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It wasn't the first, and it was cool at the time, but I blame the first Modern Warfare for really getting the GAMES MUST HAVE CONSTANT PROGRESSION thing going with it's levelling to unlock new guns and the prestige system and poo poo.
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May 3, 2021 00:39
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Panic! At The Tesco posted:It wasn't the first, and it was cool at the time, but I blame the first Modern Warfare for really getting the GAMES MUST HAVE CONSTANT PROGRESSION thing going with it's levelling to unlock new guns and the prestige system and poo poo. Agreed 100%. Interesting gimmick at the time, but it opened the floodgates for that poo poo leaving rpgs in big budget games.
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May 3, 2021 00:47
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Panic! At The Tesco posted:It wasn't the first, and it was cool at the time, but I blame the first Modern Warfare for really getting the GAMES MUST HAVE CONSTANT PROGRESSION thing going with it's levelling to unlock new guns and the prestige system and poo poo. The first Modern Warfare had a surprising amount of self awareness and the second Modern Warfare was the very best multiplayer game ever created.
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May 3, 2021 00:50
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Panic! At The Tesco posted:It wasn't the first, and it was cool at the time, but I blame the first Modern Warfare for really getting the GAMES MUST HAVE CONSTANT PROGRESSION thing going with it's levelling to unlock new guns and the prestige system and poo poo. Yeah, I think it was probably the first mega-hit with that kind of thing going on and influenced a lot of other developers, but it was also something that was in the works well before that. Age of Empires III came out in 2005, for example. Battlefield 2 in fact had a meta-progression element with the unlockable guns though now they do that for almost every weapon. It really sucked even before cell phone game elements got thrown into almost every mid and high budget multiplayer focused game.
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May 3, 2021 00:59
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its_my_birthday posted:After playing a lot of ff14, I think all games would benefit from displaying a real time clock. The old days of the vcr being the clock near the tv are long gone! I bought a little alarm clock just to keep under my monitor and see the time. A real time clock would be a nice Steam feature so you could have a tiny clock in the same way you have the FPS counter.
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May 3, 2021 07:41
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Remember when Phantasy Star partnered with Swatch and all the time in the game was rendered in "internet time" which was proprietary decimal time set to central europe because gently caress timezones or making time readable, amirite?
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May 3, 2021 07:58
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Barudak posted:Remember when Phantasy Star partnered with Swatch and all the time in the game was rendered in "internet time" which was proprietary decimal time set to central europe because gently caress timezones or making time readable, amirite? That's just like, your opinion.
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May 3, 2021 07:59
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Barudak posted:Remember when Phantasy Star partnered with Swatch and all the time in the game was rendered in "internet time" which was proprietary decimal time set to central europe because gently caress timezones or making time readable, amirite? That's just like, your opinion.
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May 3, 2021 07:59
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Early Japanese attempts at MMOs get really, really weird, with some bizarre ideas of how they assumed the game would work and how people would play it.
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May 3, 2021 08:22
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lobsterminator posted:A real time clock would be a nice Steam feature so you could have a tiny clock in the same way you have the FPS counter. The one thing blizzard does better than steam
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May 3, 2021 09:33
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Ghost Leviathan posted:Early Japanese attempts at MMOs get really, really weird, with some bizarre ideas of how they assumed the game would work and how people would play it. Western attempts had a lot of stupid poo poo too don't worry Asheron's Call had a spellcasting system that was frankly just insane. Basically everyone trained in some kind of magic because there was no such thing as classes, so a person wanted to build a melee-user they might still take item and creature enchantment so that they could buff their gear and themselves or whatever. But if you wanted to be a full-on wizard not only was 9/10ths of your inventory space dedicated to bags of flower clippings and candles, but you also had to spend an eternity learning your spells in the spell discovery system. This was a UI with iirc 8 slots, and you'd drag one of the game's hundreds of different reagents from your bag into the slots in a specific order, and then hitting the Cast button would make a spell happen, or it wouldn't, either because you got the order of reagents wrong, or maybe you picked reagents that don't actually go together, or maybe you just didn't have the skill level to cast that spell so you hit a random failure. People shared info for the reagent combinations for the lowest level of spells, but the reagents for higher-level spells had an element of randomness such that all you could do was brute force the combo. These came in the form of more and more candles added in specific slots in the ingredient chain, iirc there were like 10 colors and level 2 spells required 1 candle, level 4 required 2 candles, and level 6 required 3 candles. So in other words, even figuring out how to cast a single max-level spell required setting aside time to go through up to 1000 color combinations, with a good chance of randomly losing some reagents each time, just blowing tons and tons of time and money on learning how to cast Strength Level 6 or whatever, and it'd take like 5 seconds per casting attempt. So serious magic-users would spend hours of real time just standing around learning their spells. Thankfully it only took a few months for someone to reverse engineer the algorithm and create a tool that could predict higher-level spell reagents based on you providing it your lower-level formulae.
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May 3, 2021 10:41
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Asheron's Call had a great gimmick: the dev team produced monthly content updates that would advance a global story, literally giving the players entire expansion packs worth of fun content at no additional cost. At one point they had set up a recurring evil character who would basically destroy the world if ever released from demon jail, and the players had been unknowingly going through the process of destroying the demon's bindings by advancing through the monthly content. Eventually things culminated in a final dungeon, where it became clear that destroying the end-boss would give the players some great rewards but would unleash the demon - the expectation was that at least one group of players would go ahead and do that, and then next month's content update would address the aftermath of that decision To create some sense of tension, the developers PvP-flagged the entire zone. This was pretty flavorful, as players could permanently PvP-flag themselves by worshipping to this specific demon at various altars, and since dead players would drop tons of valuable items this incentivized people to go and defend the boss. Death in AC was no joke, not only did you receive a stacking (but removable) penalty to all of your skills for each death but you also dropped 1 item per 10 character levels, ordered by highest value. If your sword happened to be the most expensive thing on your person, then it would wind up on your corpse. People commonly carried around extremely high-cost useless items just to be used as corpse drops. But it's not like you could actually recover your corpse while it's being camped by a big PvP gang. Eventually you'd run out of the high-cost crap and you'd start losing your actual gear. So this was a great way to drive conflict and create dynamic content, and one by one each server killed the monster and unleashed this giant demon. But a single server held out. Day after day, a group of players held back the raids and kept this end-boss monster safe. They figured out that the monster could gain levels by killing them, and thus gain more health and more damage, so groups of people were suiciding themselves into it over and over just to power level it, while also maintaining a 24/7 defense against incoming players. This was the late 90s, instancing wasn't a thing yet; sometimes people were literally calling each other long-distance just to bring in reinforcements. But dev content was always released monthly, and the next patch couldn't wait, so the defense had to end. At one point the developers spawned in as a bunch of max-level characters but all got one-shot by the monster; the players had power-leveled the thing for so long that it had become unkillable by normal means. So they turned this into even more content: they contacted a willing player, gave him cheat-grade weaponry, flagged him as invulnerable, and sent him him as part of a final "raid" coordinated with other cooperative players. Problem solved.
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May 3, 2021 11:12
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Barudak posted:There is an aspect of the game where you increase the population of the games mascot characters and the game tracks them for reward tiers. The sign that counts them has 7 digits on it, the max number you need to hit is 24,000 and the sign goes away when you hit that number I'd watch a 2-3hr YT breakdown of what happened start to finish but I have a suspicious it was just garbage from day 1 and no one was good enough to get a handle on it, make something good from poo poo. The box fox idea alone wouldn't have been acceptable in a flash indie game from 2005, seeing it in a AAA release in 2021 is just confusing. It's kind of fun to see Balan Wonderworld in the same general time frame as Anthem is finally getting put down. Everything I read about Anthem made it out like the problem was 10% EA's fault, 90% terrible Bioware management and a corporate culture of ego (~bioware magic) that would not take advice. I kind of wonder if something similar happened, Square-Enix just went hands off and let an aging legacy creator do his thing unchallenged. pentyne fucked around with this message at 11:17 on May 3, 2021 |
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May 3, 2021 11:14
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QuarkJets posted:Asheron's Call had a great gimmick: the dev team produced monthly content updates that would advance a global story, literally giving the players entire expansion packs worth of fun content at no additional cost. the is poor dungeon mastering. you are supposed to roll with the punches not railroad your players. shameful
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May 3, 2021 14:44
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Rutibex posted:the is poor dungeon mastering. you are supposed to roll with the punches not railroad your players. shameful They probably would have rolled with it if it wasn’t just one server holding out.
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May 3, 2021 14:55
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I mean, just imagine Tim Allen and Bobcat Goldthwait loving. EDIT: Wrong thread Pope Corky the IX fucked around with this message at 15:01 on May 3, 2021 |
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May 3, 2021 14:58
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Pope Corky the IX posted:I mean, just imagine Tim Allen and Bobcat Goldthwait loving. ok I will
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May 3, 2021 15:06
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Ugly In The Morning posted:They probably would have rolled with it if it wasn’t just one server holding out. that's a poor excuse given how The Sleeper resolved in Everquest
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May 3, 2021 15:14
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Excelzior posted:that's a poor excuse given how The Sleeper resolved in Everquest I just read that one and it doesn’t really seem relevant, there was one holdout server that went to kill it and Sony despaired it and then respawned it?
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May 3, 2021 15:38
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Yeah Everquest's The Sleeper is a way shittier story, they just despawned the dragon to prevent players from officially killing it. That sucks. Apologizing and letting the players actually get the kill was basically the only correct response after that, but they shouldn't have despawned it in the first place. The Asheron's Call version of those events would at least have the devs personally spawning in to interfere, probably with other players in tow. And if all of the servers held out? Yeah, they probably would have just rolled with it. Each month's content was often tailored based on what players had been doing
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May 3, 2021 23:43
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The ps4 xone generation was one of the worst gens for games since the seventies. Almost zero good games released for a decade. Indie games somehow got worse. And the amount of terrible hd ports and remakes hit an all time high
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May 4, 2021 02:25
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Gaius Marius posted:The ps4 xone generation was one of the worst gens for games since the seventies. Almost zero good games released for a decade. Indie games somehow got worse. And the amount of terrible hd ports and remakes hit an all time high I was thinking about this just the other day. I definitely agree with this. I mean I don't take such an extreme line, I think there were loads of good games, but certainly fewer 'greats'. I thought GTA 5 was really boring, and didn't get into Red Dead 2, so that's like the two generation defining PS games that I thought were bum. When you go and look at a list of like 'best PS4 games of all time', there's tons of stuff on there where I'm like 'oh yeah that was good', but there's nothing where I think 'I hope that gets a fancy remake in the future', y'know? Or, "I hope that gets a sequel". My unpopular opinion is that: A) Dragons are just the shittest, and anything with a dragon in it is worse for having a dragon in it B) Magic in games, and in fiction in general, is sooooooo loving poo poo. Like, I'm not against magic as a concept, but, why are there rules?!?! Why is there an elementalist who can do frost (that slows) fire (That's high damage) Earth (That sheilds) ... Like, why isn't there magic that's like, "I do reflection magic, where I can freeze your image in a mirror, and return you to that state later, or I can freeze a reflection, and shake the images out and use them as reagents in other spells, or I can slide a reflection off onto a different surface, which does some cool thing"? I mean, that's just me spitballing as I type, gently caress, what about "I'm a fire mage. That means I can create chaos out of order, and turn things from matter to energy, so I can cast meltspeed, where the object or person disintigrates bit by bit but gets faster" No no no, nothing like that. White, holy magic that heals wounds, and dark magic that makes skeletons come out of the ground again please. Every single time. Never loving deviate from this list of rules of how 'magic that can be literally anything you can imagine' works at all or I will poo myself to death.
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May 4, 2021 03:18
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why can't i cast magic on my dick to make it huge? why can't i magic the ladies to make them sleep with me? why can't i magic their boobs to make them smaller?
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May 4, 2021 03:26
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Gaius Marius posted:The ps4 xone generation was one of the worst gens for games since the seventies. Almost zero good games released for a decade. Indie games somehow got worse. And the amount of terrible hd ports and remakes hit an all time high I think this is a bit too bold and large of a statement but I also cant disagree too much.
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May 4, 2021 03:28
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"Why does a video game have rules???" Some bigly deep thoughts.
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May 4, 2021 03:28
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Caesar Saladin posted:why can't i cast magic on my dick to make it huge? Have you heard of "mods"
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May 4, 2021 03:29
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Meme Poker Party posted:"Why does a video game have rules???" lol, it's not that a video game has rules. It's that the very concept of 'the fantastical' is needlessly shallow, and nothing ever really deviates from some really basic boring ideas that Gandalf had thousands of years ago.
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May 4, 2021 03:54
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!Klams posted:lol, it's not that a video game has rules. Sorry, maybe I misinterpreted. !Klams posted:B) Magic in games, and in fiction in general, is sooooooo loving poo poo. Like, I'm not against magic as a concept, but, why are there rules?!?! We should get this guy back in here to explain what he meant!!!
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May 4, 2021 04:01
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Gaius Marius posted:The ps4 xone generation was one of the worst gens for games since the seventies. Almost zero good games released for a decade. Indie games somehow got worse. And the amount of terrible hd ports and remakes hit an all time high lurker2006 fucked around with this message at 04:06 on May 4, 2021 |
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May 4, 2021 04:03
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Killing Floor was the first horde mode game. Killing Floor 2 is the best horde mode game and nothing will top it.
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May 4, 2021 04:21
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QuarkJets posted:Yeah Everquest's The Sleeper is a way shittier story, they just despawned the dragon to prevent players from officially killing it. That sucks. Apologizing and letting the players actually get the kill was basically the only correct response after that, but they shouldn't have despawned it in the first place. I thought they despawned it because the game had never been programmed for that boss dying and they were afraid it would crash the server? So they had to patch in proper death behavior before letting the players kill it.
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May 4, 2021 04:33
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!Klams posted:B) Magic in games, and in fiction in general, is sooooooo loving poo poo. Like, I'm not against magic as a concept, but, why are there rules?!?! Why is there an elementalist who can do frost (that slows) fire (That's high damage) Earth (That sheilds) ... Like, why isn't there magic that's like, "I do reflection magic, where I can freeze your image in a mirror, and return you to that state later, or I can freeze a reflection, and shake the images out and use them as reagents in other spells, or I can slide a reflection off onto a different surface, which does some cool thing"? I mean, that's just me spitballing as I type, gently caress, what about the reason is, you can imagine it instantly but a game is limited by what you're able to design (which is in turn limited by xxxxxx*). different developers will use their own set of rules for magic but typically they keep them the same in-house for other games in the future because why redesign the wheel. you could design a system that lets you cast Meltspeed by combining fire + time rune or whatever and now you have to program it to work by the existing ruleset of your game, and animate it, and animate any other vfx associated with it. and because you can combine fire + time, you should probably create spells of every combination of A + B which means that your workload is increased exponentially for every basic element you have in the game. so, you'll be able to recycle SOME parts of this code for the different spells. but for the most part you're going to be making entirely new if not programmed effects then at the very least visual effects for each one of these. and then you have to test and debug! and this is where you get the things that don't go across well to your testers, like you get very regular feedback that such-and-such is unintuitive or it's too much of a pain to bother with, and then it's back to the drawing board  this is all resources that could be spent making content that isn't just basic systems-level poo poo, like designing levels and enemies, or sidequests and minigames. you could make the perfect magic system of your dreams but it would take you a decade--hell, maybe as many as twenty years, or even thirty--to make just that. you could spend money and hire people to help, but this is fairly skilled labor so i hope you have a nice war chest. it's just faster and cheaper if your magic is as simple and straightforward as pokemon. you can make it pretty and you can make it feel good to use in-game but making a system of any real depth is... ... you know dwarf fortress? the game made by one dude out of his garage for the past twenty years. that's where chasing the system with the level of depth you're describing will get you. *tldr the human attention and lifespan Fur20 fucked around with this message at 04:38 on May 4, 2021 |
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May 4, 2021 04:34
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RPATDO_LAMD posted:I thought they despawned it because the game had never been programmed for that boss dying and they were afraid it would crash the server? No, they thought the players were using an exploit. Really they were just crazy overlevelled and overgeared from their long-standing PvP war.
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May 4, 2021 04:34
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open world games with crafting systems basically railroaded the first half of this gen's lifespan. those are all, without exception, loving boring. really just a ton of boring games throughout the whole gen, though big empty open world games with a map and a shopping list
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May 4, 2021 04:38
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i was talking with my friend today about how there's no such thing as nerds anymore because normal people watch anime now and Marvel and Star Wars are the biggest franchises ever, but reading this discussion about The Sleeper shows me how totally loving wrong I was and thank God for that
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May 4, 2021 04:55
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!Klams posted:My unpopular opinion is that: Stopped reading here op sorry
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May 4, 2021 04:56
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limp_cheese posted:Killing Floor was the first horde mode game. 
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May 4, 2021 05:00
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WILDTURKEY101 posted:i was talking with my friend today about how there's no such thing as nerds anymore because normal people watch anime now Normal people do not watch anime
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May 4, 2021 06:45
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!Klams posted:I was thinking about this just the other day. I definitely agree with this. I mean I don't take such an extreme line, I think there were loads of good games, but certainly fewer 'greats'. I thought GTA 5 was really boring, and didn't get into Red Dead 2, so that's like the two generation defining PS games that I thought were bum. like a level 84 poopmancer
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May 4, 2021 06:46
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i liked this post though, Magicka didn't veer too far from those but it was great for all that just a bunch of superpowered idiots blowing each other up all day
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May 4, 2021 06:47
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