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muscles like this? posted:Recently finished playing through the story mode in Black Ops 3 and man, that game is needlessly obtuse. Like all the setting background is hidden away on a fake internet. Also some of the story stuff just doesn't make a lot of sense. Like before the last mission you undergo some kind of procedure that is never explained and doesn't seem to change anything. You know that thing where a bunch of text scrolls past the screen really fast at the start of the mission, and then a few words get highlighted to form the mission's title card. Apparently the big twist is hidden in there: Your character died on the operating table after the first mission, everything after the Matrix-style training mission is your character's DNI freaking out as your brain dies and it creates a confusing mess of a storyline stitched together from your character's life and the Law and Order guy's last mission to track down a traitor in the Singapore quarantine zone since your DNIs were synced at the time of death. This is why things like hooking up with the bad guy's ex and the weird surgery thing happen (the surgery was the villain getting his bionic upgrades). It's been months and I still can't tell if that's clever or stupid. The fake Internet thing is really weird, I never thought Call of Duty, of all series, would hide all its plot behind a codex. It just kinda shouts at you that you have to stop the NRC because they're aligned with the CDP to take down Egypt, the Wilson Accord's last ally in the region!!! and if you want to know what the hell any of that means, well, read these fake Wikipedia articles in the safehouse between missions.
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Mar 6, 2016 04:18
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Developers please stop putting enemy scaling into your games. Seriously who is even asking for this poo poo?
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Mar 6, 2016 06:32
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kazil posted:Developers please stop putting enemy scaling into your games. Seriously who is even asking for this poo poo? In the same vein: Stop putting loot scaling in games. Nothing makes me not care about my loot more then the knowledge that its going to be outdated in like 4 levels. Why would I want to upgrade my iron equipment in Skyrim when steel equipment drops at level 5? And why upgrade that when dwarven equipment drops 5 levels after that? This ebony armor of +50 speed is nice but dragon armor drops next level and the defense bonus offsets the enchantment of the previous armor, and surely I'll come across another armor with a bonus to speed but since its a higher leveled armor it'll have +60 instead of +50. Its just because balancing is haaaard so just make everything scale to the player and call it good.
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Mar 6, 2016 09:35
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XCOM: Enemy Unknown: It's a loving XCOM game. ARGH! Specifically I hate how none of my crew is psionic and apparently that's a requirement to finish the game. C'mon you shits, get it together.
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Mar 6, 2016 09:49
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Leal posted:In the same vein: Stop putting loot scaling in games. Nothing makes me not care about my loot more then the knowledge that its going to be outdated in like 4 levels. Why would I want to upgrade my iron equipment in Skyrim when steel equipment drops at level 5? And why upgrade that when dwarven equipment drops 5 levels after that? This ebony armor of +50 speed is nice but dragon armor drops next level and the defense bonus offsets the enchantment of the previous armor, and surely I'll come across another armor with a bonus to speed but since its a higher leveled armor it'll have +60 instead of +50. I'm personally okay with loot scaling, as long as the game doesn't also have rare drops. That bit me in the rear end in Borderlands; I got a purple-rarity sniper rifle really early on, which was great until I started to outlevel it. It was rarer than all the guns I was finding, so I couldn't reasonably compare it, but after a point it was also clearly a lot worse than all the other sniper rifles I was finding. Which was disappointing, since I'd grown attached to that sniper rifle since it was clearly rare, and rad as hell at the time I got it. I'll poo poo on Skyrim all day, but that was something they managed to do well, albeit possibly by accident. Since you can enchant items far beyond what you can find in the wild (if you've focused on it, at least) you don't have to make do with what you've got, but the way they actually statted the armors meant that most of them hit the defense cap if upgraded anyway, it's just a matter of how much upgrading it takes. Off the top of my head I think any heavy armor Dwarven or above can hit the defense cap, and with light armor it's that the top three types can do it.
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Mar 6, 2016 09:54
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Legendary special super items should probably not have a remote, let alone very very good chance to be obsoleted by random loot though, and that there is a defense cap and/or it's so easy to hit is imo another problem, not a defense of the fact.
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Mar 6, 2016 09:59
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AlphaKretin posted:Legendary special super items should probably not have a remote, let alone very very good chance to be obsoleted by random loot though, and that there is a defense cap and/or it's so easy to hit is imo another problem, not a defense of the fact. Borderlands was really bad for this though, because legendary weaponry was still tied to their abysmal level = armour scaling system. So a weapon five levels down from an enemy was just mathematically always worse than most weapons the same level as that enemy, even if the weapon was ultra-rare legendary poo poo. Skyrim also had a stupid thing with legendaries- they scaled to you at the point when they dropped, so if you did a quest for, say, a superpowered hammer of the gods, and you finished that quest at level 10, you were stuck with the level 1-15 (or whatever) version of that hammer. There were like five versions of each legendary weapon and the last version was just better in every way than the first version. Titan Quest (once again) did this poo poo right- there are three levels of "great" gear in that game. Green stuff is the best tier of stuff that doesn't get its own name, and can outclass some blues if it's exactly what your build is looking for. Blue stuff is legendary, uniquely named and usually loaded with stuff that Green can't get, it hangs around for a while but will eventually be outpaced. And purple drops are, no matter when they drop, end-game stuff, but they can drop for someone who is in no way ready to equip them. You can get an item for a level 50 character at level 30 or so. They're included to give players something very loving special to build toward. Also enemies who have legendary gear and can equip gear will be wearing that poo poo when you fight them, so random beastman archer #431 with a shiny bow will wreck your poo poo until you drop him and then you get the bow that he used to wreck your poo poo.
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Mar 6, 2016 10:26
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Oh I was specifically talking about Cleretic's claim that it doesn't matter if your scaled-down legendary armor is beaten by a higher level generic one because at 100 smithing almost anything will hit the arbitrary cap. What you're talking about with Skyrim is what I meant by said good chance to be obsoleted.
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Mar 6, 2016 10:31
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Somfin posted:Skyrim also had a stupid thing with legendaries- they scaled to you at the point when they dropped, so if you did a quest for, say, a superpowered hammer of the gods, and you finished that quest at level 10, you were stuck with the level 1-15 (or whatever) version of that hammer. There were like five versions of each legendary weapon and the last version was just better in every way than the first version. That started in oblivion. I hate it so loving much. Oh, a fun, unique quest promising powerful rewards? Better leave it until I'm at least level 20 because otherwise I'll get the poo poo tier equipment. God forbid players get something too powerful and break the masterful combat of this elder scrolls game. One of my favourite oblivion mods added an item rescaler you could activate to re-tier your quest stuff.
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Mar 6, 2016 11:11
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Funnily enough there's one set of equipment in (goty edition but vanilla) Oblivion that you can rescale. The Knights of the Nine Crusader gear can be put back on their pedestal, and taking them off gives you a new, full-condition, level scaled set.  (:goonsay101:?)
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Mar 6, 2016 11:15
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Gitro posted:That started in oblivion. I hate it so loving much. Oh, a fun, unique quest promising powerful rewards? Better leave it until I'm at least level 20 because otherwise I'll get the poo poo tier equipment. God forbid players get something too powerful and break the masterful combat of this elder scrolls game. That actually started and ended with Oblivion. Skyrim has the ability to have scaled items, but I think the only item you can get that's actually got that scaling enabled is Chillrend, a sword you can steal during the Thieves' Guild questline (that isn't very good anyway). Fallout 3 might have it, but I don't remember seeing it. Bethesda games have so many things dragging them down that it's hard to keep track of which ones are actually in play at any given point.
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Mar 6, 2016 12:59
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Cleretic posted:Bethesda games have so many things dragging them down that it's hard to keep track of which ones are actually in play at any given point. I'll say.  My inital reaction was "wait what no" but I'm thinking and I can't come up with an example of anything else that scales. It's no longer relevant to what started this line of discussion but I guess my contribution/complaint is now "The defense cap makes higher-level rewards worthless".
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Mar 6, 2016 13:04
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Cleretic posted:That actually started and ended with Oblivion. Skyrim has the ability to have scaled items, but I think the only item you can get that's actually got that scaling enabled is Chillrend, a sword you can steal during the Thieves' Guild questline (that isn't very good anyway). Fallout 3 might have it, but I don't remember seeing it. Really? Dang. Credit where it's due, bethesda at least doesn't shy away from changing up their game's mechanics in small and large ways. Daggerfall had huge skill bloat that was cut down in Morrowind (and also the random dungeons jesus gently caress), Oblivion saw them switch to a deterministic combat system and Skyrim did away with attributes and the major/minor skill system entirely. I like that sometimes you can see the kernel of the idea in the previous game. Unfortunately some of those ideas are poo poo. At least they got rid of that particular one after one game, although then they level-locked daedric quests anyway. Don't think it was in FO3 at all. AlphaKretin posted:Funnily enough there's one set of equipment in (goty edition but vanilla) Oblivion that you can rescale. The Knights of the Nine Crusader gear can be put back on their pedestal, and taking them off gives you a new, full-condition, level scaled set. Oh yeah that armour that doing the Dark Brotherhood or Thieves guild questline, or getting caught criming locked you out of on pain of running to a bunch of shrines or some poo poo  I kind of like the idea that your mighty smith powers let you turn your average dwarven plate into armour on par with legendary daedric artifacts or hellforged ebony, but it's such a necessary/easy top develop skill for any physical attacker that it really cheapens it. Also the fact that it's probably worthless to strengthen ebony/daedric armour past a point unless you want to play dressups with lesser armour types
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Mar 6, 2016 13:16
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Fallout 3 equipment doesn't scale at all it has leveled lists that determine what your enemies are using based on your level. Fallout 4 has it to some degree where weapons get better mods as you progress but they're easily switched out anyway and uniques are fixed. You can still mod them too but there's a hard cap on poo poo is what I'm saying.
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Mar 6, 2016 18:18
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The fact I can't play Stardew Valley on my phone. I'm addicted to that drat game.
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Mar 6, 2016 18:23
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Sleeveless posted:The final boss of the original Silent Hill was set up so that he would only die when you ran out of ammo. In theory this meant that it would be a tense fight where your final bullet kills him, in execution you can dump all your ammo and then walk into the room and he dies immediately. It's a bit late, but Incubus/Incubator do actually have health bars. The thing with those fights is, unlike any of the other bosses, they float out of melee range. The last bullet/no ammo thing is to make sure the player can't accidentally render the game totally unwinnable by missing too many of their shots or coming into the last section without enough ammo. Tangentially related, the thing dragging down Silent Hill 2 the most is probably Brookhaven Hospital. It's just so dull. It's a lot of narrow corridors with kind of durable enemies, but by that point you're probably drowning in bullets and they're super prone to flinching so it really just means you're in for a slog between puzzles. The only real challenge is sometimes you have a tagalong, Maria, who is only just sort of decent at not getting murdered. The Otherworld section is also pretty tame compared to, say, Alchemilla Hospital in SH1. In Alchemilla there's a neat moment when the elevator you use to get around suddenly has a button for a non-existent fourth floor, and it drops you off in a pretty radically altered industrial hellscape. In Brookhaven you just sort of run down a long hallway with Maria to escape from Pyramid Head, who is pretty slow, and if he catches you he kills Maria and you gotta do it over again. If you get through it he kills Maria anyways, but now you get to go to the Otherworld version of Brookhaven. Where you just walk out the front door and off to something way more interesting. There's a moment where a gameshow announcer hijacks the hospital PA, but it's pretty short and more a "huh, okay" kind of weird instead of an off-putting or creepy weird. TGLT has a new favorite as of 21:22 on Mar 6, 2016 |
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Mar 6, 2016 21:17
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Reading about these old games makes me want to play them again, or for the first time depending on the game, but then I remember the last time I tried to after having played new gen games and seeing how lovely the controls and/ or camera angles (Silent Hill 1&2 hallways for example) were back in those days and they're practically unplayable. I couldn't even get through like 3 hours of San Andreas.
Thin Privilege has a new favorite as of 23:24 on Mar 6, 2016 |
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Mar 6, 2016 23:22
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There are old games I can replay to this day without a problem and some I just can't get into anymore. I recently tried to get back into Baldur's Gate and while I don't generally mind most things second edition D&D rules are much more tedious than I remembered them.
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Mar 7, 2016 02:14
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TGLT posted:Tangentially related, the thing dragging down Silent Hill 2 the most is probably Brookhaven Hospital. It's just so dull. It's a lot of narrow corridors with kind of durable enemies, but by that point you're probably drowning in bullets and they're super prone to flinching so it really just means you're in for a slog between puzzles. The only real challenge is sometimes you have a tagalong, Maria, who is only just sort of decent at not getting murdered. Just don't fight them?
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Mar 7, 2016 02:23
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Morglon posted:There are old games I can replay to this day without a problem and some I just can't get into anymore. I recently tried to get back into Baldur's Gate and while I don't generally mind most things second edition D&D rules are much more tedious than I remembered them. I genuinely regret missing out on the Baldur's Gate series. It seems like it would be the perfect game for being a kid with unlimited free time but as an adult is just a tedious slog.
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Mar 7, 2016 02:40
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Sleeveless posted:I genuinely regret missing out on the Baldur's Gate series. It seems like it would be the perfect game for being a kid with unlimited free time but as an adult is just a tedious slog. As a kid, it was a tedious slog.
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Mar 7, 2016 02:46
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I recently purchased Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast and as far as I'm concerned the level design team should be tried as war criminals. Many of the solutions to progress make no sense, there's no indication on where you should head next most of the time, and many of the panels that unlock doors blend in perfectly. Maybe I'm spoiled by modern gaming more or less holding your hand at all times, but this game was the first time in years I had to look up a guide online.
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Mar 7, 2016 06:23
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moosecow333 posted:I recently purchased Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast and as far as I'm concerned the level design team should be tried as war criminals. Many of the solutions to progress make no sense, there's no indication on where you should head next most of the time, and many of the panels that unlock doors blend in perfectly. A LOT of old FPSes had that problem. In the mid-late 90's, half the time level design was "hunt down the blue key for the blue door, and spend your time wandering in circles until you stumble on the drat thing accidentally", so JKII was an improvement, if you can believe it.
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Mar 7, 2016 06:28
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Silent Hill 2 is a game I tremendously enjoyed playing, and I feel like it was one of the better gaming experiences I've had, but man I would never even consider playing it again.
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Mar 7, 2016 06:45
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Sleeveless posted:I genuinely regret missing out on the Baldur's Gate series. It seems like it would be the perfect game for being a kid with unlimited free time but as an adult is just a tedious slog. It's no more of a tedious slog than other games of its type, though I've never quite finished it. I still have a savegame halfway through Throne of Bhaal, the farthest I've ever gotten. I think it's just that when it comes to this sort of thing, contrary to popular belief, many adults have shorter attention spans now than they did when they were children. The combination of Steam + high-speed Internet + disposable income has spoiled us.
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Mar 7, 2016 08:10
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Ugly In The Morning posted:A LOT of old FPSes had that problem. In the mid-late 90's, half the time level design was "hunt down the blue key for the blue door, and spend your time wandering in circles until you stumble on the drat thing accidentally", so JKII was an improvement, if you can believe it. Yeah, I had JK: Dark Forces 2. I loved blowing poo poo up with that railgun that stuck bombs to people, but poo poo like this is why I busted out cheat codes so often in the 90's. It's not that I want to ruin the game, I just want to spawn in all the weapons and have fun instead of playing Donkey Kong 64: First Person Edition.
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Mar 7, 2016 08:44
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Sleeveless posted:I genuinely regret missing out on the Baldur's Gate series. It seems like it would be the perfect game for being a kid with unlimited free time but as an adult is just a tedious slog. If you haven't looked into it, Pillars of Eternity was my favorite game of last year for exactly this reason. I love Baldur's Gate and that era of RPG in theory, because they're very much the kind of RPG I want when I play them, but they feel so loving old and tedious. Pillars of Eternity has all the reasons you'd want to play a game like that, but none of the reasons you'd hate actually playing it. In a completely unrelated complaint: I've been really enjoying Final Fantasy Record Keeper, if for no other reason than it's a fun occasional diversion that also lets me compose a party including Exdeath, Gilgamesh, Kefka and Jecht. They recently revamped the quest system, which is good, because the old system was bloated, convoluted and annoying. Unfortunately, the old quest system was also the way they provided most of the available party members, and while they're planning a whole separate system to replace that, it's not actually in the game yet. Without that system, you have to wait until you stumble upon either one of the rare regular dungeons that has a new character as a reward (who are usually boring generic classes, with one or two historical party members from a game you're doing content from) or look to the limited-time event dungeons that are based on a specific game. This unfortunately means that right now I've got no reason to get excited to play, since the the event dungeons currently available are for FF games I don't actually like. Wouldn't be so bad if the way the game's regular dungeons were laid out that I'm in the middle of an unbroken megastreak of FFIV, which I'm also not super into. Even that would be tolerable if it gave me more FFIV characters to play with, but nope! Just Kain and Rydia, because nobody else is currently obtainable.
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Mar 7, 2016 09:05
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Sleeveless posted:I genuinely regret missing out on the Baldur's Gate series. It seems like it would be the perfect game for being a kid with unlimited free time but as an adult is just a tedious slog.
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Mar 7, 2016 12:59
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Somfin posted:Borderlands was really bad for this though, because legendary weaponry was still tied to their abysmal level = armour scaling system. So a weapon five levels down from an enemy was just mathematically always worse than most weapons the same level as that enemy, even if the weapon was ultra-rare legendary poo poo. Borderlands is a mess.
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Mar 7, 2016 13:06
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Lunchmeat Larry posted:I’m a huge CRPG nut and I’ve never really liked Baldur’s Gate. Real time with pause combat just kind of sucks and nothing else about the game is fleshed out enough to make up for it. The first one is especially bad because you spend most of it in completely empty wilderness areas wandering up and down/back and forth wiping the fog of war away like a loving window cleaner to find the one interesting thing per massive map. 2 at least is impressive in scope and variety with some imaginative quests, but I wish the actual game were more enjoyable to play. I can see where you're coming from but to me the pause combat is a nice middle ground between real time strategy and turn based. In big turn based fights I really hate waiting around for the ai to do its thing, like in the recentish divinity original sin there were one or two fights where you just sat around for too long. On the other hand pure rts style has way less complicated stuff you can do when managing multiple characters. Baldurs Gate 1 would be rough as gently caress to go back to though.
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Mar 7, 2016 13:23
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Goofballs posted:I can see where you're coming from but to me the pause combat is a nice middle ground between real time strategy and turn based. In big turn based fights I really hate waiting around for the ai to do its thing, like in the recentish divinity original sin there were one or two fights where you just sat around for too long. On the other hand pure rts style has way less complicated stuff you can do when managing multiple characters.
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Mar 7, 2016 13:28
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Lunchmeat Larry posted:Real time with pause combat just kind of sucks Fallout: Tactics 
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Mar 7, 2016 13:32
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Cleretic posted:Telltale have been doing a Minecraft adventure game, but by all reports it's not one of their good ones. I watched the Bro Team video of it on Youtube and it's hilarious. He pressed maybe four buttons throughout the entire thing. The game just plays itself with minimal input and 80 percent of it is people standing around talking... Y'know, the think Minecraft is famous for. Also I agree with people saying they'd never replay old games. Let's Play videos might get a lot of flak, but no way was I playing Silent Hill again so I watched someone else do it as I got some work done.
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Mar 7, 2016 14:31
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FactsAreUseless posted:This is compounded - and partially fixed but only by accident - by the fact that damage calculations and the way skills interact with weapons are insane. In Borderlands 2 it's completely possible to solo super-hard raid bosses with lovely equipment because something about your skill setup means that its damage stat doesn't actually matter. But only with certain characters and builds. Unless something about that interaction is bugged. Or it interacts weirdly with another piece of equipment. Or the skill description just lies to you. Or Yeah it is. Which is too bad because it's so close to hitting all the same notes that Diablo does, but for shooters, except they managed to just slightly gently caress up everything about it and so it's not a super great game to play.
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Mar 7, 2016 14:40
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RyokoTK posted:Silent Hill 2 is a game I tremendously enjoyed playing, and I feel like it was one of the better gaming experiences I've had, but man I would never even consider playing it again. Same but with Deadly Premonition. I love it to death and recommend it wholeheartadly but god dammit never again.
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Mar 7, 2016 14:46
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RyokoTK posted:Yeah it is. Which is too bad because it's so close to hitting all the same notes that Diablo does, but for shooters, except they managed to just slightly gently caress up everything about it and so it's not a super great game to play.
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Mar 7, 2016 15:21
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The thing dragging down all of Borderlands is that they made three games with a formula that got old during the first one.
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Mar 7, 2016 15:32
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FactsAreUseless posted:The biggest issue for me with Borderlands 2 is how much it resists letting players have distinct builds for a good 20 hours of the game. It takes five levels just to get your active skill, and most of the abilities you get in the next ten levels are gradual bonuses to reload speed, fire rate, etc. You don't get to do the things your class is designed to do for a crazy long time. One active ability per class; everything else is a passive ability. And you need to put five points into one tier of a tree to reach the next tier. It's such a dumb skill system.
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Mar 7, 2016 15:40
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RyokoTK posted:One active ability per class; everything else is a passive ability. And you need to put five points into one tier of a tree to reach the next tier. It's such a dumb skill system. It's also dumb because finding new weapons can totally change up your playstyle, since weapons aren't class-specific, but your skills don't grow quickly to match. I think a giant web of abilities ala Path of Exile would work much better with the game's emphasis on continual small changes.
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Mar 7, 2016 15:46
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Everything I hear about Borderlands makes me think that loving Hellgate:London really was an underappreciated classic and not, you know, pretty bad...
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Mar 7, 2016 15:53
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