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I would love to see a 23" LCD with much greater pixel density, though. 1920x1080 still leaves a lot of room for improvement.
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Jan 13, 2012 04:27
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Sir Liquid Jerk posted:In every 'post a picture of your desk/home office' thread I see idiots with 50" plasmas hooked up to their PCs on their desk, keyboard and mouse directly in front of it. Wouldn't that be unusable for normal computer tasks though? I thought there was something about the dot pitch or whatever it is that makes text in Windows really hard to read on a TV. edit: Aside from the neck and eye strain from having such a large screen, of course. Fergus Mac Roich fucked around with this message at 04:36 on Jan 13, 2012 |
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Jan 13, 2012 04:33
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Fergus Mac Roich posted:Wouldn't that be unusable for normal computer tasks though? I thought there was something about the dot pitch or whatever it is that makes text in Windows really hard to read on a TV. You need to adjust the DPI in Windows in order to make text legible at any decently high resolution from several feet away. This breaks the UI in some programs, though, and generally looks pretty ugly. Valve is working on a home theater interface for Steam, though, so that'll definitely improve things as far as gaming goes.
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Jan 13, 2012 04:41
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I use a 32 that is right in front of me, but I usually split in half between my browser and whatever movie or TV I'm watching at the same time.
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Jan 13, 2012 04:59
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I have a 40" LCD TV that I have used as an interim monitor when my old CRT broke, and it worked fine sitting 2-3 feet away. The dot-pitch left lots to be desired though at 1920x1080. Not being able to see the edges of the display in your peripheral vision makes FPS games much more immersive (as long as you can adjust the FOV to suit).
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Jan 13, 2012 05:06
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A Fancy 400 lbs posted:PC gamers love griefing, and adding a quick save when porting can't be that hard.  incoming:I've actually grown more suspicious in general of my old friends F5 and F9 of late, i.e. I've begun to think that they are more of a crutch for weak design than a legitimate feature. There are two great things about them: one, if some point of the game is challenging you don't have to retread tons of non-challenging territory every time you retry the final boss. This is very important, as it's almost a complete dealbreaker to me when a game forces me to do that poo poo (the only reason I think I might tolerate Dark Souls is because 'non-challenging' parts seem to be pretty rare in it). Two, they let you try silly things just for the fun of it without being punished for it. However, they also get rid of what I think is one of the most satisfying experiences in game: when your plan goes FUBAR, you're forced to improvise, you burn through a lot of your stashed resources, but ultimately pull through. I am thinking here of the old X-COMs and how you would often lose a lot of recruits/equipment, yet that wasn't at all game over. The losses taken made your victories feel hard-fought (even though it was unusual to outright fail an entire mission) and when you did pull off a flawless victory that felt awesome. The sort of games where you abuse quicksave are games that suffer from a serious flaw in this regard: namely, you can either win with little or no permanent consequences, or you die and reload (or, worst of all, win but end up so crippled that you have to reload anyway - think early FPSs where you are at 1 HP and out of medikits). Quickload allows you to retry these challenge without wasting any time, which is good, but it's very very very VERY easy to be tempted to not just retry until you have a decent victory but retry until you have a perfect victory. Hence that awful feeling so many of us are familiar with, having 156 consumables stashed up "in case something goes wrong", but things never actually go wrong. You end up with the exact opposite of what X-COM did: your game feels easy and your victories cheap even though it was actually tough to pull that stuff off. So let me try and write a bottom line (bear in mind that I haven't really thought about this issue for longer than it took to write this post): For a rewarding feeling of challenge in a game, it should be easy to screw up, but it should be hard to fail. But unrestricted quicksave strongly encourages designers to make it really easy to die, and encourages players to reject even the smallest misstep. Note that I don't think quicksave INHERENTLY causes this, but rather makes these approaches far too tempting. The first and most complex step to fixing the problem is NOT removing quicksave, but allowing for the creation of game states where a lot of poo poo can go horribly wrong yet you aren't crippled. Then provide a light encouragement to the players to accept it and move on instead of reloading until they achieve a perfect outcome. (Paradox's strategy games do this quite well, IMO: you can save all you want, but you can only load a game from the main menu, so "quickloading" is fairly cumbersome and time-consuming as it involves several clicks and multiple loading screens. Not enough that you won't try something weird as a mulligan, but enough that you're not going to bother reloading just because you lose a single battle.) Whew. Thoughts?
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Jan 13, 2012 07:38
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Every single game ever made that isn't real-time PvP should have quicksave. Quick load is another story; Prince of Persia's time rewinding, Diablo 2's "Save & Exit" mechanic, and pure save-deleting permadeath all have their occasional place.
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Jan 13, 2012 08:19
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Checkpoints are great, but in freeroam games like STALKER, you just can't DO checkpoints. Limiting quicksaves/quickloads might be feasible and fix the problem. Maybe make it so it's reset by going to a very safe place, like the icebreaker in Call of Pripyat.
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Jan 13, 2012 08:33
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I suppose "quick save without quick load" is an interesting way to go about it, but I have to say that the lack of save-on-demand makes me skip games entirely. I certainly hated it back in the bad old days when I had to, say, FIND THE INN IN A TOWN to save my game (Might & Magic II  ) since my Mom was totally yelling at me to go to bed I have not played the F.E.A.R. series since trying the demo of the second one, as I am completely uninterested in replaying the same fight against the same enemy over and over again because I cannot reach a checkpoint alive.The only way I can think of to limit saves in a way that does not completely make me hate the game would be to have it so you could only save, say, every five minutes. That would avoid the shoot-miss-reload-shoot-hit-save pattern that is easy to fall into without making it too terribly inconvenient to stop playing when you want. You could even have a "save and quit the game" option that was not on a timer, because who is going to save and quit the game just to ... well, all right, someone will.
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Jan 13, 2012 08:38
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Who loving cares if some people abuse quick save? If they want to ruin their own game, let them.
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Jan 13, 2012 08:44
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It's also worth mentioning that for every game where F5/F9 wouldn't be appropriate, I can probably name three or four old console games that benefit immensely from savestates when played on an emulator.
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Jan 13, 2012 08:47
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I've always liked quick-saves. I do admit I have a severe quick-save addiction, but they allow me to experiment without too much penalty. Say for instance, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. I'll approach a camp filled with heavily armed baddies. Before getting into combat, i'll save behind a rock, or a place that allows me enough different paths to the area. After the first attempt fails, I'll try it again, or maybe change up my gameplan and try something different. Or for humors' sake, i'll try something bold and rash, like running in with an RPG and using it like a standard rifle. (Although that never ends well). Eventually i'll pass that area successfully, and quicksave right after the combat is over. I wont keep trying a certain area for a perfect victory, unless I have some reason for a video or whatever. But I will quickload if the results of the victory weren't really a victory at all, rather just more problems to deal with. It's probably an unintended result of quicksaves, but I find this playstyle very fun as it opens up a lot of testing opportunities without a large setback.
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Jan 13, 2012 09:14
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The best system for general use is probably just disallowing quicksaving in mid-combat, like how the old Infinity Engine games worked. It lets you replay a whole encounter if you want, but not alter the outcome halfway through.
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Jan 13, 2012 09:56
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I honestly don't get why it matters. If my friends call me up at 7 for a 7:30 movie, I don't want to wait 15 minutes to finish this battle, I want to save, quickly. That kind of poo poo is way more important than stopping a sperglord from wasting hours getting their "perfect victory".
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Jan 13, 2012 10:08
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Avocados posted:I've always liked quick-saves. I do admit I have a severe quick-save addiction, but they allow me to experiment without too much penalty. Say for instance, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. This is a completely legitimate style of gameplay but it's not really compatible with Dark Souls, at least as it was originally meant to be played. The bonfire checkpoint system, the toughness of the encounters and the loss of currency/XP (souls) upon consecutive unproductive deaths forces you to never drop your guard or get lazy. This design creates a lot of the tension that made the game exciting and rewarding to play. Pretty much all of that tension would be gone if you could just quicksave in front of each new encounter and reload until you got past it. It would still be a pretty good game but it wouldn't be quite so special. Also I want to note that you don't save at the bonfires. The game saves continuously while you play and again when you quit. You can't access old saves but as long as everything was working properly, you'd lose basically no progress from a crash.
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Jan 13, 2012 10:35
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HondaCivet posted:Also I want to note that you don't save at the bonfires. The game saves continuously while you play and again when you quit. You can't access old saves but as long as everything was working properly, you'd lose basically no progress from a crash. The former should be as frequent as technically possible, so teenagers can go to bed and parents can go breastfeed without ever throwing away perfectly good progress. The latter is what is actually germane to game design.
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Jan 13, 2012 11:07
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Funny how this discussion came about from Dark Souls, because that game literally saves your provgress every 10 seconds. The only twist is that you cant reload at will.
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Jan 13, 2012 14:39
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:Every single game ever made that isn't real-time PvP should have quicksave. Quick load is another story; ... Diablo 2's "Save & Exit" mechanic ... all have their occasional place. Maybe this feature should be better advertised but you don't have to set aside 1 hour+ blocks of time to play, you can quit anytime without losing progress. It reloads you within a few feet of where you were standing* and enemies killed since you last visited a bonfire are still dead. The only time it differs slightly is if you save and quit during a boss fight it reloads you in front of the boss fog door. *If you're exceptionally quick you can even quit the game before hitting the ground after falling from a fatal height and reload back where you were.
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Jan 13, 2012 14:44
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notZaar posted:Funny how this discussion came about from Dark Souls, because that game literally saves your provgress every 10 seconds. The only twist is that you cant reload at will. I really like the Souls system of saving. That "save at the inn" thing in M&MII mentioned before sounds horrible, but if you imagine that you could quit the game at will or have it crash and restore to the same point because it's constantly saving but you needed to save at an inn or campsite in order to save your progress in the case of dying it sounds awesome to me. I know I quicksave every 15 seconds in Elder Scrolls games and I'd love it if my progress was constantly being autosaved but upon death I'd reload back at the last time I slept in a bed or at a campfire.
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Jan 13, 2012 14:54
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notZaar posted:Funny how this discussion came about from Dark Souls, because that game literally saves your provgress every 10 seconds. The only twist is that you cant reload at will. Yeah, it saves after you do anything. If you accidently hit the roll button and roll off a cliff, it saves and you cannot reload to a point before you rolled off.
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Jan 13, 2012 16:31
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There is no remotely sane argument against quicksave/load. If people want to cheat/exploit a game, they will. It's stupid to take options for trying things away from people just because some morons are too dumb to not exploit things they claim to not want to exploit.
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Jan 13, 2012 16:36
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Vertigus posted:You need to adjust the DPI in Windows in order to make text legible at any decently high resolution from several feet away. This breaks the UI in some programs, though, and generally looks pretty ugly. Valve is working on a home theater interface for Steam, though, so that'll definitely improve things as far as gaming goes. Is there any word on the Windows 8 interface being DPI agnostic? With the prevalence of high resolution/DPI displays Window's slapdash UI scaling should be unacceptable.
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Jan 13, 2012 16:41
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K8.0 posted:There is no remotely sane argument against quicksave/load. If people want to cheat/exploit a game, they will. It's stupid to take options for trying things away from people just because some morons are too dumb to not exploit things they claim to not want to exploit. There are absolutely games where quicksave/load would not work at all, like all roguelikes and the aforementioned Dark Souls.
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Jan 13, 2012 16:42
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Yeah, that was a really stupid argument. You can't give a player a tool as powerful as quickload and then blame them if the game breaks when they use it in the most efficient way. It's like making you start with a trillion gold and then blaming the broken economy on "some morons [who] are too dumb not to spend it". One should not have to be one's own policeman: if you are given a trillion gold, the game had better be set up to work under the assumption that the player has a trillion gold. In other words, balancing a game's difficulty should be the developer's job, not the player's. If you find that you must come up with self-imposed restrictions in order to get a decent amount of challenge out of a game, what just happened is that the developers made a mistake* and you stepped up to fix the issue yourself. But they still made a mistake. * Assuming that providing an enjoyable challenge was one of their goals, of course. Mario Kart is completely broken as a form of challenge, and it's a better game for that.
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Jan 13, 2012 17:40
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Save-scumming still occurs in roguelikes.
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Jan 13, 2012 17:51
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Dodoman posted:Save-scumming still occurs in roguelikes. Through file manipulation, though, which is generally beyond the scope of indie developers to prevent, and not a gameplay element.
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Jan 13, 2012 17:52
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The whole quick save/load argument is moot when talking about a game like Dark Souls. The tension, atmosphere and whole experience is based on the fact death has consequence. You misstep and fall of a cliff, that's your fault, you mistime a swipe/parry/block, your fault. The price you pay is what makes the atmosphere almost tangible in a game like that. Also with monitors, upgrading your size is great, but when you are still at a low res the difference is not staggering. Providing you can run it, upgrading to a higher resolution is the most aesthetically noticeable upgrade, even old games look great (Prince of Persia Sand of Time). My U3011 was one of my best upgrades, and makes games look stunning. Proximity can be an issue, but wheels on a chair, wireless Keyboard/mouse sorts it out.
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Jan 13, 2012 19:50
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I say put the option in there, but off by default. If you try to turn it on the game insults you a number of times until it finally lets you do it. This kinda reminds me of the Very Easy difficulty in Ninja Gaiden which unlocks after you die a bunch of times and Ryu wears a little pink ribbon the entire game if you pick it.
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Jan 14, 2012 02:12
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SolidSnakesBandana posted:I say put the option in there, but off by default. If you try to turn it on the game insults you a number of times until it finally lets you do it. This kinda reminds me of the Very Easy difficulty in Ninja Gaiden which unlocks after you die a bunch of times and Ryu wears a little pink ribbon the entire game if you pick it. I disagree, it would run contrary to the entire direction of the game. It's a divisive game to be sure, but there's absolutely no need for quick saving for the reasons already brought up in this thread, and quick loading would make the whole always-on PVP system entirely moot. The biggest emotional hooks Dark Souls has come from the permanence your actions have in your game world. If you accidentally attack and kill an NPC, they're gone for the rest of the game. When you die the developers added the kind of lingering consequences you see in very few games anymore. It's not the impossibly hard game some people make it out to be, but even adding it as an option as you suggest would create a situation where you'd either have to permanently disable those characters from the incredible constantly-on multiplayer side of the game, or have players with a massively unfair advantage griefing other players. You already have people running late game areas to obtain high-level gear at very low levels so they can invade people in starting areas, that would just make the process of building those specialized overpowered invasion characters so much easier.
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Jan 14, 2012 02:44
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All I care about is being able to save and quit whenever without losing progress. If I can do that, I'm happy. If not, you need to redesign your game, because that's loving stupid.
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Jan 14, 2012 02:55
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A Fancy 400 lbs posted:All I care about is being able to save and quit whenever without losing progress. If I can do that, I'm happy. If not, you need to redesign your game, because that's loving stupid. I would go as far as to say that just about every game should have frequent enough saves, includign a save on exit, that I never need to autosave (which is how Dark Sould operates). Having to mash a button every time I do something difficult in order to not lose progress is really dumb.
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Jan 14, 2012 03:01
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A Fancy 400 lbs posted:All I care about is being able to save and quit whenever without losing progress. If I can do that, I'm happy. If not, you need to redesign your game, because that's loving stupid. It's hard to say you are losing progress at all in Dark Souls. You never lose progress unless you are absolutely awful at video games and action games in general and lose all your in game currency to everything. If you can't pay attention, can't notice tells and trends in bosses, can't react in time to anything in general, or gently caress, remember things at all, Dark Souls is not for you. If you save and quit, you will be dropped off at the last Bonfire you were at, with everything you had. Now if you did that before a boss, you will have to fight your way back to the boss room, as using a bonfire resets all the enemies. Once you learn the areas, you get through them pretty fast. Your first time through will always be the slowest.
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Jan 14, 2012 03:03
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Edoraz posted:It's hard to say you are losing progress at all in Dark Souls. You never lose progress unless you are absolutely awful at video games and action games in general and lose all your in game currency to everything. If you can't pay attention, can't notice tells and trends in bosses, can't react in time to anything in general, or gently caress, remember things at all, Dark Souls is not for you. That's fine then, the way people were talking about it earlier made it sound much harsher.
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Jan 14, 2012 03:06
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A Fancy 400 lbs posted:That's fine then, the way people were talking about it earlier made it sound much harsher. Something told me that happened. The same thing happened with the Demon's Souls and Dark Souls Console threads. The games are excellent, they are just, ya know... Hardcore. Not meant for baby gamers. I think people get the warnings all wrong, all the time.
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Jan 14, 2012 03:27
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From what I remember if you save and quit in Dark Souls you will reload at the exact same spot you were standing in, not the last bonfire.
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Jan 14, 2012 15:03
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Regardless of the save and quit thing, the inability to pause is an even more bullshit idea. And for all their whining about the "experience" I can't be bothered playing any more without a decent co-op.
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Jan 14, 2012 15:22
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notZaar posted:From what I remember if you save and quit in Dark Souls you will reload at the exact same spot you were standing in, not the last bonfire. Yep, you do. The saving system is basically that of an MMO. You can't save and reload, but you can quit anytime you want and come back right where you left off. If you die, you get resurrected at a graveyard (bonfire) and have to do a corpse run and all the enemies have respawned. The fact that you can't pause makes it even more like an MMO. This actually seems like a good way to describe how saving/pausing/stuff works in DS.
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Jan 14, 2012 15:23
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Praseodymi posted:Regardless of the save and quit thing, the inability to pause is an even more bullshit idea. And for all their whining about the "experience" I can't be bothered playing any more without a decent co-op. Not really, no. You can be invaded and such. How would that work if you were paused? Multiplayer is a pretty big part of the game.
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Jan 14, 2012 15:43
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The Flying Milton posted:Not really, no. You can be invaded and such. How would that work if you were paused? Multiplayer is a pretty big part of the game. Not for me, I played it offline. I couldn't be bothered to wait for the PS3 to install 6 months of updates just so I could get griefed by Demon's Souls even more.
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Jan 14, 2012 16:10
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Praseodymi posted:Not for me, I played it offline. I couldn't be bothered to wait for the PS3 to install 6 months of updates just so I could get griefed by Demon's Souls even more. Wow, so the entire co-op aspect of the game didn't appeal to you enough to install any updates? When you ran into an especially difficult boss, did you settle for the lovely NPC helpers instead of the real thing and just muscle through it? Did you play with a guide as well? I can't imagine how much loot I'd have missed out on if I wasn't playing online to read the tips everyone leaves around the world. e: I'm assuming you're playing the unpatched version of the game as well, since you didn't patch your PS3? Sumac fucked around with this message at 16:44 on Jan 14, 2012 |
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Jan 14, 2012 16:39
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