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boojiboy7
narcissistic irony-laden twat
Joined: 04 Dec 2006
Location: take me on a blatant doom trip.
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 Posted: Wed Dec 14, 2011 12:11 am |
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| TXTSWORD wrote: |
Dragon's Souls (it's skyrim)
or it's a PSP monster hunter clone but actually it's good because it's from software. |
you think monster hunter sucks? let me guess, you played it single player, didn't you? |
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boojiboy7
narcissistic irony-laden twat
Joined: 04 Dec 2006
Location: take me on a blatant doom trip.
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| Posted: Wed Dec 14, 2011 12:59 pm |
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| TXTSWORD wrote: |
| boojiboy7 wrote: |
| TXTSWORD wrote: |
Dragon's Souls (it's skyrim)
or it's a PSP monster hunter clone but actually it's good because it's from software. |
you think monster hunter sucks? let me guess, you played it single player, didn't you? |
I was really hoping no one would take that away from what I said, I probably should have made more of an effort. I love Monster Hunter. Ask persona! I just haven't liked any Monster Hunter clones, and referring to a game as a monster hunter clone doesn't sound affectionate... which is what I was trying to counter but failed to articulate. My brad. |
Ah OK, yeah, I can dig. Really the only MH clone I have played/enjoyed was Peace Walker, which did enough different with the formula to not even really be a clone much, except for the boss fights which were clones in the best way. I guess parts of Lost Planet 2 could be considered an MH clone, and that game was the bestest, so there's that.
But yeah, every time I have heard someone scream about MH (or LP2) sucking, it's because they tried to play it exclusively solo, even though the game yells at you not to do that, hence my reaction. |
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boojiboy7
narcissistic irony-laden twat
Joined: 04 Dec 2006
Location: take me on a blatant doom trip.
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| Posted: Wed Dec 14, 2011 3:37 pm |
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| The problem of that is people would still work really hard to game the tendencies. |
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boojiboy7
narcissistic irony-laden twat
Joined: 04 Dec 2006
Location: take me on a blatant doom trip.
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| Posted: Wed Dec 14, 2011 6:32 pm |
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| True enough, but the original post mentioned it as a way of "preventing completionist/min-max gameplay", which it wouldn't really do, which was my point. |
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boojiboy7
narcissistic irony-laden twat
Joined: 04 Dec 2006
Location: take me on a blatant doom trip.
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| Posted: Wed Dec 14, 2011 6:38 pm |
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Yeah, that is not going to happen, 8128, much as it might sound fun (and it does). It was fun in Chromehounds (RIP).
So many players would be super pissed off if there wasn't some easy explanation behind how to do everything in the games. |
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boojiboy7
narcissistic irony-laden twat
Joined: 04 Dec 2006
Location: take me on a blatant doom trip.
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| Posted: Wed Dec 14, 2011 6:46 pm |
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| Sorta. I mean, you were divided into different factions with no idea which one to join outside of friends telling you, and then you fought team based battles to take over different regions of the global map(as in everyone on Live was fighting over the same huge map), and if you didn't go on the web and find groups talking about where to fight for, you just fought for random shit and hoped your side eventually won, giving you some benefits. Sadly, I came in at the end of it when the game was broken (From never balanced it well, each patch introducing new breaks), so I didn't get in at it's glory days, but yeah. |
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boojiboy7
narcissistic irony-laden twat
Joined: 04 Dec 2006
Location: take me on a blatant doom trip.
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| Posted: Wed Dec 14, 2011 6:56 pm |
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| CubaLibre wrote: |
| Just because it wouldn't eliminate min/maxing doesn't mean it wouldn't prevent it. The harder it is to min-max, the fewer people will do it, just because it's a pain in the ass. People don't like pains in the ass. I would have no problem with D^3 Souls disincentivizing it as heavily as possible, regardless of whatever tiny diehard niche of OCDers out there would work through the pain. |
The problem is that a large core of From's original fanbase (and if we are to go by the statements of the company, vis a vis "we make the games we want to play") likes the min/max. All of From's games have realtively simple min/maxing built into them.
Add into this that any game with a competitive aspect encourages the min/max, so trying to remove or ignore the min/max is a silly pursuit counter to the game's design. Fighting games get by by relegating the min/max to player skill, but From has yet to do this in their games at all, which is fine.
Also, the last thing From games need is more obfuscation of what is going on. At their best, their games have mechanics that get better the more you know about them, where as something like was originally suggested actually gets worse the more you know about it. |
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boojiboy7
narcissistic irony-laden twat
Joined: 04 Dec 2006
Location: take me on a blatant doom trip.
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| Posted: Wed Dec 14, 2011 7:17 pm |
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| Maybe have the strengths of the covenant's players affect a certain boss tied to each covenant? |
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boojiboy7
narcissistic irony-laden twat
Joined: 04 Dec 2006
Location: take me on a blatant doom trip.
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| Posted: Wed Dec 14, 2011 8:18 pm |
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| cactusfriend wrote: |
| boojiboy7 wrote: |
| True enough, but the original post mentioned it as a way of "preventing completionist/min-max gameplay", which it wouldn't really do, which was my point. |
Yes, I suppose I should have used the word 'further discouraging' instead of 'preventing'. Sure glad we got that all worked out. |
I don't even really think it would discourage it much at all, though, so clearly we didn't get that worked out.
| cactusfriend wrote: |
| Good point - a better way to discourage min/maxing would be for there to be no 2-3 'obvious game-winning/breaking' builds. |
Man, as anyone who played Chromehounds could tell you, From never got good at working around that. |
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boojiboy7
narcissistic irony-laden twat
Joined: 04 Dec 2006
Location: take me on a blatant doom trip.
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| Posted: Thu Dec 15, 2011 2:48 pm |
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| CubaLibre wrote: |
| I don't consider it very fruitful to limit the next game From makes by some schematic of "the games From makes," especially since Souls, and by extension King's Field, has always been cloaked, nay swathed in mystery, quite unlike Armored Core. |
Man, have you ever really played AC? Those games have even more mystery about them than any of the Souls games. For example, try to figure out the plot to AC4 and AC4A without looking anything up outside of the games. And then try to figure out what the stats for your robots do in AC4 as well. At least the Souls games let me pull up an (often not very helpful) help window, and occasionally NPCs explain some things going on in the story. AC is actually incredibly notable for containing a metric ton of story and stats, most of which are never even close to clearly explained but have to be pieced together in the game itself.
Really, the only game from has made recently that is even close to being upfront about it's story is 3d Dot, which was a definite fun exception, but even then had a ton more shit going on in it than people might realize (for insance, the subpolots of the game that involve being at certain palces after beating certain dungeons, and so on).
The reason I bring up "games From makes" is that they have been very explicit in interviews that they only make games they want to play, and don't really care a whole ton about outside criticism, if it disagrees with what they think. They are a very stubborn company, and I think that works in their favor and occasionally against them.
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| That's what attracts me and a lot of other fans to them. "More obfuscation is good" is a bad way to put it, because there's good obfuscation and bad obfuscation. For instance, the effort in Dark to clean up the stone-upgrade system and make it a little more transparent is good. The effort to reobfuscate it by spreading it out over multiple blacksmiths, some of which are well-hidden, is also good. It injects life into the gameworld. |
Oh yeah, I thought Dark Souls make good progress at the right kind of obfuscation, which is something From experiments with a lot in all of their games. Sometimes they get it annoyingly wrong (for example, trying to figure out exactly what your world tendency was in Demon's Souls, if you wanted to, was a big pain in the rear, though thankfully it was largely not worth bothering with, so it wasn't too bad on the obfuscation, really; and yes, this is nitpicking, but I think it should be obvious, I love nitpicking games, and especially games I either really like (Demon's/Dark) or games I really hate (HL2)).
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| I'm realizing that as I play games more and more it's this feeling I'm looking for - not conquering challenges, not planning and executing strategies, but exploring, learning. Being fooled, basically, fooled by the game into thinking there's more there than there is. As the mysteries resolve, if solid mechanics are left in their place we we have a great game; if wanky mechanics are left in their place we have a flawed gem. I hope we can all agree that cold hard mechanics are vital to reinforce a game's world as much as "mystery" and vice versa, this isn't some unbendable taxonomy I'm proposing, I'm just trying to get across the primary driver of my enjoyment of these games. |
For a lot of the time, I agree on this, with some minor exceptions (fighting games and shmups, really). The problem I end up ahving is that once the mystery disappears, I inevitably experience some degree of disappointment. I love the moment in games when it feels like the world and potentially its mechanics are never-ending, and I can explore it forever. Once a game losses that, I often end up not finishing it, and I am fine with that. I have come to appreciate the feeling, and be OK when it disappears, not force myself to soldier on to the point of non-enjoyment.
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| Of course you're right that Souls has pvp aspects and that anything remotely "competitive" is going to foster minmaxing. In that sense I feel like the covenant system was a noble but flawed experiment. I think it's at its best when you just stumble upon some small amount of the total covenants, enter into one semirandomly, and let it influence the way you play the game. It's also clearly an attempt by From to "tame" the endgame pvp minmaxers, to force them to semi-RP a bit. It... sort of works, but not really. Partially because of other balance issues (lightning weapons = best for everybody all the time) that could use some resolution on the singleplayer side as well. But even people who "like" to Souls pvp agree that it's faintly ridiculous, because of a lack of true matchmaking and how weird lag issues ruin the knife-edge deadliness of it. Anyone who dedicates themselves to Souls pvp does it as a fun side-project, it will never and can never be the core of the games, at least as they're currently designed. |
On this, I think we are generally in agreement, though I msut say I wish they would tighten it up somehow, because I think it could add to the game a lot if it was tighter, whereas right now, being invaded feels like a chore, because it's mostly a matter of "how is lag going to fuck either me or him this time?" and I don't really like having fights determined by ping, which is why I largely ignore PVP as much as possible.
| Quote: |
| To me, a Souls game is all about the singleplayer and the multiplayer blending seamlessly into one integrated, essentially singleplayer experience: I'm playing my game, other humans and NPCs drift in and out of it. Ideally humans and NPCs would be indistinguishable, though of course that's an impossible holy grail. But that's where the design of these games should be heading. Youpi's OP has it all exactly right (aside from a few specific quibbles I have...). I don't want a sword 'n sorcery Armored Core. I want a multiplayer-integrated, fast-action (, high-framerate) King's Field. |
The problem right now is that they don't, and I don't really think From will ever get it fully right (which is not, of course, to say I won't enjoy the hell out of their attempts, but just to acknowledge that they aren't ever going to hit "perfect", which is something of course unobtainable). You phrasing there made me laugh a lot (exactly right, except when it isn't), so I wonder what your quibble are.
Oddly, in terms of multiplayer, I think there is a lot these games could learn from AC. The tuning factor is the biggest one, which Youpi brings up above. Part of the problem I have with Souls multiplayer is that there is such a penalty (in terms of player time and souls and even leveling (thus breaking matchmaking)) to wrongly leveling a character. This obviously wouldn't be a problem in a single player only game(which these games are clearly designed as), but is a problem in a multiplayer game, in that it makes the beginning of the game (already difficult on its own) even more difficult, by potentially forcing you to go up against people who have already beaten a game and can thus be rolling as minmaxed characters designed to fuck you over. If I could re-spec myself (the way I can in Armored Core), I would have a tool to deal with this, even as a first time player, but as it is, if I have improperly over-levelled a bit, or happened to dump some souls into the wrong stat, good luck! Best to either disconnect my PS3, or just try to be on when no one else is. Yeah, I know, you can play Hollow and such, but it basically disincentivizes something that I would like to see be a whole part of the game, instead of the side-project you describe it as. Right now, the multiplayer feels very tacked on in these games in a unique way (as in not tacked on like so many other games feature silly PvP modes that don't work), and I would like to see them more fully and carefully thought about in terms of being integrated.
From can do this (see Armored Core), but at the same time, they aren't always good at thinking out the balancing of this (see Chromehounds). I really do want the same thing you want ("a multiplayer-integrated, fast-action (, high-framerate(good luck)) King's Field."), but I don't have a lot of confidence in it being fully thought through. The potential for it is what keeps me coming back, though, so that is good. |
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boojiboy7
narcissistic irony-laden twat
Joined: 04 Dec 2006
Location: take me on a blatant doom trip.
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| Posted: Thu Dec 15, 2011 6:12 pm |
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| Youpi wrote: |
| The ratings on the messages in Dark Souls, which supposedly have five different portrait icons ranging from an undead (the only one I ever saw) to a picture of Oscar depending on their amount of ratings, the levels being hardcoded, really makes me think that as far as balancing is concerned, From is often satisfied to just release numbers that look good on Excel and seem to work well enough for the testers, then disregard the social factors and the western online gaming culture. |
Yeah, pretty much, which would be fine if so much of the games didn't involve that gaming culture. Chromehounds again. :( |
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boojiboy7
narcissistic irony-laden twat
Joined: 04 Dec 2006
Location: take me on a blatant doom trip.
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| Posted: Thu Dec 15, 2011 9:56 pm |
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| Yeah, that doesn't work at all, really. |
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boojiboy7
narcissistic irony-laden twat
Joined: 04 Dec 2006
Location: take me on a blatant doom trip.
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| Posted: Fri Dec 16, 2011 12:56 pm |
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| Youpi wrote: |
| There has to be an elegant way of balancing the pvp fights to be interesting and where the winner is generally the best overall fighter, instead of the one with the correct character and technique. |
I think the counterargument to this, and not one that I agree with, per se, is that the winner of most armed fights IRL is most often the better armed, not just the better fighter. Now, from a game persepective, this sucks, and throws the idea of balance out the window, but there it is anyhow. |
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boojiboy7
narcissistic irony-laden twat
Joined: 04 Dec 2006
Location: take me on a blatant doom trip.
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| Posted: Fri Dec 16, 2011 7:49 pm |
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| CubaLibre wrote: |
| That would be a weird counterargument! "Reality" is a fairly bizarre reason for anything in particular in a Souls game. It's also not even really true, most of the time. When it comes to medieval melee combat, "better armed" is almost totally a function of training and context, not a linear progression of like muskets > rifles > assault rifles. All these different weapons exist because they work better at different times and in different places. At its best that's what a Souls duel between two evenly-matched opponents is: them jockeying to shift the context into a place that gives their chosen setup/weapon the advantage. Giving a slvl 20 guy a lightning sword is like giving a Confederate soldier an AK-47; it's not "realistic," it's bullshit. |
I think in a certain light the Souls games are attempting to create their own version of reality, in which everything is governed by the same set of physical principles and such. Souls isn't modeling medieval melee combat (unless somehow there was something about medieval rings/magic/etc. that I missed), it is modelling Souls combat, and Souls combat takes place in the world of From, where certain items/weapons are inherently stronger/faster/more damaging than others (not unique to From, mind you, but certainly something present in their games).
And your last sentence is exactly what I was getting at. The way the game is set up now, the Confederate can get that AK, and therefore has an advantage, and this is fine for From (and really, fine for me to an extent too; again, a reminder, I am not really arguing my own position here). They make games in which certain weapons are very clearly better than other weapons, and so make games in which people can easily be "better armed" in a way that if it were strictly modeling medieval combat, you are right, they could not.
Hoping for that to change is a silly hope, because it is embedded in the way they have until now approached weaponry. The only way they temper that is by making things better for certain situations than others, but that just requires a consciousness of the situation for your weaponry, and where the balance can be said to fall apart in these games is that certain weapons have a distinctly smaller set of disadvantages versus others, or are disadvantaged in far less situations. |
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