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But...the game is still randomized  . You have a 75% of landing that hit when the game makes that calculation, it's just that you 'reroll' by taking forcing the game to recalculate rather than when you take the shot. In either case you're just choosing at which point the game makes the roll.e: Like I see what the designers were trying to do in that they were trying to discourage savescumming because if the seed reset every time you reloaded the game you might as well just make that 75% of landing a hit a 100% chance 'when it counts' because players would just reload if they needed that shot to land. It's not a solution that worked (and Ironman mode is the better solution to 'stop savescumming') but I don't personally see how it changes how random the result was. RoboCicero fucked around with this message at 01:04 on Mar 14, 2015 |
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Mar 14, 2015 01:01
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How a player perceives a system to work is far more important than how the system actually works. If saving the seed makes a player feel like the outcomes are deterministic based on stupid factors then it is a bad system for that player. I'm not sure how common that perception of xcom is though.
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Mar 14, 2015 01:09
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Yea, and that's the thing. I'm not saying the system is unfair, I'm saying that it feels unfair, and that feeling stems from noticing the anti-scumming mechanics.
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Mar 14, 2015 01:24
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Sigma-X posted:I get that they wanted to avoid save scumming but this wasn't communicated to the player in any useful way. It was not communicated well but it did end up saving me from myself and I appreciate that. I had a 75% to hit shot I really needed so I saved and keep trying to take it and after 5 tries went and looked up the random seed being saved in the save game. After that I ended up saving every other turn or so and made myself somewhat live with my choices. It caused me to play the game much more properly using cover and setting myself up to survive bad rolls instead of save scumming myself out of situations. Of course that could have been done with self control but I appreciate the system. Probably what they needed to do was popup a message about the RNG after you reloaded the same save the third time.
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Mar 14, 2015 01:25
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RoboCicero posted:But...the game is still randomized Because you can reload to force your opponent to gently caress up instead. Their anti-scumming method is ironically more exploitable in your favor. I don't know if it was there from day 1 or if it was patched in but EU does have a streak breaker. So the more you miss the greater the chance your next attack hits to the point where you'll hit with 100% accuracy after 3-4 misses even if the game says you have 1% chance to hit. al-azad fucked around with this message at 01:30 on Mar 14, 2015 |
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Mar 14, 2015 01:28
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Stick100 posted:It caused me to play the game much more properly using cover and setting myself up to survive bad rolls instead of save scumming myself out of situations. This might just be me, because I'm pretty bad at X-Com, but I feel it made the game more boring- whenever I play Ironman, I play in an extremely boring way: set up snipers with overwatch, have a heavy standing by to neutralize any cover xenos find near the snipers, and use an assaulter/support team to repeatedly trigger a squad of xenos and then pull them out where the snipers could hit them. It was extremely boring in larger maps, but significantly safer than the up-close, hyper-aggressive CQB stomps I could try in non-ironman safe in the realization that if I completely cludged up I could always go back.
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Mar 14, 2015 01:31
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Omi no Kami posted:Yea, and that's the thing. I'm not saying the system is unfair, I'm saying that it feels unfair, and that feeling stems from noticing the anti-scumming mechanics. Only if you don't trust Math  Unfortunately lots of people don't trust math. 
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Mar 14, 2015 01:41
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People are about as good at intuiting probability as they are at unpowered flight. Possibly worse
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Mar 14, 2015 01:51
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I think people are fine with math and fine with probability it's just that these things have a psychological effect. A surprise factor I guess, I don't know if there's a legitimate term for it. You tell me I have a 99% chance to succeed and I fail 3 times in a row it hurts. If we made that test a million times I wouldn't feel bad about it but instead I fail when it counts and it hurts more as a result. I never understood why roleplaying groups would suggest harsher critical hit/fumble rules because those things punish the players more than their opponents. Because maybe you get that auto-kill against an enemy but they're only relevant for 1 battle while you're relevant for 100. You're only compounding the chances of things going bad for your character, not your opponents.
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Mar 14, 2015 02:08
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Zaphod42 posted:Why is it infuriating? It just means that the game is more based on strategy than repetition. Some things are still random so they're slightly unpredictable, but if a certain strategy fails, doing the same thing over again and just hoping the RNG works for you this time is weaksauce. You should actually try doing something different. The notion of failing a critical 95% shot every load unless you move to a tactically-worse location just so the random number re-rolls is dumb. Either let me save-scum or don't, but the implementation is one that still allows save-scumming while making save-scumming for someone who is not familiar with the outside-of-game knowledge of how the system works (none of this is in the game and it's poo poo you had to learn from reading a loving article somewhere). Like, I don't know if you've played the game, but there are frequently areas where there is a single "correct" piece of cover and if you are unlucky enough to move your "correct" guy there and fire when RNGesus nails you to the cross, you can't try it again without making a worse line of play, at which point, if you do, everything resolves itself fine except you've put yourself in a non-optimal position. Rather than relying on the traditional conventions of saving and loading to let me retry something when I fail, I have to have unreasonable knowledge of how the game was developed to achieve the traditional convention. But they provide the illusion of the traditional convention when what they really wanted to enforce was a semi-ironman approach. It's a failure in design, not a failure in the end-user.
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Mar 14, 2015 02:13
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The problem here is obviously that you're save scumming at all and isn't playing XCOM with ironman mode enabled.
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Mar 14, 2015 02:17
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People hate planes and would probably take a motorcycle the same distance even though the motorcycle would kill them 166 times more than the plane, because people feel in control in the motorcycle vs in the plane. Agency is a big part of risk and I assume what it comes down to is when someone says "I want to have my dude take this shot and it will be 75% likely" then it's perceived as you making the decision, but when it's "I'm taking the shot" *dice rolls and comes up a 1* "oh well that was the game deciding my probability for me and it failed this isn't acceptable" This is the only thing I can assume here. (Just make a baby easy mode where all the randomness always comes out 100% for the player no matter what and let them have their 'every day's my birthday' problem)
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Mar 14, 2015 02:22
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It seems futile to try to prevent any kind of cheating, let alone just save-scumming in a single player game when anyone can load up cheat engine and manipulate the game's memory directly.
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Mar 14, 2015 02:22
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Peewi posted:The problem here is obviously that you're save scumming at all and isn't playing XCOM with ironman mode enabled. I know you're just loving around but "forcing" the player to play "as the designer intended" while not communicating the design (ie, if you want me to play ironman mode, make it ironman mode, rather than a save system that is defacto ironman) to the player. If your game has rules, those rules need to be communicated to the player. The communication does not have to be immediate or obvious, but the save system in X-Com is intentionally obfuscating the rules by taking a standard and well understood system with cultural implications (saving), and perverting it into something else without any indication to the player of the change outside of them quitting the game and going to google why the gently caress it sucks. There is no good game design decision that ends with the player exiting the game to figure out what the gently caress is going on. e: I'm not arguing against or for ironman modes (and I agree the game benefits from permanence of action), the issue is that the game is lovely about communicating the design and is dressing up a quasi-ironman mode in non-ironman mode clothing.
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Mar 14, 2015 02:22
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Right, okay, stepping back a bit (because seriously this discussion is just looping in on itself), it's clear that at least some players find the bog-standard "encode the RNG state in the save, only advance the RNG when random events happen" approach to be bad. I think it's exacerbated in XCOM because individual events are a) infrequent, and b) of high significance. So, y'know, it feels like we're arguing about whether FTL's randomness is good design when it's fundamentally part of how the game plays, if you see what I mean. Is there some general-purpose lesson we can learn here? Maybe for the specific case of XCOM you could assign a different RNG to each unit, so that their hit rolls are independent of each other; that seems really kind of weird to me but whatever. More generally, you can advance the RNG frequently (e.g. every frame) regardless of what's happening in the game, but that's effectively allowing savescumming to happen -- if the player reloads and tries again, they are very unlikely to input their command on the identical post-load frame as they did last time, so they'll get a different result (if you want to prevent savescumming, then you have to give an identical result given identical inputs; that's what preventing savescumming is). So what's the takeaway here, aside from that some of us hate XCOM? 
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Mar 14, 2015 02:22
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:So what's the takeaway here, aside from that some of us hate XCOM? The human brain is really loving stupid.
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Mar 14, 2015 02:32
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:So what's the takeaway here, aside from that some of us hate XCOM? Probably that putting in anti-cheat systems in a single player game when nobody asked for it is counter-productive. I don't get how we've arrived at this point when it used to be standard practice to include cheat codes within the game itself because the devs figured it would help people's enjoyment. I sure as hell wouldn't have gotten nearly as much re-playability out of games like Deus Ex if I couldn't spawn a million LAMs and terrorists at the same time just to see how well my computer could handle all the chaos and explosions. 
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Mar 14, 2015 02:34
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:Right, okay, stepping back a bit (because seriously this discussion is just looping in on itself), it's clear that at least some players find the bog-standard "encode the RNG state in the save, only advance the RNG when random events happen" approach to be bad. I think it's exacerbated in XCOM because individual events are a) infrequent, and b) of high significance. So, y'know, it feels like we're arguing about whether FTL's randomness is good design when it's fundamentally part of how the game plays, if you see what I mean. Either allow save-scumming or blatantly, clearly disallow it. Don't try to silently solve it. In general, communicating that the player got narrowly hosed by RNG is not good communication - X-Com does this where they will tell you you're 98% likely to succeed and so when you loving whiff that 2% shot it feels terrible. The less you communicate about the player's chance of failure, the better. Consider partial failures over full failures for important or player-agency manuevers, or provide ways to alleviate failures - IE, instead of missing point blank, you hit for half damage, or give the player the ability to buy/use a true-shot undodgeable buff, etc. X-Com has some other poor design/implementation elements that are outside of the RNG, but the issues with X-Coms RNGs aren't RNG-specific, it's that they communicate really poorly to the player and it exacerbates the feeling that game is cheating (which is really exacerbated by the level design / enemy spawn triggering system, which is the really lovely part of the game that breaks immersion).
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Mar 14, 2015 02:35
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:So what's the takeaway here, aside from that some of us hate XCOM? Risk analysis is a thankless job because people will ignore you on low risk situations and then blame you for not telling them about low risk situations (that they ignored).
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Mar 14, 2015 02:35
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:So what's the takeaway here, aside from that some of us hate XCOM? I think the best takeaway is "Sometimes players are stupid": there are cases where it's less important how numerically fair, or how balanced a feature is, and more important how that feature feels to the player. Sigma-X posted:I know you're just loving around but "forcing" the player to play "as the designer intended" while not communicating the design (ie, if you want me to play ironman mode, make it ironman mode, rather than a save system that is defacto ironman) to the player. This is unrelated to X-Com, but I think this is something that even great devs fail to understand sometimes. Payday 2 is a great example of this: the devs worked really hard to build a neat game, and I think they succeeded, but the programmers and artists were also the ones who did all the playtesting, and they developed a very specific idea of how the game should play: each map was intended to progress through a cycle of Stealth (nobody knows we're in the bank) > Control (we've been spotted, but we're holding everyone at gunpoint and nobody has called the cops) > Ramp-Up (The police have been notified, and are getting in position and probing our line), and Escape (we no longer have the DPS to repel the police, we need to either move somewhere else, or run away). Stealth missions, in particular, were intended to be a very seat-of-your-pants experience: if a single civilian/guard saw you, you could tie them up and proceed with the heist, but you couldn't move them- they would sit down where they were, and if somebody else saw a tied-up civilian they would panic, then others would see their panic and panic, and suddenly the entire map was freaking out and calling the police. This made for a fun experience, but within days of the game going into open beta, players realized that instead of tying civilians down and carefully sneaking around, it was both faster and significantly safer to put silencers on assault rifles and shotguns, rush the map, and quickly execute every single living thing on it before anyone had a chance to call the police. It was fun, it required a surprising amount of skill (you had to coordinate locations, time when people put up jammers to prevent alarms going off, and successfully suppress the entire map in an extremely tight window), and it didn't make maps significantly easier than the developers had intended. What it did do, however, was deviate from the developers' notion of how stealth runs should be played, and launched an almost six-month arms race where the devs would patch in new mechanics or eliminate old ones to try and force players to abandon kill-and-clear runs in favor of slow stealth missions, and the players finding ways around the new mechanics so they could go back to clearing out entire maps. At least in my opinion it led to the current stealth mechanics being significantly less fun than the original ones, all because the developers were fixated on encouraging their intended playstyle over the emergent one. Omi no Kami fucked around with this message at 02:46 on Mar 14, 2015 |
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Mar 14, 2015 02:44
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:So what's the takeaway here, aside from that some of us hate XCOM? Be as transparent as possible and don't waste the player's time. And throw them a bone once in a while because their failure is personal. Talking about FTL, it's essentially a series of die rolls made over an extended period of time. Eventually you're going to fail when it really counts and that sucks whether it's "fair" or not.
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Mar 14, 2015 03:26
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al-azad posted:Talking about FTL, it's essentially a series of die rolls made over an extended period of time. Eventually you're going to fail when it really counts and that sucks whether it's "fair" or not. Legitimately curious: what, in your opinion, is the alternative? I just feel like if you're playing a game where your chance to succeed is based on a die roll, then you can't complain when the die doesn't roll your way. Similarly: Sigma-X posted:In general, communicating that the player got narrowly hosed by RNG is not good communication - X-Com does this where they will tell you you're 98% likely to succeed and so when you loving whiff that 2% shot it feels terrible. The less you communicate about the player's chance of failure, the better. So you think it would be better if it just didn't display the % to hit chance? Like, yeah it sucks to miss a 98% chance to hit, but ...it's directly telling you that you have less than 100% chance to hit, so I just don't really get what the issue is.
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Mar 14, 2015 03:50
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the wildest turkey posted:Legitimately curious: what, in your opinion, is the alternative? I just feel like if you're playing a game where your chance to succeed is based on a die roll, then you can't complain when the die doesn't roll your way. Having methods to mitigate bad rolls (preferably tied to a resource) is one of the better options, especially if you've got very all-or-nothing outcomes for certain rolls. 4E D&D, for example, has numerous once-per-fight (and sometimes once-per-day) powers that give you rerolls or provide boosts to a specific roll if you happen to fail it, which makes the relatively binary nature of combat and skill checks less aggravating (since you have ways, limited though they are, to overcome bad rolls at critical times).
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Mar 14, 2015 04:00
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:So what's the takeaway here, aside from that some of us hate XCOM? We're all supposed to be game designers, right? Like... every gamedev presentation ever made talks about this. The takeaway is: feeling trumps everything. A game is an entertainment product and the reality is that "not feeling random" is way, way worse than "not actually random". Blaming the human inability to appreciate true randomness is about on the same level as blaming people for having two arms. If a 10% miss rate seems like too much, then it's too much. That really disturbs some people and maybe they'd be happier writing meteorological simulation software or something. To tie it back in to the RPG discussion, read the TG GM Advice thread sometime, because there's a lot of good stuff about game feel and making players feel satisfied by a "fair" and exciting environment. One thing that is agreed on almost universally (with the exception of only the must tedious grognards) is to lie about failing dice rolls that would frustrate your players. Failure should happen only when appropriate, and failure should be fun. The same thing holds (or should hold) true for video games: failure should occur when you make a bad decision, and the fun should lie in devising a new strategy (not in beating an RNG). I understand why the X-COM devs did what they did, but missing two or more 95%+ shots in a map just should not have been able to happen, regardless of what the RNG spit out. It's not fun, it's an arbitrary failure mechanic that frustrated me no matter how good my strategy was.
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Mar 14, 2015 04:01
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I'd love to see people focus more on random inputs rather than random outcomes. Running into 5 sectoids instead of 2 so you can only take 4 down and the last one kills someone would feel much better than only hitting 1 of your 4 shots and then someone dying to the last sectoid. And gently caress panic. X-Com is built so you can failure cascade horribly and lose just because of a chain of dice rolls from a single shot or muton yell on Impossible. It's really disgusting when you get unlucky in that game on higher difficulties. It feels like some design decisions were based on  rather than what makes it fun. It never really hit the right balance for me because every difficulty was either terribly easy or terribly RNG-dependant. 65% chance to hit sectoids in the open with 4 1-shottable low morale characters with no abilities and only 1 not-quite-lethal grenade each sure is a fun first level!
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Mar 14, 2015 04:03
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the wildest turkey posted:
The aggravating thing is that X-COM seems to have a history of thoroughly dicking the player over. You'll miss four 95+% chances to hit in a row and then a sectoid will creep around a corner and critically hit your star sniper in heavy cover from across the map and they'll die. I don't think I've ever seen a game whose numbers have been so consistently all over the place. On harder difficulties X-COM also becomes even more frustrating in that you'll have Thin Men who just kind of can't miss. Other times the RNG will just kind of decide that that one minor, tiny thing will lead to a massive failure cascade like I had mentioned before. Sometimes a single point of damage can cause your entire squad to freak out and murder each other. That isn't to say it's a bad game it's just that the way the numbers are generated is kind of flawed, especially when a single unlucky roll can doom the entire mission. This is especially true early on. A guy with six hit points is getting blasted at by aliens with guns that do four points of damage and almost always have a 75% chance to hit. Chances are your 4-6 dudes are almost always outnumbered. To a certain degree missions can also become an attrition fight. Sometimes you'll wipe out two pods without taking a scratch but the third one will blast most of your squad to one hit point. Which not only means it's exceedingly risky to put them in harm's way but also that you can't use them on the next mission sometimes. It's kind of one those weird balancing acts. The unpredictability of the game and the high stakes combat is exactly what makes it fun. You just kind of can't turn dudes into bullet sponges. You kind of need to put dudes in places they can be shot at if you want to get shots off. Miss and suddenly your dudes are in danger. The irritating thing is you can do literally everything exactly right and still miss several almost certain shots in a row only to then watch the aliens gun your whole squad down. That's part of what makes it so interesting; nothing is guaranteed and the game becomes more challenging by threatening to hammer you in the dick repeatedly with a dump truck.
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Mar 14, 2015 04:04
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You guys all sound really bad at X-COM.
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Mar 14, 2015 04:17
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the wildest turkey posted:Legitimately curious: what, in your opinion, is the alternative? I just feel like if you're playing a game where your chance to succeed is based on a die roll, then you can't complain when the die doesn't roll your way. Predictable patterns. One of the best strategies against non-drones involves setting fires with lasers or bombs because the AI prioritizes certain systems over others. The best non-skill based roguelikes revolve around enemy recognition and understanding AI routines. You can't predict the RNG but you can predict how the game will react to you. Vermain posted:Having methods to mitigate bad rolls (preferably tied to a resource) is one of the better options, especially if you've got very all-or-nothing outcomes for certain rolls. 4E D&D, for example, has numerous once-per-fight (and sometimes once-per-day) powers that give you rerolls or provide boosts to a specific roll if you happen to fail it, which makes the relatively binary nature of combat and skill checks less aggravating (since you have ways, limited though they are, to overcome bad rolls at critical times). The greatest thing to happen to D&D in the 40 something year history of the game is give you a second chance at save-or-die rolls. There is nothing worse than your level 15 character being disintegrated in the first round because you rolled a 1 on your save. al-azad fucked around with this message at 04:30 on Mar 14, 2015 |
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Mar 14, 2015 04:27
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I think the perceived issue with X-COM isn't "The dice don't always roll in my favor" but more.. "knowing how the RNG works makes it feel like I was always doomed to failure on that particular roll without regard to any of the actual choices I made." I think when it 'feels' just unlucky it's more palatable than when it feels.. 'fated', you know?
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Mar 14, 2015 04:28
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One of the key differences between XCOM: EU/EW and the original X-Com is the squad size, which is why those roll failures hurt so much. In the original game a LOT of your troops were basically just cannon fodder for your couple of elite dudes that would just hang back out of harms way, so yeah a lot of guys would die but it didn't really matter most of the time since rookies were cheap and you could bring 14 dudes on a single mission (even more when you research the X-Com landing craft). In the new one you can only bring 6, max, and you generally needed all of them to be able to carry their own weight so you couldn't get away with bringing one important person and 5 rookies to eat up shots. The upshot of that is that if even one of them dies that's a huge hit to both your current mission's chance of success, but also your team as a whole since it's much more expensive to replace troops and it takes several missions to get them trained up to high level. The fact that a single bad roll can lead to the death of one of your soldiers despite you having done everything you can to mitigate the risk can really sting because of all that.
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Mar 14, 2015 04:38
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Onion Knight posted:To tie it back in to the RPG discussion, read the TG GM Advice thread sometime, because there's a lot of good stuff about game feel and making players feel satisfied by a "fair" and exciting environment. One thing that is agreed on almost universally (with the exception of only the must tedious grognards) is to lie about failing dice rolls that would frustrate your players. I disagree strongly with this assertion as someone who's both DMed and played in tabletop games before. If a game system is designed as such that it needs to regularly lie to its players about the outcomes of dice rolls (because the alternative is a feeling of "unfairness"), then you should either have outcomes that are less "all-or-nothing" (which is where the feeling tends to stem from), or you should have methods of mitigating bad rolls built into the system. Transparency in system design is critical, as it allows players to make informed decisions about how they play the game, rather than having weird under-the-hood mechanics that attempt to remove "unfairness" without player input.
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Mar 14, 2015 04:55
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Vermain posted:I disagree strongly with this assertion as someone who's both DMed and played in tabletop games before. If a game system is designed as such that it needs to regularly lie to its players about the outcomes of dice rolls (because the alternative is a feeling of "unfairness"), then you should either have outcomes that are less "all-or-nothing" (which is where the feeling tends to stem from), or you should have methods of mitigating bad rolls built into the system. Transparency in system design is critical, as it allows players to make informed decisions about how they play the game, rather than having weird under-the-hood mechanics that attempt to remove "unfairness" without player input. I don't think anyone is arguing it's right to regularly lie. But the DM's job is to make the game fun and sometimes that means gauging the players' disposition on the fly. If the DM looks in their toolbox and says "this is a legal action but will kill the mood if I open with it" they're doing their job. I've left a game with a TKO feeling satisfied because it was hard fought. If the DM opened with a circle of death and we all died it would've sucked. But the computer can't make that decision on its own so you need ways of softening that blow.
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Mar 14, 2015 05:22
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al-azad posted:I don't think anyone is arguing it's right to regularly lie. But the DM's job is to make the game fun and sometimes that means gauging the players' disposition on the fly. If the DM looks in their toolbox and says "this is a legal action but will kill the mood if I open with it" they're doing their job. I've left a game with a TKO feeling satisfied because it was hard fought. If the DM opened with a circle of death and we all died it would've sucked. I think this also depends on the type of the game you're shooting for. Some groups like D&D for the tactical wargaming aspect, and would be upset if they realized you were fudging dicerolls. Others are playing for the story or social elements, and have a much better time for it. It all comes down to context, and what makes for the best experience.
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Mar 14, 2015 05:49
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al-azad posted:I don't think anyone is arguing it's right to regularly lie. But the DM's job is to make the game fun and sometimes that means gauging the players' disposition on the fly. If the DM looks in their toolbox and says "this is a legal action but will kill the mood if I open with it" they're doing their job. I've left a game with a TKO feeling satisfied because it was hard fought. If the DM opened with a circle of death and we all died it would've sucked. Again: this is a consequence of a poorly designed system. If we are designing a system from scratch (which is the assumption here), the objective should be to design it in such a way that a feeling of "unfairness" as a consequence of random elements never develops in the first place. This is easy to do, with one or more of the several different methods that have been given: 1) Ensure that the range of outcomes is more granular and less "all-or-nothing." 2) Ensure that the randomization fits a Bell curve to reduce the frequency of very high/very low results. 3) Ensure that players have some way of mitigating the effects of bad rolls, such as through a resource that allows them to reroll. If you've designed a system where you have to switch out a bad dice roll behind the scenes to make the game feel fair, then you've designed a bad system.
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Mar 14, 2015 06:04
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Vermain posted:I disagree strongly with this assertion as someone who's both DMed and played in tabletop games before. If a game system is designed as such that it needs to regularly lie to its players about the outcomes of dice rolls (because the alternative is a feeling of "unfairness"), then you should either have outcomes that are less "all-or-nothing" (which is where the feeling tends to stem from), or you should have methods of mitigating bad rolls built into the system. Transparency in system design is critical, as it allows players to make informed decisions about how they play the game, rather than having weird under-the-hood mechanics that attempt to remove "unfairness" without player input. al-azad nailed it, but please note that I didn't say "the DM should lie to prevent players losing" or "the DM should lie in service of the plot". The DM should lie, if necessary, to prevent player frustration. Players who are unable to utilize skills or strategies, or are unable to see their plans come to fruition or failure, because of random chance is un-fun gameplay and bad DMing. I agree with you that having to do this often is a bad game design smell (one of the reasons my friends and I dropped D&D/Pathfinder in favor of Dungeon World and its ilk). Perfectly designed games shouldn't need unfairness reduction mechanisms (or whatever we're calling it), I agree. But, in tabletop games as well as software games, "feeling" is still going to be important to players, and unfairness reduction helps games to feel better. They don't need to see how the sausage is made, and if your reduction mechanisms are so significant that it's influencing how players develop strategy, then the design of your game is just bad.
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Mar 14, 2015 06:09
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Onion Knight posted:failure should occur when you make a bad decision See this seems kinda crazy to me, because again while missing a 95% chance shot totally sucks and there's nothing that makes it not suck...the idea is that if you're taking a shot/action that is not 100% guaranteed to hit, you're taking a risk. If your "good strategy" results in one shot with <100% chance to hit, it's not actually a good strategy. It's a bad decision, and therefore failure is a totally viable outcome? I just don't see how it's an "arbitrary failure mechanic" when it explicitly tells you that you have a chance to fail. That's like, the exact opposite of arbitrary. Not to mention the fact that there are plenty of alternatives to taking a <100% chance shot (explosives, various skills, falling back/relocating, etc.). You bring up the idea of how the player feels, which is definitely an important aspect, but that's not something you can completely control when designing a game/engine/whatever because it's totally subjective. A situation/mechanic that you find frustrating, I think adds tension. hailthefish posted:I think the perceived issue with X-COM isn't "The dice don't always roll in my favor" but more.. "knowing how the RNG works makes it feel like I was always doomed to failure on that particular roll without regard to any of the actual choices I made." Yeah I kinda went off on a different topic than the original RNG-seed chat, but in regards to this - to me it seems like just the opposite: I feel like it is very specifically reacting to the actual choice that you made, in that if you repeat that same choice then you get the same result. fake edit: maybe sometime I'll stop talking about XCOM and actually talk about the thing I'm planning/working on
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Mar 14, 2015 08:00
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Look at dis thread arguing over RNG
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Mar 14, 2015 08:15
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the wildest turkey posted:See this seems kinda crazy to me, because again while missing a 95% chance shot totally sucks and there's nothing that makes it not suck...the idea is that if you're taking a shot/action that is not 100% guaranteed to hit, you're taking a risk. If your "good strategy" results in one shot with <100% chance to hit, it's not actually a good strategy. It's a bad decision, and therefore failure is a totally viable outcome? I just don't see how it's an "arbitrary failure mechanic" when it explicitly tells you that you have a chance to fail. That's like, the exact opposite of arbitrary. Not to mention the fact that there are plenty of alternatives to taking a <100% chance shot (explosives, various skills, falling back/relocating, etc.). It is literally impossible to play X-COM on Impossible difficulty without relying on random dice rolls. Literally. It starts with the very first mission where you have 4 troops with 3 HP each, carrying 2-4 damage spread weapons and a 65% chance to hit sectoids in the open at medium range. The sectoids come in groups of 2-3, each with 4 health. Your grenades only do 3 damage so you can't kill all 8 sectoids with grenades. There is no strategy at all that does not come down to a dice roll. That's why it's arbitrary. It's impossible to eliminate the risk and the risk is very very high, so when it inevitably comes you either laugh it off and go or you get annoyed at the game for deciding to screw you over.I played a lot of X-COM on Impossible because it appealed into the gambling part of my brain. But it was just gambling. Probability and strategy helped but it all came down to the RNG in the end. The Cheshire Cat's post is pretty illuminating because the change in squad size narrative definitely fits how the RNG feels off. As it is the RNG is just too punishing for something you can't avoid. If you played 1-shot missions without a meta-game it would be fine too because hey losing is part of a game with a heavy random element. CCGs and roguelikes (two of the most common rng-reliant genres) are self-contained games where you win/lose and then move to the next game and it all balances out over your time playing many games. X-COM is a game where losing one mission impacts future missions or even end a campaign entirely. The RNG just does not fit the rest of the game. EDIT: RNG, its psychology, and how it interacts with other game systems are all very important topics for designing any game with random elements. Arguing over RNG is not just for butt-hurt players. Futuresight fucked around with this message at 08:52 on Mar 14, 2015 |
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Mar 14, 2015 08:46
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Sigma-X posted:I know you're just loving around but "forcing" the player to play "as the designer intended" while not communicating the design (ie, if you want me to play ironman mode, make it ironman mode, rather than a save system that is defacto ironman) to the player. loving lol do I play XCOM. Dude the original XCOM and TFTD were my very first PC games as a kid. I grew upon that poo poo. Hardmode.  Like I was already saying, you shouldn't be savescumming every loving turn. Even if you don't play on ironman, if your battle really goes poorly, reload your save from the beginning of the battle. Try doing different things. If you have to save every single turn and load every turn until it succeeds, you should like, drop the difficulty, or abandon that mission or something. TooMuchAbstraction posted:So what's the takeaway here, aside from that some of us hate XCOM? Most people really don't understand probability. See: Posts about "I got it on the first try so the drop chance can't be that rare" Count Uvula posted:The human brain is really loving stupid. Better answer. Sigma-X posted:Either allow save-scumming or blatantly, clearly disallow it. Don't try to silently solve it. Hm, so then the answer would be to only allow mission saves at the start, but sometimes for really long missions I can understand making a save halfway through, or what if you really do have to git up and stop playing? Well then you can do a system where you can save but loading the save or continuing to play deletes the save, but that's always stressful. But its not like the game's really hiding anything from you. Its just how you're choosing to assume what "90% chance" means. That doesn't inherently mean "doing this again after loading a save will be different". You're not the only one though, so I guess some kinda warning is needed. Maybe when you go to save have a popup, or make it a tip on a loading screen. I would say "put it in the manual" but these days... Zaphod42 fucked around with this message at 09:32 on Mar 14, 2015 |
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Mar 14, 2015 09:28
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Higsian posted:It is literally impossible to play X-COM on Impossible difficulty without relying on random dice rolls. Literally. It starts with the very first mission where you have 4 troops with 3 HP each, carrying 2-4 damage spread weapons and a 65% chance to hit sectoids in the open at medium range. The sectoids come in groups of 2-3, each with 4 health. Your grenades only do 3 damage so you can't kill all 8 sectoids with grenades. There is no strategy at all that does not come down to a dice roll. That's why it's arbitrary. That's fair, I kinda forgot about Impossible and I stick to Classic for these exact reasons (especially the part in bold). I feel like Classic hits the balance of strategy vs. luck (or lack thereof) a lot better because it allows for those alternate options to actually be effective and doesn't totally cripple you on HP/hit chance, which helps to limit the potential negative impact of the RNG. quote:It's impossible to eliminate the risk and the risk is very very high, so when it inevitably comes you either laugh it off and go Totally. I think it just comes back to the idea of player 'feel' versus what I first posted: "if you're playing a game where your chance to succeed is based on a die roll, then you can't complain when the die doesn't roll your way." If you enjoy that aspect of Impossible that it is extra reliant on the RNG, then cool. If not, just don't play Impossible. And if you want your 95+% chance to hit to actually be 100% chance to hit, just play on Easy/Normal. That's...why these options exist. efb but basically this: Zaphod42 posted:If you have to save every single turn and load every turn until it succeeds, you should like, drop the difficulty, or abandon that mission or something.
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Mar 14, 2015 09:42
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