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Is there a reason why all these delay announcements are happening right now? In a big wave, I mean.
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May 18, 2018 13:23
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FourLeaf posted:I just saw this video about writing competent dialogue in games. The example the presenter used for bad writing was a scene from Assassin's Creed: Odyssey, and to demonstrate good writing he breaks down a scene from Blade Runner and transforms it into game dialogue: Ingold is great and more people should pay attention to him.
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Dec 3, 2018 14:26
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MJBuddy posted:I'm all for explanations for how things would actually work. I'm very put off by the detailess demands. My current union dues are £15 a month. Generally our relations with my employer is pretty good, the union mainly comes in play when representatives take part in pay negotiations and we vote on whether to accept the pay offer or not. The big union related thing came in when the parent company wanted to force a big pension change on us. The ballot rejected the original offer so the central union sent us a legal advisor and a trained negotiator to help us have another go at it, eventually getting the company to tone down the pension change and give us additional paid vacation days. We were advised on the potential for further action including strikes but ultimately the offer passed the ballot. Also I get a free magazine.
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Apr 6, 2019 16:02
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quote:Once we have the embryonic form of that, then we can debate You are mixing up a union with an activist group. The point of an union is to create an organisation where you can have that discussion and develop those ideas.
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Apr 6, 2019 17:01
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Star Warrior X posted:Are we not having a debate in a forum right now? I disagree with the idea that we have to all join together just to have a discussion about what our actual end goals are. Look, you don't have to take part in the decision making process. You don't have to be a founding member of any union, you can wait until other folks discuss things and come up with motions before signing on. But the core of an union is not a 'platform' but rather a *process* whereby folks come together, submit motions, make decisions, and the organisation can then go and enact that consensus decision. Platforms can change, and there will be always individual points individual members don't like. The idea that consensus decision making leads to the entire union working towards the motion is what gives the union power, and stops it from fragmenting on the basis of each minor decision. That's not equivalent to random strangers chatting on a dead gay comedy website, no. You are basically going 'why should Congress exist, why can't we just chat on Twitter'. Edit: The point of it is to have a democratic power structure in the workplace outside of profit centric shareholders and whatever whims of the management. Even if you are all completely happy with how your company is being run, the point of the union is still there as a safeguard so that the CEO knows that if they try and fire a third of the staff for no reason an emergency meeting will be held and the union can consider action. Fangz fucked around with this message at 17:34 on Apr 6, 2019 |
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Apr 6, 2019 17:27
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The point of unions is to address practices that are not (currently) illegal. It's not a gofundme for lawsuits.
Fangz fucked around with this message at 20:32 on Apr 7, 2019 |
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Apr 7, 2019 20:28
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Star Warrior X posted:In that case, is there no middle ground purpose for a union or guild? Nothing it can do that requires less collective power than the full ability to strike against a studio, to back up its collective negotiating stances? Does this truly need to be a one-step process, from nothing to full-blown every-studio-vs-a-union-rep contract negotiation all at once? Yes. There are 'middle ground purposes' but those middle ground purposes are not unions. They are stuff like lobby groups, activist groups, and yes legal fee gofundmes. If employment law already allows most issues to be addressed through lawsuits, if a self sustaining lawsuit process is plausible whereby settlements can fund additional lawsuits, then there wouldn't be the need for unions that people see. The core purpose of union is the bargaining power to negotiate employment contracts and hold management to their terms (probably not drawing up new contracts, but at least resisting changes to contracts, or establishing minimum terms). Stuff like legal aid and pressuring lawmakers to change the laws are secondary things an union might also offer but they require a large organisation with lots of members to already exist.
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Apr 8, 2019 10:40
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It's not related at all. The core skillset of union leadership is to be a facilitator and help organise union meetings. Their job is not to come up with the union's position. It's not a big deal, we can find committee members easily in our 40 person organisation. If the membership aren't confident in their PR/negotiation capabilities just go for more modest proposals. If specific skills are needed, hire outside people or get in consultants from other unions/professional bodies. The biggest issue we've ever had is finding someone to take notes at general meetings. Fangz fucked around with this message at 14:34 on Apr 8, 2019 |
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Apr 8, 2019 14:27
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In what context do you mean here?
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May 19, 2019 20:35
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Are you comparing a bunch of guys in the pub who were extras or helped move equipment in the Avengers to some ex-Bioware writers/designers/artists trying to kickstart an indie project. Because if so then obviously you aren't comparing like to like.
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May 19, 2019 20:40
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-pmh70cZu4 Watch this.
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Jul 15, 2019 21:08
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I actually think that market fragmentation will help. A key part of the problem is that as Steam or any other platforms grow, the number of games it can give attention to doesn't grow proportionately. If the top 20 games on a platform will always get 50% of sales (numbers plucked out of the hat), a fragmented market with different audiences going to different platforms multiplies those numbers for each platform. Audience money gets spread out more amongst more games.
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Oct 22, 2019 18:15
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Red Mike posted:Surely if there were diamonds buried in the mud, then much like in film we'd end up having new "cult hits" that bomb at the box office but people hear about and start buying. Even if they were average, we'd see one or two pop up 'out of nowhere' when someone randomly comes across it post-release when going through a backlog. Has that happened in modern storefronts at all? Why is that the case? I'm not sure how I can even "randomly come across" an unpopular game on Steam.
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Mar 15, 2021 13:04
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Red Mike posted:
I'm not sure what you are doing to get those recommendations, because the recommendations I get right now if I pull up steam are Valheim Forza horizon Little Nightmares 2 Persona 5S The only way I can find games with few reviews are if they were released within the last hour or so, going off of New and Trending. That or if I sort all the games on steam alphabetically or something.
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Mar 16, 2021 23:39
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It really depends. Some things are far easier in 3D than 2D. Rotations, for example, if you want multiple angles of a 3D character you just do it. In 2D every different angle you add multiplies the number of images you need, for every animation you require, for every character there is. That's why some games like the Supergiant ones and Doom make 3D models (physical clay models in the case of Doom) to base their 2D art on.
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Dec 24, 2021 13:50
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I think these days it's just better to trust the player and give them the options to adjust difficulty themselves at any point while playing the game.
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Jul 29, 2022 13:42
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Lemming posted:I like when this is done through gameplay, not through dedicated difficulty selection or whatever. I'm not the biggest fan of Elden Ring, but stuff like having the option when you get stuck on a boss to grind, change your build, get more consumables, get more summons, get some online no-lifer to solo the boss for you, etc, are all options to tune how difficult it is based on what you're willing to put in No, I think you should still have a dedicated difficulty selection or whatever. Grinding takes time I don't have - and creates sometimes the opposite tuning problem of players accidentally getting overleveled and losing desired challenge, thus punishing committed players for playing too much. Inexperienced players cannot be expected to know what build is good and looking up a guide to builds is something that can ruin the enjoyment of a game. Getting some online no-lifer might get me over one speedbump but it won't help me with the *next boss*. Yes, you can have other systems as well, but a well thought out, usable at any time difficulty/assist mode should be the baseline for all games. Maybe I'm just 20% shittier than the anticipated average player, so a simple 20% HP boost will just make the game 10x more fun. Meanwhile some pro gamer type can give themselves half the normal health or something. Everyone's happy. Fangz fucked around with this message at 17:25 on Jul 29, 2022 |
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Jul 29, 2022 17:18
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It's not perfect, but it's a strict improvement on not having it. It's not a problem that most players play on the default difficulty. Frankly *just knowing the option is there* is enough to allow me to try some games that I otherwise would have avoided. And no, I'm not saying this is an alternative to playtesting your game. According to reddit's celeste subreddit, which probably selects for a more hardcore audience, about a fifth of players have used Celeste's assist mode. Fangz fucked around with this message at 19:57 on Jul 29, 2022 |
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Jul 29, 2022 19:51
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Canine Blues Arooo posted:I don't necessarily agree here. The problem is that your barely win is my never win. Compare my number of deaths in Celeste, with assist mode on, and I still die more often than a good player does. But assist mode allows me to put difficulty at a level where I can actually perceptibly improve. Whereas in many games without sufficient difficulty options that are too hard, progression feels entirely random. It's just a matter of bashing my head against a difficulty wall until randomly I get lucky and get through. There is zero perception of progress at all. I do not even understand why I succeeded. This is an absolutely dire experience and I will ragequit your game and never ever play anything by you ever again. And yes, my original point specified options you go into *after* you played a bunch of the game. There's little point handing players excessive options before they've played it. EDIT: VVV I did not use assist mode to remove all challenge from Celeste. I used it to allow my perception of Celeste to align with those of people who enjoy this sort of game. I had fun and received a fair challenge. Fangz fucked around with this message at 21:06 on Jul 29, 2022 |
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Jul 29, 2022 21:00
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Wait until you're older and have less time and worse muscle coordination and can expect to be able to complete only 20% of the games you want to play.
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Jul 29, 2022 22:03
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What about games that are supposed to be challenging but where the designer made the game too easy? Is it still unacceptable to the "journey" to include an option for expert players to be able to create challenge modes within the game? I don't see any difference between a game where the default is possibly too hard with an optional easy mode, and one that is too easy with an optional hard mode, except that in the former you are using player's default behaviour to ensure most people give higher difficulties at least a try. Or do you always play on the easiest difficulty possible? Anyway, getting back to adaptive difficulty. The reason I said giving the players options is better than adaptive difficulty is that it's a pain in the arse to playtest. You need to playtest not just progression through the game, but also different sorts of progression. An adaptive difficulty system might seem to perform well for your playtesters playing normally, but in fact there could be issues like "if they die on the first boss, the difficulty becomes trivial", or "if the player grinds, the game becomes impossible". Making the game more reactive opens up more room for unexpected behaviours that break stuff. It's really hard to hit the right balance where it makes an impact, but doesn't make the game terrible. There's a few games that have a tutorial that you play and give you a recommendation "we think you should play on easy mode". That's maybe a good idea. Fangz fucked around with this message at 09:42 on Jul 30, 2022 |
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Jul 30, 2022 09:35
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There are people who are very good at Dark Souls, for whom Dark Souls is indeed pretty easy to beat. They still play Dark Souls. They play Dark Souls a lot. In fact, instead of being the people who are least interested in Dark Souls, they play and enjoy Dark Souls the most of all! The design with the multiplayer aspects is designed around retaining those players. Asking for the game to be optionally more accessible is not asking for the removal of all challenge. It's based on the idea that challenge can only be a subjective notion based on the capabilities and experience of each player. Equivalently, the minority of players who have played every Soulslike would also benefit from higher difficulty options to give them back the failure/success cycle they no longer get. I don't want a super-easy story mode. I want a challenge that feels fair *to me*. Why do we keep circling around this point of removing all challenge? It's infuriating and feels in bad faith. Also I'm annoyed by the "not all games have to" blah blah framing. The status quo is that games like Celeste are in the absolute minority! For wide range of genres, there are very few, or even no equivalent to these games that offer more accessibility.
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Jul 30, 2022 22:50
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Canine Blues Arooo posted:
That's irrelevant to my point. My point is that posters like you keep making points like quote:Necessarily though, games where you are allowed to be 'good', you are also allowed to be 'bad'. ... when no one is asking that games stop allowing you to be bad! I want games to stop forcing me to be bad with no option to be good. quote:Focusing on the AAA space, while it's certainly not universal, the trend is to cast as wide of a net as possible. Part of that means sanding down systems, which means less room for expression of skill, which necessarily means a reduction in difficulty. Difficulty is highly subjective of course, but I think the conversation about "when is 'accessible' too much, and how do you identify that?' is worthwhile. I don't really have answers here, but I'm always interested in the conversation. This is a completely tangential point to whether games should offer you options. Indeed it's the *lack* of options, the lack of trust for players, the removal of stuff like mod support, that makes "casting as wide of a net as possible" problematic, because once you combine "there should be only one way to play" with casting a wide net, that's when systems get sanded down and skill gets removed. Once you get only one way to play, you will inevitably end up with players who find the game too hard and players who find the game too easy. You keep making this argument be about your desire for challenge, but I'm saying the point is designers should ensure your access to that challenge be not a matter of being luckily in the middle part of the bell curve that happens to match the type of people the devs designed for. You've also skipped my point about lack of alternatives. Oh sure, there's various generic ubisoft games, but Assassin's Creed isn't really Dark Souls except with more forgiving timing, is it? There might be lots of easy AAA games in some genres, but other genres are extremely under-served. Prior to Celeste, basically there *weren't* any possibly-easy platformer games. As AAA continues to get eaten by F2P, there actually isn't that many options at all. Fangz fucked around with this message at 23:47 on Jul 30, 2022 |
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Jul 30, 2022 23:35
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If you can accept that games should make allowance for colour blindness, why is it different to say that games should make allowance for the fact that human reaction times vary by a factor of two or more, so for significant numbers of players the game is effectively running at twice the speed and there's nothing they can do about it? (If I may be snippy, I would suggest that the difference is that the gaming community is more used to the idea that having faster reaction times makes you a better person and people with slow reaction times deserve to suffer, when it's socially unacceptable to think that of colour perception.) Lemming posted:but if we're going to consider games as being some form of creative expression, I really don't like the attitude of there being some kind of objectively correct/incorrect ways to make them I don't think criticising an artwork is implicitly saying there's objective correctness in art. If someone says "no artwork should shoot spikes into viewers eyeballs/be made of the skin of endangered animals/display child pornography", it would be extremely anal to protest that as an objective constraint on creative expression and too much of a blanket statement. If people can come up with a persuasive reason for a game to not grant difficulty options, then fine. But "some games are about the challenge" isn't one, because it fails to engage with my point that I *want those difficulty options so I can engage with that challenge*. Fangz fucked around with this message at 00:36 on Jul 31, 2022 |
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Jul 31, 2022 00:14
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Lemming posted:This is part of why I was trying to be careful with my language; I think if something is going to impact the core of your game, like the main thing you're trying to do with the game, then that's a reasonable choice to do something that would end up making the game less accessible for some people. Admittedly I can't think of an example offhand, but I can imagine that if someone made a game that was really focused on the use of color, it might be difficult or impossible to make a version that's accessible for people who are color blind. Like there are plenty of paintings that would lose a lot of their nuance and impact if you saw them and you were colorblind, I don't think it means that the artist "should" have painted it differently Most difficulty options are not that hard to implement. Letting people slow down the game speed by a few percent is not massively more challenging than rejigging the UI to accomodate font rescaling, or designing for colour blindness. quote:Alright, I think this is a little bit unfair. We're talking about video games, not insanely hosed up crimes. I think you can reasonably intuit that nobody here is saying morality doesn't exist but in the eye of the beholder. I tried to be reasonable in pointing out the particular use of the word "should" and that it has a lot of heavy implications behind it, and that was likely a big piece of the disagreement, because people here on both sides are pretty clearly passionate about the topic Where do you draw the line here? Because the line seems to be drawn at: "any criticism of games is impossible outside of pointing out outright criminality." Like, what do you get out of: quote:A strong, reasonable reason is "the creator of the game didn't want to make that game." What critique is actually allowed by this? The reality here is that you're supposed to take the subjectivity as implicit. When I say "all games should have difficulty options", that's me saying "I want all games to have difficulty options, it sucks, for me, that I can't play the majority of games I want to play". The creator may have chosen to do this thing, but I choose to say that by doing this thing, the creator is being cruel to me just so some assholes can feel they are better than me. It's an unnecessary bit of pedantry to raise this whole creator choice/objective correctness/is it valid to do X stuff. I mean I don't jump on people who critique AAA games as being too dumbed down with "the creator choose this, are your saying their choice isn't valid!!!?" quote:I think Getting Over It is a great example of this - it's literally a game specifically made to gently caress you over and be unreasonably frustrating and piss you off. The fucker even makes fun of you for it while you're playing it. But man, it really would have been a completely different game with a bunch of difficultly settings, and I really don't think it would have been better for it. I get that it's an extreme example and *most* games aren't specifically trying to make you pissed off, so I'm not trying to argue that it somehow invalidates the idea that it's good for games to have more difficulty options, but I think it's a good example of something that I don't think someone could make a really convincing case that it "should" have difficultly settings Sure I can. There's frustrating and then there's "this game is impossible". The game is designed around you getting over a series of challenges and then being faced with a new challenge that fucks you over in a new way, with narration triggered as a result of that. The player is meant to engage with each of the new and different ways the game fucks you over. The game fails as a design if the player never gets over the first obstacle after 2000 hours of play and thus never encounters any of the cleverness the designer puts into it. Adding in options to alter the game's speed would probably be fairly simple addition. Canine Blues Arooo posted:I mean, that is definitely the desired experience some developers want to deliver. There are a lot of games where the structured content is designed to be something you have work at to overcome. Depending on how familiar with genre conventions, that may take a longer or shorter time, but if the goal is to deliver this consistent experience, then that's that. Even if they wanted to, it's a lot of work to go back and add simpler modes. A Technical Platformer like Meatboy would require a lot of time to build an 'easy mode' into it. Again. I want difficulty options so I CAN RECEIVE THAT DESIRED EXPERIENCE. This is why I am getting pissed off. I keep making this point but it seems to just slide off. It is impossible for a game to structure content to deliver a consistent experience unless it recognises that players are different. Fangz fucked around with this message at 01:21 on Jul 31, 2022 |
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Jul 31, 2022 01:06
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Canine Blues Arooo posted:For games with challenging structured content where that content is the point, you just have to put in the time and effort. The desired experience is 'you must perform this well to accomplish this goal', and a difficulty slider compromises that. A personal example for me is that I'm working on grinding out Master Mode in Tetris Effect where you have to clear 300 lines at G20 with increasingly strict rules. It's really hard. If there was an option to relax the rules, or to make it so I only had to clear 200 lines, or whatever slider one could imagine here, it's no longer delivering the intended experience. The intended experience IS this enormously difficult gauntlet - that is the design, so much so that little micro adjustments to rules around repeat rate have been made to further fine tune it over the years. I might not ever finish it, but it'll be a hell of a day if/when I do. Imagine playing Master Mode at 2x the normal speed. Or 4x. Or 10x. Can you still beat it with time and effort? There is a point at which the game becomes so hard that you can't just put in the time and effort. It is physically impossible for you as a player. The purpose of the difficulty setting is to get the game to a state where your time and effort actually matters and you obtain this difficult gauntlet - and not an experience where you are basically just pressing random buttons because it makes no difference. Even speedrunners hate crap that requires sub-frame-level precision. There's a threshold, which varies from person to person, where a game crosses from a matter of skill to a matter of pure luck. A game being "about challenge" ceases to be about challenge when it breaches that threshold. Fangz fucked around with this message at 01:35 on Jul 31, 2022 |
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Jul 31, 2022 01:27
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MJBuddy posted:I mean, maybe it's not massively more challenging in that both things are actually very hard to do. Though they require different specialties to do each. There's a programming challenge, but I would argue that if anything, games with reaction time difficulty have an easier time of things. It's much harder to add difficulty options to the likes of XCOM, where giving enemies one fewer points of HP so they can be one-shot by a grenade dramatically changes the encounter design. The space between "boringly trivial" and "mathematically impossible" could be tiny. So yes, that's one situation where I can accept difficulty settings might not be suitable. But these "challenge based games" people mention are not those. I will also point out that allowing programmatic tuning of the speed of game events is good for your development process beyond difficulty settings. It's an essential element of allowing you to tune the gamefeel. So in this case you should absolutely implement this early so you can respond to playtester feedback. The case with Celeste was that their assist settings were also their debug settings. Perhaps this is not always the case, but often it could be. Fangz fucked around with this message at 01:59 on Jul 31, 2022 |
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Jul 31, 2022 01:51
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Lemming posted:
You're interpreting me too absolutely. When I say the game fails as a design, it's in the context of that player, with no game being 100% successful. I'm not saying if even a single person doesn't get it, the Thing Sucks Now. But in the case of Getting Over It, there's desired frustration which is when the design succeeds, and then there's undesired frustration, which is the "never even the first obstacle" situation. Reducing the latter so players can access more the former makes the game more successful for that player. To analogise, it's rather different when a book makes a reader sad because of what happens in it, vs because the book uses a fontsize they can't read. A reader has an absolute right to complain about this, and claims about the validity of the writer's choice and why they can't use the word "should" is just tedious. Most person would happily agree that the book has failed as an artwork for that reader.
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Jul 31, 2022 02:16
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Canine Blues Arooo posted:
On master mode, the delay between a block dropping and it locking in place is 6 frames. For a game locked to 60 fps that's 0.1 seconds. If you react based on seeing the preview that gives 0.2 seconds. Average reaction time to visual stimuli, which corresponds to the limit of what you achieve if you train and eliminate all thinking time, is 0.25 seconds. This means at least half of people will never be able to complete Master Mode. Double the speed of the game and that number drops further. There's meanwhile many people with reaction times of over 0.4 seconds. These factors are governed by the fundamental biochemistry of how your nerves are set up. Beyond a certain limit (around 10-20%), you just cannot git gud. Fangz fucked around with this message at 02:37 on Jul 31, 2022 |
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Jul 31, 2022 02:34
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Canine Blues Arooo posted:My goals here are not to get into the ultra specifics of a given game, but I kinda wanna take a second here because this is important I think to the perception that these challenges are just unapproachably difficult. Lock Delay on M30 is 8 frames IIRC, but the math generally works out to be roughly what you posted - it's a spicy one. On the surface level, it really does look like you need super high reaction times to complete this, but that's a bit of an illusion. Most players who play these kinds of challenges are playing about 3 or 4 blocks ahead. This is so important actually that playing with just 1 block visible in the Next pipeline is a nontrivial difficulty increase. It really does look like there is a strong reaction time element to completing something like this, but your reaction time really just needs to be better then roughly 500ms to have a shot at this. The actual hard thing here is not reaction time, but having such competency with piece movement, planning, and patterns that you are dropping pieces without any hesitation in a correct spot every time. It's 6 because I looked it up. If you are playing at 4 moves ahead and you have a reaction time of 200ms that gives you 200 ms of thinking time. If your reaction time is 350ms like about a quarter of people you have only 50ms of time to think. The game is 4x as difficult for those people. And I raised the initial possibility of making the game 2 or four or ten times faster. Do you still think you can git gud achieve that with effort and time? What about playing with just one block visible? Fangz fucked around with this message at 10:24 on Jul 31, 2022 |
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Jul 31, 2022 10:15
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MJBuddy posted:Does Tetris change board state or possible draws from a finite pool within a scenario? No? So it's not structurally different than baseball where you sit fastball and react offspeed. You could just "assume" a scenario set in Tetris and react to deviations. I'm not a top Tetris player, but that's how chess and baseball and virtually every competitive game is played so why would this be unique? Wait, you don't know that Tetris uses a RNG?
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Aug 1, 2022 10:00
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