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Solaris 2.0 posted:Not really in the scope of this thread but isn’t Siege all about room-breaching but in multiplayer format? It's not really the same kind of thing, honestly. Siege is a good game but there isn't really any modern equivalent to the original Rainbow Six games or SWAT 3/4.
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Aug 18, 2019 04:49
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AnEdgelord posted:I have my own criticisms of the game (not being able to fully look up or down combined with short swarmy enemies and hard to hit flying enemies being at the top of that list) but the game I'm playing and the game he talked about bear basically no resemblance to each other. The flying enemies are a pain and I just alt-fire with the loverboy to deal with them, but something I've found helpful for the spiders is to crouch, since it lines them up with your fire way better than trying to look down at them.
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Aug 20, 2019 06:42
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Maybe the issue with crossbows is that because they're projectile weapons rather than hitscan, they lack immediate feedback, but they're still fast enough that the crossbow bolt doesn't feel like an independent entity the way a rocket does. So you end up with this weird middle ground where it just feels like input lag. I feel like I remember the Half-Life 2 crossbow being pretty fun to use, although the fact that it pinned enemies to walls was probably a big element of it. Plus looking up some videos of it and either it is just a straight hitscan weapon or the projectile moves so fast it might as well be.
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Aug 21, 2019 00:11
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Dewgy posted:I loved GTAIV but this is pretty much entirely correct. RDR2 has a very similarly dour plot, but it doesn’t have the big satirical pastiche of NYC to distract you from it. Yeah it kind of sucks how juvenile some extremely foundational titles were because it means we get to carry that baggage forward through history forever since you can't just like, NOT have the stupid bullshit. Although honestly considering how cringeworthy the original Shadow Warrior is, I think the remake actually did a really good job making the story actually good (I mean it's not a masterpiece but the characters and mythology they built up are actually pretty decent as video game plots go). So you don't HAVE to carry that poo poo forward.
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Aug 21, 2019 00:37
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Fabricated posted:Something weirds me out is how we really do just chug right on through every single graphic/design style in order for videogames as everyone just ages into boomerdom. I was thinking we'd probably skip the lowpoly/2.5d era and nope we're going right through it. My head will explode if we get a series of PSX-style lowpoly throwbacks with intentionally implemented z-fighting. My friend are you not familiar with hit indie title Devil Daggers? We are already at the "I'm nostalgic for wobbly PS1 polygons" phase.
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Aug 21, 2019 01:38
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Cream-of-Plenty posted:I completely forgot about New Vegas’ absolutely idiotic decision to hardwire the 2 Key to ammo swaps. I really don’t know why that one particular thing was hard bound, and why it was the 2 key. Bizarre. I guess there are mods that can fix this but I don’t understand why they went with that in the first place. I wouldn't be surprised if this was some stupid engine thing. Fallout 3 also had a weird, arbitrary mix of keybindings you could change and keybindings that were hard coded. Most likely the engine supports rebinding only a limited set of functions and anything you add on top of that, like ammo swapping, is just hard bound to a button via a script or something.
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Aug 22, 2019 19:07
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site posted:i didnt mind the grinding because thats also is basically the game telling you the missions are about to get harder so use the money to buy the new weapons/ships that are now unlocked in the new areas. that and you usually only had to do like 3 missions at most to hit the next plot trigger I think one of the coolest elements of Freelancer honestly was how much extra stuff there was that you could totally miss if you didn't go exploring. Like entire systems that are only accessible via wormhole that the story will never guide you to. You can find them pretty easily by just looking at the map with the option to show NPC routes on and seeing "oh hey there's a lot of traffic to this one spot in the middle of nowhere for some reason", but the game never explicitly guides you there.
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Aug 23, 2019 00:26
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Mordja posted:Steam says it took 8 hours, same amount of time I to to beat Amid Evil. I think it just feels really long because of the way the levels are structured to be multiple connected maps, half-life style, with the only breaks coming in the between-zone summaries. Compared to other Build engine games, the pacing is different because of that.
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Aug 23, 2019 21:19
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Narcissus1916 posted:The Nintendo 64 is like peak Nintendo hardware design. Some dumb loving design decisions that make literally no sense whatsoever next to a few blindingly great design innovations that set the standard. I think the thing about Nintendo is that their greatest strength and greatest weakness is that they don't really pay attention to what anyone else in the market is doing. This allows them to work unfettered by trying to chase current trends, but at the same time it means that they tend to make mistakes that other people have already found solutions for. Also seconding on the 360 controller being the best one overall. The dualshock gets a lot of credit for basically setting the standard on how a controller should be laid out, but I think the shape of the 360 controller is just more comfortable to actually use.
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Aug 23, 2019 22:16
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Solaris 2.0 posted:I thought the same thing! There’s a reason I spent thousands of hours in Tribes 2, Battlefield 1942 /Vietnam/2, and to a lesser extent Unreal 2k4. I think the thing is as the market expanded, that kind of coordination just got worse over time because the vast majority of players would be people just casually dropping into matches to blow some stuff up, and the smaller scale, individual deathmatch type of game was a lot more conducive to that sort of thing. The big complex stuff does better with a smaller, more hardcore community, which is a bit of a problem when your game relies on huge numbers of players to be able to fill a match.
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Aug 24, 2019 01:32
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Solaris 2.0 posted:This is a hot take but I blame match-making. Games with 60+ players per match really thrive with dedicated servers that are populated by regulars and strong administration. These servers often created a strong sense of community. Yeah I don't really like the rise of matchmaking either. I understand why it exists, but I hate how it's pushed out custom servers from multiplayer games entirely. It's not as if you can't do both - Warcraft 3 had ladder play and custom matches.
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Aug 24, 2019 02:20
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fadam posted:And what's the lore behind there being TWO different Offspring references? My assumption is just that someone on the dev team is a fan.
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Aug 24, 2019 20:56
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For some stupid reason I decided to try playing Blood on Extra Crispy and just got through the first episode. It has kind of a weird difficulty progression because in the first two levels you're basically sitting there thinking "well, this is impossible", but if you eventually push past that hump it actually isn't that hard. A lot of saving and reloading but I didn't really hit any situations where I felt like I just didn't have the health or ammo to possibly get through (admittedly the dining car in the train was daunting but you can exploit the AI by opening and closing the door really quickly and they'll end up blowing themselves up a lot). Until I hit the boss, at which point I literally did not have the ammo to kill it, because it spawns two of them and they have shitloads of health. Crouching to exploit their AI means they couldn't touch me but I fired everything I had at them and it only ended up taking down one of them. I had to pitchfork the other to death. It took like five solid minutes of just the pitchfork before it finally died. Before that point it was actually pretty fun though. I had to use a lot of tactics that I never really made use of on Lightly Broiled (yes, I skipped Well Done entirely, because I am stupid) because just charging in and shotgunning everything isn't really a viable strategy anymore.
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Aug 27, 2019 04:56
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PunkBoy posted:Oh man, Half-Life mods were my everything as a kid. Some of my favorites (no particular order) Man I loved The Opera. It really seemed to be overshadowed by Action Half-Life, though. It's a shame because I liked the concept of The Opera more, where scoring was more down to doing something cool rather than getting more kills.
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Aug 28, 2019 00:28
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Wamdoodle posted:What were the differences between The Specialists, The Opera and Action Half Life? MP never has been my thing I just have heard of these I never played the Specialists so I'm not really sure what its thing was. Action Half Life basically was standard MP but where the movement was changed to be more "action movie" so lots of running around and diving through the air while firing two guns and so on. It also worked in single player, so you could play the regular Half-Life campaign with AHL movement and weapons which was neat. The Opera's big thing was that it was sort of like The Ship where HOW you killed someone was more of a score factor than just getting lots of kills. You would get more points for "stylish" kills, so say, getting a headshot while diving through a window would be worth more than just popping someone from cover. Both of those are simplifications since the mods added a lot more than that (including lots of big custom maps - AHL in particular is famous for the incredibly elaborate secrets in a few of its MP maps) but that is the gist of it.
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Aug 28, 2019 02:39
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site posted:hot take but bad company 2 was the battlefield i had most fun with. just stupid amounts of hours put into that game I dunno if it's that hot a take - I think a lot of people really liked BC2, especially compared to the games that came after it. The real hipster option is 2142 (I never played it, but it's the one where you get the most "actually it was the best one that nobody played" from people).
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Aug 28, 2019 22:41
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ponzicar posted:BF1 was great. The setting, weird prototypes, and antique firearms really set it apart. It's not as big a thing now but I can understand the argument back in the day when PC hardware was significantly more capable than consoles and when games went multiplatform, noticeable cuts had to be made. Like compare Crysis/Warhead to the sequels. Big scale stuff had to be cut back when the leap to consoles was made and that killed off a lot of interesting stuff. It wasn't universally bad - the whole Bad Company series was a deliberate attempt to make the BF games a bit smaller scale and it worked out really well, but I think it's because they also added new things to the formula to make up for it.
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Aug 28, 2019 23:16
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Cream-of-Plenty posted:I didn't mind the voodoo doll very much, and probably got a lot more use out of it than normal because I wasn't carrying weapons between levels. But you know what I basically never used? The Life Leech. I still don't get it. It just felt kind of clunky and burned through ammo really fast despite not feeling especially powerful. I must have been missing something. I just finished playing through on Extra Crispy (the difficulty level, not the mod), and yeah the Life Leech was basically the only weapon I didn't find a regular use for. Voodoo doll was absolutely vital for stone gargoyles - the worst part of the game was the first boss fight where I had to kill two of them without it and used up literally all the ammo I was carrying and had to pitchfork one of them for a while. The thing about the Life Leech is that it does have niche use with the secondary fire - the primary seems pretty useless. Just not enough damage, weird ammo consumption because you always fire it in bursts of 14 shots but the pickups only give you 10. The turret mode though? It doesn't do a lot of damage per shot but if you leave it sitting there long enough it starts to fire REALLY FAST. And it has unlimited ammo. It was very useful for dealing with those annoying groups of mother spiders who would have just been massive wastes of ammo otherwise. Just plunk it down and find somewhere to stand where they can't reach you, and wait a while.
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Aug 31, 2019 21:10
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John Murdoch posted:Didn't the Life Leech originally heal you when it damaged enemies? Everything about its design makes way more sense with that in mind, but then for some reason they removed that so now it just eats your health if you run out of ammo. Yeah, I think that was also the same patch that gave it the secondary fire turret mode (originally it didn't have a secondary fire at all). So they clearly realized that it was pretty worthless with the healing removed, but I guess couldn't figure out a better way to make it seem worthwhile?
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Sep 1, 2019 04:40
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Cream-of-Plenty posted:So since I don't really have much experience with Blood pre-Fresh Supply, was the Life Leech vampiric feature removed because it was super imbalanced or something? Because its very name suggests the mechanic, and it's weird to not have it. It's possible - health pickups are way more limited and deliberate in Blood than in most other shooters from the era, so they might have felt that a weapon that can heal you would mess up the pacing they'd established. Although it seems like a minor issue given that you get it so late in the game.
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Sep 1, 2019 05:24
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Quicksilver6 posted:I am having trouble getting into Blood. I’m a few missions into E1 after hearing good things about it but it’s losing me. Yeah don't start on Well Done. Play Lightly Broiled if you want something that's actually comparable to Doom on UV. A lot of the weapons are kind of gimmicky but once you learn the gimmicks you can use them pretty effectively. If you found the shotgun weak, use the secondary fire. You'll find that when you're using it, that is your main mode of attack. The primary fire that only fires a single barrel is only really for tagging enemies that are farther away when you want them to not shoot at you, or for finishing off something that you're pretty sure is almost dead and where both barrels would be overkill. Even then it's not a big deal - you'll have plenty of shotgun ammo. Both barrels all the time is fine. The flare gun is really efficient when you get a sense of how many flares it takes to kill enemies - they deal damage over time so for a lot of enemies it only takes one or two shots, and then you just wait for them to die. Also honestly the first few missions of E1 are kind of the roughest part of the game. You just don't have a lot of ammo for a while, but there's a turning point where suddenly you're going to find you're swimming in weapons and ammo, even when you start a new episode, because it just gives it all back to you so much faster each time.
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Sep 2, 2019 04:27
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“It has an extremely limited palette, which isn’t even a subjective opinion because it’s a technical tradeoff they knowingly made to allow more colour depth in shading, but it’s not literally all brown so checkmate, atheists”
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Sep 3, 2019 21:08
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Zaphod42 posted:Ahhhhhh that makes sense! Yeah, because this was in the early days before hardware acceleration they only had 256 total colours to work with at any given time, so they made a conscious decision to fill the palette with lots of gradients of a few colours to make the lighting smoother, then just built the look of the game around the colour choices they made. The original X-Com does something similar, which is why the lighting in that game looks so cool. https://quakewiki.org/wiki/Quake_palette
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Sep 3, 2019 23:19
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Convex posted:I like Quake's colour palette. It works very well with the atmosphere the game ended up with, and I think it's still colourful in its own way compared to the desaturated greys and browns if the early 360-PS3 gen. Yeah it's one of those weird things where they probably wouldn't have made the game quite so brown if they didn't have to, but because they did, they leaned into it and made the look of the game very rusty/earthy. But those later games don't really have any excuse because we were well into the point where limited palette space was no longer a concern. They were just sort of copying Quake's look without really understanding why Quake looked the way it did.
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Sep 3, 2019 23:29
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ZogrimAteMyHamster posted:I loving hate how the title system of this series lost any sense of consistency. It's infinitely worse than First Blood turning into Rambo. Look, it's Raven Software. These are the guys that did Heretic -> Hexen -> Hexen 2 -> Heretic 2. I think they just don't know how numbers work.
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Sep 5, 2019 02:06
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Soricidus posted:I’m glad they don’t because I’m really bad at action games and don’t want to miss half the cool stuff just because i can’t get past the bosses unless I play in baby mode I feel like a nice compromise would be to have separate options for "mission" and "enemy" difficulty. Similar to how the Silent Hill games have one difficulty setting for combat and another for puzzles - if you suck at action games but really want to bust out your esoteric knowledge of Shakespeare, you can just go easy/hard. I like when games have more customization options for difficulty because just lumping everything in to one setting means that you have to take annoying tradeoffs if you actually want some aspects of a higher difficulty but not others. Like, a lot of strategy games will adjust the AI's intelligence based on the difficulty setting, but also give it a bunch of cheats on higher settings to just straight up give it more resources. So there's no option to play against an AI that isn't dumbed down but also doesn't cheat. Blood: Fresh Supply's "Made to Order" setting is fun because it allows you to tweak everything individually, so you can do fun stuff like having the enemy spawn density set to the maximum difficulty, but have their health and reaction time set to the easiest difficulty, allowing you to play it more like Doom where you just run and gun against hordes of enemies, as opposed to just playing on the default highest setting where trying that will just lead to you dying all the time.
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Sep 10, 2019 23:06
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skasion posted:Pathways into Darkness was a couple months earlier and had some fairly interesting weapons in the crystals — one fires like a cone of lightning, and one does a big circular AOE. A PiD remake would be cool. I know it'll never happen but it's one of those unique things that could only really come about from those early experimental days of the FPS before everything got codified. It's got a lot more in common with adventure games than with Wolfenstein 3D.
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Sep 13, 2019 04:24
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al-azad posted:I disagree with Civvie on the animation interpolation. The choppiness gives a 2d sprite feeling and a more tactile feel to everything. The LEGO Movie and Spider-Verse have been popularizing limited frames in 3D animation for aesthetic effect. I agree; to me frame by frame animation always feels like it carries more weight than smoother interpolated stuff. It's one of those things where the lack of detail lets your mind fill in the blanks and the suggestion of motion is more impactful than actually showing the motion. One of the things that's been cropping up in modern games is throwing in classic traditional animation techniques like smears into the animation (you can get some pretty funny frame grabs in Overwatch because of this).
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Sep 16, 2019 02:03
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Sectopod posted:Was there ever an introduction to the future prison setting? I checked his early videos but couldn't find anything. Who's the robot/chicken, why is there a green glowing mouse? He actually makes a joke about how none of the continuity makes any sense in the DNF video that was just posted. There was never really an introduction to any of it - the original concept of the channel was that he would play a bunch of just awful video games (and also watch terrible movies but he didn't do very many of those) and the whole "department of special corrections" thing was just the loose framework to justify why anyone would do that. The scope of the channel expanded over time to include games he actually liked so it doesn't really make any sense anymore but he'd already established the gimmick by that point so now he just runs with it.
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Oct 3, 2019 00:35
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I feel like the weird thing about DNF is all the really creepy elements and the annoying characters and so on could have worked if the framing was like, this is the world that Duke has created for himself to serve his own ego and the whole thing is basically how Duke tells his own story. The "ego as health" thing suggests that was supposed to be the joke, but the prestige never arrives and it starts to become clear that like, they really were trying to creepily pander to players with all this stuff and the tone is just all over the place. Like all the EDF people being incredible dumbasses that need the great hero Duke Nukem to come save them - okay, that can work as a joke on its own, but then it's like, are you supposed to actually like captain Dillon? He shows up way too much to just be a joke. And all the women just wanting to gently caress Duke constantly feels a lot more like the sad fantasy of a very pathetic man. Like the whole thing comes off as some sweaty dude sitting next to you on the bus and deciding to tell you all about his sexual fantasies and it's just gross and off-putting. I feel like even accounting for the fact that the development is a total clusterfuck and the final result being hastily stitched together, there were some fundamentally bad ideas baked in there to begin with and more polish wouldn't have saved it unless that polish was "yeah just cut all this".
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Oct 3, 2019 23:15
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Yeah it's a weird thing and I feel like it must be some kind of programming oversight where they just forgot to set the damage of the fists back to normal after the effect wears off?
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Oct 4, 2019 06:47
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Honestly I don't consider any video game crossbow to be a proper crossbow unless it can pin enemies to walls like in Half-Life 2. The standard has been set.
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Oct 5, 2019 05:23
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Al Cu Ad Solte posted:Bruh. Really. Who wants this? How has RWS been in business for this long anyway? I'd be so sad if my artistic cultural footprint was...the Postal series. I feel like I read somewhere that Vince Desi (the owner of RWS) is independently wealthy so RWS is basically just being bankrolled by a rich guy and doesn't actually have to sell much in the way of games. Even if I'm just misremembering and that's not actually true, it's not a particularly big company so they can get by with pretty modest sales. The Postal series is one of those things where like, Postal 2 had some neat gameplay ideas - it was basically an immersive sim - but the presentation was so deliberately off-putting that it was like, well, obviously it wasn't going to sell well, what were you expecting? Noah Caldwell-Gervais has a good video on the series but it's over an hour long so I don't blame anyone for not bothering to watch it (I'm just posting it for anyone who is interested). And yeah if your only familiarity with it is through Civvie11's videos, bear in mind that he is pretty charitable to the game's problematic elements. I would expect the new postal thing is going to be a major political trash fire just because like, basically the only reason Postal 2 is at all tolerable is how dated all the references are. The video I posted above points out how when they released the Paradise Lost expansion (the one from 2015, which came out after Postal 3), the "jokes" had basically... not changed at all, despite being over a decade later. It doesn't really seem to suggest that developers are particularly likely to have grown as people and updated their takes to be more nuanced. The Cheshire Cat fucked around with this message at 02:54 on Oct 15, 2019 |
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Oct 15, 2019 02:48
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Shoehead posted:Oh no he aint one of ours! He's up there with other legends of shite Irish VA, like Conner from Assassins Creed, or yer man from the Saboteur. Or DIII Lachdannan. Yeah he doesn't sound Scottish, he just sounds like an American doing a bad Irish accent (I don't know if the voice actor is actually American but they are definitely not from anywhere in Ireland or the UK)
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Oct 15, 2019 22:44
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The thing about doing WW1 realistically in a FPS is that fundamentally the problem you'd run into is that infantry in WW1 just weren't that important. It was all about artillery and machine guns - the people in the trenches were really only there because you had to have SOMEONE physically blocking the enemy army from just marching into your country. Like to do WW1 in a video game it just makes more sense to be some kind of zoomed out strategy thing rather than actually being down in the trenches where not a whole lot happened.
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Oct 31, 2019 07:08
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Zaphod42 posted:I generally agree, although there are some moments you can blow up and make a game out of, like Red Baron stuff. But yeah, trench warfare in ww1 sounds pretty miserable. Yeah WW2 games aren't very realistic either, although there was quite a bit of house to house fighting in that war so some moments of it would have been very infantry heavy and good subject matter for FPSes. Honestly any depiction of warfare in any era where firearms exist are going to be unrealistic just because as you say, the real version isn't particularly "fun". WW2 has been heavily romanticized in movies so I think that's why video games focused so heavily on it for a while. There's not a lot of exciting WW1 movies for video games to steal from.
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Oct 31, 2019 07:19
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catlord posted:That works really well, actually. I gotta say, Half-Life has really good music but somehow when playing it, it just sorta passes over me and I don't really notice it. I think the thing is that it's used very sparingly and it's a relatively long game so it's easy to forget the game even has music, even if the tracks themselves are actually pretty good.
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Nov 3, 2019 23:29
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Vikar Jerome posted:i remember reading mags trashing it because it used sprites and goldeneye and turok didnt. they did the same thing with KI gold too if i recall. There were a lot of extremely bad opinions on 2D vs. 3D in the early 3D era. There were people who said Symphony of the Night had "bad" graphics because it was 2D.
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Nov 16, 2019 06:16
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al-azad posted:Thief has a really interesting and smart design where the first couple levels are explicitly designed so that you're rarely exposed to light and the game's difficulty ramps up by distinctly reducing the availability of shadows which force you to find more clever ways to navigate the maps which were always there from the beginning if you wanted to look. I'm hard pressed to think of a video game with more thoughtfully designed levels. Yeah and they were really subtle about it too. I saw a video a while ago that was comparing the new Thief game to the originals and it pointed out that one of the issues with the new Thief game is in all the "streamlining" it feels like it takes away player choice - things like rope arrows now have pre-designated points where you just shoot it to climb up. Except that the original game did the same thing (this isn't my observation - this was the point being made in the video)! If they didn't want you climbing somewhere they just made the surfaces into stone or metal or other stuff that you can't shoot a rope arrow into. It serves mechanically the same purpose but it feels more "natural" because it's not some meta-game-y UI element that pops up going "you can shoot an arrow here!". It's just that there was usually way more wood around than you had rope arrows so it became more about considering for yourself when it would actually be useful to climb up somewhere rather than just taking the prompt whenever it appeared.
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Nov 27, 2019 02:15
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StrixNebulosa posted:Picked up Blood: Fresh Supply, and... huh! I did not expect this to be as hard as it is? It honestly feels more like a survival horror game in the first few sections, as all you get are a pitchfork, TNT, and a flare gun. I miss having a pistol that would quickly put things down. Honestly one of the cool things about Blood is how it bucks the trend of "standard FPS loadouts" that was set by Doom and then basically remained unchanged up to this day. Most FPSes you've got your melee, pistol, shotgun, rapid fire, rocket launcher and then maybe some variations on those. You can map Blood's weapons to a couple of those categories, but most of them work in unusual ways and it really changes up the dynamic.
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Nov 28, 2019 01:57
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