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dis astranagant posted:"I felt like I was rather bullied into adding mouse controls to the first game, and that was to the detriment of that game. " Remember when the creators of Legend of Grimrock added an entire new control feature because one disabled gamer messaged them about it? Yeah, gently caress Arcen Games.
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| # ? Feb 21, 2013 00:14 |
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| # ? May 18, 2013 10:23 |
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If it didn't involve sitting through the tutorial again I'd have another fun little passive aggressive screenshot out of them. They really do love their customers.
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| # ? Feb 21, 2013 00:30 |
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Tried out AVWW 2 after being thoroughly confused with the first game, as it lacked any direction and was unnecessarily convoluted with the tacked-on AI War gameplay features. I really don't notice too much of a difference from the first one all, and now with that mouse-look option smug comment I think I'm done with Arcen's games too. Hey Arcen: Your entire 'A Valley Without Wind' franchise is a watered down and less interesting tactical experience.
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| # ? Feb 21, 2013 01:16 |
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Speaking of Fallen Enchantress, is there a thread where people are talking about it? I know there was an Elemental thread, and maybe a Fallen Enchantress one once upon a time, but I couldn't find one via search.
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| # ? Feb 21, 2013 02:02 |
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the black husserl posted:Remember when the creators of Legend of Grimrock added an entire new control feature because one disabled gamer messaged them about it? Yeah, gently caress Arcen Games. Yeah, that's not really fair. They've bent over backwards to make their games accessible to people and usually include extra graphical options to tone down screen excitement to help people who are prone to trouble with lots of bright flashy things. This was never a case of 'I am disabled and need this option to play', and if it had been I'm sure they would have done it in an instant. This was the devs trying to make a certain game the way they wanted. They honestly felt that mouse aiming would make it too easy and undermine the challenge they wanted it to offer. You're free to disagree with that assessment, but don't set them up as your personal cripple-hating strawmen just so you can tell them to gently caress off. (And that control option in LoG was probably worthless anyway, considering how much quick reaction that game required. Later complaints from not just one but multiple older gamers with less than perfect reaction times got no traction with Almost Human Games)
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| # ? Feb 21, 2013 03:50 |
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I don't think the black husserl's intent was to set up a stawman where Arcen hates disabled people so much as to present a contrast where a player wants a weird control scheme and the devs add it no questions asked because a player wants it versus a bunch of players wanting a control scheme and the dev begrudgingly adding it while adding a big long tooltip saying "WELL OKAY I GUESS BUT YOU'RE DOING IT WRONG AND PLAYING OUTSIDE OUR VISION". It's a tonal thing. If they truly believe that mouse aiming will ruin the feel of the game they can put a simple tag saying "Note: May lessen difficulty" instead of a paragraph long spiel about how it's overpowered and how you're not getting the true spirit of the game if you use it. It's definitely better than them just going "no gently caress you" and not adding it though.
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| # ? Feb 21, 2013 03:55 |
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Not to mention "THEIR GRAND GAMEPLAY DESIGN" has you firing 8way shots at tiny enemies that come at really odd angles. A lot of them are bad enough to hit with the wonky and not very precise mouse aim. Bonus points for all the times you get stuck shooting into walls because your shots come out about 3 feet in front of you.
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| # ? Feb 21, 2013 04:04 |
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Exactly! It's more challenging! I wish I could keep loving Arcen but man they just have not done anything right since AI War and it continues to be really depressing.
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| # ? Feb 21, 2013 04:07 |
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Seriously, imagine if Capcom decided to add 360-degree free aiming to a Megaman game. If the entire game (combat, level design and more) has been designed around limitations in aiming, it's going to screw things up if you go and change the core mechanic like that. Their implementation of fixed-direction aiming may have been clunky, but the entire design of the game was built around it. It's very understandable that they'd be hesitant (at best) to patch in mouse aiming.
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| # ? Feb 21, 2013 04:10 |
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Dominic White posted:Seriously, imagine if Capcom decided to add 360-degree free aiming to a Megaman game. If the entire game (combat, level design and more) has been designed around limitations in aiming, it's going to screw things up if you go and change the core mechanic like that. No, no it wasn't. They can holler that all they want but they're full of poo poo. Especially with the weird mess of enemy shots cancelling yours all the time.
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| # ? Feb 21, 2013 04:21 |
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dis astranagant posted:No, no it wasn't. They can holler that all they want but they're full of poo poo. Especially with the weird mess of enemy shots cancelling yours all the time. That's intentional. With 360 degree aiming you can just jump up over those shots and shoot past them. As designed, you're supposed to use a higher caliber spell to cancel out the enemy spell. It gives you a reason to do something besides spam one spell all the time. Again, you can dislike the implementation but they didn't just make this up at the last minute. They had a plan here.
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| # ? Feb 21, 2013 04:24 |
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Several classes can only cancel incoming shots with their ammo spell, leaving them pretty much hosed after 2 or 3 shots.
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| # ? Feb 21, 2013 04:26 |
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dis astranagant posted:No, no it wasn't. Yes, it was. It was one of the very first things they announced about AVWW2, before any other details of the game were revealed. I should know - they sent me a press release ages ago. One of the core design decisions of the game was more Metroid-style combat with a pure digital control system. You might not like how it turned out (I certainly don't), but it was a fundamental pillar of the design from day 1.
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| # ? Feb 21, 2013 04:26 |
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I meant that in the sense that they did basically nothing to enemy behavior to accommodate the change. All they "designed" different was crippling the controls for no real gain.
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| # ? Feb 21, 2013 04:29 |
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Dominic White posted:it was a fundamental pillar of the design from day 1. I think this is where the disagreement is coming from. It was there from day 1, but "fundamental pillar of the design" implies that it was actually taken into account. Like everything else in this fiasco, it's a gameplay element that was crammed into the design without any consideration for how it affects and is affected by any other part of the game design. How far back it was implemented is immaterial if that time wasn't actually used for anything.
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| # ? Feb 21, 2013 08:12 |
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sethsez posted:I think this is where the disagreement is coming from. It was there from day 1, but "fundamental pillar of the design" implies that it was actually taken into account. Like everything else in this fiasco, it's a gameplay element that was crammed into the design without any consideration for how it affects and is affected by any other part of the game design. How far back it was implemented is immaterial if that time wasn't actually used for anything. Cramming as many elements into a game as possible is Arcen's MO, so it's not surprising to see them waffle on this point. They don't seem to design against things like, in this case, limitations on player movement and shooting angles. It worked well in AI War's case where the game is asymmetric from the beginning and cramming more stuff in there just works, but we how problematic it is in a 2D sidescrolling action game where the player's freedom of movement (or lack thereof) is the core design and everything else must flow from that. I guess what I'm saying is that AVWW doesn't play to their strengths as a developer.
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| # ? Feb 21, 2013 14:41 |
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I started playing the first game and figured this was some oddbal goof poo poo made by some deranged lunatic who found a copy of game maker. Then I played it a bit more and got it, it had this odd interesting factor to it. Then I decided to jump to the second game and I was instantly frustrated at the change in controls. I finally got it sorted out and play with the gamepad and got to the city building section and I gotta say, this game is really cool. It has a ton of problems (the level design in the first castle thing you start in is mind boggling, I was so glad when I got out of it) but it does a lot of interesting stuff and the music is pretty great. It's totally worth checking out if you like experimental games that try new stuff.
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| # ? Feb 22, 2013 02:50 |
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Yeah I definitely had some fun with it, hell I even have hours of playtime in AVWW1 built up from playing while watching things on Netflix. It's just rather deceptive of them to call this a sequel, let alone a finished product. I really want to see the game improve but with how things are going I don't know if it'll actually happen with their vacuum-like forum.
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| # ? Feb 22, 2013 02:57 |
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This game, as well as the first one, are completely baffling. I mean sure, it's confusing as hell to play, but I can't even begin to imagine what the design doc looked like, if there even was one. It's like someone just made a bulleted list of concepts and just went to town, moving from feature to feature as they pleased. I'm surprised the game is even remotely stable.
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| # ? Feb 22, 2013 09:11 |
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They did finally add mouse aiming AVWW2, not that it makes me any more inclined to buy in.
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| # ? Feb 24, 2013 05:46 |
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TOOT BOOT posted:They did finally add mouse aiming AVWW2, not that it makes me any more inclined to buy in. Yeah, the tooltip and developer's thoughts on the idea are even quoted at the top of this page.
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| # ? Feb 24, 2013 05:59 |
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| # ? May 18, 2013 10:23 |
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Played through 2 last weekend, before mouse aim was intorduced, on lower difficulties so I could just screw around and see what the game had to offer. I didn't find it so bad, a little annoying with limited shot angles and annoyinbg enemies (flying eyeballs) and found the caliber system annoying (why do I have to charge shot to hit that clockwork pigeon) but there were some nice ideas in there. Im interested to see whare it goes in the future. I kind of want to see them put Ice Age dudes and robots back in, too. Also, near the end I realized the best way out of caves and towers and such was to pop a poison pill, since it skips rooms of nonsense once you complete objectives, and gives you a place to swap skills or classes easy.
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| # ? Mar 3, 2013 20:14 |
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