, oh look, another thresher maw.
Assassin poems, Poems that shoot
guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys
and take their weapons leaving them dead