|
 Muscle Tracer posted:Give me Armored Core but soulslike. Same scale as Souls, same brutality of bosses, but instead of picking up cool swords and helmets I'm picking up rocket arms and quad legs. Instead of flasks, generators and radiators. Instead of talismans, OP-INTENSIFY. Everybody's a fricken mech. I hear lots of people say they "want this but that" but what do they even mean? The explanations are always real simple and abrupt as if they're scared of going into nerdy-rear end detail about what they want. Its kinda become a meme among game designers that players can't really elaborate this stuff and I don't think players are quite as stupid as designers often make them out to be (sure they're dumb but not always that dumb). WHAT THE gently caress IS GENREMOSHING AND WHY SHOULD I CARE? Born from geeky literary circles, genremoshing is something aspiring writers do to practice: Combining things which "feel like they would taste really good together" into a single story or concept or character and it can be thought of as adjacent to datamoshing in that something is lost in resolution but gained in new context. In this thread, there is no fear:
Show me what you got. WHATS THE POINT, ANYWAY????
ESSAY SERIES: ARMORED SOULS: FINDING THE DARK CORE
Expo70 fucked around with this message at 12:04 on Jul 26, 2022 |
#
?
Jul 10, 2022 00:58
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 26, 2024 08:21 |
|
|
My first one is more of a visual design genre mash-up, but here we go: A JRPG with a protagonist that actually looks masculine. I actually really dig the more 'realistic' (i.e, not OPENLY a cartoon) look of a lot of, say, Square-Enix's recent releases, but holy poo poo am I tired of the main characters looking like they just stole the look of a random K-pop performer. Nothing wrong with androgyny, but sometimes I like pretending to be a big stompy guy (or girl, those are fine too). As for actual genre mash-up: Hidden Object FPS. I've gotten weirdly addicted to playing hidden object games, but it falls a bit flat when you're confronting the big evil and they're just posing there menacingly on the side of the screen or in the playing area, doing nothing but making a noise when you tap them or glaring menacingly at you while you find a bunch of random objects. Give me a list of items I need to find to jury-rig a gun or other weapon, which is already a game mechanic in most of these, and then give me a sequence where I'm actually USING said weapon, which breaks at the end of said sequence because duh, I slapped it together out of a funnel, a hacksaw, a pipe, and a coffee press. Implausible? Sure, but I'm already trying to thwart the schemes of some five-hundred-year-old demon-worshipper who runs around dressed as a medieval monk in a modern-day setting, 'silly' is just par for the course.
|
|
#
?
Jul 10, 2022 02:24
|
|
|
Posting in this thread for cool Expo70 posts
|
|
#
?
Jul 10, 2022 12:38
|
|
|
Captain Foo posted:Posting in this thread for cool Expo70 posts  A multipart essay on the concept of "Armored Souls" through the lens of a qualified game-designer, deconstructing the concept academically -- "Armored Souls: Finding the dark core". As someone who is currently working on an AC-inspired game who comes from the Raph Koster school of game design, I figure I should make the effort to understand what audiences mean when they ask stuff like this and maybe I'll get to entertain a few of you along the way. Might do some Dall-E fuckery along with my art research to help communicate certain ideas. Hopefully providing this as a functional example of genremoshing might help get the thread rolling  Its a really interesting example, because its one people have painted art of:  I'm very reminded of genremoshing of games like Ace Combat and Touhou (Touhou Combat) so I might do that as my second "well researched" genremosh post after I do Armored Souls. Edit: FrozenGoldfishGod posted:
Oh wow this is genuinely something I didn't know existed (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_object_game). Could you explain what you feel the appeal of Hidden Object games is to you personally? I'd love to know. Expo70 fucked around with this message at 12:25 on Jul 12, 2022 |
|
#
?
Jul 10, 2022 21:01
|
|
|
Captain Foo posted:Posting in this thread for cool Expo70 posts https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rpTlZMLZh0w ♬ USUDA - DO YOU REMEMBER (ver 2) [Kota Hoshino/FreQuency cover]  So to begin, I will preface by explaining who I am, what this essay is, and what it is not and how this is going to work. Then I'll explain what Armored Core and Dark Souls are. We kind of need to do things in this order, because I need those of you who don't know what these things are yet to go in with as little bias as possible. So no pretences here: I’m an idiot who enjoys pedagogy, human-factors, psychology, game-design and essay writing. I might know lots of big words and fancy terms, but I’m fallible and stupid and will probably say things people do not like very much... BUT I am open to criticism (and some ridicule, as a treat) and if you have any feedback, thoughts, ideas, disagreement or you just want to hurl insults its all welcome. If my grammar and spelling are particularly bad, blame my dyslexia. Second, I’m of the firm opinion that there is something valuable in this concept: That by understanding the people who say “Armored Souls”, that there may be good ideas which can be rescued from this cursed trash fire game-design request, which everybody seems too scared to analyse to my understanding. People keep asking for this. Why? Somewhere in this pile of poo poo polished into a smooth ball is a blood diamond of a good idea that needs to be rescued from this mess of misunderstandings. Even if we only rescue one good idea from this concept, I think that’s a success. So, WTF is “Armored Souls”? It started with meme originating not long after dark souls II, “Armored Souls” became a popular discussion topic on Japanese image board 2ch — where shitposts would eventually give rise to Japanese artists uploading “Armored Souls” concept-paintings on pixiv. Soon after Dark Souls 3, users would begin discussing the topic on Reddit. Recent leaks have also suggested Armored Core 6 itself, may actually have “souls-like” elements. It seems the meme is coming true. Many have responded with hostility to this.  Joy. Naturally, Armored Core fans feel pretty left behind: The last game in the series was released in 2013 (Armored Core V: Verdict Day, known for its excellent multiplayer and lively community) — and the last “good” single-player game in the eyes of many players, in 2008 (Armored Core: For Answer, which ACVD’s strongest storybeats functionally depend upon, where Hidetaka Miyazaki honed his storytelling skills). The notion that “Souls would be leaking into Armored Core” is a feeling of encroachment or invasion the fandom is struggling with, and it means nobody wants to touch this topic with a barge-pole. Personally, I don’t think we really have a choice. If we care about mecha as a genre, and we enjoy Souls or Core or are in the market of making games inspired by them we should do everything we can not only to understand them but also surpass them. SO WHAT IS THIS ESSAY? The classic adage goes “Compare and contrast”. Its the first totem pole of every high school level essay, but we should evaluate why that is first before proceeding just to make sure we’re all on the same page here. Raph Koster (probably the best living game-designer in the world, and a hero of mine) said, “creativity is mashing up contexts making things that you know very well unfamiliar to you again is a classic creative technique, and its why the history of creativity is littered with people getting stoned in various ways (to force them to re-contexturalize the present)” This recontextualization will be our difference engine. OK, sure, but what does that mean? Why do we compare and contrast stuff? Human beings are contrast-detection systems, which classify the world by deciding if things are “more like A, or more like B”, say apples, and oranges. This in turn morphs the definitions of A and B themselves. Over time, we prefer apples which “seem more apple” whether that’s freshness or color and this alters how apples are produced. Like the banana, a hundred years from now, the apple might look nothing like it does now. This process is called hyper normalization — that the “base definition” of a thing morphs over time, creating cultural value-drift (Value drift – Effective Thesis). The most radical examples would be cargo-cults (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult) where the entire context of the original object is completely lost, or is so exaggerated that it becomes completely unrecognizable as a hyperbole of itself. Those of you who like the shitheap that is TVTropes might liken this to Flanderization, the bitter confused drunk cousin of hyper normalization's dead uncle - the game of telephone. Its the same property that makes people crave unreal exaggerated versions of forms in say, pornography or videogames or whatever media exists and why culture's values change over time based on the tokens and objects that culture is using to represent itself. Whether its a cultural idea like those establishing personal identity like what’s considered manly or womanly, or what’s considered modern or classical, etc, changes over time. And that's a good thing, because it essentially keeps culture from going stale -- and often allows culture to compartmentalize a fad or trend and fully encapsulate and digest the conclusions of a long line of work back into its dominant culture. Coming back to cargo-cult writing, probably the most famous example of deliberate example of it I can personally think of Hideaki Anno, attributed to using religious imagery in Neon Genesis Evangelion when in fact the origins themselves are in 1973’s Ultraman Brothers — with Evangelion returning to Imaginary Space, and the Planet Golgotha of Ultraman in its (maybe) final work, Evangelion: Thrice Upon a Time. If you wanted classical literary examples, you're going to have to look elsewhere. While we should be weary of hyper normalization, it is also an incredible source of originality without sequalization, as a pure recontextualization of past historical place, feeling and notion. On some level when evaluating media, we should look at the through line of the stories told and the goals of their creators and attempt to “lead the shot” by estimating the time on target. While we might miss, whatever happens will undoubtedly be either very interesting or exceptionally unique. I think our goal here is to use this outside concept of “what is armored souls?” to make both Armored Core and Dark Souls unfamiliar to again, by crossing them into one another, to slingshot into the blue yonder of unbridled creative potential. OK, WHAT??? Sure this is all waxing lyrical masturbation, but I think without bringing you guys onboard into the process none of this would even work. I’m going to evaluate the games through several lenses: That of game-loop, tension-resolution loop, control-design, conceptualization/stylization and narrative style. In discovering the core differences, we can not only discover what separates them but what makes them function and whether or not any of these properties are either in direct opposition of one another or whether or not they amplify one another. In turn once the basic concepts of the lenses are established, we’re then going to find connections between them so we can see which elements re-enforce one another to gestalt into being more than the sum of their parts.  SO WHAT ISN'T THIS ESSAY? Outright, I want to say, this essay is not insisting that “Armored Souls” should exist: AC-fans will claim nonsensically that “FROM has milked Souls-like for years, and Armored Core has been neglected by comparison for over a decade.” Likewise, Souls-fans will claim by comparison that their backlog and library is larger and that they are ungrateful, again - nonsensical. To both of those groups of people, I have only this to say:  Moving on: We’re not here to give credence to either side here, only to see where these ideas lead in the event they have something to bring to the table to tell us more about their respective franchises and the philosophy, mindset and applied functional design of both. Once more for the folks in the back: It is not insisting Souls-likes would improve Core-likes, or Core-likes would improve Souls-likes. This is a thought exercise, as a fact-finding mission. I make no statement whatsoever and while I do come with a bias which leans toward Armored Core, I fully acknowledge and state it right here and I am exceptionally open to criticism and correction from any and all parties as I write this essay. It is not insisting or creating a game-design document. Unless we want it to be, anyway. Maybe it should be. We'll know as we get deeper into this ongoing work. HOW DO WE DEFINE ARMORED CORE? Armored Core is a mecha-action game-series running from $1995 to $2013. The game is characterized by high speed anime-like movement in its primary game loop in its forward game loop and customizability the likes of which had never been seen before in a console game defining every element of your robot from its limbs to its weapons, but also its energy management systems, booster drain and other systems which must work harmoniously to have a functional build. This leans on a longer tradition of mech-customization coming from games like BattleTech/MechWarrior, Heavy Gear (the engine for which was MechWarrior derived), and Earth siege/Star siege (which sought to be a direct competitor with Battletech). The concept would be flipped on its head however: basic combat not depending on manual aiming as many PC games at the time did, but instead high speed movement and an auto-aim assist to compensate for the use of projectile weapons rather than hit scan, giving rise to proper dodge and aim mechanics without demanding superhuman levels of aiming as seen in FPS games like Quake at the time). This aim-assist was then deliberately limited as a manipulatable stat in the game, and compensated with a deliberately finite turn-speed (“tank controls”, giving rise to high speed turning-fights not unlike those of dogfighting aircraft where positioning was extremely important even in open-space), and a heavy demand that the player design a build which would respond to the challenge of the mission that they were facing as a surprisingly deep self-optimization challenge wherein there was no linear-progression but instead he interoperability of parts for purpose, giving rise to different “builds”. The net result is the game depended far less on precise control inputs, and far more on an understanding of the game’s various builds and the depths of the game’s systems to select appropriate matchups and strategies — which would then be rewarded by what was perceivably a near superhuman level of play for games of the time. Armored Core tells its stories through the lens of criticizing hyper capitalist futures seen in cyberpunk dystopias — at once revelling in the technology while simultaneously critiquing the cold utility-function evaluations of companies and their materialistic demand to satisfy profit at the expense of human life. Not exactly revolutionary, though the 4th iteration in the series (actually the 15th game) and its successors (Armored Core 4, and Armored Core: For Answer) are a retelling of the French revolution through an accelerationist near post-capital lens (I’ll go into this more later). I will indicate here that I do have something of a bias, with this particular story being my favorite in the series — though I feel Armored Core 3 and its games (Silent Line, Nexus, Nine Breaker, Formula Front and Last Raven) are probably the cultural highpoint of the series owing to the much tighter mission design. I’m going to be focusing mainly on 4 and For Answer since they seem to resonate the strongest with Dark Souls conceptually (which makes sense given Hidetaka Miyazaki directed both Dark Souls and 4th gen AC) though I will occasionally invoke 3rd and 1st generation Armored Core games, and superficial elements of 5th gen games. HOW DO WE DEFINE DARK SOULS? Dark Souls is a series of games running from 2011 to 2016, based on the 1994 FROM Software game “Kings Field”, known for its refusal to onboard or hand-hold during gameplay, a legacy Dark Souls inherits. Dark Souls is defined as a “cultural recontextualization” of “western roleplaying dark fantasy”, through the lens of a Japanese action game’s control scheme and Japanese storytelling tradition. Functionally, Dark Souls is a game about resource management and strategic thinking with a game loop honestly not too different from blackjack: In that all actions are calculated risks and the player is deliberately forced to take risks — spending stamina through their actions and applied balancing of character traits and equipped items. Unlike many RPGs, experience-points used to level up are not a protected stat, and the progress and hard work building experience can be lost with a poor decision. This forces players who are linearly progressing their level and stats to always be extremely aware of their environment and the objects within it as the cost of failure grows exponentially with success until a safe-place is found — the bonfire, where the investment can be properly protected. While Armored Core depends strongly on positioning, Dark Souls prizes movement in time, rather than space and in selecting fights to minimize the complexity of exchanges so players can gradually chip away at opponents in protracted battle — forcing the player to internalize that they shouldn’t rush in without thinking and they shouldn’t bite off more than they can chew. Unusually, guarding is far more important than attacking, giving a very definite rhythm to the exchanges between players and opponents which ground them in the moment. One slipup, one poorly timed guard or roll can result in failure that can be supremely hard to recover from. The world of Dark Souls represents fables of human struggle and individual miseries through the lens of direct metaphors and analogies: The pitfalls of personal corruption, unending grief, and the never-ending torment of knowing that which is will not always be. Awareness, to a near meditative focus is essential for victory, and the length and patience of this focus is essential: There are no free meals here, and the game is not here to give you a power-fantasy. You will work for everything you have, you will struggle and it will be misery, but you are here for the long haul and who you leave as may not be the same person you entered this world as. It is an understatement to say that with the gameplay itself being so similar to the mental grounding strategies of those undergoing cognitive behavioural therapy and the conceptualization of the world itself it is no wonder that many users all over social media have stated that “Dark Souls helped me defeat depression”, or “Dark Souls saved my life”. In turn, that Dark Souls itself is all about grief and acceptance of the finality of life is frankly something you can probably find in a thousand tongues by far more capable writers in essays, video-essays and endless intoxicated rants on teamspeak and discord servers throughout the bowels of the internet. WHAT WOULD ARMORED SOULS NEED TO BE? It would need to be something which takes the strengths of both which compliment each other well and have them amplify one another to become something entirely different. Like how walking is made of a left foot step and a right foot step, the act of moving the entire body is the composite of both actions combined with balance. Its easy to say that the sheer differences could never compliment one another, that any choice which satisfies one audience dissatisfies the other audience. Instead, should it not create its own audience with its game loop, and play? HOW DO WE DEFINE A GAMELOOP? “Game loop” is a term which is often thrown around by not only players but also designers who don’t necessarily have a consistent or even clear working definition. To ensure we’re all on the same page and to make sure I’m not wasting your time, I’m going to have to explain exactly in precise terms what I mean. “Game loop” is how we are defining metrics or terms of success and failure for a given session in both measured and non-measured systems, and how we incentivise players to steps via teaching, performed using punishment and reward systems. To clarify, it is not the controls, it is not the genre, it is not the camera system, it is not the visual design: It is purely the materialistic product of the game’s concept of “play” once most of the interaction systems have been stripped away. As strange as it may sound, most videogames can be translated directly into board-games. It is very difficult, to be sure, but they all depend on logical rules which are analogous to a board-game since even when a game is running at 60 frames a second that is still 60 “turns” a second to the computer. These turns can be incredibly complex, but the core metrics of success must be comprehensible to players and thus the actual game-design part of a game actually tends to be quite simple. If it helps, try to think of “the game loop” as being the part of a game performed by a dungeon master who manages a session, or a poker dealer who serves to enforce the social contract of turn and exchange. Like board-games, or card-games or sports the strategies which can be used to maximize success are a set of systems a player builds in their mind over time — a strategic model of likelihoods, of rules and of cause and effect which permit the player. It has nothing to do with physical inputs or timings, which are properties of control-design and come with control-fluency and eventually the awe-inspiring automaticity seen in the high-level play speed runners or replicated with tool-assisted performances. The game loop is abstract goals, rather than immediate goals. It is the motivating reason a player selects a position, or distance or orientation or other value difference between themselves and another system. But why would anybody want to do these things? HOW DO WE DEFINE PLAY? Let’s actually construct a working definition of “play” too in order to separate it from the concept of “game” for our purpose while we’re at it. At best, you learn a useful tool you can use to evaluate the games you like or the games you like and at worst, you find something new and pretentious to hate sociologists for. Though not always material, it is often quantifiable via score (attempting to deliberately maximize or minimize values: score-attack and protection/resource management) or time (time-attack, and speed-running). Often by even providing these metrics to players, they will construct or invent their own goals even when no system is present to provide secondary reward (this is where speedrunning comes from, when a game is exhausted of all possible content or challenge in the traditional sense). This is “self-guided gameloop” — and is an essential part of many games where then the relation of systems with metrics is defined in the mind of the player. This is commonly characterized by the session either having no clear ending (beyond catastrophic failure, such as sandbox games) or the “session” being treated as an optimization strategy against other past sessions (be those from the past such as speed running, the future such as optimization strategies, or in serial such as MMOs or parallel play such as general multiplayer games). In his book, “Man, Play & Games”, French sociologist Roger Calliouis defines “games” as fitting into four categories: Agon (competitive), Aled (chance), mimicry (roleplay) and Ilinx (vertigo or pure thrill). He also did not split structured and unstructured play into a binary state, and instead had a spectrum of all four groups with paidid (unstructured play, such as minecraft or open-ended games) and ludus (highly structured play in formalized games). GoufyGoggs has a phenomenal 11 minute video essay on the structure where she goes into a formalized example, breaking down and explaining why games like Katamari Damashi exist (The Spectrum of Play: Katamari Damacy Analysis, 2021) The importance here is that while highly formalized play exists, highly unformalized play is equally valid and to this end unformalized play is where player preference takes charge over the agon-dominated “meta-play” or “optimized play”. Adam Millard theorizes that while problem-solving is inherently very fun due to the learning/reward loop, a solvable problem in itself is boring because it may not actually be play since there is a “perfect answer” which then nullifies or invalidates all other answers which removes incentive for player-expression and experimentation. Essentially, a lack of fair insolvability turns play into basically “work”, even when the gameplay itself is high in Ilinx-rooted thrill or mimicry-rooted desire to progress a story or see an ending. Similarly, being unable to meaningful experience or perceive any kind of growth or change also turns a play into work. In persons with low-frustration-tolerance particularly, the given “problem” needs to be resolved quickly in play, to keep the type of play novel and interesting. It is an investment of reward-experience vs investment-availability — and people can either lack or have an excess of investment-availability for a wide range of reasons not limited to trauma, a pre-existing external unresolved frustration capacity depletion (social as social stratification or pain management problems). Numerous biological factors such as ADHD, autism and other conditions may also exist beyond the control of players which they should not be punished in their play for by the lack of foresight or basic understanding on the part of game-designers. Sociologist Leonard Berkowitz has suggested that those with adequate justifications have a much MUCH higher fustration-tolerance — and so much of game design as a whole is the formulation and re-enforcement of good justifications for player-action in countable, measurable or emotional rewards. Returning to Adam Millard’s concept of problem-solving, in this way, a good “meta” is balanced by being an inherently unsolvable problem, and that “solutions” are which achieve an equilibrium of strategies are considered “broken” (that is, meta-breaking) for this reason. To this end, many titles which depend on unsolvable problems to define their game loop often contain elements of systemically linked difficulty: that expanding or improving one resource has “cost” to another — meaning your success becomes an antagonistic force in some way which counter-balances the difficulty of the game into a slope (commonly referred to as a difficulty curve). Berkowitz Justification factor can so often in play be mastery, or revealing new content, or seeing “what happens next” or simply because the control-limitation design feels satisfying to interact with.  SO WHAT NEXT? So in Chapter 2, I'll be comparing the two games core game loops, tension/resolution loops, control limitation choices, conceptualization purpose and narrative style while drawing comparisons this time between both to see what commonalities and differences each actually has. Here, we should find where the two align or have compatible ideas, or cursed and entirely incompatible ideas . Even better, we should be able to with this technique, define and "lead the shot" as we mentioned earlier could be by spotting the nucleus of what defines both so we can then extrude a third new option. That third option should in practice be a new original thing. Whether that thing is good or not, we can probably take an educated guess at. Again, this is all very free-form and I'd love to discuss any points I've made in this first chapter while writing the second chapter. It might be a few weeks while I conduct research and do writeups and interview other people to verify my findings and go through a few drafts, but I think there's promise here if only because it means we get to learn where these mindsets come from and why people desire things like this in the first place. Expo70 fucked around with this message at 12:55 on Jul 26, 2022 |
|
#
?
Jul 26, 2022 12:01
|
|
|
Captain Foo posted:Posting in this thread for cool Expo70 posts She tried ritalin for the first time recently, can you tell.
|
|
#
?
Jul 26, 2022 12:48
|
|
|
I’m excited to read the rest of this essay
|
|
#
?
Jul 26, 2022 13:15
|
|
|
Captain Foo posted:I’m excited to read the rest of this essay Thank-you. I'm somewhat nervous about sharing this kind of writing in a public forum as its not something I've ever done before in a space where I have a direct means of communication with an audience. I've written books, but that's primarily dealing with publishers who then act as a filter for the audience which is an entirely different experience, though that was maybe ten to fifteen years ago now and it was entirely in the space of fiction, rather than non-fiction. I know this is *just* a forum post, but I need to kinda find my sea-legs with these kinds of topics. I'm passionate, I know but I'm deeply intimidated by online spaces which are male dominated. Its something I'll be chugging away at for the next few weeks, maybe next month or two while I do interviews and further evaluations and research. Chapter 2 is going to be breaking the two games down in some fixed terms I'll define. Chapter 3 is going to be a synthesis, to imagine what Armored Souls might play like, or look like using the same categorical systems I used to break the two games down to compare them against one another. I'm currently working through Chris Crawford's library of books and some more Raph Koster writing on game design, and I'm studying the concept of umwelt in conceptual perceptive models so expect this to be invoked in some capacity. Unrelated, but do give "Ways of Being" by James Bridle a go if you get the chance. It really will change the way you look at minds and thinking as a whole, by showing you that cognition exists outside of humans, and that our definitions of thinking are not only almost entirely anthrocentric but that there are cognitive traps we're prone to that other organisms aren't, and that the systems we use to measure cognitive function themselves are enormously biased by the tester's perception of the subject. I think if this is properly applied, something akin to "what free jazz did for music" could be done for game design -- where the core elements of a gameloop are themselves actually data-driven, invoking different elements of common language objects like certain kinds of camera or lockon or movement, or attack/defence/resource management interfaces and strategies, as well as the actual game's measurements of success and failure within its defined gameloop and scoring metrics. Koster describes "all games as being made up of other games, which influence eachother" -- eg, a fighting game is rock paper scissors with distance, and two hands simultaneously which influence a neutral, positive or negative position which is in turn based on frame-data. I think these kinds of ideas in and of themselves of games containing games can be systematized and explored as an interface for problems, which feels like the next step in the game-design of something like Armored Core. You stop drawing boundries between brawlers, fighters, shmups, FPS, 3rd person shooters, racing and fighter jet games and you just start feeling out the design affordances and commonalities and you blend them together into a single heuristic of game design. That said, this is more "the next step of AC", not "Armored Souls", which is entirely its own animal. I firmly believe FROM's "entire bread and butter" is advancing toward this concept but I feel they lost their way some time in 2011/2012 due to the Bandai/Namco acquisition -- based on an interview they gave with an Agetec in Playstation Magazine in 2001, where when asked about their customization heavy game design decisions they said their goal was to "make the player feel like a game-designer, by giving them the tools to solve problems they face in interesting ways. Its sort of like a "meta" style of game-design, partially letting the player build the kind of game they want to play and then turning that itself into problemsolving. They were really advancing toward that concept, and then they just kind of gave up on it. They stopped "leading the shot", and switched to pure pursuit of what they thought audiences wanted, rather than what audiences needed. I don't have the skills, but I'd love to know what FROM were doing when they wrote desktop software and to know who they kept onboard from those days, because I also think their interactions with clients on the desktop side and the tools they wrote in those days are embedded in the DNA of the company's second, third and fourth generations, with Dark Souls being part of the fifth onwards. I view Namco Bandai's acquisition as sort of a near death of the company, and I feel like they had to show to their new publisher "no, we have to do things our own way", but I don't know enough about FROM's newer work -- nor have I read their newer artbooks or their interviews so I can't really speak as any kind of authority on this matter. Expo70 fucked around with this message at 13:42 on Jul 26, 2022 |
|
#
?
Jul 26, 2022 13:29
|
|
|
yeah, sure, I'll bookmark this thread
|
|
#
?
Jul 26, 2022 16:30
|
|
|
Expo70 posted:This aim-assist was then deliberately limited as a manipulatable stat in the game, and compensated with a deliberately finite turn-speed (“tank controls”, giving rise to high speed turning-fights not unlike those of dogfighting aircraft where positioning was extremely important even in open-space), I do feel like I want to add a bit extra here, not intending to refute or anything so much as just to expound, with a little bit more emphasis on the pre-ps3 stylings as a complementary add-on. In AC, taken as a whole, while positioning is super important, I feel like the super operative thing is just general movement, with an especially big spotlight on transversal velocity, what you do with it, and how you work against it. In AC, even with the heaviest and slowest of builds, you are constantly moving, being still is a death sentence. Managing and pulsing boosts, letting momentum carry you from a quick hop so you can recover energy while still moving along at a decent clip, and making sure that you can return fire without bogging yourself down or burning too much energy, so much of everything is focused around avoiding the death that comes from losing mobility. To highlight this, a quick look at the way the aforementioned aim assist is in order. As a general rule, there are two states to it, 'lock' and 'double lock', with the first being given as soon as an enemy enters your reticule, and has you aiming exactly at where an enemy is at the time, regardless of how they're moving, and the second being a state that you get after keeping them locked for a few seconds, at which point you start actively leading your shots and aiming at where they will be vs where they are. Therefore, with double lock being as powerful as it is, movement strategy has to often work around it, and given a high enough skill on the other end, you cannot always expect to escape the reticule, and so have to operate on the intention that you will be double locked for a significant amount of time. But with the movement abilities available, sometimes that target leading can be a curse, and with juking back and forth, making use of quick altitude changes to subtly veer shots into the air or ground, or just using landing from a jump to immediately kill forward momentum, you can force a whiff on someone who otherwise might have you dead to rights. Of course going from there you start getting into counter-counter strats of deliberately un-and-re-locking to lose a double, and shoot directly at someone who, in trying to avoid a leading shot, leaves them still just long enough to take a hit from a direct one, and so on and so forth, and all of this is happening while you yourself are still under fire and having to evade yourself. The best way I can really describe it is kinda like having several games of rock paper scissors going at once, where the decisions you have to make on firing and moving have to be made significantly in advance rather than purely on reaction. Which, speaking as someone who really loves both AC and Souls, gives each a very unique and different feel.
|
|
#
?
Jul 27, 2022 10:09
|
|
|
I want a cooking game that is more than Cooking Mama. And not some cooperative stressful thing either. There are some rougelike games on Steam with cooking as a focus or major part of the gameplay loop. That's ok but it's like with Moonlighter's central theme of running an item shop taking a backseat for "kill stuff and beat the dungeon". Rougelike? Procedurally generated kitchens with limited ingredients and tools, but you have to make something to appease the increasingly harsh judges at the end of the kitchen. Add classes and skills for different kinds of chefs. Along the way you can engage with customers for side MOBA or competitive cooking? I want to play Iron Chef, but I don't know how. Heran Bago fucked around with this message at 12:11 on Jul 27, 2022 |
|
#
?
Jul 27, 2022 10:57
|
|
|
Heran Bago posted:I want a cooking game that is more than Cooking Mama. And not some cooperative stressful thing either. There are some rougelike games on Steam with cooking as a focus or major part of the gameplay loop. That's ok but it's like with Moonlighter's central theme of running an item shop taking a backseat for "kill stuff and beat the dungeon". This legitimately sounds really fun. I'm curious to know what you think of va-11 hall-a. ACES CURE PLANES posted:I do feel like I want to add a bit extra here, not intending to refute or anything so much as just to expound, with a little bit more emphasis on the pre-ps3 stylings as a complementary add-on. Absolutely true ACES CURE PLANES posted:To highlight this, a quick look at the way the aforementioned aim assist is in order. As a general rule, there are two states to it, 'lock' and 'double lock', with the first being given as soon as an enemy enters your reticule, and has you aiming exactly at where an enemy is at the time, regardless of how they're moving, and the second being a state that you get after keeping them locked for a few seconds, at which point you start actively leading your shots and aiming at where they will be vs where they are. ACES CURE PLANES posted:Therefore, with double lock being as powerful as it is, movement strategy has to often work around it, and given a high enough skill on the other end, you cannot always expect to escape the reticule, and so have to operate on the intention that you will be double locked for a significant amount of time. But with the movement abilities available, sometimes that target leading can be a curse, and with juking back and forth, making use of quick altitude changes to subtly veer shots into the air or ground, or just using landing from a jump to immediately kill forward momentum, you can force a whiff on someone who otherwise might have you dead to rights. ACES CURE PLANES posted:Of course going from there you start getting into counter-counter strats of deliberately un-and-re-locking to lose a double, and shoot directly at someone who, in trying to avoid a leading shot, leaves them still just long enough to take a hit from a direct one, and so on and so forth, and all of this is happening while you yourself are still under fire and having to evade yourself. ACES CURE PLANES posted:The best way I can really describe it is kinda like having several games of rock paper scissors going at once, where the decisions you have to make on firing and moving have to be made significantly in advance rather than purely on reaction. Which, speaking as someone who really loves both AC and Souls, gives each a very unique and different feel. In AI, these peaks and vallies are usually called local maxima, and local minima, because machines tend to get stuck in the dunes because they perform minor gains based on their current position on that big sand-dune graph of imaginary future positions using what's called "successive approximation". Humans on the other hand, we tend to evaluate positions by culling bad positions based on trends and then looking for when those trends happen so we don't occupy bad spaces. In a much simpler (though more stressful) game like Touhou, the same is happening, only the negative spaces you don't want to occupy can be moving, overlapping and treated as series of objects. With games like Touhou, the game "clicks" when you learn to think of ideal space as the gaps between the bullets, because it will make you stop trying to comprehend everything on screen at once which is overwhelming. Eventually, you learn to step up through that process successively and then through your own mental optimization, you can then start predicting where safe negative spaces and unsafe positive spaces occupied by bullets will be. Dark Souls has this king of thing in spades too, tracking the individual movement of opponents very very closely based on those memorized negative spaces. In Armored Core, you're generally going to be exposing yourself to negative space to cross it like a void using velocity, timing and planning so unless you keep constantly moving you're going to get shot and punished quite hard. AC is generally far far more forgiving, but its also asking you to juggle far more of these individual "games within games" like our rock-paper-scissors -- which are kind of the foundational elements of any balancing system in any game. What makes Armored Core so interesting especially is the synergy between those systems, because you can play a disadvantage into an advantage by capitalizing on knowledge of an opponent to run the numbers in your head and make important strategic decisions. AC rewards long-form problemsolving and memorization enormously and is more speculative. Dark Souls tends to reward fixed problem-solving and as a result is more meditative. If I'm wrong or you disagree, please jump in at any time. Outside opinions are kind of the point here, and without them I'm basically just a windbag regurgitating mixtures of my observations in a vacuum which is just totally useless to everybody here. Also, I appreciate your username, buddy. Expo70 fucked around with this message at 11:31 on Jul 27, 2022 |
|
#
?
Jul 27, 2022 11:28
|
|
|
Huh, sometimes I think about this very topic. AC and DS both occupy a special place for me where I like the games a lot even if I'm not much good at them. Anyway, It's struck me that there are actually quite a few parallels, at least superficially, between armored core & dark souls. Although bear in mind that I haven't actually played AC4 and onwards so I'm used to the slower pace of PSX/PS2-gen games. Both series seem to share: -High level of player customisation - near complete change of playstyle based on gear, intimidatingly esoteric stats screens -Combat effectiveness relying a lot on tactics and positioning rather than sheer twitch reflex or button-mashing -Emphasis on management of regenerating stamina in order to move quickly and use weapons -Management of limited health & ammo resources between set refill points rather than reliance on drops/pickups -Depressing post-apocalyptic world with undead & lords/corporations & mercs endlessly perpetuating the same cycle of death/rebirth/inevitable decline and decay -Player-class enemies who drop in and try to gank you with no or minimal warning, when you thought you were going to be having a fun time beating up mooks -Indirect storytelling, although AC's a bit more explicit about what's going on with its emails -A really good sense of weightiness to the player character and animations (seriously this, it's a subtle thing but the sense of weight and momentum makes movement and combat in both games feel great) At any rate, I don't think you'd actually have to change a whole lot up about AC to move it much closer to being a soulslike. As the post above, there are some deep differences in the combat but I don't think that makes the concept totally unworkable. In my head at least it only really comes down to a few things: -It surely wouldn't be too hard to add an improved melee comat system to give the player a better option if they run out of ammo between bonfire-equivalents. -AC lacks, I think, any dodge move that gives invulnerability frames to let you dodge through big sweepy attacks, but the increased tankiness of the average AC vs DS player character and ability to easily jump & fly could be used to balance it out if the close combat is carefully designed. Maybe switch the player from the traditional AC lock-on system to a souls-style one when you have a melee weapon armed? -The really hard one is whether/how to limit player movement so you can have a really diverse, sprawling interconnected map with that metroidvania-esque progression of the souls series. The ability to fly and cover large distances from the get-go is a hallmark of AC, but it's the inability to do so that enables souls' wonderfully interconnected level design. I'm not sure how you'd best deal with this - make the boosters consume way more energy to severaly limit flight range, and to compensate reduce consumption of energy weapons? Just have a really massive scale of level design including giant cliffs and bottomless death-pits that are simply too big to fly over? Plot contrivance to have a lot of gigantic enclosed areas (like how most metroid games take place underground)? Some variation of the thing they did in AC5 (I think) where there's an arbitrary ceiling on how high you can fly relative to your takeoff altitude? And of course all of the emails you receive would need to sign off with the sender laughing in an awkward creepy way. Crazy Achmed fucked around with this message at 09:02 on Aug 4, 2022 |
|
#
?
Aug 4, 2022 08:54
|
|
|
Sorry for the lack of updates and keeping you guys in the dark for a whole month. Dealing with a shoulder injury at the moment so I'm too drunk on the painkillers to write properly for more than a few minutes -- and proof-reading or doing deep-rive longform essay/thinking work is just out of the question when I'm in this state because it'll come out jibberish. I mean poo poo I can barely code like this and I had to stop because I kept implementing things badly. First pass of surgery is coming up next week and then more down the line. Again, sorry for the lack of updates. Thank-you for your patience. Expo70 fucked around with this message at 07:35 on Sep 13, 2022 |
|
#
?
Aug 26, 2022 16:50
|
|
|
Feel better soon!!
|
|
#
?
Aug 26, 2022 19:58
|
|
|
Update: Surgery went very well. Need to finish a course of treatment, and then I can resume writing. Again, sorry to have kept you all waiting.
|
|
#
?
Sep 13, 2022 07:36
|
|
|
Heal up! Don’t stress about us
|
|
#
?
Sep 15, 2022 03:44
|
|
|
Well, I'll be damned. Looks like I'll have to turn this into a series of predictions, and we'll see if they come true. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kKO1s-CUZvY How it feels: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D-n9siHeCQg Expo70 fucked around with this message at 00:28 on Dec 12, 2022 |
|
#
?
Dec 10, 2022 01:35
|
|
|
I knew the announcer would get you back in here
|
|
#
?
Dec 10, 2022 04:38
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 26, 2024 08:21 |
|
|
Captain Foo posted:I knew the announcer would get you back in here Here's some other writing to tide you over for the time being: https://anosakaisfinetoo.tumblr.com/EssaysOnMecha Depression a poo poo. Edit: Actually gently caress it, I'll try to do the cursed game design problem and figure out how to have a game which is both methodical (souls-like) and fast/3D (AC-like). I think we could hypothetically discover a third gametype. Also, this is neat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tD751DPMcI4 Expo70 fucked around with this message at 06:32 on Dec 11, 2022 |
|
#
?
Dec 10, 2022 18:37
|
|