Early FPS Megathread: the kids need to learn about TekWar sooner or later

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > Retro Games > Early FPS Megathread: the kids need to learn about TekWar sooner or later

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An Actual Princess: Dec 23, 2006

Groovelord Neato posted:

I played DUSK in one day I could not put it down. And I rarely game nowadays.

dusk is untouchably great though

# ? Aug 6, 2022 03:12

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# ? Jun 4, 2024 22:01

Heavy Metal: Sep 1, 2014; America's $1 Funnyman

I should get back to Dusk, played the first episode, or most of it. Got to levels where you started seeing more commando-y humans. Been some years, on a new comp now, forget if I have the save file.

Anybody play Dusk on a controller? For the record I actually got ok at playing Action Half-Life on a controller. I see some patch notes for Dusk from November added a bunch of controller settings.

# ? Aug 6, 2022 03:30

SeANMcBAY: Jun 28, 2006; Look on the bright side.

It controls great with a controller. I play it on Switch.

# ? Aug 6, 2022 03:33

Heavy Metal: Sep 1, 2014; America's $1 Funnyman

Nice to hear, I'll pop that up the play list.

# ? Aug 6, 2022 03:35

treat: Jul 24, 2008; by the sex ghost

Groovelord Neato posted:

I played DUSK in one day I could not put it down. And I rarely game nowadays.

Same, but I also got to play the hell out of episode 1 and pine over how great the rest of the game would be. Things like HROT and Ultrakill are things I think would be worth it.

# ? Aug 6, 2022 03:37

Barudak: May 7, 2007

Prodeus still has big bevvys of areas that are like "future content goes here" and Im suspicious if that content will ever actually exist.

# ? Aug 6, 2022 03:45

Cream-of-Plenty: Apr 21, 2010; "The world is a hellish place, and bad writing is destroying the quality of our suffering."

Nowadays, I'm definitely in the "wait until 1.0" camp when it comes to EA. I might occasionally buy the game (if it's cheaper during EA) and play around for a bit, but I won't seriously check it out until it claims it's feature-complete. I think it's great* that people have the opportunity to get their hands on something as early as possible if they really want it, but me? I like to eat the burger when all of the constituent ingredients are finally in place.

*Generally great; there are certainly examples of EA gone awry.

Cream-of-Plenty fucked around with this message at 05:10 on Aug 6, 2022

# ? Aug 6, 2022 05:07

Volte: Oct 4, 2004; woosh woosh

I had the most fun with Dead Cells when it was in early access and it gradually got more and more tuned towards die hards and they kept nerfing the most fun power combinations and making the game harder and harder until I just didn�t have any interest in it anymore by the time it hit 1.0. A real shame because I loved it at first.

# ? Aug 6, 2022 05:13

Cream-of-Plenty: Apr 21, 2010; "The world is a hellish place, and bad writing is destroying the quality of our suffering."

Volte posted:

I had the most fun with Dead Cells when it was in early access and it gradually got more and more tuned towards die hards and they kept nerfing the most fun power combinations and making the game harder and harder until I just didn�t have any interest in it anymore by the time it hit 1.0. A real shame because I loved it at first.

Yeah Dead Cells is an interesting example. The die-hards who had been playing the crap out of the game since Day 0 seemed to be the most vocal, and they kept tweaking the game further and further toward something that might only really appeal to a small segment of the population.

Fortunately, I think they've gone back and, through an enormous number of revisions and patches, re-tuned a lot of it to be much more welcoming to ordinary players like you or me (at least between normal and up to BC3 or so; it's fine if BC4+ is still crazy difficult). I feel like it's a lot more accessible now than it was shortly after "full" release. It's actually kind of wild that they continue to add to the game--both through paid DLC and a lot of free content.

# ? Aug 6, 2022 05:36

Al Cu Ad Solte: Nov 30, 2005; Searching for
a righteous cause

https://twitter.com/RuffvanVEVO/status/1555648390364598272

# ? Aug 6, 2022 05:54

Quantum of Phallus: Dec 27, 2010

SeANMcBAY posted:

They just reconfirmed Prodeus for Switch

Sweet

# ? Aug 6, 2022 08:30

Rev. Melchisedech Howler: Sep 5, 2006; You know. Leather.

Cream-of-Plenty posted:

Yeah Dead Cells is an interesting example. The die-hards who had been playing the crap out of the game since Day 0 seemed to be the most vocal, and they kept tweaking the game further and further toward something that might only really appeal to a small segment of the population.

Fortunately, I think they've gone back and, through an enormous number of revisions and patches, re-tuned a lot of it to be much more welcoming to ordinary players like you or me (at least between normal and up to BC3 or so; it's fine if BC4+ is still crazy difficult). I feel like it's a lot more accessible now than it was shortly after "full" release. It's actually kind of wild that they continue to add to the game--both through paid DLC and a lot of free content.

Agreed, Dead Cells is very welcoming now. For example, it used to have one of those unwelcoming optimum strats that you'd need to read a wiki to realise, where leveling up your stats generally made everything harder. All of that sort of stuff has been binned and they've even added modes where you can one hit kill everything etc should you want along with lots of accessibility options.

# ? Aug 6, 2022 09:05

The Kins: Oct 2, 2004

I played Dead Cells exactly once when it landed on Game Pass (so no DLC) and I some how managed to make it all the way to whatever the �normal� no-DLC-or-secrets end boss was and beat them on my very first run. The RNG probably gave me some incredibly OP weapons, but still. Felt like I�d reached the mountain summit without having to fight for it. Didn�t feel a need for a round two, even if I could rip my own head off now�

Incidentally, the original designer of Dead Cells went indie and made a cute, cheap little puzzle platformer: Nuclear Blaze. Short, and it gets a bit repetitive by the end, but I quite enjoyed it, and he�s since kicked out a harder, more complex remixed mode for free. To be fair though, I might be biased since I really, really wish there were more non-shovelware firefighting games out there�

Back on topic, I played through the first loop of the new Cyriak mapset I mentioned earlier, and it was a blast. Short, but some wonderfully inventive abuse of Boom tricks and some real cool set pieces. Worth a spin!

# ? Aug 6, 2022 10:18

Turin Turambar: Jun 5, 2011

Yeah, even not counting the new accessibility options they added in Dead Cells two updates ago, they also made the game easier in general around updates 1.1-1.3.

# ? Aug 6, 2022 10:20

ExcessBLarg!: Sep 1, 2001

I played Dead Cells for a while when it first came out but dropped off. With all the updates that have gone into it does it makes sense to start over? When I start it now there's an overwhelming amount of stuff in the Prisoner area.

# ? Aug 6, 2022 13:28

Convex: Aug 19, 2010

Dark Messiah of Might & Magic, the best FPS kicking game in existence, is �1.07 on Steam right now.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XS49Dazin3E

# ? Aug 6, 2022 13:42

Quantum of Phallus: Dec 27, 2010

Convex posted:

Dark Messiah of Might & Magic, the best FPS kicking game in existence, is �1.07 on Steam right now.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XS49Dazin3E

Game owns. The villain is so hammy.
�Impalll him Sareth�
Yes!!!!

# ? Aug 6, 2022 13:43

Volte: Oct 4, 2004; woosh woosh

Interesting to hear about Dead Cells, I kind of stopped paying attention after it came out and I figured it had turned into a game that wasn't for me. I'll have to give it another shot.

# ? Aug 6, 2022 13:47

Guillermus: Dec 28, 2009

Convex posted:

Dark Messiah of Might & Magic, the best FPS kicking game in existence, is �1.07 on Steam right now.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XS49Dazin3E

Dark Messiah of M&M loving owns. It's not perfect but The Adventures of Sir Kicksalot Deathboot in the Land of the Conspicuously Placed Spike Racks is super fun to play.

# ? Aug 6, 2022 14:03

Angry_Ed: Mar 30, 2010; Grimey Drawer

Dark Messiah's largest crime is over-reliance on spiders in areas where the conspicuously-placed spikes don't exist. Aside from that it's pretty awesome.

Angry_Ed fucked around with this message at 14:52 on Aug 6, 2022

# ? Aug 6, 2022 14:50

Convex: Aug 19, 2010

Angry_Ed posted:

Dark Messiah's largest crime is over-reliance on spiders in areas where the conspicuously-placed spikes don't exist. Aside from that it's pretty awesome.

https://www.gamefront.com/games/dark-messiah-of-might-and-magic/file/no-spider-patch

quote:

If you want to play Dark Messiah without spiders, download this ZIPfile I put together and then read the README.txt file in the ZIPfile.

It replaces all small and regular spiders with pigs, so if you're uncomfortable with pigs as well then this wont help! In most cases, you can just walk past the pigs, but there is at least one scenario where you have to kill all the pigs to proceed.

The Queen Spider is still in, but she auto-dies after a few seconds so you can just run back toward the elevator then let her die by herself. She's too big to follow you to the elevator.

# ? Aug 6, 2022 15:27

Tiny Timbs: Sep 6, 2008

Its biggest crime was making the kick take so much stamina I had to spend way too much of the game not kicking

# ? Aug 6, 2022 15:29

Mordja: Apr 26, 2014; Hell Gem

You know, Dark Messiah might be the platonic ideal of RPG elements in an action game. You've got some skill trees that let you do fun, new stuff, you've got some items you can find that make you more powerful at specified intervals, but you're not checking your inventory every couple of minutes for the next incremental upgrade just so you can keep up with a cast of leveled enemies whose health and damage inexplicably balloons because a number next to their health bars goes higher.

# ? Aug 6, 2022 15:42

Shadow Hog: Feb 23, 2014; Avatar by Jon Davies

Automata 10 Pack posted:

Quake 2 with all the console ports and mod support would be rad.

They would probably leave RTX out. Which is fine. It�s a gimmick.

SeANMcBAY posted:

They should leave RTX out since it looks like poo poo.

Quantum of Phallus posted:

Not gonna let these pass without defense - the RTX is far and away the most interesting thing about Quake II to me in 2022, and leaving it out of any console remaster (Switch excepted for obvious reasons) would be a goddamn waste. Setting the skybox time-of-day emulation to real-time x12 and then seeing the sun rise and set on Stroggos while I went around fragging was the closest I've felt to a "now THIS is next-generation" experience since the 3DS came out; even the literal next-generation of consoles that came out after it didn't evoke that feeling from me. Q2RTX and Minecraft's raytracing have made me a believer in the feature in a way that pretty much no other implementation has (everything else uses it for reflections or subtle lighting/shadow tweaks, which is good but not revelatory), and it's a shame to me that Nvidia's "let's take old games with basic graphics by today's standards and jazz them up by making their renders work solely with real-time path-tracing" program seems to have completely stopped with those two titles.

# ? Aug 6, 2022 16:35

Al Cu Ad Solte: Nov 30, 2005; Searching for
a righteous cause

How does that run on modern PCs? I haven't played it since it came out.

# ? Aug 6, 2022 16:45

ExcessBLarg!: Sep 1, 2001

What's the point of Q2RTX though, just a tech demo?

I doubt they sold additional copies of Quake II with it. They didn't make the game more accessible (like Quake Remaster on modern consoles) either.

# ? Aug 6, 2022 16:59

SeANMcBAY: Jun 28, 2006; Look on the bright side.

I still think it looks bad and not cohesive at all with the old art direction.

# ? Aug 6, 2022 17:09

Guillermus: Dec 28, 2009

Al Cu Ad Solte posted:

How does that run on modern PCs? I haven't played it since it came out.

Runs perfectly fine, last time I played (last Christmas)

ExcessBLarg! posted:

What's the point of Q2RTX though, just a tech demo?

I doubt they sold additional copies of Quake II with it. They didn't make the game more accessible (like Quake Remaster on modern consoles) either.

Q2RTX is a tech demo yes. It was basically to show off RTX on an old game for shiny purposes.

# ? Aug 6, 2022 17:13

repiv: Aug 13, 2009

It started as part of a university research project developing the rendering tech, then Nvidia picked it up and added some more polish

If they just wanted to make Q2 look nicer they could have got 90% of the way there without using raytracing, but the point was to validate the RT tech more than make a practical remaster

# ? Aug 6, 2022 17:23

Shadow Hog: Feb 23, 2014; Avatar by Jon Davies

SeANMcBAY posted:

I still think it looks bad and not cohesive at all with the old art direction.

I can't agree with this at all. Not only does it look incredible, but it's one of the few "HD retexturing" jobs that feels perfectly in line with the original art. I'm sure a side-by-side can (and probably did in the past) disavow me of the illusion for the latter but it's rare enough for me to like any of these kinds of HD remaster jobs (for instance, I don't like the new textures in the Perfect Dark XBLA port, and the fact you can't go back to the original assets really annoys me), so I think it fooling me at all is high enough praise.

Al Cu Ad Solte posted:

How does that run on modern PCs? I haven't played it since it came out.

Having just ended a session of this since this discussion reminded me I never beat it, my i7-7700K and RTX3080 can hit 90-100 FPS at 2K/1440p without any resolution scaling, and setting it to resolution scale to target 120 or 140 FPS generally only goes as low as 80%. My GTX1080 on the same system (before I lucked into the 3080 in 2020) previously could hit 60FPS at a resolution scale of 30%-ish. I believe the thing is now supported on Radeon cards, but I haven't used one of those past the HD5870 so I can't comment on its performance there; generally the RX6n00 line is somewhere around the RTX20n0 line in terms of RT performance (despite generally matching the RTX30n0 in raster performance), so maybe reference some RT benchmarks for those cards and extrapolate from there. I imagine the scaling is going to purely be off of GPU power, so the now-weak-ish CPU I'm using shouldn't really be a huge factor here.

ExcessBLarg! posted:

What's the point of Q2RTX though, just a tech demo?

I doubt they sold additional copies of Quake II with it. They didn't make the game more accessible (like Quake Remaster on modern consoles) either.

I mean, I don't think making it more accessible was the goal; you were required to own a copy of Quake 2 to play it past the demo levels (though it can source the relevant files straight from your Steam library, as needed). "Tech demo" is probably the aptest descriptor (so in line with Quake 2 itself, really), but it's one I'm pretty high on.

I won't say I have zero complaints. For one, the addition of a flare gun is nice, especially since I never use grenades (they're so slow) and it uses those as a flare source so I'm finally not wasting opportunities to use those resources, but I'd prefer a flashlight, in all honesty. For another... it's still Quake 2. Weapon-switching is really slow, enemy stun animations are just a bit too fast relative to your firing rate making shooting everything down without taking any damage yourself harder than it is in Doom or Quake prior, etc. I still think I prefer the gunplay of it to Unreal, problematic as it is, but Unreal has better everything else.

# ? Aug 6, 2022 17:42

Tiny Timbs: Sep 6, 2008

repiv posted:

It started as part of a university research project developing the rendering tech, then Nvidia picked it up and added some more polish

If they just wanted to make Q2 look nicer they could have got 90% of the way there without using raytracing, but the point was to validate the RT tech more than make a practical remaster

Yeah it honestly doesn�t look impressive at all, though I understand the technical achievement.

# ? Aug 6, 2022 17:43

repiv: Aug 13, 2009

The big contradiction in Q2RTX is the main benefit of the rendering tech is that it works in extremely dynamic lighting and environment setups, but it's a game built around 1997 constraints so nearly everything is static :v:

For the purposes of research it's enough to know that it would still work in a more dynamic game, but as far as the end user is concerned it's just a slow way of getting the quality of static baked lighting

# ? Aug 6, 2022 18:20

Twerk from Home: Jan 17, 2009; This avatar brought to you by the 'save our dead gay forums' foundation.

I'd love to see Doom 3 RTX! IIRC launch Doom 3 was all dynamic lighting, so the levels are designed around it and have plenty of motion.

# ? Aug 6, 2022 18:44

SCheeseman: Apr 23, 2003

Twerk from Home posted:

I'd love to see Doom 3 RTX! IIRC launch Doom 3 was all dynamic lighting, so the levels are designed around it and have plenty of motion.

It probably wouldn't work since all the light bounce would make the levels way brighter. Quake 2 may have had baked lighting but they did at least calculate rudimentary GI.

# ? Aug 6, 2022 18:47

repiv: Aug 13, 2009

They wouldn't necessarily have to compute bounce lighting, they could just swap out the stencil shadows for nice area light shadows

I swear someone was working on Doom 3 RT but searching now just turns up fake raytracing videos done with ReShade

repiv fucked around with this message at 18:57 on Aug 6, 2022

# ? Aug 6, 2022 18:52

repiv: Aug 13, 2009

#soon

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CzTCqW89Pxs

# ? Aug 6, 2022 19:16

Quantum of Phallus: Dec 27, 2010

SeANMcBAY posted:

I still think it looks bad and not cohesive at all with the old art direction.

# ? Aug 6, 2022 19:23

Quantum of Phallus: Dec 27, 2010

Art > Realism

# ? Aug 6, 2022 19:24

Volte: Oct 4, 2004; woosh woosh

Quake 2 RTX was never designed to look good, I don't think anyone believes it looks good. But if someone went through and did proper lighting direction I think it could look great.

# ? Aug 6, 2022 19:28

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# ? Jun 4, 2024 22:01

JLaw: Feb 10, 2008; - harmless -

You guys reminded me of https://twitter.com/joewintergreen/status/1228591039381815296

# ? Aug 6, 2022 19:44

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > Retro Games > Early FPS Megathread: the kids need to learn about TekWar sooner or later

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