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Carmack did say that a story in a game is like story in porn movies. It doesn't really matter much.
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Dec 15, 2014 03:12
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I loved Quake's atmosphere and general serendipitous art direction that was entirely the result of compromising between HeXen-like dark medieval fantasy and high-tech Doom space bases. It created this blend of magic and technology that most other games don't attempt that often and really should. The fact that the story was brief only helped it make it even more surreal, like I was the pawn of some Carmackian overlord that was plopped into the middle of a Beksinski painting and told to slaughter everything. Now if only it didn't get so loving dark in the last episode. I tried playing through it in Darkplaces and it's like I'm playing half blind.
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Dec 15, 2014 03:16
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Elliotw2 posted:Which Quake 1 being "all over the place" isn't really much different from how Doom worked. It didn't have a plot, and each episode having a different tileset and theme is just a standard thing in high quality FPS's at the time. Yeah it did, kill the demons, go deeper into the base. then go deeper into the second base, then go right into hell.
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Dec 15, 2014 03:19
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Dave Angel posted:Jedi Knight did one thing really well: sense of scale with some big-rear end environments. I think it was level 8 where you come out on top of that giant tower, with a Tie Bomber (!) doing bombing run flybys on the roof, and if you jumped off the edge you would fall for aaaaages. I did that lots, sometimes I would catch something on the way down and die, and watch my corpse make the rest of the trip. Don't think it was until Skyrim's mountains I saw something similar. oh HELL yes. I don't think JK aged well in a lot of regards, and a lot of the world visuals aren't that great anymore, but the sense of environment and scale is still cool as hell
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Dec 15, 2014 03:36
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My fondest memory of JK is the first level, when I realised that, man, if you fall, it's a looooong way down. My younger brain didn't see the bottomless pit for what it was, which is just like an empty area that triggers player death when you get down far enough, so I always thought it was one of the biggest, most massive games I'd ever played. And then later, you get the lightsaber and fuuuuck yes! Other guns? What other guns? Correct me if I'm wrong, but in JK, wasn't your ability to deflect shots based on how much force training/power you had? So at first you sucked, but after a while, you were a master? JO just started you off as awesome, but, hey, let's have you fight people with weapons you can't or won't deflect. Great  As for Quake, I always appreciated the weird medieval-techno juxtaposition, and think the game was all the better for it.
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Dec 15, 2014 04:10
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Rupert Buttermilk posted:And then later, you get the lightsaber and fuuuuck yes! Other guns? What other guns? Correct me if I'm wrong, but in JK, wasn't your ability to deflect shots based on how much force training/power you had? So at first you sucked, but after a while, you were a master? JO just started you off as awesome, but, hey, let's have you fight people with weapons you can't or won't deflect. Great Actually, they did have that mechanic in Jedi Outcast. When you first start using force powers, you aren't able to block all of the shots coming at you, but by the end of the game you were reflecting most of the gunfire coming at you. It was also that aspect of the game which I feel Jedi Outcast did better than Jedi Academy. In Jedi Outcast, you still had to diversify your weapon usage because the lightsaber was, at least when you first got it, not ideal for every situation, so you had to mix it up a bit. With Jedi Academy, it feels like you could, and were almost expected to go through the entire game using only your lightsaber. I will agree though that it's complete bullshit in Jedi Outcast that the first level where you get to toy around with your new force powers is littered with Disintegrater Rifle toting enemies. Probottt fucked around with this message at 06:22 on Dec 15, 2014 |
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Dec 15, 2014 06:18
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MONKET posted:I loved Quake's atmosphere and general serendipitous art direction that was entirely the result of compromising between HeXen-like dark medieval fantasy and high-tech Doom space bases. It created this blend of magic and technology that most other games don't attempt that often and really should. The fact that the story was brief only helped it make it even more surreal, like I was the pawn of some Carmackian overlord that was plopped into the middle of a Beksinski painting and told to slaughter everything. This is why I'm so glad they didn't take the Alien licence they were offered when they were making Doom. What they came up with themselves, that mixture of sci-fi and myth, worked so perfectly. For a bunch of nerds, they were pretty good at coming up with cohesive themes. Quake had more of a magic and medieval element than Doom. The monsters were proper Lovecraft, and had character despite being made up of a handful of polys. Quake II went more with the milatary theme, but got more horror as you got to see the human suffering that resulted in the twisted cyborg enemies. Doom 3 kind of worked, but actually telling the story through cut scenes and explaining everything away kind of ruins the mystique. I've got a little grudge against games that need to excuse their mechanic with some second rate story. 99% of the time it's just not neccesary, or only needs to be hinted at. EvilGenius fucked around with this message at 08:07 on Dec 15, 2014 |
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Dec 15, 2014 08:02
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Zedsdeadbaby posted:Carmack did say that a story in a game is like story in porn movies. It doesn't really matter much. This holds up true for me even nowadays. If I launch a game and the gameplay is satisfying, why do I need any kind of plot twist, morale conflict or whatever? Press "E" to enter mass grave. 
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Dec 15, 2014 11:27
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Some people like myself enjoy having a bit of plot or motivation in the background, that's not exactly a bad thing. It helps them get involved in the game.
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Dec 15, 2014 11:59
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EvilGenius posted:Any links to articles/videos on this kind of UnrealEd 1 hacking? Always been fascinated with by the art of squeezing every last drop out of an engine or system. Oof. Not really, I'm afraid. A lot of it was things I found out when messing around in UnrealEd (that was another stroke of genius — deliver the editor along with the game, along with everything needed to pick apart the existing content) and tricks described on the very early unrealtech forums. A lot of that is lost in time now, since the forums ar long gone or the hard drives long-since seized up, but it might be possible to dig it out from wayback machine. For me, it came out of my friends wanting me to recreate (and minutely update) classic doom DM levels in Unreal and then UT99, and then me stuffing too much “fun stuff” in there to the point of making them unplayable.  <droning personal nostalgia tangent> My journey down that path actually started with an argument a friend and I had about the (over)use of light flares on lights in many Unreal maps. His argument was that they were nonsensical since flares are a lensing artefact, and that since you're playing a first-person shooter and the eye has no such artefacts; mine was that I'm looking at a monitor so it would look strange if the the artefacts from film and video wouldn't appear as they always do on-screen. So he challenged me to create a more realistic lighting look using the tools in the engine and some fiddling around led to the use of fog sectors and invisible, non-interactive light-deflecting planes to create shafts of light in that fog. That, in turn, led to two other discoveries: one was the additive nature of fog in the rendering and lightmap calculation process: very naturally for a pre-HDR pipeline, the lightmaps had a max value of 100%, meaning it gave the full underlying colour. There was no way to really wash out textures with light alone and, in fact, since lights were also used dynamically to create real-time shading, filling the level with them to the point where you had that 100% coverage instantly brought the engine to its knees. The solution was fewer actual lights, and a clever mix of ambient lighting and fog of the same colour as the lights to push the final pixel colour beyond what just the texture provided. Instead of 100% green + 100% white light = 100% green, you'd have 100% green + 50% white light (to retain some dynamics) + 50% white fog = 150% green (i.e. half-way towards full white). The other was the way sectors and portals worked. The fog solution created two new problems: one was that, while you could now have very dark corners next to very bright areas, the fog tended to wash out those dark areas as well — the textures had entirely black pixels due to the lack of light, but the fog brightened them to some dull grey. Solution: create separate sectors without that fog (or with a dark fog to make them even darker, just to create even wider dynamic range), which worked when used in conjunction with the neighbouring bright-fog sectors. However, you quickly noticed the other problem, which was how the engine cheated: fog was not rendered unless you were in a fog sector, so if you just built a normally sectioned-off corridor leading to a bright area, you'd see some (relatively) ugly textures at a distance and when you crossed some magical threshold (the plane that marked the edge of the sector) the fog would suddenly pop up out of nowhere and completely change the look. So either some clever layout was required to ensure that you never went directly from a non-fog to a trick-fog sector, you had to just set the entire level as having fog which once again made the engine cry in pain. This was a very natural result of, and indeed the entire point of having sectors: so the engine could say “you can’t even see this part of the level, so no rendering for you!” One of the data points culled aggressively was fog. The planes that separated the sectors were just a viewport into another part of the level, and that viewport was rendered using whatever settings were relevant for where the player was — no fog around the player = no fog rendered in the viewpoint. The real magic was that these portals could be placed anywhere, and that you could control what would be on the other side. You could tag a sector as a “teleport”, which somewhat belied what it actually did. Yes, it did teleport actors that entered that sector, but more importantly, it said to the engine that “this side of the portal plane isn’t actually this sector, it’s that sector over there →”. Suddenly, you could have a corridor end in a teleport sector that pointed to a hole in a ceiling in a different sector, effectively letting you walk on the walls of what looked like a larger room. Or you could have a hole in the floor be a teleport to a hole in the ceiling, creating an actual bottomless pit. Or you could have a niche at the very top of a circular staircase lead to a corresponding niche at the bottom, creating Penrose stairs. Or just create an infinitely regressing and overlapping labyrinth, with a completely impossible exit in the middle. Having fun with all of this took up so much time that I never really learned to use advanced textures beyond the basic water or droplet animations that was instantly obvious when you created an animated texture template. The trickier stuff required some scripting, and that was beyond me at the time… </long-rear end tangent>
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Dec 15, 2014 12:02
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Tom Hall posted:Having a good story behind a game will provide a rich source of ideas for actors and settings. The story provides a framework for the game's world to be built on and designed from. It's not really important that the user reads the story--in fact, long stories are not welcome--but the story is important for a) building a coherent world and b) providing a unique wellspring of ideas, producing concepts and actors unlike other games. The former makes the player feel the game is really "together" and allows another of their layers of disbelief to fall away--since the world is "behaving" correctly (even if it is chaos), they allow themselves to get deeper into it. The latter is what many designers miss. There's so much you can do with each subject, but many designers tend to have a wild idea, then implement it just like the last game they liked in the genre. You want something new in your game, so it'll stand out. A story is just a handy tool to make the game unique and interesting.
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Dec 15, 2014 12:02
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Jblade posted:Some people like myself enjoy having a bit of plot or motivation in the background, that's not exactly a bad thing. It helps them get involved in the game. Well, I do too. I just don't give it that much importance once the gameplay is cool. I find hard to finish a game (we're talking mostly about FPS) that has nice plot but the shooting is garbage. Deus Ex is one of these, I never finished it because as much as I try to treat it as a pure RPG game, shooting something is frustrating until you invest a lot on an hability. I'm sure lots of goons played E.Y.E. Divine Cybermancy. The plot doesn't make any sense considering that it has some work on it but every weapon is cool, and you can do crazy stuff. To me is like a porn movie with good presentation 
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Dec 15, 2014 12:34
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The Kins posted:Tom Hall quote I actually disagree with this in certain situations. A videogame world doesn't need to be narratively consistent, because it doesn't necessarily need a narrative at all. It can be consistent in other things - in how the world is presented, how it responds to the player, how it borrows from the real world and from myth. Just look what happened when they started to try and explain Sonic the Hedgehog. Sonic is fun because it presents a consistent style and design, which allows for fun ideas to be built into the game that test the player.
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Dec 15, 2014 14:20
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Jblade posted:Some people like myself enjoy having a bit of plot or motivation in the background, that's not exactly a bad thing. It helps them get involved in the game. People like you are what happened to Sonic  e: beaten, sorta Mak0rz fucked around with this message at 14:24 on Dec 15, 2014 |
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Dec 15, 2014 14:22
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Tippis posted:Words I'm at work, so I'll read this all when I get home, but just chiming in to say I agree about the lense flares! Making a game look like a film is often mistaken for realism. Nobody drew lense flares on paintings, and videogames that claim to be realistic should be the same.
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Dec 15, 2014 14:24
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Jehde posted:Kinda telling that your first complaint about an early FPS is the graphics. Instead of taking the time refuting your many objectively wrong opinions, I'm just gonna post this speedrun again that does a lot of it for me: This is pretty cool but wait, if you get all the secrets on a level you get another force point?! I never knew this. Also I just wanted to talk about the jedi knight level design again. I'm not sure if it's really bad or good? I thought it was good back when it came out but haven't played it since. What I remember is that the levels were really BIG and not just big as in long but big as in stuff was really BIG compared to other FPS I had played. Big open areas, big drops, big buildings, big crates, Big low poly blocks making up everthing etc. On top of the that there was a lot of verticality and layering in it too. Compared to Quakes confined level design it was pretty impressive at the time (even if quakes smaller levels gave better gameplay).
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Dec 15, 2014 14:29
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EvilGenius posted:I'm at work, so I'll read this all when I get home, but just chiming in to say I agree about the lense flares! Making a game look like a film is often mistaken for realism. Nobody drew lense flares on paintings, and videogames that claim to be realistic should be the same. I'd say it depends on what “reality” you want to mimic: is it regular vision or is it the cinematic depiction of a scene as seen with a camera? I mean, look at what some of the late '70s–early '80s Ridley Scott or John Carpenter movies intentionally did with (in particular anamorphic) flares to stylise their films. That kind of look can be beautiful if done right, but it needs to be understood as a cinematic style rather than a realistic touch. Of course, back in the day before we had proper bloom, HDR, and other over-brightness techniques, flares were really the only viable option. UnrealEngine fog could simulate some of it, as mentioned, but at an often impractical cost.
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Dec 15, 2014 15:00
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Tom Hall is dumb and the Doom Bible sucked.
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Dec 15, 2014 15:03
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Alain Post posted:Tom Hall is dumb and the Doom Bible sucked. I still want to play a game that actually follows the Doom Bible guidelines though, Maybe with Quake 1 level graphics and engine to run it on instead of Doom engine, but still.
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Dec 15, 2014 16:03
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Nintendo Kid posted:I still want to play a game that actually follows the Doom Bible guidelines though, Maybe with Quake 1 level graphics and engine to run it on instead of Doom engine, but still. That sounds like something I'd play. Probably just to have my childhood dreams crushed.
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Dec 15, 2014 16:20
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This artist Wayne Barlowe did a whole suite of paintings on a concept of Hell that he'd been working on, I think for a book he was writing. The whole thing has an unbelievable sense of scale and reality, he imagines Hell more like a sci-fi planet than a strict afterlife, and the surreal horror of it all is pretty intense. http://waynebarlowe.wordpress.com/artwork/hell/ As I was looking through his works, I just kept thinking "This is what I want a game to do, this is what Doom 4 should be" Doom's always been about pushing tech in an FPS. So make a fast, arena style shooter that starts on Earth but quickly descends into Hell, and then really have fun with the environments and landscapes. Other genres of games have done some pretty impressive graphical things that FPS games haven't simply because FPS games are mostly about soldiers running around in fields shooting people. I'm talking things like Shadow of the colossus or God of War, climbing on the back of a giant god, moving through a scene, while fighting smaller dudes. Give me some really far out, crazy, over-the-top ridiculous poo poo. Also I wouldn't mind some more old school Doom/Quake satanic horror. Doom 3 went a little too resident evil. And keep it fast. Yeah painkiller did some of that kinda thing, but graphically it wasn't anything all that. And painkiller is getting old anyways. Wow, thinking about it, just reminds me how much Bulletstorm was one of the best FPS I've played in a long time.
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Dec 15, 2014 16:50
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Zaphod42 posted:Yeah painkiller did some of that kinda thing, but graphically it wasn't anything all that. And painkiller is getting old anyways. Painkiller is basically a Quake fangame, made by people who spent most of the late 90s playing QuakeWorld. Chmielarz boasted once, that the only games worth caring about is QW and Virtua Fighter, and gameplay shall never be the slave of design. I wish he got back to making 3D shooters, but after his leave from Epic and bitter resentments towards the industry I don't really see it. Bulletstorm was fun, I agree. Shame about the PC port, and shame that we won't see the sequel. At least remove GfWL from Steam version, Epic
laserghost fucked around with this message at 17:07 on Dec 15, 2014 |
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Dec 15, 2014 17:03
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I tried several times but I found Bulletstorm repetitive and boring. Please tell me what's wrong with me.
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Dec 15, 2014 19:01
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Did you try kicking your problems, like Duke taught you?
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Dec 15, 2014 19:06
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Kill with skill that's the whole point on Bulletstorm. You shouldn't kill two guys the same way. Bulletstorm is pretty much Sir Kicksalot Deathboot with an assault rifle. The whole enviroment is designed to be deadly and you should blast through enemies like a kicking hurricane: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DivmRkXOn2k "Sir Kicksalot Deathboot travels to the future just to kick mutants in the dick." Bulletstorm while lacking a jump button has a lot of dicks. Also while being in a dick mood, here's the kickstarter of all things: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KnxgQMSsc8c
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Dec 15, 2014 19:13
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I remember Jedi Outcast being a lot more fun than this is, what the hell. All my guns suck and there's a shitton of enemies that do way too much damage and everything is ugly and terrible.  Where is the fun game I remember?quote:Kill with skill that's the whole point on Bulletstorm. You shouldn't kill two guys the same way. Geight fucked around with this message at 19:48 on Dec 15, 2014 |
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Dec 15, 2014 19:46
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All the guns are really powerful in Jedi Outcast in both your hands and the enemy's but, they're really hard to aim since the projectiles are really slow. There's locational damage too, so get kinda close and try and hit the stormtroopers in the face with a blaster shot. Later the shotgun and the compression rifle are really good, but the ion gun is poo poo against non-robot enemies. The sniper rifle is also really good at all ranges, and a full charged scope shot will instantly kill most normal enemies.
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Dec 15, 2014 19:53
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Geight posted:I remember Jedi Outcast being a lot more fun than this is, what the hell. All my guns suck and there's a shitton of enemies that do way too much damage and everything is ugly and terrible.
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Dec 15, 2014 19:57
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Tippis posted:Did you get your lightsaber back yet? It's a real slog until that point. And it's a terrible slog right afterwards, too 
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Dec 15, 2014 20:12
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Bouchacha posted:I tried several times but I found Bulletstorm repetitive and boring. Please tell me what's wrong with me. The first hour of the game is really slow, but after that its all gravy. Sounds like you played at least that far though, so I dunno. I love running around sliding into people, kicking them into walls of spikes, and then seeing all the bonus points I get from shooting people in the rear end and stuff. Bulletstorm feels like the natural evolution of quake style shooters. All kinds of trick shots and environmental traps and trying to string together points.
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Dec 15, 2014 20:22
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Rupert Buttermilk posted:And it's a terrible slog right afterwards, too I don't even remember what you do just afterwards — only the relief that it's finally time to turn on dismembering.
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Dec 15, 2014 20:24
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Rupert Buttermilk posted:And it's a terrible slog right afterwards, too That was a masterful troll by the devs. "Yay I've got my lightsabre"! Now do this boring training level "Yay now a proper level "! Level full of snipers you can't reach
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Dec 15, 2014 20:27
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Yes, Bulletstorm gives you so many different ways of killing dudes but a handful stand out as being very efficient (i.e. kicking dudes into spikes or off ledges for example), especially compared to just emptying clips into the sponges that you tend to do the same time thing over and over again. I'd love it if I was wrong, but even though I adored Painkiller, I tried playing Bulletstorm at least 3 separate occasions and just couldn't get into it. It's goddamn beautiful at least.
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Dec 15, 2014 20:57
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Geight posted:I remember Jedi Outcast being a lot more fun than this is, what the hell. All my guns suck and there's a shitton of enemies that do way too much damage and everything is ugly and terrible.
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Dec 15, 2014 21:12
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Casimir Radon posted:I kind of think it behaves funny under Windows 7. For instance I don't remember getting instakill disruptor sniped on Nar Shaddaa after being out of cover for only a split second. That might be related to a high frame rate than anything else. The Quake 3 engine is weird like that.
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Dec 15, 2014 21:36
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The Nar Shadaa level might be a bit more bearable if you could move while scoped in and/or charging the sniper rifle. The enemies can move and charge!
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Dec 15, 2014 21:48
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If you stand far enough away they won't notice you until you shoot at them once. Don't miss.
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Dec 15, 2014 21:52
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Geight posted:The Nar Shadaa level might be a bit more bearable if you could move while scoped in and/or charging the sniper rifle. The enemies can move and charge! I wish Jedi Knight/MOTS would get a source port too but there's probably not enough interest for that too happen.
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Dec 15, 2014 21:55
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That's intentional, they're not bugged or anything. There's nothing processor speed or framerate synced there, they're just scripted to be precharged and charge while moving. Someone was working on a Jedi Knight/MOTS reverse engineer project, but they couldn't figure out how to actually get things to render and collide properly. Karasu Tengu fucked around with this message at 21:59 on Dec 15, 2014 |
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Dec 15, 2014 21:56
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Elliotw2 posted:That's intentional, they're not bugged or anything. There's nothing processor speed or framerate synced there, they're just scripted to be precharged and charge while moving.
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Dec 15, 2014 21:59
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