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How the gently caress do you constantly play test something like that for months and come to the conclusion it's fine? More importantly, how does that keep happening in indie games?
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Dec 17, 2014 01:40
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Because Dark Souls. Unfair difficulty = fun, right? They seem to fail to realize that the Souls games are more about balance than difficulty for the sake of it.
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Dec 17, 2014 01:41
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Mokinokaro posted:Because Dark Souls. Unfair difficulty = fun, right? Except that's not Dark Souls at all, but yeah I guess if you don't actually understand that it's the takeaway.
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Dec 17, 2014 01:42
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Orv posted:How the gently caress do you constantly play test something like that for months and come to the conclusion it's fine? More importantly, how does that keep happening in indie games? Only playing with dev codes, and no long term gameplay consequences because nightly eating saves forever. The earlier post about "Iron spawns got upped after a dev was forced to play through normally dealing with how bullshit it was" warmed my shriveled heart. vvv Yeah. If not for how  the combat was, that would have probably been a cool and enjoyable early mission. But the combat mechanics just dragged down the GOOD work put into it.
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Dec 17, 2014 01:44
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IronicDongz posted:So gently caress this, I'm not doing that all over again. I really like the environment, but yeah, that doesn't look fun. Needs more enemy variety, needs to not rely on meatbrick HP enemies, and the boss needs work, being able to turn on a sixpence and hit you when you dodge past him is stupid. Seriously the setting is really nice, exactly what I'd want from the game, but all the loot you were finding was trash items, there's only one enemy, and it only has one attack + a basic melee, and it just takes ages to kill. Considering you didn't take damage for most of it that looks more time consuming than challenging. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 01:47 on Dec 17, 2014 |
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Dec 17, 2014 01:44
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Eh, I think it's more that drops just kind of suck compared to the crafted stuff now. Between that and novakid being the only race with access to guncrafting it's kind of stupid for anyone who isn't the master race. I don't know why they don't just make it so everyone can make both melee weapons and ranged weapons. You can also technically kit yourself out in full steel armor before doing that mission, but that's a really lovely defense of it that shouldn't exist yet will come up a lot if you post it on the official forums. The real travesty is how loving hard it is to find a musical instrument now. They should really just add a vendor for them at the outpost.
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Dec 17, 2014 01:51
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Mokinokaro posted:Because Dark Souls. Unfair difficulty = fun, right? Dark Souls' difficulty is just front-loaded sensory/timing overload (like how EVE's is frontloaded with holy gently caress menus everywhere) and when you get timing down fights really aren't hard, they just aren't as easy as an auto-regen FPS. The Souls games definitely do put in some "suprise, you're dead  " stuff at times but Demon/Dark Souls have been advertised as hard games from the start so you'd have to ignore all that info to be surprised when sudden beatings happen.
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Dec 17, 2014 01:54
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I don't even know how much longer that goes, either. For all I know there are as many ridiculous brick wall zombies for me to get through as there were pink spitter dudes. And even if the zombie dudes were reasonably killable, it would be tedious and grindy. An important thing to know when comparing Dark Souls to something like this trash is that in Dark Souls, you have a dodge move which gives you invincibility frames, and basically all enemies have obvious windups so after a little practice it's not hard to roll through attacks. The reason you're limited by stamina and such in that game is that enemies have proper hitstun, so with infinite stamina you could infinitely stunlock almost all enemies, and you have a fast invincible dodge which isn't really that tough to time. This game has neither of those things, and waiting around for your weapon to be usable again like this is pretty fundamentally unfun.
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Dec 17, 2014 01:54
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Bauxite posted:The real travesty is how loving hard it is to find a musical instrument now. They should really just add a vendor for them at the outpost. The outpost should have some sort of rotating shop NPCs that come and go ("fellow travellers") each with their own specializations. Maybe a more developed ground settlement could attract them and possibly give them permanent housing as well. And people don't seem to get my point: Dark Souls and the super hard indie platformers are the obvious inspirations to making Starbound combat tedious even if it really wasn't sold as that type of game. I also fully get the Souls' games and their combat (which has no real appeal for me.) No need for a lecture.
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Dec 17, 2014 01:55
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Orv posted:How the gently caress do you constantly play test something like that for months and come to the conclusion it's fine? More importantly, how does that keep happening in indie games? They don't play the game. Or, since I don't ever visit the Chucklefish offices, I at least doubt they play the game themselves. Sure, maybe they "test" it, you've used the /admin command right? It gives you infinite energy, item spawning, unlimited durability pickaxes, unlocks recipes, etc. They probably always use it and don't really get how lovely it plays, look at Ironicdongz's video holy poo poo doing 1 damage to the boss with a shotgun. The community gets the nightlies, so they're supposed to be the "playtesters" and it clearly doesn't work. This reminds me of a video I watched a while ago about John Romero and how he designed all of the maps in Doom- he did iterative design, meaning he played each map over and over and over and over, tweaking the design each time and making sure that each map was playable even if you died and had to respawn with only the pistol. That's why Doom is Doom and all these bad games are the way they are, the developers might not even play them.
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Dec 17, 2014 01:56
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Evil Fluffy posted:Dark Souls' difficulty is just front-loaded sensory/timing overload (like how EVE's is frontloaded with holy gently caress menus everywhere) and when you get timing down fights really aren't hard, they just aren't as easy as an auto-regen FPS. Even then the surprise you're dead moments aren't the point of the game, if the game put them in everywhere it'd be a lot worse. But all the enemies do stuff like telegraphing their attacks, they all have strengths and weaknesses, and none of them should be giant bricks of hitpoints except for stuff like some bosses and maybe a couple of enemies you don't really have to fight. It's not an especially unusual game in that respect, it's just quite easy to kill stuff and also to die. It's slightly higher stakes than normal and has a somewhat unusual physics-style combat system where you hit where your weapon goes. But otherwise it's not really a difficult or remarkable game, it's just good at being what it is. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 01:59 on Dec 17, 2014 |
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Dec 17, 2014 01:57
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OwlFancier posted:Even then the surprise you're dead moments aren't the point of the game, if the game put them in everywhere it'd be a lot worse. Those moments exist purely to teach the player in Souls. They're specifically made to catch unwary, rushing players who aren't paying attention.
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Dec 17, 2014 01:59
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I find it incredibly frustrating that simple ease-of-use/quality-of-life things aren't in there. It is clear devs don't actually play the game and just add in random poo poo whenever they get a random idea thanks to drugs or some fever-dream. Usability example: loving crates everywhere, hitting 'e' opens them, but how do you easily close them? Escape or click the X icon? Same with no loot all button. If the devs don't wanna play their own game (without dev codes/cheating) they should at least organize some focus groups and usability testing. And if there are keys for this, the should be more obviously documented.
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Dec 17, 2014 02:03
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Mokinokaro posted:Those moments exist purely to teach the player in Souls. They're specifically made to catch unwary, rushing players who aren't paying attention. Yeah the first couple should teach you 'be careful' which is important more for dealing with enemies than it is with the bullshit traps. Bullshit traps aren't common enough to be a significant obstacle but being careful in combat is a good idea. You do it out of fear of traps but it helps you more in fights. But the other thing about dark souls is that most stuff does die if you hit it a couple of times, so being careful doesn't mean you have to sit and plink away at enemies, it means waiting for or creating an opening to hit them and kill them. One of the nice things about the limited use ranged weapons and melee focus is that you always need to focus on getting good hits in. I guess maybe starbound is trying for that? But it's not achieving it, because enemies are still blobs of hitpoints with no telegraph for their attacks and no patterns to learn, so you have twitch-based enemies with weapons and damage levels designed for pattern recognition. And also the game is just stacked numerically against the player because they do less damage than the enemies do.
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Dec 17, 2014 02:04
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Koobze posted:I find it incredibly frustrating that simple ease-of-use/quality-of-life things aren't in there. It is clear devs don't actually play the game and just add in random poo poo whenever they get a random idea thanks to drugs or some fever-dream. Usability example: loving crates everywhere, hitting 'e' opens them, but how do you easily close them? Escape or click the X icon? Same with no loot all button. If the devs don't wanna play their own game (without dev codes/cheating) they should at least organize some focus groups and usability testing. I posted this in January. Bilal posted:I don't know if I'd say Starbound has a better interface than Terraria, there are a couple UI things that are driving me nuts. For example the inventory window always resets to being in the middle of the screen when you use a crafting station or campfire, right where it completely covers up your character and the area around you. So whenever I have to place objects or tiles I end up dragging the window off to the side so I can place something, then as soon as I use a crafting station I have to do it again. In addition the key for bringing up the inventory is "i" which means that I have to take my left hand off WASD, whereas in Terraria you could bring up the (fixed) inventory window with Escape. I've found it's simpler just to use the mouse to bring it up. None of this has changed.
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Dec 17, 2014 02:06
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You'd think a Dynasty Warriors-y feel would be more apropos of a game where players are going to be constantly encountering groups of random, unremarkable guys while they're on their way to an objective of some sort.
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Dec 17, 2014 02:11
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Bilal posted:I posted this in January. lol
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Dec 17, 2014 02:12
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So, related videos showed another person showing off that mission uploaded Dec 10. Whatever gun he has, absolutely DESTROYS the generic enemies and kills the minibosses in seconds (who in fact walk past him without attacking sometimes, and slow down when he's walking backwards shooting at them  ).so of course all the comments are gushing over it. Wonder what version of nightly reality that was. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5BGaU_uRRuE EDIT: vvv Ah, not particularly surprised. He learned well from the developers, only show off dangerous content when you are basically cheating (or have editing cuts handy) 
Section Z fucked around with this message at 02:23 on Dec 17, 2014 |
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Dec 17, 2014 02:15
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So wait, do Novakids lose the ability to craft melee weapons in favor of guns, or do they just straight up get to craft guns without any penalty?
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Dec 17, 2014 02:19
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Section Z posted:So, related videos showed another person showing off that mission uploaded Dec 10. Whatever gun he has, absolutely DESTROYS the generic enemies and kills the minibosses in seconds (who in fact walk past him without attacking sometimes, and slow down when he's walking backwards shooting at them Judging by the benches in his ship, he's got access to stuff at least past the first couple of bosses.
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Dec 17, 2014 02:19
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Dec 17, 2014 02:36
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OwlFancier posted:Judging by the benches in his ship, he's got access to stuff at least past the first couple of bosses. He says he's wearing rubium armor about 5 minutes in, and a gun he finds in a locker only did 1 damage a shot for 6DPS versus the 8-11 damage a shot and similar ROF of whatever it is that he's wielding. It looks like he is using near end game gear for the first non-tutorial mission.
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Dec 17, 2014 02:41
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yessssssssss
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Dec 17, 2014 02:43
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From various comments I see in the IRC, there seems to be a bug lately (since one of the rebalancings, maybe) that is making NPC's armor way too effective. So yeah, that mission is just straight-up broken. Along with basically all combat against NPCs. That was an awesome post IronicDongz, and I hope you send it to Chucklefish. I wanna digress here though, the existence of a bad gameplay experience or bug does not mean that the developers have never played their game. Quite possibly, it was actually unintentional and they may even plan to fix it. All the people going on in this thread about how nobody who works for Chucklefish has ever played the game outside of admin mode, "here I can even show you video evidence check out this clip", you sound like conspiracy gumballs. Only you know the true reality. It's unsupported by any actual evidence of any kind, but it was the simplest explanation you could come up with that supported your pre-existing notions so it must be true. They play the game. They talk about playing the game often, even with admin turned off. There are many other, more complex reasons why a game would suck, other then "derrrrr i bet they never even played it". (and let me be clear, this dungeon does suck) Incompetent coders or designers who know a game is screwed up but can't figure out how to fix a bug, or haven't bothered to rebalance something because they don't think it's important, for instance. I guess since I'm saying Chucklefish isn't flawed the way you think they are, it sounds like I'm defending them, but I'm not. They definitely are flawed. In fact, the flaws I think they have are much worse than what you suggest. It'd be fuckin' awesome if all they had to do to make a perfect game was start playing it.
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Dec 17, 2014 02:44
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IronicDongz posted:
This looks amazingly fun! No... wait, the opposite of that.
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Dec 17, 2014 02:58
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Inventories that are touching should be connected so you don't have to open a million crates to get your 1 pixels.
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Dec 17, 2014 03:16
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Reason posted:Inventories that are touching should be connected so you don't have to open a million crates to get your 1 pixels. Hmm... But what's the balance ?? How about the chests opened simultaneously this way drain your energy bar exponentially. [claps dust off hands] Time to polish up the hoop-and-stick code
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Dec 17, 2014 03:22
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If you killed things too quickly the core gameplay would be trivial, therefore:
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Dec 17, 2014 03:38
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hmm, maybe there shouldn't be 100 billion crates containing 15 pixels each everywhere.Preem Palver posted:He says he's wearing rubium armor about 5 minutes in, and a gun he finds in a locker only did 1 damage a shot for 6DPS versus the 8-11 damage a shot and similar ROF of whatever it is that he's wielding. It looks like he is using near end game gear for the first non-tutorial mission. one of that dude's commenters was having the same trouble I am.  note that that was 4 days ago. the enemies there have not been fixed, at all, in over 4 days, and gently caress up the first real mission which you need to do to unlock the loving FTL drive. this game updates nightly. not to mention they'd already made basically this same mistake wrt armor before with the armor penetration system. Koobze posted:I find it incredibly frustrating that simple ease-of-use/quality-of-life things aren't in there. It is clear devs don't actually play the game and just add in random poo poo whenever they get a random idea thanks to drugs or some fever-dream. Usability example: loving crates everywhere, hitting 'e' opens them, but how do you easily close them? Escape or click the X icon? Same with no loot all button. If the devs don't wanna play their own game (without dev codes/cheating) they should at least organize some focus groups and usability testing. Bilal posted:They probably always use it and don't really get how lovely it plays, look at Ironicdongz's video holy poo poo doing 1 damage to the boss with a shotgun. Speaking of, I just tried to do it again because I'm losing my mind This time, I took advantage of the super limited aggro ranges and the weird frameiness starbound enemies sometimes get to rush it and avoid the meatshield pink dudes. Got to zombie guy faster like that, and after a bit of needling away at him I tried to speed things up with melee. I tried 'parrying' his attacks(when you parry your shield doesn't take damage), but since his attacks don't really... have tells, eventually it broke. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RuYIIRpeUp4 And then he one-shot me. While I was wearing the best armor I could, which the game required me to have. whoooooo alright fullon nothing but cheese strats now, I don't care how long it takes I'm doin this. shotgun until out of energy, hold shield while recharging energy so the shield recharges, every time the shield recharges I can take that one hit without dying to deal a whopping 7 sword damage. any more could easily get me killed. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suc81Wzw-hI 27 minutes. It took 27 minutes, almost all of it spent on those few zombies. jesus gently caress
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Dec 17, 2014 03:42
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IronicDongz posted:27 minutes. It took 27 minutes, almost all of it spent on those few zombies. jesus gently caress The whole design of that last corridor where you fight the super-dude, and much of the rest of the dungeon, is also really lovely as well. Like I could imagine that maybe, if the balance wasn't so totally hosed, you could be jumping around and dodging the attacks of the enemies and engaging them in melee and stuff. But you can't do that because almost every area where enemies appear is a tiny corridor with no room to move at all. I saw you trying to do it in some of your videos, but there's no room for you to try to move around in, like at all. poo poo man, if you want "positioning" to be a thing you need to give room to dodge. Hell, even if they left the balance as hosed up as it is, if those corridors weren't as cramped as they were you might be able to jump around that dude a little more and get a bunch of hits in. (except, like you said, his attacks don't really have any tells, so they'd kinda need to add that, too)
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Dec 17, 2014 03:50
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Supernorn posted:I told you guys. I hope you like it!
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Dec 17, 2014 03:51
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Even the pink blobby dudes, who aren't bugged, are still really boring meatshields(with better weaponry than the base steel ones!) And attacks not like, having tells, is kind of an enormous problem if you're going to introduce parries to your melee system. They've added parrying because it's a thing other games have but as a mechanic it doesn't make sense when there's no tell, and they don't seem to be interested in changing attack animations.
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Dec 17, 2014 03:53
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDGlN6mluGA
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Dec 17, 2014 03:55
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Jesus Christ Xboxpants you're insufferable. Do you read what you write or do you just vomit onto the keyboard and hit submit?
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Dec 17, 2014 03:56
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IronicDongz posted:Even the pink blobby dudes, who aren't bugged, are still really boring meatshields(with better weaponry than the base steel ones!) A lot of monster attacks have tells, so at least they understand the concept and could theoretically make other attacks have them. Unfortunately, now they need to actually do this.
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Dec 17, 2014 03:59
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Also multi-hit attacks don't really make sense with parrying. Also also the stupid flesh vomit attack has portions of it(individual projectiles, really) sometimes go invisible which is really fun when they take off a huge amount of your shield's HP, which coincidentally is always 100 because you can apparently only craft one kind of shield
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Dec 17, 2014 04:10
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The easy zombies in that level die fairly quickly if you have a steel level ranged weapon, which you can only reliably get if you play a novakid. If you melee all you do is watch for them to do the goo spray thing and jump over them. They can't track you with it so they stop and turn around and suffle after you while swinging their T-rex arms around and dying to two handed weapons. The one in the corridor has one attack animation and just runs at you, you literally jump over him and shoot him in the back. Again, this is something that's basically only useful to a novakid because steel tier guns. Basically why the gently caress can't everyone make both guns and melee weapons (novakids only make guns, no melee weapons, but all of their armor is sheriff and wild west stuff which is great) Novakids cannot craft shields, or at least I never saw them or used them, but that's mainly because I can make guns.
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Dec 17, 2014 04:20
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Koobze posted:I find it incredibly frustrating that simple ease-of-use/quality-of-life things aren't in there. It is clear devs don't actually play the game and just add in random poo poo whenever they get a random idea thanks to drugs or some fever-dream. Usability example: loving crates everywhere, hitting 'e' opens them, but how do you easily close them? Escape or click the X icon? 'e' used to close them again as well, but it was changed. The new way is much simpler. Now all you have to do is this: quote:Edit once more: If you don't understand why it's more player-friendly to make users simply dig through the game's config files, with no direction from the game whatsoever that such a thing is even possible, in order to edit the keybindings by giving them new functionality, then I just don't know what to say to you good sir.
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Dec 17, 2014 04:43
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IronicDongz posted:lmao rubium armor, let's do tutorial missions with endgame gear Fun note: At one point that guy actually loses a bunch of HP when one of the low-level pink guys pokes him like, twice. BALANCE
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Dec 17, 2014 05:46
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XboxPants posted:'e' used to close them again as well, but it was changed. The new way is much simpler. Now all you have to do is this: If I didn't know any better, I would swear you work for ChuckleFish. Oh wait, you're actually providing really good information and helping me enjoy the game, no way you'd be working for them. Thanks!!
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Dec 17, 2014 06:04
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