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CubaLibre
the road lawyer
Joined: 02 Mar 2007
Location: Balmer
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 Posted: Wed Dec 14, 2011 6:49 pm |
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There are a million games that are about team pvp area control that end with a "win," a conferral of some bonus, and a slate-wiping new season. Actually when you wrote it at first I thought you were being sarcastic because that's like an MMO type of thing. WoW has areas like that, as do more limited action-based games like Global Agenda.
| 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. |
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.
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CubaLibre
the road lawyer
Joined: 02 Mar 2007
Location: Balmer
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| Posted: Wed Dec 14, 2011 10:16 pm |
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| boojiboy7 wrote: |
| 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. |
I don't really agree with this at all. 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. 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.
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.
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.
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.
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CubaLibre
the road lawyer
Joined: 02 Mar 2007
Location: Balmer
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| Posted: Thu Dec 15, 2011 9:10 pm |
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Introducing some kind of two-tier, same-numbers-but-different-mechanics, split pvp/pve system is some World of Warcraft shit and completely destroys the whole purpose of these games to me, which as I said is to integrate multiplayer seamlessly into an essentially singleplayer experience.
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CubaLibre
the road lawyer
Joined: 02 Mar 2007
Location: Balmer
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| Posted: Fri Dec 16, 2011 7:37 pm |
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Dark tries to encourage evenly matched duels with the Dragon covenant. But the point is that asshole invaders don't want evenly matched duels, they want to beat up on noobs and it's difficult to stop them from doing that while also keeping the rest of the game as flexible as it is.
It does have a similar kind of balance, though, in that the invader doesn't have a health penalty but that he cannot heal, except by using an item that takes longer to use (and therefore leaves you more open) than the normal healing flask.
| boojiboy7 wrote: |
| 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. |
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.
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