Oblivion maybe? You can beat all the gates without killing enemies, by just running all the way up to the crystal or whatever was in there, which results in the gate shutting down and you back in the overworld.
But that's a bad example, because doing that will make you not level... which actually makes you more powerful. Leveling up quickly in Oblivion is just a recipe for pain unless you go very carefully about it :P.
Anyway, after being playing Etrian Odyssey for a while, I have one thing to bitch about - poorly defined quest objectives.
I wouldn't mind if there's a dozen hard-as-fuck bosses in the way. I wouldn't mind if the place is a puzzle labyrinth that would make Minos grow a boner. I can even survive the million random encounters. Not a single one of those is a bother when compared to the fact that apparently it's fallen out of style to give the mercenaries you're paying a detailed account of what in the name of the Abyss you're looking for, or give either cryptic or extremely unhelpful directions. "Somewhere in the west"? Golly gee, good thing the Western area of the worldmap is only like a thousand miles across!
This is particularly compunded in EO by the fact you don't actually see things until you bodily enter their square, so you can't even go around keeping an eye out and hoping to stumble on quest objectives - gotta search square by square - which is what made me think about this. But indeed thinking on it, a lot of games do the whole "force quest text to fit in two lines of written or spoken text, therefore leaving the player out in the dark and have to simply wander hoping to trip on the quest flag", and it's annoying. I don't mind hard quests - but I want to know where I'm supposed to start looking, at least! Or what I'm supposed to do! Or something! Come on, throw me a bone here!
Has any game ever been able to get population scale right without needing to resort to filling gaps with your imagination?
The problem is that games are really good at making cities feel huge and decently populated, but if you actually count the people you're looking at like one street of one small neighborhood.
Which games have done it best? How many people are in FF12's Rabanastre? Are there enough people in Morrowind or Oblivion to sustain a normal population?
I'm often impressed with the number of people walking around in GTA4, but it's obviously nowhere near how many people would really be walking around in a New York-based city.
Has any game ever been able to get population scale right without needing to resort to filling gaps with your imagination?
The problem is that games are really good at making cities feel huge and decently populated, but if you actually count the people you're looking at like one street of one small neighborhood.
Which games have done it best? How many people are in FF12's Rabanastre? Are there enough people in Morrowind or Oblivion to sustain a normal population?
I would say FF12 did it right, I haven't counted but there are plenty of people around and not all of them want to talk to you (like real life!). Did they say how big of a region the game covers though? I'd say it's about the size of a small U.S. state if you're going realistic but I'm thinking they intended the game to cover a small country sized chunk of land.
Has any game ever been able to get population scale right without needing to resort to filling gaps with your imagination?
The problem is that games are really good at making cities feel huge and decently populated, but if you actually count the people you're looking at like one street of one small neighborhood.
Which games have done it best? How many people are in FF12's Rabanastre? Are there enough people in Morrowind or Oblivion to sustain a normal population?
The World Ends With You does a good job of actually making the city seem populated.
Whilst talking about realistic populations, how about the ability to enter peoples homes at will and rifle their stuff? Every once in a while, there will be a comment from a guy, or in the Elder Scroll games I think you could get in trouble, but mostly you could just walk in and talk to people and open their chests with no ramifications. that always bugged me... but no so much that I wouldn't take any family heirlooms I could find.
I agree with a lot of this, though I think the game does the right thing in leaving Midgar, there was no shortage of room to expand on the setting itself. Obviously, the game follows the story it aims to tell, but there's no shortage of interesting questions. This is, in part, because FFVII actually succeeds, if barely, in the area of "more than one city per country". The whole of the eastern continent is probably one country, albeit a sparely populated one. Kalm is almost certainly part of the same country, historically, as the slums of Midgar (and Midgar itself, by extension). The national delimination of FFVII's world is probably not as relevant seeing how all the governments collapsed and their responsibilities taken over by the Shinra Corporation.
It does leave questions, nonetheless. We know what happened to Midgar, more or less. What about Junon, which was home to the Shinra's fleet and aviation service, not to mention the Junon Army and probably the best armed city in the world (until the moving of the Sister Ray). What happened after Rufus' death in the chaos after Meteor? What happened when that huge, now-headless military decided to take over? Was the war with Wutai to the west what caused Junon to be converted into a fortress so tough not even WEAPON could assault it successfully?
It is, of course, entirely unavoidable. It might even be the side effect of a setting that interests people (I wouldn't ask these same questions about Spira--the mystical knock-off of Polynesia where people communicate through spheres and do so much dancing in their daily lives it's a little suspicious).
Given that the option was to...remain in a town with, what, 12 other people? Maybe 11? I'd get the fuck out of dodge too.
Yeah, I definitely agree that the original game needed to leave Midgar, because the story was about the entire Planet, and it directly admitted that Shinra was the only important political organization in the modern era (shown when you talk to Mayor Domino).
I'm just saying that, as far as side-games and expansions went, they could have done much worse than having some game take place entirely in Midgar, exploring that city and the people who live in it. It was probably the best-done thing about the original game, and probably one of the most interesting settings from any RPG I've ever played.
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As far as the "realistic population" thing goes, the only game I've found that even approaches it is from the Assassin's Creed series, where you have literally thousands of NPCs milling the streets of the extremely large (but still scaled-down from reality) cities. It'll be at least a console gen before we see that kind of thing in RPGs, though, if we ever do. I'd like to see it personally but it would probably be more trouble than it was worth (you'd have to highlight the 'real' NPCs somehow, and that would seem weird - not to mention those cities probably take years to develop).
Has any game ever been able to get population scale right without needing to resort to filling gaps with your imagination?
The problem is that games are really good at making cities feel huge and decently populated, but if you actually count the people you're looking at like one street of one small neighborhood.
Which games have done it best? How many people are in FF12's Rabanastre? Are there enough people in Morrowind or Oblivion to sustain a normal population?
The World Ends With You does a good job of actually making the city seem populated.
Yeah, TWEWY is the only game I can think of that really has large crowds of people.
I'm often impressed with the number of people walking around in GTA4, but it's obviously nowhere near how many people would really be walking around in a New York-based city.
i was surprised at how noisy the streets in that game were in comparison to san andreas, which had the occasional tootling car going along in hollywood. but i'd have loved some proper crowds in times square, yeah.
I guess there's the Hitman games, but they don't really try to simulate a whole city.
yeah, the crowds of NPC's in new orleans was very different from NPC's in the rest of the game. to my recollection they were a lot easier to kill and weren't as intelligent, like they didn't panic as readily or sprint to tell the authorities that a crazy man has a gun.
they made a great impression though. murdering people in a back alley inches from the biggest crowd of people i'd every seen in a game was exhilerating
I agree with a lot of this, though I think the game does the right thing in leaving Midgar, there was no shortage of room to expand on the setting itself. Obviously, the game follows the story it aims to tell, but there's no shortage of interesting questions. This is, in part, because FFVII actually succeeds, if barely, in the area of "more than one city per country". The whole of the eastern continent is probably one country, albeit a sparely populated one. Kalm is almost certainly part of the same country, historically, as the slums of Midgar (and Midgar itself, by extension). The national delimination of FFVII's world is probably not as relevant seeing how all the governments collapsed and their responsibilities taken over by the Shinra Corporation.
It does leave questions, nonetheless. We know what happened to Midgar, more or less. What about Junon, which was home to the Shinra's fleet and aviation service, not to mention the Junon Army and probably the best armed city in the world (until the moving of the Sister Ray). What happened after Rufus' death in the chaos after Meteor? What happened when that huge, now-headless military decided to take over? Was the war with Wutai to the west what caused Junon to be converted into a fortress so tough not even WEAPON could assault it successfully?
It is, of course, entirely unavoidable. It might even be the side effect of a setting that interests people (I wouldn't ask these same questions about Spira--the mystical knock-off of Polynesia where people communicate through spheres and do so much dancing in their daily lives it's a little suspicious).
Given that the option was to...remain in a town with, what, 12 other people? Maybe 11? I'd get the fuck out of dodge too.
Yeah, I definitely agree that the original game needed to leave Midgar, because the story was about the entire Planet, and it directly admitted that Shinra was the only important political organization in the modern era (shown when you talk to Mayor Domino).
I'm just saying that, as far as side-games and expansions went, they could have done much worse than having some game take place entirely in Midgar, exploring that city and the people who live in it. It was probably the best-done thing about the original game, and probably one of the most interesting settings from any RPG I've ever played.
Regrettably, that's not the path they decided to take (instead, they went with some Chekov's Gun about a huge reserve army Shinra apparently just stored underneath their building), and Junon is never mentioned.
On the issue of Nibelheim, having a really low population could actually be part of the reason young men eventually leave the town (apparently usually for Midgar), while a similar number from other cities arrive to take their places.
Hitman: Blood Money did great work with the "faux-crowd"--even if their models did shift radically when you moved away from them.
Synthesis on
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PunkBoyThank you! And thank you again!Registered Userregular
edited August 2010
I thought Shenmue 2 had some pretty decent crowds. Granted, you were confined to several areas in Hong Kong and Kowloon, but I recall the streets being decently busy.
PunkBoy on
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Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
Whilst talking about realistic populations, how about the ability to enter peoples homes at will and rifle their stuff? Every once in a while, there will be a comment from a guy, or in the Elder Scroll games I think you could get in trouble, but mostly you could just walk in and talk to people and open their chests with no ramifications. that always bugged me... but no so much that I wouldn't take any family heirlooms I could find.
Yeah, that's pretty much a relic of the days when storage was a premium. If you had just treasures and no people or buildings around, every world would've seemed empty. If you just had people and buildings and no treasures, then there would've been no real incentive to explore. But since games didn't always have the loads of space they have now, you couldn't always keep looting areas separate from "people" areas and thus you had to combine the two. Nowadays, it's just tradition.
Obviously, being able to get in trouble for swiping things as in the Elder Scrolls games makes a lot more sense, but then that brings up other issues like idiot developers slapping a "stolen" tag on common, everyday items (so you can't sell them normally) or houses in general basically having nothing of value in them. It really doesn't do any good to have a peudo-city with a bunch of houses if you never have any reason to enter them, whether it's to talk to the owners or just swipe things. Also, hideously stupid karma systems which punish you for stealing when nobody anywhere ever will ever see you steal that fork off the table. Although that's really only Fallout 3, but it was pretty hugely stupid move.
Although I suppose creating a "suspicion" system where people tend to notice the mysterious new guy wandering around right about the time things go missing would mean actual effort rather than cheap and easy copout dev choices like preventing you from selling perfectly unidentifiable (but stolen) items.
Hell, Deus Ex had a better take on stealing. Unless you set off an alarm, nobody cares and you don't get punished for it. You are trying to save the world after all, so why should Denton feel bad about swiping some cash from a hitman or taking a bunch of mods hidden in a secret base?
One problem I often find in co-op multiplayer is the issue of item pickups. You're playing through a game with a buddy, or just a random stranger online, and they decide to advance in front of you. Maybe you like playing conservatively, or just enjoy sniping enemies at long range. What inevitably happens? Well, your friend gets to grab all the ammo and health pickups. Consequently, you can end up at a severe disadvantage. This is an even bigger problem in games where the levels in co-op mode don't account for the increased player count, leading to item starvation. You'll pick up an ammo item off the floor and then get killed by some enemy. Sure, you'll just respawn right near your teammate after a few seconds or once they get out of combat, but now you've lost that ammo forever.
But back to my point... it's certainly realistic in having individual pickups for each player, but this breeds a sort of antagonism after a while as everyone fights to get to the ammo or health item before it's snatched away. In a lot of cases, a player who's only used up a small amount of ammo for their gun will gobble up an ammo pickup while their teammate is close to running empty and needed it more. Sure, you can work closely together to communicate the various states of health and ammo quantity and do some sort of need before greed system, but we're talking about multiplayer shooters here, not World of Warcraft. That sorta thing is way too slow and time consuming for most people. It's alright if you're playing splitscreen with a buddy sitting right next to you, but hard to pull off with strangers online.
Having pondered this problem for a while now, I propose a system where item pickups are instantly applied to all players in a co-op game. Pick up a medikit, and every player you're with gets the benefits. This would completely eliminate the mentality of racing ahead for the next pickup and punishing players who prefer to play more cautiously. Of course, this method is completely unrealistic since the item is magically distributed to everyone, but I think that's a small price to pay for better gameplay.
One problem I often find in co-op multiplayer is the issue of item pickups. You're playing through a game with a buddy, or just a random stranger online, and they decide to advance in front of you. Maybe you like playing conservatively, or just enjoy sniping enemies at long range. What inevitably happens? Well, your friend gets to grab all the ammo and health pickups. Consequently, you can end up at a severe disadvantage. This is an even bigger problem in games where the levels in co-op mode don't account for the increased player count, leading to item starvation. You'll pick up an ammo item off the floor and then get killed by some enemy. Sure, you'll just respawn right near your teammate after a few seconds or once they get out of combat, but now you've lost that ammo forever.
But back to my point... it's certainly realistic in having individual pickups for each player, but this breeds a sort of antagonism after a while as everyone fights to get to the ammo or health item before it's snatched away. In a lot of cases, a player who's only used up a small amount of ammo for their gun will gobble up an ammo pickup while their teammate is close to running empty and needed it more. Sure, you can work closely together to communicate the various states of health and ammo quantity and do some sort of need before greed system, but we're talking about multiplayer shooters here, not World of Warcraft. That sorta thing is way too slow and time consuming for most people. It's alright if you're playing splitscreen with a buddy sitting right next to you, but hard to pull off with strangers online.
Having pondered this problem for a while now, I propose a system where item pickups are instantly applied to all players in a co-op game. Pick up a medikit, and every player you're with gets the benefits. This would completely eliminate the mentality of racing ahead for the next pickup and punishing players who prefer to play more cautiously. Of course, this method is completely unrealistic since the item is magically distributed to everyone, but I think that's a small price to pay for better gameplay.
I've seen a few ways people have tried to rememdy this. Each player will have their own powerups spawned (I like this one), the items respawn after a while, the way you described where it's first come, and where if someone is close when you grab something, they get some of the effect.
One problem I often find in co-op multiplayer is the issue of item pickups. You're playing through a game with a buddy, or just a random stranger online, and they decide to advance in front of you. Maybe you like playing conservatively, or just enjoy sniping enemies at long range. What inevitably happens? Well, your friend gets to grab all the ammo and health pickups. Consequently, you can end up at a severe disadvantage. This is an even bigger problem in games where the levels in co-op mode don't account for the increased player count, leading to item starvation. You'll pick up an ammo item off the floor and then get killed by some enemy. Sure, you'll just respawn right near your teammate after a few seconds or once they get out of combat, but now you've lost that ammo forever.
But back to my point... it's certainly realistic in having individual pickups for each player, but this breeds a sort of antagonism after a while as everyone fights to get to the ammo or health item before it's snatched away. In a lot of cases, a player who's only used up a small amount of ammo for their gun will gobble up an ammo pickup while their teammate is close to running empty and needed it more. Sure, you can work closely together to communicate the various states of health and ammo quantity and do some sort of need before greed system, but we're talking about multiplayer shooters here, not World of Warcraft. That sorta thing is way too slow and time consuming for most people. It's alright if you're playing splitscreen with a buddy sitting right next to you, but hard to pull off with strangers online.
Having pondered this problem for a while now, I propose a system where item pickups are instantly applied to all players in a co-op game. Pick up a medikit, and every player you're with gets the benefits. This would completely eliminate the mentality of racing ahead for the next pickup and punishing players who prefer to play more cautiously. Of course, this method is completely unrealistic since the item is magically distributed to everyone, but I think that's a small price to pay for better gameplay.
I've seen a few ways people have tried to rememdy this. Each player will have their own powerups spawned (I like this one), the items respawn after a while, the way you described where it's first come, and where if someone is close when you grab something, they get some of the effect.
My friend and I solved this in Resident Evil 5 by splitting weapon types. He took shotgun ammo and grenade launcher ammo, I took SMG and Sniper ammo. We both picked up the occasional pistol ammo, he grabbed frag grenades while I took incendiary and flash. Worked fairly well for us.
Another bitch for me is MEGA EXPLOSION SPACE BATTLE SOUND EFFECTS in the vacuum of space. Not just in games. Every time it's just... dumb. And following from that, people who say "turn off your sound HAHA I'm so funny and cutting wit!" That is not a good solution. If something is set in space, why not use the opportunity to really explore what it's like to be in space? How vast and empty and lifeless the space between the other bits of the universe actually is. Space is not underwater. Space is not an endless sky. It's different. Use the opportunity to crate something different. Someone could really do awesome things with a space sim that actually incorporated 3d battles and cockpit or bridge sound effects instead of ignoring the problem or even worse, making things sound like they are underwater.
Trying to sell a game whose high points are "vast and empty and lifeless" sounds pretty tough. Frankly speaking, just the idea of not being able to hear enemy pew-pews, just sitting there with my cockpit sounds, seems like a giant turn-off. Is the goal to go more submarine sim instead of Star Wars dogfighting?
Orogogus on
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L Ron HowardThe duckMinnesotaRegistered Userregular
One problem I often find in co-op multiplayer is the issue of item pickups. You're playing through a game with a buddy, or just a random stranger online, and they decide to advance in front of you. Maybe you like playing conservatively, or just enjoy sniping enemies at long range. What inevitably happens? Well, your friend gets to grab all the ammo and health pickups. Consequently, you can end up at a severe disadvantage. This is an even bigger problem in games where the levels in co-op mode don't account for the increased player count, leading to item starvation. You'll pick up an ammo item off the floor and then get killed by some enemy. Sure, you'll just respawn right near your teammate after a few seconds or once they get out of combat, but now you've lost that ammo forever.
I loved doing things like this in Diablo. My friends and I would sit there and try to out-ninja each other. We've gone so far as to rip a sound byte from a PS2 game where one of the guards would yell "NEENJA!!!!!" whenever he'd see the protagonist. It was a ninja game, coincidentally. Anyway. We'd sit there and steal items as quickly as possible, and still do to this day. Any co-op game we play at a LAN or whatever, when we can ninja things from each other, one of us invariably alt-tabs over and plays the sound.
Of course, once we'd go into town we'd trade the items back and forth; but the point is that games like that I think are fun, when they're minuscule things that can easily be traded. Ammo and health packs do suck though.
Rant: Every god damnn douchebag game site owner who makes you go through the fucking hassle of setting up a worthless one-shot account to his stupid fucking site that you otherwise don't give two shits about in order to get to download the one single goddamn thing on it that even justifies the site's mere existance deserves nothing less than to be slit open from chin to scrote, strung up, and have their last fucking moments of their pitiful fucking existance be watching their own internal organs streaming out like some sort of meaty knotted linin rope. I DO NOT WANT TO JOIN YOUR FUCKING SITE! I DO NOT WANT TO POST ON YOUR FUCKING SITE! I DO NOT WANT TO GET NOTICES FROM YOUR FUCKING SITE! WHAT I WANT IS TO DOWNLOAD ONE GOD DAMNED FUCKING FILE THAT YOUR FUCKING SITE IS HOSTING WITHOUT HAVING TO JUMP THROUGH THIRTY FUCKING HOOPS THAT SHIT UP MY MAILBOX!
I swear to god, if I ever met one of these dipshit forced-registration site owners in real life I don't think I could honestly control myself from beating them to a pulp. Everybody fucking hates this stupid-ass shit and yet every other fucker with two strings of HTML feels compelled to make their stupid shit exclusive for whatever stupid fucking reason. And no, doing it as a means of controlling downloads and bandwidth consumption does not count, because we still get the fucking files and jump through the fucking hoops and bitch the webmaster out every fucking step of the way.
Sorenson on
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-Loki-Don't pee in my mouth and tell me it's raining.Registered Userregular
edited August 2010
That's what hotmail is for. Just make a fake hotmail account and point any junk signups at that. It's still annoying but it doesn't fuck up your inbox.
The email thing isn't even that big the problem, it's the principle of the whole fucking thing and every time I get hit with it it just drives me into this big fuck-off bloody-murder Hannibal Lector rage. There's no fucking point to it, there's no rationalization of it, the shitbag's just trying to create his little private clique thing for the simple fact that he can.
One problem I often find in co-op multiplayer is the issue of item pickups. You're playing through a game with a buddy, or just a random stranger online, and they decide to advance in front of you. Maybe you like playing conservatively, or just enjoy sniping enemies at long range. What inevitably happens? Well, your friend gets to grab all the ammo and health pickups. Consequently, you can end up at a severe disadvantage. This is an even bigger problem in games where the levels in co-op mode don't account for the increased player count, leading to item starvation. You'll pick up an ammo item off the floor and then get killed by some enemy. Sure, you'll just respawn right near your teammate after a few seconds or once they get out of combat, but now you've lost that ammo forever.
I loved doing things like this in Diablo. My friends and I would sit there and try to out-ninja each other. We've gone so far as to rip a sound byte from a PS2 game where one of the guards would yell "NEENJA!!!!!" whenever he'd see the protagonist. It was a ninja game, coincidentally. Anyway. We'd sit there and steal items as quickly as possible, and still do to this day. Any co-op game we play at a LAN or whatever, when we can ninja things from each other, one of us invariably alt-tabs over and plays the sound.
Of course, once we'd go into town we'd trade the items back and forth; but the point is that games like that I think are fun, when they're minuscule things that can easily be traded. Ammo and health packs do suck though.
The email thing isn't even that big the problem, it's the principle of the whole fucking thing and every time I get hit with it it just drives me into this big fuck-off bloody-murder Hannibal Lector rage. There's no fucking point to it, there's no rationalization of it, the shitbag's just trying to create his little private clique thing for the simple fact that he can.
I know nothing of how these things work, but it would not surprise me at all if this shitbag can get certain moneys by selling advertising on his site. The amount of said moneys could be tied to the number of registered users to the site.
I hate how JRPG worlds are absolutely covered with a completely random and inane assortment of monsters, none of which are actually acknowledged by the storyline. In FF VII, shacks attack you in Midgard and ghost pirates attack you in underwater military installations, and nobody thinks anything of it.
One of my biggest pet peeves with RPGs, and something FF is particularly guilty of.
I think Final Fantasy XII was the worst offender about this. It's bad enough the characters were devoid of personality about 1/4 of the way into the story, but no matter what massive monstrosity you fought, they would do nothing but stare blankly with no emotion whatsoever.
Even when you fight and obtain Espers, there's no reaction whatsoever. In Vagrant Story, you had two soldiers practically shitting themselves when witnessing a moving platform (a scene I still fondly remember), and in FFT the use of summons and other creatures was considered blasphemy. But FFXII? No reaction at all.
This is something that FFXIII did right. Party members openly comment at locations you visit as well as monsters on the field. It was generic stuff like "look at the size of that thing", but at least it gave a connection to the player.
FFX was my particular favorite, though, with some of the funniest comments occurring in battle, such as Rikku wondering if the Flan monster was edible, or Wakka wondering how many steaks you could make out of a Behemoth.
FFX was my particular favorite, though, with some of the funniest comments occurring in battle, such as Rikku wondering if the Flan monster was edible, or Wakka wondering how many steaks you could make out of a Behemoth.
I don't care what anyone says, I love Rikku. She is my videogame girl crush.
So we get stiff once in a while. So we have a little fun. What’s wrong with that? This is a free country, isn’t it? I can take my panda any place I want to. And if I wanna buy it a drink, that’s my business.
Has anybody noticed that multiplayer RTS gameplay is completely different from singleplayer RTS gameplay? Online play always seems to be about actions per minute, build orders, and defending against rushes. You've gotta hotkey every button and know the tech tree inside and out. There's no time for anything else. It's completely different from how most people play RTSes in the campaign, right? There, you've got time to sit back and think strategically, build up forces, and play at a leisurely pace. It's why I find RTSes appealing, actually. Like, if I wanna play a twitch game that requires a ton of actions per minute and lightning fast reflexes, I'd just play a shooter. I'd play an FPS online for that sort of instant reaction environment. That's where you get satisfaction from fast play. It's a great sort of experience, isn't it?
But in RTSes, you're a commander lording over the entire battlefield. There's armies for you to control, yet you're distant from the action. It's all happening down there in the midst of a murky fog of war, while you give out orders from on high. There's a sort of tranquil peace in that elevation, that distance. It's a different sort of experience, where you can enjoy building up forces and surveying the landscape. All of this is lost in multiplayer, IMO. There hasn't been an RTS that's really bridged the gap, through some like Supreme Commander have come close.
Anyways, I think a lot of people out there feel the same as me and never ever make the jump from SP to MP.
TLDR: People don't wanna play RTSes like hopped up heroin addicts (Koreans).
Usually the single player is designed specifically to be different from the multiplayer, because doing the same things you do in multiplayer, only against an AI, over and over again isn't a very compelling single player experience.
As for APM and such, why not just play a turn-based strategy game? I mean, what's the real point of making things happen in real time if the speed at which you do things makes no difference?
I think you are making a quite a leap from a scenario of Actions Per Minute worries to time making no difference. I read a SC2 MP help thing where it mentioned if you built things in a certain order you could get some facility up 4 critical seconds sooner. That's intense.
In SP RTSs the times do matter, but they are not down to the second. You have time to get a base going and a defense set up before the enemy starts attacking. In multiplayer, if you decide to build your base up too much without enough defense, you have a bunch of Zerglings eating your shit in like 1 minute. Being so time intensive, they almost become formulaic in how to win, with little oppurtunity to strategerize.
I agree with Delta. I don't play the MP of RTSs for the exact same reason, but love the more relaxed, but still time-sensitive, nature of the SP modes. You can strategize and win the match in any number of ways... throw your soldiers away in endless waves of cheap units or conserve forces with pin point assaults on weak spots.
I think you are making a quite a leap from a scenario of Actions Per Minute worries to time making no difference. I read a SC2 MP help thing where it mentioned if you built things in a certain order you could get some facility up 4 critical seconds sooner. That's intense.
In SP RTSs the times do matter, but they are not down to the second. You have time to get a base going and a defense set up before the enemy starts attacking. In multiplayer, if you decide to build your base up too much without enough defense, you have a bunch of Zerglings eating your shit in like 1 minute. Being so time intensive, they almost become formulaic in how to win, with little oppurtunity to strategerize.
I agree with Delta. I don't play the MP of RTSs for the exact same reason, but love the more relaxed, but still time-sensitive, nature of the SP modes. You can strategize and win the match in any number of ways... throw your soldiers away in endless waves of cheap units or conserve forces with pin point assaults on weak spots.
If we're talking Starcraft, then it's just about the opposite. There's often one or two optimum ways to beat a single player mission, while in multiplayer build orders -- strategy -- can make more of a difference than apm for most players, and the strategies, even at the very, very highest levels, are varied and always evolving. One of the main things that makes Korean pro Starcraft so interesting to watch is that all the top players have unique styles. They don't just do the same thing with different degrees of efficiency.
Sure, the games are fast, but who wants to spend an hour for each one?
I agree with Delta. I don't play the MP of RTSs for the exact same reason, but love the more relaxed, but still time-sensitive, nature of the SP modes. You can strategize and win the match in any number of ways... throw your soldiers away in endless waves of cheap units or conserve forces with pin point assaults on weak spots.
I'm also pretty much this, yeah. I can about keep up with the necessary speed and nine-way multitasking and hotkeying for a few minutes, but I end up with an actual headache afterwards. Not really worth the effort, to be honest, especially since I don't really get much satisfaction out of competitive multiplayer anyway. Surviving in Starcraft requires more reflexes and undistracted attention to the screen than freaking ESP.ra.de!
Why can't all these modern consoles with their USB ports use random USB controllers? If I want to play HAWX with a flight stick on the 360, I have to buy a special one, instead of just using the PC one I have already.
The PS3 gets this right, and thanks to that I can use this USB modded NES controller to play Mega Man 9/10 the way it's meant to be played, and I can use my PC joypad for fighting games.
Why can't all these modern consoles with their USB ports use random USB controllers? If I want to play HAWX with a flight stick on the 360, I have to buy a special one, instead of just using the PC one I have already.
The PS3 gets this right, and thanks to that I can use this USB modded NES controller to play Mega Man 9/10 the way it's meant to be played, and I can use my PC joypad for fighting games.
Or better yet, USB keyboard and mouse. Console shooters with KBaM? Yes please!
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But that's a bad example, because doing that will make you not level... which actually makes you more powerful. Leveling up quickly in Oblivion is just a recipe for pain unless you go very carefully about it :P.
Anyway, after being playing Etrian Odyssey for a while, I have one thing to bitch about - poorly defined quest objectives.
I wouldn't mind if there's a dozen hard-as-fuck bosses in the way. I wouldn't mind if the place is a puzzle labyrinth that would make Minos grow a boner. I can even survive the million random encounters. Not a single one of those is a bother when compared to the fact that apparently it's fallen out of style to give the mercenaries you're paying a detailed account of what in the name of the Abyss you're looking for, or give either cryptic or extremely unhelpful directions. "Somewhere in the west"? Golly gee, good thing the Western area of the worldmap is only like a thousand miles across!
This is particularly compunded in EO by the fact you don't actually see things until you bodily enter their square, so you can't even go around keeping an eye out and hoping to stumble on quest objectives - gotta search square by square - which is what made me think about this. But indeed thinking on it, a lot of games do the whole "force quest text to fit in two lines of written or spoken text, therefore leaving the player out in the dark and have to simply wander hoping to trip on the quest flag", and it's annoying. I don't mind hard quests - but I want to know where I'm supposed to start looking, at least! Or what I'm supposed to do! Or something! Come on, throw me a bone here!
Well, we can assume that there are more people living in that town. Otherwise I DON'T wanna know the rate of inbreeding.
Somebody could form a complaint about that. I don't really know how to bitch right.
The problem is that games are really good at making cities feel huge and decently populated, but if you actually count the people you're looking at like one street of one small neighborhood.
Which games have done it best? How many people are in FF12's Rabanastre? Are there enough people in Morrowind or Oblivion to sustain a normal population?
I would say FF12 did it right, I haven't counted but there are plenty of people around and not all of them want to talk to you (like real life!). Did they say how big of a region the game covers though? I'd say it's about the size of a small U.S. state if you're going realistic but I'm thinking they intended the game to cover a small country sized chunk of land.
The World Ends With You does a good job of actually making the city seem populated.
I'm just saying that, as far as side-games and expansions went, they could have done much worse than having some game take place entirely in Midgar, exploring that city and the people who live in it. It was probably the best-done thing about the original game, and probably one of the most interesting settings from any RPG I've ever played.
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As far as the "realistic population" thing goes, the only game I've found that even approaches it is from the Assassin's Creed series, where you have literally thousands of NPCs milling the streets of the extremely large (but still scaled-down from reality) cities. It'll be at least a console gen before we see that kind of thing in RPGs, though, if we ever do. I'd like to see it personally but it would probably be more trouble than it was worth (you'd have to highlight the 'real' NPCs somehow, and that would seem weird - not to mention those cities probably take years to develop).
Before getting frustrated with it because they decided to hide a ton of small flags throughout this giant city.
AC1 and AC2 also had realistically annoying street vendors and proselytizers.
Two things I will never be able to get out of my head:
- "PRAISE BE SALAHADIN"
- "CARNE FRESCA!"
Yeah, TWEWY is the only game I can think of that really has large crowds of people.
i was surprised at how noisy the streets in that game were in comparison to san andreas, which had the occasional tootling car going along in hollywood. but i'd have loved some proper crowds in times square, yeah.
yeah, the crowds of NPC's in new orleans was very different from NPC's in the rest of the game. to my recollection they were a lot easier to kill and weren't as intelligent, like they didn't panic as readily or sprint to tell the authorities that a crazy man has a gun.
they made a great impression though. murdering people in a back alley inches from the biggest crowd of people i'd every seen in a game was exhilerating
Regrettably, that's not the path they decided to take (instead, they went with some Chekov's Gun about a huge reserve army Shinra apparently just stored underneath their building), and Junon is never mentioned.
On the issue of Nibelheim, having a really low population could actually be part of the reason young men eventually leave the town (apparently usually for Midgar), while a similar number from other cities arrive to take their places.
Hitman: Blood Money did great work with the "faux-crowd"--even if their models did shift radically when you moved away from them.
Yeah, that's pretty much a relic of the days when storage was a premium. If you had just treasures and no people or buildings around, every world would've seemed empty. If you just had people and buildings and no treasures, then there would've been no real incentive to explore. But since games didn't always have the loads of space they have now, you couldn't always keep looting areas separate from "people" areas and thus you had to combine the two. Nowadays, it's just tradition.
Obviously, being able to get in trouble for swiping things as in the Elder Scrolls games makes a lot more sense, but then that brings up other issues like idiot developers slapping a "stolen" tag on common, everyday items (so you can't sell them normally) or houses in general basically having nothing of value in them. It really doesn't do any good to have a peudo-city with a bunch of houses if you never have any reason to enter them, whether it's to talk to the owners or just swipe things. Also, hideously stupid karma systems which punish you for stealing when nobody anywhere ever will ever see you steal that fork off the table. Although that's really only Fallout 3, but it was pretty hugely stupid move.
Although I suppose creating a "suspicion" system where people tend to notice the mysterious new guy wandering around right about the time things go missing would mean actual effort rather than cheap and easy copout dev choices like preventing you from selling perfectly unidentifiable (but stolen) items.
Hell, Deus Ex had a better take on stealing. Unless you set off an alarm, nobody cares and you don't get punished for it. You are trying to save the world after all, so why should Denton feel bad about swiping some cash from a hitman or taking a bunch of mods hidden in a secret base?
But back to my point... it's certainly realistic in having individual pickups for each player, but this breeds a sort of antagonism after a while as everyone fights to get to the ammo or health item before it's snatched away. In a lot of cases, a player who's only used up a small amount of ammo for their gun will gobble up an ammo pickup while their teammate is close to running empty and needed it more. Sure, you can work closely together to communicate the various states of health and ammo quantity and do some sort of need before greed system, but we're talking about multiplayer shooters here, not World of Warcraft. That sorta thing is way too slow and time consuming for most people. It's alright if you're playing splitscreen with a buddy sitting right next to you, but hard to pull off with strangers online.
Having pondered this problem for a while now, I propose a system where item pickups are instantly applied to all players in a co-op game. Pick up a medikit, and every player you're with gets the benefits. This would completely eliminate the mentality of racing ahead for the next pickup and punishing players who prefer to play more cautiously. Of course, this method is completely unrealistic since the item is magically distributed to everyone, but I think that's a small price to pay for better gameplay.
I've seen a few ways people have tried to rememdy this. Each player will have their own powerups spawned (I like this one), the items respawn after a while, the way you described where it's first come, and where if someone is close when you grab something, they get some of the effect.
My friend and I solved this in Resident Evil 5 by splitting weapon types. He took shotgun ammo and grenade launcher ammo, I took SMG and Sniper ammo. We both picked up the occasional pistol ammo, he grabbed frag grenades while I took incendiary and flash. Worked fairly well for us.
Trying to sell a game whose high points are "vast and empty and lifeless" sounds pretty tough. Frankly speaking, just the idea of not being able to hear enemy pew-pews, just sitting there with my cockpit sounds, seems like a giant turn-off. Is the goal to go more submarine sim instead of Star Wars dogfighting?
I loved doing things like this in Diablo. My friends and I would sit there and try to out-ninja each other. We've gone so far as to rip a sound byte from a PS2 game where one of the guards would yell "NEENJA!!!!!" whenever he'd see the protagonist. It was a ninja game, coincidentally. Anyway. We'd sit there and steal items as quickly as possible, and still do to this day. Any co-op game we play at a LAN or whatever, when we can ninja things from each other, one of us invariably alt-tabs over and plays the sound.
Of course, once we'd go into town we'd trade the items back and forth; but the point is that games like that I think are fun, when they're minuscule things that can easily be traded. Ammo and health packs do suck though.
I swear to god, if I ever met one of these dipshit forced-registration site owners in real life I don't think I could honestly control myself from beating them to a pulp. Everybody fucking hates this stupid-ass shit and yet every other fucker with two strings of HTML feels compelled to make their stupid shit exclusive for whatever stupid fucking reason. And no, doing it as a means of controlling downloads and bandwidth consumption does not count, because we still get the fucking files and jump through the fucking hoops and bitch the webmaster out every fucking step of the way.
*Ahem* Tenchu
I know nothing of how these things work, but it would not surprise me at all if this shitbag can get certain moneys by selling advertising on his site. The amount of said moneys could be tied to the number of registered users to the site.
One of my biggest pet peeves with RPGs, and something FF is particularly guilty of.
I think Final Fantasy XII was the worst offender about this. It's bad enough the characters were devoid of personality about 1/4 of the way into the story, but no matter what massive monstrosity you fought, they would do nothing but stare blankly with no emotion whatsoever.
Even when you fight and obtain Espers, there's no reaction whatsoever. In Vagrant Story, you had two soldiers practically shitting themselves when witnessing a moving platform (a scene I still fondly remember), and in FFT the use of summons and other creatures was considered blasphemy. But FFXII? No reaction at all.
This is something that FFXIII did right. Party members openly comment at locations you visit as well as monsters on the field. It was generic stuff like "look at the size of that thing", but at least it gave a connection to the player.
FFX was my particular favorite, though, with some of the funniest comments occurring in battle, such as Rikku wondering if the Flan monster was edible, or Wakka wondering how many steaks you could make out of a Behemoth.
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I don't care what anyone says, I love Rikku. She is my videogame girl crush.
But in RTSes, you're a commander lording over the entire battlefield. There's armies for you to control, yet you're distant from the action. It's all happening down there in the midst of a murky fog of war, while you give out orders from on high. There's a sort of tranquil peace in that elevation, that distance. It's a different sort of experience, where you can enjoy building up forces and surveying the landscape. All of this is lost in multiplayer, IMO. There hasn't been an RTS that's really bridged the gap, through some like Supreme Commander have come close.
Anyways, I think a lot of people out there feel the same as me and never ever make the jump from SP to MP.
TLDR: People don't wanna play RTSes like hopped up heroin addicts (Koreans).
As for APM and such, why not just play a turn-based strategy game? I mean, what's the real point of making things happen in real time if the speed at which you do things makes no difference?
Anyone want to beta read a paranormal mystery novella? Here's your chance.
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Perhaps someday an Alexander will cut this Gordian knot.
In SP RTSs the times do matter, but they are not down to the second. You have time to get a base going and a defense set up before the enemy starts attacking. In multiplayer, if you decide to build your base up too much without enough defense, you have a bunch of Zerglings eating your shit in like 1 minute. Being so time intensive, they almost become formulaic in how to win, with little oppurtunity to strategerize.
I agree with Delta. I don't play the MP of RTSs for the exact same reason, but love the more relaxed, but still time-sensitive, nature of the SP modes. You can strategize and win the match in any number of ways... throw your soldiers away in endless waves of cheap units or conserve forces with pin point assaults on weak spots.
If we're talking Starcraft, then it's just about the opposite. There's often one or two optimum ways to beat a single player mission, while in multiplayer build orders -- strategy -- can make more of a difference than apm for most players, and the strategies, even at the very, very highest levels, are varied and always evolving. One of the main things that makes Korean pro Starcraft so interesting to watch is that all the top players have unique styles. They don't just do the same thing with different degrees of efficiency.
Sure, the games are fast, but who wants to spend an hour for each one?
Anyone want to beta read a paranormal mystery novella? Here's your chance.
stream
I'm also pretty much this, yeah. I can about keep up with the necessary speed and nine-way multitasking and hotkeying for a few minutes, but I end up with an actual headache afterwards. Not really worth the effort, to be honest, especially since I don't really get much satisfaction out of competitive multiplayer anyway. Surviving in Starcraft requires more reflexes and undistracted attention to the screen than freaking ESP.ra.de!
The PS3 gets this right, and thanks to that I can use this USB modded NES controller to play Mega Man 9/10 the way it's meant to be played, and I can use my PC joypad for fighting games.
Or better yet, USB keyboard and mouse. Console shooters with KBaM? Yes please!