T w e n t y S i d e d
It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel like doing a podcast.
Hosts: Paul, Shamus. Episode edited by Issac.
Diecast297
Link (YouTube) |
Show notes:
00:00 Apocalypse Update
How is everyone? Okay? Remember, stay indoors. If you encounter one of the infected, don’t let them bite you. If you have to go out for supplies, make sure you’re wearing a mask and that you’re properly armed. Also, ignore all the crazy conspiracy theories that this was caused by the Umbrella Corporation. I follow Wesker on Twitter and he’s a super-nice guy. There’s no way he’d unleash a doomsday virus just to prove that he can make a doomsday virus so that he can sell doomsday virus.
00:49 Unplanned Cities Skylines Rant
Old Man yells at simulated clouds.
12:15 Mailbag: Lying to players
Deeeeaaar Diecast,
I found an interesting blog post about games lying to players to improve the experience: https://askagamedev.tumblr.com/post/612309635577397248/i-just-watched-a-war-story-from-a-developer-of
A few examples from the post:
* Amnesia contains a tip that monsters can find you easier when you have low sanity which is not true.
* In the Batman: Arkham trilogy, mooks spend most of their time posturing and position themselves so that you can keep your combo going.
* Fire Emblem displays wrong to-hit chances, player characters actually get to roll twice with the displayed chance. (So 90% is actually 99%.)What are your opinions on stuff like this?
Personally, I wouldn’t even classify the second thing as a lie, it’s pretty obvious that Batman mooks follow some fight scene choreography protocol. The hit-chance thing is something that really bugs me, though. If a game shows me a probability, I don’t want it to be fudged according to some ad-hoc theory about how “normal people” interpret probability. Why not make it green/yellow/red if you just want to convey some intuitive idea?
I knew the Fire Emblem thing, but one of the reblogs points out that the XCOM remake invisibly adjusts hit chances except when playing on hard, so you might bump up the difficulty and notice that you hit less often than you’re used to without knowing why. That seems even worse.
Happy Easter,
RFS-81
21:33 Mailbag: Guilty Pleasure Games
Dear Diecast,
I like Final Fantasy VIII (or 8 for short). However, I will readily admit the game has severe issues and is just not as good as, say Final Fantasy VI (aka Final Fantasy III). I’d call it one of my “guilty pleasures”, a game I like better than it actually is.
Do you guys have games like that, where you like it despite knowing it’s not very good? Or does a game having obvious flaws just ruin the entire experience for you?
Vale,
-Tim
26:04 Mailbag: Doom Guy Speaks
Dear Diecast,
I’ve been playing through Doom eternal and have been loving it, but I wanted to ask your opinion specifically on “that” cut scene. (Spoilers) You know the one where Doom slayer is confirmed to be Doomguy and speaks for the for the first time. I’ve heard a few people call this sequence “cringe,” say it ruins his mystique from 2016 Doom among other things. I personally find it inoffensive and kind of cute in a way, like it was solely crafted to make fans laugh and smile. That’s my opinion, but I’d like to hear yours.
Happy ripping and tearing,
-Kaden
35:07 Mailbag: Scorn
Dear Diecast,
Have you heard of a game called Scorn? It’s not been released, but there’s a trailer and a bit of information out. The game is essentially ‘explore H.R. Giger nightmare world as a weird biomechanical guy, fighting weird biomechanical horror monsters with weird biomechanical guns’. I was pretty fascinated by it as soon as I came across it.
Unfortunately…the game was originally meant to be released in two parts, with the first arriving in October 2018. Then the developers announced that they were going to push the date back and release it all together. We basically haven’t heard anything in the two years since that announcement.
So — have you heard about the game? What do you think of it, based on the information available? Do you think it’s just taking a long time because game development is hard, or do you think it’s vaporware?
Regards,
Kestrellius
(No, that’s Kaecilius.)
Link (YouTube) |
41:30 Mailbag: DOOM
Dear DIECAST,
I enjoyed hearing you talk about the new DOOM game (DOOM V?). I have had a lot of fun with DOOM II, but have never played DOOM. Is it worth checking out or would you miss the super shotgun too much?
Also, I would love to hear your thoughts on the 2D Duke Nukem games.
Sincerely, BadIdeas
PS Happy Easter
oh wait that was cancelled – wasn’t it
44:29 Mailbag: Games that Run Out
Dear Diecast,
Do you ever find yourself putting a game down before finishing it, not because it’s bad, but rather due to feeling like you’ve gotten everything you can out of it and not seeing a reason to continue?
My personal examples would be: DUSK (after the first episode), the original Flashback (after winning the ticket back to Earth in the ‘Running Man’-esque level). I enjoyed both, but stopped playing each with a sense of: “Okay, that’s what it is, cool, I get it – let’s play something else now”.
Best,
Mako
Bethesda’s Launcher is Everything You Expect
From the company that brought us Fallout 76 comes a storefront / Steam competitor. It's a work of perfect awfulness. This is a monument to un-usability and anti-features.
Chainmail Bikini
A horrible, railroading, stupid, contrived, and painfully ill-conceived roleplaying campaign. All in good fun.
Spec Ops: The Line
A videogame that judges its audience, criticizes its genre, and hates its premise. How did this thing get made?
Mass Effect Retrospective
A novel-sized analysis of the Mass Effect series that explains where it all went wrong. Spoiler: It was long before the ending.
Grand Theft Railroad
Grand Theft Auto is a lousy, cheating jerk of a game.
Re: which of the original Doom levels to try – honestly, just play the shareware episode (“knee deep in the dead”). It has the best level designs in the series – they are tightly constructed, flow nicely and the individual level areas have their own identities, so you can actually navigate without using the map. The later episodes for the original Doom rapidly degenerate into teleporter nonsense and give up all semblance of “place”. Doom 2 starts strong and then rapidly devolves into a series of gimmick levels.
Important corollary: I like Doom 3 and therefore should not be trusted.
I remember a review of Doom 2, back when it was first released. Pretty much more of the same. The SSG didn’t do enough in the way of elevating it above Doom 1.
All I hear about people with YT subscriptions is that they don’t work. Why does anyone bother? I normally see things on the front page, and I have all my favourite channels bookmarked if I feel the urge to watch them.
What makes a game a guilty pleasure as opposed to wonky but fun? I suppose the difference is admitting to other people that you play them, and I never admit my guilty pleasures.
Borderlands 2 & TPS often spawn ammo for the gun you’re running low on. I’ve always seen that as a feature instead of a hidden advantage. Lets you keep going with what you’re currently using. Especially handy for the thirsty minigun.
That’s what I use subscriptions for; there’s just a menu listing all the people I normally watch on Youtube and I can scroll through to see if there’s anything interesting.
YT subscriptions work for me, but that’s because I use the subscriptions view for most of the videos, and for the channels that only updates once in a blue moon, I’ve managed to make the “please warn me” thing work.
I also just have the subscriptions page bookmarked. This is a time-sorted list of all videos released by channels that I subscribe to, with no weirdness involved. It works quite well, so I assume Google will remove it in an update at some point.
Yeah. I do the same. Though I must say (no… rant) that the default home page for Youtube is just awful. It is guaranteed to full of crap by a function of the algorithm. 95% of it consists of 1)videos I’ve already watched or 2)videos suggested to me before that I’ve previously decided I don’t want to to watch. And I don’t get it. It knows I’ve watched this stuff. Why keep suggesting I rewatch it?
It should be throwing fresh things at me constantly to see what sticks. As it is now, the youtube algorithm will always end up in a rut and never be able to dig its way out.
Never really understood why Final Fantasy VIII gets such a bad rap. No, I tell a lie. I do understand – it was just too weird and different for the time, and its systems were more than a little obscure. But I always liked it more than the widely celebrated IX, which just never clicked with me.
In my case, if there’s something in the game that speaks to me, I’m more than willing to overlook many of its flaws. For example, I’ve been playing Days Gone on and off for the last couple of weeks. It’s every bit as mediocre as people say, but it has heart. There’s something in the characters and in the way it makes you respect the game world. The same could be said for Death Stranding, which, for all its flaws, at its best felt way more satisfying than any given moment in Control, an overall much better game.
Atmosphere, I think, is the defining trait here. If a game is atmospheric, there’s a lot I can forgive. And if a game actively undermines its own atmosphere, no amount of content or solid gameplay can make up for that.
FF8? Well, the characters do have some depth going on but wow it takes almost the entire game before they get past acting like obnoxious brats, most of the plot occurs because they were acting like morons, too much of the game is tedious conversations that don’t go anywhere, the combat system is so obscured that the normal way to play actively hinders you, the optimal way to play is incredibly tedious and pointlessly grindy, the world is way too backloaded so you can almost never leave the narrow plot-rails the very *very* end when it suddenly opens up, the card game is goddamn horrible, and the plot is heavily sci-fi based and those FF’s have never ever been as good as the more fantasy-based ones.
Sure, it’s still a good game in many other ways, and there are reasons to defend it (I could name a dozen). But the above is just a *partial* list of why it really did not work for a large part of the audience. Also, you’re kind of wrong about FF9; a lot of people disdained it at launch but it’s grown in acceptance until I would say it’s now much more appreciated than FF8, 10, or 12, specifically because FF9 has a strong story foundation, good side content, fun characters and an overall good system design. But all three games i listed were intially much better received than FF9.
Huh, I’m pretty sure I remember FF9 being celebrated as a return to form even back in the day. Might be wrong, but that was always my distinct impression – fans of the series seeing 9 as a course correction after 8.
FFIX was released like a year before FFX came out, and wasn’t marketed as heavily, and was almost not a numbered installment at all (it was Final Fantasy Gaiden for much of development, which in part is why all the weird callbacks to the other mainline FF games; being a nostalgia trip was explicitly baked into the game’s design)
I don’t remember seeing a lot of people disliking IX (other than some individual rough spots like the encounter rate in the Ice Cave), but it did somewhat slip through the cracks to the point where Penny Arcade made a strip joking that it doesn’t exist.
Right – it was a good game, but in the last year of the PS1 era. Critically it was received a bit better than FF8, but it was still something of the leftover title for many. However, the backlash against FF10, and the succeeding FF games led to a partial re-evaluation of FF9 which allowed it an updated re-release on Steam.
But I’m one of those people who thinks FF7 is… kind of… a mediocre game, so maybe my views are outside the norm.
I think Final Fantasy VI is wildly overrated. Join me in apostasy!
FF6 is the best of them all except maybe 14, Heretic!
You got that 9 upside-down there, friend.
You’re both misspelling 5.
Oh man, FF5 is so good! The job system is fun to play around with, the characters are memorable, there is gameplay and story integration, and it has Gilgamesh and Ghido!
So good.
Interesting that nobody as yet has correctly stated the best Final Fantasy game.
It’s
Chrono TriggerYou’re misspelling Seiken Densetsu 3 quite badly.
Just watched someone play through the Trials of Mana demo, and wow was that game better without voice acting.
I’ve been watching Graham play through FF7 on LRR and all I can think about is the many ways FF6 kills itself in the second half, and the middle part of FF7 that people were calling good is just as much of a mess as I remember when I played it.
FF6: the bad guy gets the doomsday device, your party is split up, you have a big emotional scene, you need to search out the rest of the party. So what’s the first character you get, before you even leave town? The one character that craps all over everyone else by having infinite area attacks and infinite area healing with no cost or effort and an unlockable guaranteed max damage attack(Sabin), when everyone else has to spend a bunch of time and effort learning and managing magic. Then the second character you find goes back on her previous arc where she accepted the call to action and instead decides to sit down and protect a small group of kids instead of save the world- until later when you come back and a giant monster shows up, and this *proof* that those kids needed protection is what makes her *leave* them to join you. Oh, and you also have two characters who have an obtuse combo that is required for one of them to learn most of their skills, which you must scour the world to collect (the old man and the little girl, sketch to learn enemy skills), but now they’re gone so once you find them you’ll have to go back through a bunch of the world doing all that to make him useful. Oh, and there’s a beast kid whose mechanic I don’t even remember.
FF7: they drop the plate, it’s emotional, things have been good, you leave Midgar, and then you spend the next several hours doing ever more bizzare and wacky quests with barely a thread connecting them to your actual goal, during which a main character dies out of nowhere for no reason after the game set you up to use them, and also after being repeatedly forced to bring a traitor/comic relief character with you. Cloud’s development during this section is good, but unless you’ve already played the game and know to focus on that, it’s just a hook for future stuff that hasn’t happened yet, while what you’re actually playing is nonsense. Oh, there’s also two completely missable characters, one of whom’s sidequests later are apparently like half the explanation of what’s actually going on, and nearly all of the nifty combo materia that makes people gush about the system is just randomly laying around in places, also completely missable (I should dig out my old file and see just what I actually had at endgame).
Yeah, those two definitely bug me. Particularly of course because the first half of 6 is great, and the materia system would be really cool if it wasn’t buried in that mess which I can’t unsee. 9 is fine, I haven’t touched 8, and I intent to replay 10 with a guide next (SoonTM).
Gau’s mechanic is breaking the game in two without breaking a sweat.
Okay, technically it’s “mimicing monsters”, but between Magic Pot, Nightshade, Aspik, and Intangir (remember to cast Mute!) he can break the game even when Wind God Gau is disabled.
Sabin doesn’t have a guaranteed max damage attack, Bum Rush is based off the Magic stat (which means Gogo is better at it than Sabin, strangely enough). He’s also kind of off the beaten path if you decide to follow the plot instead of exploring a bit before going after Edgar.
Final Fantasy VII, while I don’t really care for it and I’m not gonna be getting the remake, I can actually understand why Cait Sith should be in the party, even if the situation doesn’t work. Reeves (the guy controlling CS) has been shown to be the one guy with a conscience in the Shinra corp, and kinda starts playing mole later on. On topic of the missable characters, Yuffie pops up in random encounters on the world map, so you’ll probably find her. Vincent is a real Guide Dang It!
Oh Yuffie. I’d actually checked how to unlock her because she was one of the characters everyone talked about. It said to go fight random encounters and she’d show up and join the party. I fought her. Twice. She didn’t join the party and stopped appearing. I gave up. Cait Sith like everything in that section, could have been done better with some effort, instead of just being wacky.
It’s been a while for FF6, so all I can say is that I made what seemed to me the first logical move (go to big town), which led straight to Sabin (and when I looked up sidequests his was the quickest so I did it first, and Bum Rush never did less than 9999 for me, unless I’m really remembering wrong-but it’s still stronger than any but the most powerful magic, for free).
You have to beat Yuffie and then navigate her conversation tree, and also never turn your back on her or try to use the save point.
Wait, you’re playing these games with a guide and then complain that certain things can become too easy? Now that’s new.
You can have ultimate abilities without them being *that* ultimate, and it’s not exactly well hidden even without a guide. To be clear, Sabin’s entire design mocks the rest of the characters from a mechanical standpoint, it’s just extra problematic that he’s available earlier than less god-tier characters after the split.
I’d legit continue discussing, but these comments only hold so many back-and forths, and I’m stuck typing one-handed for a while, so I’m bowing out now.
In FF6, you don’t actually have to do all the sidequests in World of Ruin. You only “must” get three characters, although it would be rather difficult without a full party. However, it’s deliberately set up to allow you to go anywhere and do all the sidequests in basically any way you please. WoB is linear, WoR is basically a big open-world, just in the SNES JRPG days.
[The plot makes a more sense than you imply. For example, Terra is taking care of a bunch of children who couldn’t survive on their own and she had a bit of an emotional crisis shortly before the world went to hell; however, seeing the party fighting an ancient demon to help her and that some of her young orphans were maturing enough have her to confidence to fight an evil that she knew wasn’t going to stop until everything was destroyed. I also noticed some factual inaccuracies in your statement, which, while not huge, make me question your memory in this specific game only.]
I think Terra refusing the call and defending the children is part of the deliberate design decision from the team that “there is no central protagonist”. Not sure that it was the best way to do it, but since she’s so important in the WoB, you’d expect her to be important in the WoR, but nope!
I have to say that the 2nd half of the game is interesting, but I much prefer the first half for the stronger narrative. Of course, each half is meant to appeal to different audiences.
The game has a number of flaws (It’s way, way too easy), but it was released when I was in High School and thus is an important game during my formative years. It was also revolutionary for its time.
The ensemble cast was probably the thing that hurt it the most. It means that in a 30-40 hour game, nobody gets more than a cumulative hour’s worth of story progression and development. As a result the characters feel thin and their arcs rushed. I need more than a selection of cute vignettes (that, as with Terra’s, don’t always make sense) to feel a bond with the party or care about their motivations.
What’s left is a fairly humdrum struggle against a gang of Boring Evil antagonists who telegraph the Big Twist in their first cutscene together. Kefka might be the least interesting villain in all of gaming. And yeah, it’s way too easy, although to be fair I’d have disliked it more if it had taken me longer to beat.
At least the opera scene was nice.
“An hour’s worth of story progression and development” is the equivalent of each of them getting a feature film.
Most characters get a couple major arcs, and there are tons of small bits (like having Sabin in the party when recruiting Setzer reveals a thing about Edgar). While it’s unfortunate that you won’t see all of them without a guide, the major characters certainly have plenty of plot.
Obviously that hour includes grinding through the character’s respective dungeon. The story itself is meted out in dialogues that will take a few minutes to read.
Sorry, but have you played FFIX? Next to Tetra Master, Triple Triad is like a godsent. The only major flaw is the Random rule that can be annoying to get rid of.
Yeah, Triple Triad is a great sidegame with major main-game rewards, its major problem is how the rules spread. Random is a horrible pain and it’s sticky like nothing else.
It’s been fifteen years and I’ve still never forgiven Tetra Master for my 250 point card being defeated by a 3 point card.
I only played it for a couple of hours on a friend’s PS, and this was 20 years ago, so my memory is pretty spotty. I just remember that the characters seemed kind of annoying, the gun-sword mechanic was an eye-roller, and there was an optimal way to play the game that is basically “Automatically win this encounter, but take a minute to do it while you watch the same animation play over and over”. I just remember it not grabbing me like previous games.
The really fun part about summon spam was that the final boss, and only the final boss, could one-shot your summons, so suddenly you need to know how to play without them.
Summons aren’t the optimal way to play, using GFs too much lowers your SeeD rank (aka your income), they have lower DPS than limit breaks, and with exception of Doom Train (who you can only get after you’ve got free reign in Esthar) they don’t inflict status effects on enemies.
To clarify, when I talked about the “optimal way” I mean drawing all the spells, converting them all, drawing *more* spells, finding spots in the world to draw spells, and making sure never to accidentally kill anything because usually levelling made things worse. You didn’t necessarily *need* to do that to play but the optimal progression was very time-consuming. And if actually fighting enemies is close to being a net negative, well, why is it even in the game?
True Optimal is actually learning the Mod abilities and getting all your spells from the card game. Drawing is kind of a trap, you can’t draw the really good spells from monsters and the only way to get rid of old low-level spells is to cast them one by one.
You can pretty much remove fighting enemies. The Enc-None ability is available very early in the game and eliminates random battles altogether, leaving only boss fights and those battles where you choose to grind for AP or cards.
It makes me wish they’d committed to these bizarre mechanics and eliminated levels/XP altogether.
The thing with Final Fantasy VIII is that it changed the formula too much too quickly for people to be comfortable with it, so when they tried to play the game the way they were used to, they had a bad time. And this is exacerbated by the game treating itself as more or less a regular game in the series and encouraging the use of the new systems, when in reality you’re likely to have an easier time if you avoid grinding, due to the level scaling of the enemies.
Next games in the series have more or less avoided bad reception by very gradually changing systems. The latest Final Fantasy games are pretty much unrecognizable as part of the series if you start playing them without looking at the title, but that’s because changes were being introduced litlle by little instead of all of a sudden. Look at how widely praised FFXIII is, despite objectively being a monumental pile of garbage.
FFXIII is widely praised? Huh?
Crazy as it sounds, it is. There’s a reason for why it has so many spin-offs. VII is the only game in the series with more spin-offs, and VII is pretty much the mascot of the series.
I was under the impression that was driven by Square Enix trying to wring every last bit of money from those expensive assets.
I mean, I thought FFXIII was all right, once you finally have full party control and you get your head around the importance of buffs and debuffs. Its real sin in my mind was a lack of awesome characters.
I beat XIII, and I never got full party control, only a strange system of giving general orders.
Oops — my fault. I should have said ‘full control over who’s in my party.’ I honestly didn’t miss queuing up attack commands for everyone, though. Based on people’s reactions to FFXII’s Gambit system, which I adored, I gather I am in the minority.
Interestingly, FFXV reverses this, having easily the most likable main cast since FFX. That’s probably why some people like the story despite the obvious development hell-induced gaps (not talking about plot holes so much as the equivalent of a movie missing entire reels)
Man, don’t tell me that! I just settled my mind on taking another crack at Pillars of Eternity, and now you’re telling me that the last Final Fantasy game I bought has exactly what I want out of an entry in the franchise?!
Imagine that the climax of The Empire Strikes Back was told from Leia’s point of view. So she spends a lot of time tooling around looking for Luke, he drops onto the getaway ship, and then tearfully tells the rest of the team “Darth Vader cut off my hand! And then he told me he was my father!” And then you realize why everyone said you needed to get the Jedi Master edition of the movie with all the DLC so you could play “Episode Luke” and actually see these important events happen instead of just having it summarized in clunky exposition. Also the combat is complete butts.
If a likeable main cast is enough to overcome all that, you might like Final Fantasy XV.
I mean, I’ll give them that, XIII is quite pretty. Not a lick of sense to the plot, characters mostly ranging from annoying to bland, but very pretty. I also didn’t hate the job system once I got used to it.
Yeah, my benchmark for enjoying a Final Fantasy game is two likable characters. I figure I 80% liked Fang and 75% liked Sazh, which makes the cut if I round to the nearest integer.
Once I got the hang of Paradigm Shifts and understood how to get 5-star rankings in battle, I enjoyed FFXIII’s combat system more than I had any game in the series since FFVII was perfectly okay with you warping the universe with Materia combinations.
My primary complaint about FF8 was always the way summons worked. In order to get the most out of them, you had to go rapid fire on a button to “empower” it or whatever. For shorter summons, this was just an exercise in jamming on it as fast as you could before it finished. For longer summons, the whole thing capped out at 255 (or something like that), after which . . . it rolled over. That’s a fun discovery for sure.
The whole thing made actually using the summons not just a chore, but a literal pain.
For my money, the very first Final Fantasy will always be my favorite. I know it’s really threadbare in terms of narrative, and the mechanics lead to a very grindy experience, but it’s a game I cherish anyhow.
I feel you there, brother. Same. Exact same.
It got a bad wrap because the characters were awful, the protagonist ridiculous from his style to his dialogue to his stupid weapon, the love story asinine, and the setting nonsensical but without the charm that made FF6 or FF7 work so well. Not because it was just too dang awesome for its time.
You can definitely tell the difference in difficulty between Half-Life 1 and 2 where 2 eases up on you if your health starts dropping low. Not counting falling off things, I died a LOT more in HL1 vs. 2.
And then you have the lying where the game makes it seem like you have a better chance of success than you actually have. The Civilization series is known for not being fully honest about the numbers. For example, Prince is suppose to be the even playing field against the computer, but the computer has the happiness bonus of Chieftain or Warlord.
I also was reminded of the Weaponcrafting mechanic from Wasteland 2, where the percentage of gun parts that dropped from breaking down a weapon seem incredibly wrong. The Devs denied it, people ran some statistical sampling and found that things were drastically off (such as a 50% chance to get a gun mod according to the display, but giving you junk parts 90% of the time). The Devs said they would address it in the next patch, and then the next patch never happened…
Oh man. Wasteland 2 had a lot of things that it did badly, but the weapon mod system was amongst the worst. Scrap a weapon for a CHANCE to get a weapon mod, with no guarantee that the mod you get is the one you actually wanted (if you even got one). The amount of money I wasted on the advertised 5%(!) chance of gaining a Laser Sight…
On top of that, the actual mods you got from where were utterly counter-intuitive (Turn a revolver into a scope that fits an assault rifle? WHERE DOES THE GLASS COME FROM) so the entire system seemed needlessly stupid and arbitrary.
It would NOT surprise me to hear that the game was lying to you about the chances you had…
(On a related note, the game tells you that an unmodded weapon has a 3-4% chance of jamming, to which I say FUCKING BULLSHIT)
Yeah, why I never used Heavy Weapons, unless you got one of the rare ones that had 0% chance of jamming. Just not worth it.
One of my chief complaints would be that there were too many weapon skills, especially considering the lack of balance between them due to other game mechanics. Developers tried to fix this with the DC, but still never changed things to where 3 Assault Rifles and 1 Sniper weren’t the ideal combinations. So you have a lot of game mechanics that are best but suboptimal.
I can definitely take being lied to as long as I don’t find out. Games are full of trickery, but it does ruin the magic a bit for me when you see through it. As far as adaptive difficulty is concerned, when the cat is out of the bag, it never feels too great to know you were babied. And more annoyingly, if you want to try again against the same challenge, you now have to load a save or restart a chapter just to face a non-turned down version. It makes that grind to improve yourself more frustrating than it would have been otherwise.
Automatic difficulty adjustments are difficult to pull off. The cheating AI in Homeworld 2 gets a stronger fleet than you based on how strong your own fleet is. Rimworld keeps upping the difficulty until you die to raiders or bugs; It forces players to work around the tricks of the game. Left 4 Dead (and 2) hamper players who are doing too well, but because of the response-time of the zombies, single players could run past everything, and then the zombies wake up just in time to punish the other 3 players who are honest. These systems have marginal benefits in my opinion, but can punish players, or just make them feelcondescended to, so it’s not worth it.
FF8 and Graveyard Keeper are the big ‘very flawed but still fun’ games. I’ll throw FF2 in there too, the level-up mechanic is broken but it’s 90% of the way to great. Then Valkyria Chronicles 1 has significant class balance issues, Scouts wreck everything and Snipers are dead weight. And I guess I can count Party Hard, I remember folks like Rutskarn saying it was awful but once you get over the absurd unrealism of people continuing a party with twenty dead bodies it’s fine. And probably You Must Build A Boat, simple Match 3 stuff. …And sure, Fairy Fencer F Advent Dark Force is a T-rated porn JRPG that ended up becoming more interesting than it seemed; not wonderful but neat.
Fun But Done games include Baba Is You and… well SFD is kind of murky, it’s like a roguelike Tactics Ogre game and once you mute it it’s not bad, but it’s not as addicting as other roguelikes. …Oh, and Scribblenauts Unlimited. There’s probably others but I can’t think of them, mostly they get dropped for lacking something.
I hate to-hit chances in games so I don’t much care if the game lies about it, especially in the player’s favor. I’d much rather replace hit chance with a fixed pool of attacks; change 90% to ‘9 of 10’ and guarantee 9 will hit and 1 will miss. Something like Hard West’s Luck mechanic, which is apparently just XCOM’s mechanic put in front of the scenes. Or just replace to-miss with mitigated damage; 90% hit rate means you only hit for 90% of full power.
Advance Wars did partial damage explicitly – each ‘unit’ was a platoon of infantry/tanks/etc, so the listed percentages for combat overview referred to what percentage of each unit was taken out by the attack, with battle animation showing the multiple instances which were shot down. This meant that damaged units dealt a scaled amount of damage due to losing guns. First attacker had a massive advantage as their volley would damage the opposing unit first, with the counterattack damage being scaled down as a result, but attrition would get you and the game was much more about supply lines moving fresh units to the scene (for the natural MOBA-style difficulty scaling where your reinforcements are delayed more and theirs are delayed less as you approach your opponent’s factories).
Scribblenauts Unlimited would have been on my list, but my wife started playing it with me, and we finished it together. Would be interesting to hear about all the games people only finished (or kept playing) because of other people and not the game itself. WoW probably qualifies for a lot of people on that front.
Hard West’s Luck mechanic wasn’t really like that. It was its own unique thing with its own flaws.
What happened in Hard West is that every attack was effectively a fractional hit. Shots against you would subtract Luck in a 1:1 %:luck ratio. So if someone shot at you with 50% chance to hit and you had 55 luck remaining then it would miss and now you have 5 luck remaining. The next shot with a 20% chance to hit would now hit and you would be left with 85 Luck.
Effectively it became a form of hit points. It became about controlling damage by getting shot by the right attacks at the right time when your Luck was low to regain it. So you deliberately absorbed a 3 hp attack while taking half damage rather than a 9 damage hit with no mitigation. It was a strange system that created perverse incentives. Especially since special attacks spent Luck as a resource.
It resulted in a combat that was more like a puzzle to be solved than something like XCOM.
Hard West does not explain itself at all well in-game. You really need to read the manual to understand what’s going on. That on-screen “percent chance to hit” value is the single most misleading thing I’ve ever seen in a game’s UI. Given what I’ve heard about the treatment of cover in their follow-up game, Phantom Doctrine, unusual, poorly explained combat mechanics are apparently the developers’ specialty.
I found the UI serviceable. It wasn’t good though. I’ve seen worse. Oh I’ve seen much much worse. (I’m currently playing Thea 2 and that game’s UI is hot garbage.)
I should note that Hard West had the same mechanic for enemies. Like there would be an enemy in cover and you have a 20% chance to hit him. He’s got 100 Luck. So you will certainly miss. You still take the shot though. Because that is part of your plan for the round. IE: Shoot twice at 20% with w/e weapon, subtracting 40 Luck total. Which allows you to actually hit (guaranteed) with that 65% shot that ignores cover and does fair damage. Leaving him with 75 Luck and low hp. Which means that you can run up to him with a different character and blast him close range with that final attack with a 80% to hit that is certain to kill him.
The game was just a math puzzle to solve. Lots of subtraction with no probabilities.
I kinda enjoyed that aspect of Hard West. Made me think that guys like Nathan Drake were all actually using the same system, and not regenerating physical health. I think one of creators of Uncharted actually confirmed that theory?
Players probably wouldn’t notice, but I think guaranteed chances would be interesting.
1. Decide on an increment of probability (e.g. 1/20).
2. Generate #probability lists of all numbers 1..probability.
3. Shuffle each list.
4. Whenever a random number is needed, iterate over the corresponding list.
5. Whenever at the end of a list, reshuffle and set point at the first element.
The best part about that is that the displayed probabilities would be technically correct, which, of course, is the best kind of correct. I’m not really in love with XCOM style combat either and mitigating or avoiding streaks seems like a good idea. It’s just that I want to know the rules when I play a strategy game.
I think this style of random, like a deck of cards, probably feels more “fair” to the average person. At least, judging by devs wanting to fudge numbers, and the other comments here. I myself am a total nerd, who calculates cumulative probabilities on random chances in games to report bugs; Dice-roll style random is what I grew up with! :)
That’s known as ‘bag randomization’. It’s also what Final Fantasy kinda did… except it advanced the list every two frames while in the battle menu, and shuffled it then burned it into the ROM.
Speedrunners have figured out how to manipulate that RNG via buffering techniques, resulting in deterministic outcomes.
Why did they advance the list at set times instead of only when they needed a number? Or are you talking about the SNES and earlier?
Strong words considering I don’t remember a single fade-to-black sex scene in the game, let alone an actually explicit one*. If Fairy Fencer is porn then Fire Emblem’s been there for some time as well, but with their hotub scenes behind extra dlc or gacha game fronts.
Fairy Fencer has a lot of visual novel style talky bits and is generally made of anime/VN tropes, sure, but that doesn’t make it “porn game.”
*Unless the third arc is just full of fuckin, but if the first two aren’t I doubt the third is.
Boobs are bouncing constantly, and unsealing the Goddess reveals she’s not wearing anything under the seal, so the main quest is a game-length striptease.
Never played a Fire Emblem. Lots of anime games walk the line but Compile Heart’s games are particularly brazen about it.
I can agree on that second phrasing- they’re certainly not kid’s games.
FF2, yeah. It’s like TES before TES, with the skill grinding. Of course the original (drink!) NES version really messed up with the requirements to get certain stats up.
Yeah, I played FF2 on the GBA, where it actually seemed to work properly.
Ooh, I forgot Milon’s Secret Castle! You can make a game longer with secrets, or with high difficulty, and MSC tried to max out both. Haven’t played it in a long time and never managed to clear a single level on the second floor, but that was one of the first games I owned and it’s got a special place in my heart.
Oh, man. As a kid with a NES and no Internet, I was stuck on the first level of that game for years. It turns out that the controller reads inputs from all controller ports. My sisters figured this out one day, resulting in Milon trying to obey three sets of commands at once, which in turn was how we accidentally discovered you can move blocks.
I think amnesia did it right, and I wonder how many people did find it was a lie on they own. The thing is that it concerns a vague behavior, and not something precise, a number or whatever you can easily discover.
Also, it’s maybe not a pure lie. When the sanity is low, daniel movements/senses are impaired, so it naturally makes the monsters harder to avoid. And when the sanity is at its lowest, you fall on the ground for something like 10-15 seconds, you can’t walk or run anymore, just slowly crawl, and it becomes almost impossible to hide (not to mention to run) from a monster, so it makes you feel weak and paranoïd.
So, it’s true the monsters will not be more attracted by you when your sanity is low. But that lie is backed by the way the game works.
It’s an awkward phrasing if nothing else. I wouldn’t be surprised if the actual mechanic the way it is described was something that got abandoned during production for some reason or other, or maybe playtesters were under the impression that when the sanity was low (and hence when they were more vulnerable) the monsters were somehow always finding them and the devs just went with it.
Doom 1 is worth playing if you liked Doom 2, if for the most part much easier. Episode 4’s start is brutal though. Losing the super shotty isn’t too bad but makes pinkies slow to fight with 2/3 shots depending on RNG. The level design in 1 tends to be better (no awful city levels) but you really, really miss the new enemies. If you have room to strafe every non-hitscan enemy in doom 1 can’t ever hit you and the only dangerous hit-scanner is an end of episode boss.
Voicing a silent protagonist after years with internet memes feels like a “How do you do fellow kids?” corporate moment. Like the “Doot” revenant skin, it feels like someone in a boardroom sat down and asked what the kids are into these days. Doomguy’s had various names and characterisations across games and someone sat down and decided in the middle of the story (which is huge and apparently supposed to be taken seriously) they needed the silent protagonist to belt out some joke references from the internet. The comic when it came out was derided and only became noticed in the modern era when people wanted to show how awfully “90’s” it was.
That’s how the Doom comic was initially received, but like some other memes, it took on a life and legitimacy of its own. At some point, “Haha, can you believe this 90’s shit?” crossed over into “But seriously, this is pretty fucking Doom”, and the fandom collectively had zero problem with it.
I was fine with it, for a lot of the reasons detailed in Noah Caldwell’s video here. And given how so much of Eternal is like a fully-erect love letter to the whole franchise, I honestly felt like it came from a place of love and fun; not some bigwig at Bethesda demanding the inclusion of more internet memes.
I get why it comes off as cringe to some people, and it may induce an eye-roll if your mental model of Doom is more dark and scary than the rainbow piñata that is the latest game. But if there’s a failure here, it’s from the devs nerdgasming so hard, not some out-of-touch boomer.
The interesting thing about Fire Emblem is that the first 5 games actually display the hit chance accurately. However, they got negative feedback from people who played the games because it defied their intuitions about how probability should work. The decision to start fudging the numbers in later games wasn’t some arbitrary decision made on a whim but was based on actual feedback. And the new system which shows inaccurate hit chance doesn’t seem to get criticised as much. Most people don’t even realize the numbers are fudged unlesss someone tells them.
Apocryphal psych story: There was one university psych department which got odd results from a prediction experiment, where people were presented with a string of computer-generated random decimal digits and tried to guess the next one. People try to see patterns where they don’t exist, but those guesses are naturally expected to be correct 10% of the time when real randomness interacts with arbitrary choices… but enough data was collected to confidently state that people were correct 11% of the time. The effect was small, but statistically distinguishable from mere chance. Had they discovered psychic powers?
This was very exciting until someone else took a look at the program generating random numbers for the study. Whoever put it together was evidently frustrated that the sequences weren’t random enough; after all, it kept producing strings of the same digit, and that’s hardly random at all! It was as if one in every ten digits was followed by the same digit, and sometimes in the thousands of digits generated there were three or more in a row, which we all know is strictly impossible. To fix this bug in the cryptographically secure random number generator, the programmer ensured that it would only draw randomly from the set of digits other than the one just produced – which is to say, each remaining digit had a 1/9 chance, or 11%.
Of course, this implies that with a real random number generator, the initial guesses were worse than random, because they statistically didn’t include the possibility that a number might repeat.
It implies no such thing. If the numbers are really random than any guessing strategy should be just as good as random regardless of any arbitrary, incorrect bias. Even someone who just guesses “7” every time should statistically succeed 10% of the time.
There is a 1/10 chance that the number is repeated, you will always be wrong when this happens.
There is a 9/10 chance that the number is not repeated, and you will be correct 1/9th of the time when this happens.
So your total odds of getting the correct result is (1/9)*(9/10) = 1/10
Welp, I set out to prove you wrong… but I guess you were right.
Any strategy that is worse than average can trivially be converted to a complementary strategy that is better than average.
Did people explicitly complain that the displayed probabilities felt wrong in the early games? Did people think that 90% means they should succeed 99 out of 100 times, or did they think that having the PCs miss too often made the games unfun and frustrating? I’d love to run an experiment if there would still be complaints about current Fire Emblem games if they showed the real probabilities.
If you want to try an X-Com style game where the probabilites are WYSIWYG: The developer of Vigilantes is very adamant that the game always displays the exact chance to hit, with no adjustments (though it can never go higher than 95%). From my own experience of the game, this seems to be true – e.g. I missed with two 95% attacks in a row around twice during my entire playthrough. Considering I probably made a couple of thousand attacks over the course of the game, many of which would not have been at 95%, this feels correct to me. It’s also a very decent game, albeit low-budget.
The screenshots remind me of Underrail for some reason. I don’t think Underrail lies about the probabilities, but it certainly has a lot of “read the wiki” in its character creation.
I don’t know about Fire Emblem specifically, but I do know that most players don’t understand probability to the point that if you make any game that regularly shows probabilities to players you will get a deluge of completely wrongheaded complaints about it. At least one version of Civilization did have playtesters who thought that, say, 90% should never miss twice in a row despite the high number of combats featured in a full game of Civ. Or ask anyone who’s worked on an online card game of any kind. It’s so bad that people who find an actual RNG mistake in such games usually have to state their case in 2 or 3 different ways before successfully convincing people that it’s a legitimate bug and not one of the many cranks.
I think Tim Cain also mentioned something like that in one of his talks, where someone complained to him that the random dice rolls “weren’t very random”.
I’d prefer designers ditch probability altogether if players don’t understand it well. Either the effect should be small enough that you don’t need the probability displayed (i.e. each attack has a range of damage), or confine it to positive effects where people care less if it doesn’t come off as often as they think (critical chance), or just use a deterministic mechanic.
Displaying incorrect probabilities messes it up for the people trying to actually calculate.
In general I agree; people can be wrong about probabilities, but they can’t be wrong about whether they’re having fun or not. Sometimes the answer is to stop giving the player explicit probabilities at all and fudge the numbers however you want to make things fun.
When it comes to strategy games (even, say, somewhat luck-heavy card games) I do believe the answer is to change mechanics rather than lying about them though. E.g. Hearthstone’s mana system as compared to Magic: The Gathering’s.
I think another solution would be to use a style of random like a deck of cards. The main probabilities that normally get shown to players would be the same as dice-rolls (80%, 4/5, 8/10, etc), but it doesn’t have two catastrophies in a row, or two amazing successes in a row. :)
Don’t lie to players about the probabilities even then- if you use a bag randomizer, tell people that you’re using a bag randomizer.
Oh, and if there are opponents who need random numbers, make them use the inverse; a random result that’s bad for the player to get should be bad for the player when the enemy gets it.
It’s not lying – just not specifying dice-roll or card-deck (or “bag”, etc). If the problem is that “average” people don’t understand randomness sufficiently, adding extra terms is probably overkill. It could be in an info-box that explains that part of the UI, but most people would probably not need it.
Interestingly, some board games do something like this with a literal deck of cards (blackjack did this accidentally, which is the entire reason card counting became a thing). I can’t think of this kind of randomization being visible in a video game, but would be interested to know if something like that exists.
Well, if you want it can have 2 identical rolls in a row, (e.g. a D6: first shuffle gets 3, 5, 6, 2, 4, 1; second shuffle gets 1, 3, 2, 6, 4, 5), but it won’t have 3.
People complain about that for modern XCOM all the time.
The internet is full of memes about 80% = 0% (or whatever initial percent you want).
I think I’m like this, but the opposite way round. If I see something has a 70% chance to hit I will assume it’s going to miss every 2 in 3 times. People unfortunate enough to have a Pokemon that learned Thunder or Blizzard in generation 1 will understand why.
Props to Issac for the editing on this episode. You’d never know it, but my mic kept cutting out and forcing me to leave and re-enter the recording session.
I wouldn’t have known except for this comment. Good job Issac!
Destiny 2 does (or did? Haven’t played in ages, maybe they patched it) the lying to players thing in one of the worst ways I’ve seen. Your health bar goes down slower when it’s nearly empty, in order to create more dramatic “oh no I’m almost dead” moments without having the player actually be almost dead. The problem is that this ruins the healthbar. You still have a fixed amount of bullets you can get hit with before dying, but now you can’t get an accurate sense of it because the game is lying, and even once you notice the lie you still don’t know how much health you have because you can’t read the log-scale bar chart that is your healthbar.
For contrast, Nuclear Throne does a thing similar to Half Life where the spawn rate of ammo depends on how much ammo you have. It’s a hugely significant mechanic and it’s inexcusable that you need to read the wiki to learn it, but once you know about it I don’t mind it because it just becomes part of the game. You understand when ammo drops will be rare and can exercise some control over it (you carry two guns and each of their ammo pools contribute separately to the drop rate), just like you understand that enemy type A has a higher drop rate than enemy type B.
For me the line of acceptability is not misleading vs lying, but whether or not I can salvage the true state of things once I know about the lie. Fire Emblem’s simple formula is easy to calculate in my head, XCOM’s vague fudge factors are much more frustrating.
I didn’t know about Destiny 2, but that does sound pretty dumb. For maximum utility, the scale should (if anything) be non-linear the other way around. The last quarter of your healthbar is way more crucial than the first half.
For maximum utility it should just be damn number. There’s a reason we don’t have bullet bars, why can’t UI designers apply the same reasoning to health?
The Diablo series kinda did this in a clever way that was both honest but also communicated seriousness to the player: the health bars were rounded bottles. AFAIK, the health percent displayed was completely accurate based only on *height* however. This meant that , say, the first 15% of health loss was barely noticeable, because it was at the rounded top of the bottle and there only a small portion of the graphic was lost. But as you took more damage, it cut into the wide center portion of the graphic, so you knew you were getting into trouble. By the time you were down to the last 15% or so, there was an obvious huge empty bottle with a sliver of red left in it.
This had practical effects, too, since it’s easier to notice that happening out of the corner of your eye without looking away from the action in the middle of the screen. I’ve occasionally run into issues with games that don’t do this, where’ I’m having so much fun but tunnel-vision the middle of the screen that I literally don’t notice that I need to use a health potion or medkit or whatever.
That’s interesting. I guess I always assumed your remaining health was measured by the vertical pixel count rather than the total.
Pretty sure that’s what Hector wrote. Measured by height, displayed with area.
Oh, right. That makes more sense.
For me, Nuclear Throne’s handling of ammo-drops doesn’t even feel dishonest. It’s external to the player, so it doesn’t seem like something that should be accurate or relied upon. The health-bar shenanigans you describe in Destiny 2 feel like a lie, since a health-bar is only an abstraction of how your character is interpreting their well-being. Since they’re generally a skilled bad-ass, it’s reasonable that they would be able to accurately judge their own well-being, so a non-lying health-bar seems appropriate.
The ammo caps in Nuclear Throne are so low that it pretty much needs to be done that way, imo.
I’m pretty sure pokemon does the slower bar at low health for dramatic effect thing- but it works because its not a real time game, so the dramatic reveal of whether you OHKO’d them or they’ve got 1hp left is dramatic, not actively hurting play.
That’s a pretty clever way to use it – the numbers are still correct at the end, but the information is revealed in a suspensful way! :)
Homebound did it even better.
A “reblog” is a tumblr thing. You can leave comments there, but nobody’s going to ever see them, so the standard thing to do is to reblog it by posting a quote on your own blog with your commentary below it. That’s basically the main functionality of tumblr. Here’s the post that talks about XCOM, so you can see what that looks like after a few iterations.
Scorn looks interesting, but after watching the trailer, the only thing I know for sure is that it has huge guts.
Why can’t people see comments? From the main page on Tumblr, and a support article I found, it seems like they’re supposed to be like comments on other public things (public Facebook posts, other public blogs, etc) – people comment, and have a discussion. Is the feature broken?
I’m only occasionally lurking on Tumblr, so I actually have no clue. Reblogging seems to be the default mode of responding.
I’d rather games not lie to me, if only because discovering that a game has been lying to me is always such a disappointment. There are exceptions, however. I don’t mind too much when an RPG tells me that the main quest is urgent but still lets me spend as much time as I’d like on sidequests. I don’t exactly approve, but it’s a genre convention and I’m inured to it. I also don’t mind too much when games lie to me about probabilities. I wish they wouldn’t. I’m a big boy and I can accept that a 90% chance of success is still a 10% chance of failure. Missing a 90% shot in XCOM is aggravating but I know how math works and I know that if I play enough XCOM I will (or should) eventually end up missing a lot of 90% shots. The reason that I can say that lying about probabilities doesn’t bother me is that I don’t think I’ve ever actually noticed it in practice. I’ve never tried tracking that kind of thing.
That’s the key to a good–by which I suppose I mean successful–lie, I think. It should be hard to detect. If the lie is easy to spot, then, even if it benefits the player, it comes off as clumsy and artless.
I played only a bit of XCOM before getting bored, but I thought that 60%-70% craphshoots succeeded more often than they should. Then again, I knew about the Fire Emblem thing already, so I was primed to be suspicious.
For me, finding out about the lie makes me feel condescended to. The game devs are effectively saying, “We don’t trust you to handle dice-rolls and failures like an adult. Here, let us just fudge the numbers, so you feel good for no reason.” (Note, for PG-13 or Teen rated games, I think young adults are old enough to handle real numbers in dice-rolls.)
I’d rather just have the limits of the abstraction completely obvious. Show me the percentages or dice-rolls. Make the end of a 3D level have cardboard-cutouts and wooden fake-buildings like an old-West movie-set, so I know I’m going out of bounds. It’s easy for me to see the limits of the game and move on; That’s better than the game setting a higher expectation of simulation, than what it’s able to provide.
It’s one of a things Pathfinder: Kingmaker got right, even if they caught a lot of flak for it. The game does not lie when it tells you a main quest is urgent, and you WILL get a game over if you ignore it for some sidequests. And it also, usually, gives you enough time to finish said sidequests after you’ve dealt with each chapter’s main quest and there’s no immediate danger to your kingdom, which feels much more natural.
Being lied to is kinda silly. I can see it being useful for like amnesia to make you more scared, but for hit chances its just silly.
Also I dont know which fire emblem the article is talking about (the hit chance calculations are different for different entries), but in general its some combination of the skill stat, the hit chance of the weapon used, the weapon proficiency level of the attacker, speed stat of the defender and luck stat. And you dont always attack twice. The amount of attacks you launch depends on your speed stat compared to the enemy speed stat. If its close to the same (4 points or less) both attack once, if one has a higher speed rating than the other exceeding 4, the speedier person will double attack.
Now in the later games on normal difficulty the stats of enemies arent that good, so you almost always double them. So maybe he thinks its always the case. But even if you take that in account you always double attack the % hit the game displays is still valid. It just tells you how big the chance is each individual hit will connect. So its 90% for each hit, and 99% for any of your two hits to connect (which is kind of silly to use as the %hit to display)
It turns out that the article and my memory were not entirely correct about Fire Emblem, but it is true that the virtual dice are rolled twice for every single attack. I’ve found this website that explains what actually happens. The game generates two random numbers in the range from 0 to 99 and takes the average. If the result is below your displayed hit chance, you hit.
The best part of this is that this system to lie in favor of the player (well, generally it works out in favor due to relative stats) is called “True Hit”.
For anyone who’s curious about Gordon Freeman’s voice, here is the last known time he actually spoke.
Shamus : “I don’t have much to say about the game…”
Paul : ” It’s a good game.”
….
Shamus : “Actually I have a rant….”
Had me in suspense there for a minute.
It really was an impromptu rant. There wasn’t even an entry for Cities Skylines in the show notes when we started.
[stands up]
Hi. I’m Phil, and I enjoyed Too Human.
The game was definitely flawed, but I really dug its take on Diablo-style combat. Stick-aiming attacks felt more natural than the button-mashing I got from Torchlight, even though the latter is a better game on the whole. I really wish someone would take that approach to ARPG combat controls, but from an isometric perspective. It’s a shame the game bombed, and also that it is associated with Denis Dyack.
I think the true percent chance to hit aggravates many people because they more commonly see the negative outcome. A player is far more likely to take 90% shot than a 10% shot so people are generally going to see a 90% shot miss far more often than a 10% shot hit.
re: games that run out
For me, that would be Darkest Dungeon. I really like the game, it’s wonderfully atmospheric… but I don’t really feel like playing it right now, so I’ll pick it up again later.
I played a similar game, Mistover, which is like Darkest Dungeon and XCOM had a baby that grew up to be a roguelike. So lots of Impactful Decisions and worrying about dwindling resources on the micro and macro scale. Lots of fun but I got exhausted with it.
My inner completionist hates it when I walk away from a game before the credits, but I have too many to get through and a lot of modern developers seem to have a cloying jealousy of the player’s time, which leads to unnecessary padding and time-wasting.
Nobody commented on the 2D Duke Nukem games so far, so here goes: They are among my favorites from that era of 2D side scrollers, especially the 2nd one. I would say they still hold up today, although the 1st one is a bit rough in terms of sound, with only PC speaker being supported. Still, great pixel art and gameplay. The 2nd has better presentation in terms of graphics, sounds, effects etc., but is often criticized for being too “zoomed in”, which can make it hard to see enemies coming. It also gets quite tedious in the middle of the 2nd and 3rd episode. The 1st episode (which is also the shareware episode) is still really great though, closely followed by the 4th episode, which has some of my favorite levels.
To sum it up: I think out of all the popular side scrollers from that era, the Duke games are the best when it comes to fast paced, action heavy gameplay with lots of explosions all over the place. And they have a little bit less of a cartoony feel to them compared to Commander Keen and the like, which you may or may not prefer :)
Shamus, for your farming woes is Cites: Skylines, I recommend the Industries DLC with the mod: Rebalanced Industries
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1562650024
Description: “Fix the traffic (and more!) in your Industries DLC districts with Rebalanced Industries (Rebind). Reduces cargo traffic and employee numbers for a more playable and realistic experience. Industries DLC is required, this does not affect zoned industry.”
The DLC alone is much better then a terrible vanilla system, but it is still not ‘good’ when it comes to farms. The mod substantially improves it. There are some farm field assets linked from the mod itself that also help.
Note again that this mod requires the Industries DLC to work. The vanilla system is just too broken to fix.
For your problems with the deathcare system I recommend the mod: Lifecycle Rebalance Revisited 1.2, it does not require any DLC.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2027161563
Description: “Tired of immersion-breaking “deathwaves” in the base game? Struggling with the base game’s unrealistic education level straightjacket, and not wanting to artificially limit education delivery to fill your base-level jobs? Unhappy with the transport choices of your citizens? Looking for a more realistic simulation experience? Then this mod is for you!”
I think XCOM’s number fudging is fine, especially because it is something they implemented in testing so that it “feels” like the numbers are right (because humans can’t really deal with chances that well). The way it works, from what I read, is that if you miss a shot, your next shot has a hidden (plus)chance to hit that varies with difficulty until you actually hit a shot. And the same applies when enemies hit a shot, having a -chance to hit for every successful hit. So that if you miss a 90% chance on the second easiest difficulty, the next 90% chance will actually be 100%, because players will be aggravated to no end for missing two 90% shots in a row, despite the fact that this is very possible. And if an enemy hits you with 10% chance, the second 10% shot will always miss, which is another thing that might aggravate players.
I’d too rather not having the chances fudged one way or the other, but I see the reasoning and I agree with it. People want good numbers to FEEL like good number and they want to hit every third 30% chance shot, despite the fact that’s not how chances actually work. They just need to feel like it works the way they expect it to work. I mean, this is the thinking that leaves gamblers to keep losing money on cassinos, but a game shouldn’t be a cassino… as much as publishers want them to.
The impossible difficulty takes all that away, if you really don’t want the fudging. But it does take away a bit of the frustration for lower difficulties, when people ALREADY think hit chances are bullshit AGAINST them (as I can attest from lots of Lets Plays I’ve watched). Pro players in XCOM treats anything under 95% chance like a huge risk and love to take guaranteed stuff, like guaranteed shots or grenades.
Thing that would be interesting. An XCOM speed run.
Oh, there are XCOM speedruns. They abuse the hell out of the easiest difficulty but it is impressive still.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gxpI_OY6sUo
Number of people required to run a farm varies wildly with technology. Currently, it’s probably around 1/section (640 acres) with modern machinery, and a bump at harvest time if you have lots of hand-picking. In a medieval era, it’s much higher, not least because plow technology has changed so much over the years:
https://ecommons.cornell.edu/bitstream/handle/1813/22848/01_Evolution_of_Plow_Design_(Rehkugler)-.pdf?sequence=38&isAllowed=y
For reference, the 40-acre homestead plot was expected to be manageable by a single family and to feed a family with a bit of surplus in the 19th century.
But I can’t think of a time that 16 people could survive on the output of an acre of farmland, much less would be required to farm an acre of ground. (Barring something like a multi-floor hydroponic food factory, which I will assume wouldn’t be called a “farm” in this context.)
Oh, and you do know what a “truck garden” is, right? 8-)
I have two big guilty pleasures in gaming.
First one is casual games. I basically always have one that I’m in the process of playing though I usually only play it two-thee times a week after I wake up from my nap and before I leave for a nightsfhit. It could be a match 3, it could be time management, it could be one of those jigsawlikes. The thing is they do so much that annoys me in other games, the mechanics are repetitive, the stories (if any) are saccharine, I’m not even going to talk about things that they do to mythological or historical settings. But for some reason I just like having something like this to sit down to for a little while and I often find myself actually engaged with the (stupid, goodie two-shoes, naive, brainless) characters…
Also, idlers/incrementals. Shamus mentioned playing Grim Clicker recently but I tend to have 2-3 going at the same time and that’s pretty much by me exerting willpower not to invest myself in more. I know they’re basically just burning through cycles on my CPU and lay claim to a portion of my RAM but I just like seeing numbers grow, also some of the more complex ones have fairly robust systems that give you the constant illusion that you’re progressing or achieving something. I’ve recently dropped Crusaders of the Lost Idols in which I’ve invested a good couple years (they introduced infinite levels to certain skills and I liked having goalposts even if, or maybe more so, they kept being moved) in favour of returning to Idle Champions of the Forgotten Realms, got a bunch of time in NGU Idle and sometimes I take some random one for a spin for a week or two.
What’s the point of askagamedev besides shilling for companies and being paternalistic via the medium of tumblr gifs?
Also re: lying, multiplayer games generally don’t do it and they seem to get along fine, so how necessary it is in singleplayer games is dubious.
If I remember correctly the League of Legends Crit system is technically lying.
In the beginning it was a proper random roll vs crit % but it was changed since it felt bad to have fights decided by multiple normal hits in a row if you had high crit chance or multiple crits in a row from a low crit build.
The current system has crit chance as an additive value, so if you have a 20% crit chance your first attack has a 20% chance to be a critical hit, if its not the next attack has a 40% the one after that 60% and so on until you get a critical hit at which time it will reset back to the base value for the next attack.
It does seem a bit weird for a multiplayer competitive game but since it reduces the amount of fights and matches that are decided by random chance it feels a lot better when playing (and watching pro play) then the alternative it works.
“Do you ever find yourself putting a game down before finishing it, not because it’s bad, but rather due to feeling like you’ve gotten everything you can out of it and not seeing a reason to continue?”
Wasteland 2, with great sadness.
I’d thought it would another Arcanum, yet was quite different in handling. Here, the safest approach to Fights is also very tedious and I can’t break that pattern. Also, little to no crafting.
There are so many secrets and things and ways to botch quests it led me to play-by-wiki, and that’s not the funnest way to enjoy it.
So the game is not bad, in fact it’s far from bad, but it interacts with me in counter-fun ways.