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Asehujiko posted:Strategy games are probably the hardest games in which to implement granular difficulty to any meaningful degree because they are so deeply systems driven, second only to puzzle games and it's incredibly hard to even quantify what difficulty means for them. The big three RTS series all have bespoke map scripts for each map on each difficulty level and parametrizing those into user operable sliders would be an unenviable task for the designer(and QA staff!) I would disagree. Simply add sliders for... Player Unit Health Enemy Unit Health Player Unit Damage Enemy Unit Damage Enemy Unit Movement Speed Player Resource Costs Bazam, you now have someone with the option to lower their own resource costs to, say, 90% of max, just to give themselves that little edge they need to get past a tough mission without completely trivializing it. All the actual game dev and complex level design stuff does not need touching.
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Apr 10, 2023 01:29
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My stance remains that if I find a game too hard to be enjoyable, I'll almost always either cheat or stop playing. It's why the most recent WoW raids I ever did were from Warlords of Draenor. Those were the last ones it was practical to solo, since Ion apparently really did not like people soloing old raids to see them and collect the loot. It also means that on the occasion that I do knuckle down and ultimately prevail fairly, I'm typically even more critical and judgmental than normal because of my feeling that the game got me to turn fun into work so there had better be a good payoff. Some games have had the reward I wanted (in whatever sense) and so I generally look fondly on them, some games have not and so I despise and resent them for what I feel was tricking me into working instead of having fun despite my misgivings.
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Apr 10, 2023 01:53
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I don't know if they're supposed to be weird afterlife ledges floating in the air or what, but I'm getting some real "big rear end demon perching on a
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Apr 10, 2023 04:14
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It is theoretically plausible Vashj was sent to Revendreth first and then Maldraxxus, but unlikely.
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Apr 10, 2023 04:38
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Seeing how they sorted various mass murderers and war criminals in the afterlife was an important point for me in taking WoW lore less seriously. It's "what seems cool to a few writers in the moment" all the way down. The decision is completely arbitrary to take someone who did some hosed up stuff and put them in either Plague Valhalla, Vampire Purgatory, or Infinite Ultrahell based solely on what kind of story they want to tell for that character going forward, and completely divorced from any reasonable analysis of that character's actions prior to their afterlife assignment.
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Apr 10, 2023 05:08
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I feel like one possible explanation for Vashj ending up in Maldraxxus is that her heinous actions were arguably carried out with the intention of benefitting her people as a whole. As opposed to two other notable individuals we encounter in Revendreth, who may have started out with similar goals but eventually began committing atrocities for purely selfish reasons.
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Apr 10, 2023 09:09
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quote:Beyond the Dark Portal has felt to me like it expects flawless micro, reading the devs' mind, numerous reloads, or some or all of the above. I do not think any game of that era expected of you to be able to beat any mission except the most basic ones first try. A lot of them are set up explicitly as puzzles for you to solve, with weak points in the enemy's base left deliberately open for you to find, them relying on certain units above others so you can tailor your composition to counter theirs, and so on. You won't find that out on your first attempt, and you're not meant to. I didn't play WC2, but I played Command and Conquer, the remaster of the first two to be precise, and that's exactly how they work. Especially in the first game, you often do not even have more resources than what's absolutely necessary to build up the exact army you need to beat the mission. That is true brutality, and I am convinced that the devs thought "well, they're just gonna reload after a failed push, so on the one hand this forces a complete restart if the army was built wrong from the get-go, countering the reload, or the push itself can require tight micro because you can erase execution gently caress-ups. I don't know why you are treating reloads as an inexcusable thing here. They're baked into the idea of how the game should flow, both as complete resets of the mission once you realize your starting position is wrong, your first peasant should have survived, this oil field is a trap etc., and liberally in-mission to make micro errors less costly. Obviously you're not having fun with the genre in general so I'm not saying "oh just spend at least three times as much on a single mission and you'll Get It", but to me, the missions don't seem badly designed or evil or whatever at all. It's how RTS design was done back then, and it's still very playable nowadays imo if you approach it with the mindset that's expected of you. In fact, I enjoy figuring out what the dev wanted me to do much more than a free-form "you got all tech unlocked go nuts" mission towards the endgame, because the design there is usually much looser.
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Apr 10, 2023 11:32
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I think thats a point to make, It isn't reading the dev's mind, you were expected to learn what you did wrong, reload, and then do something different to win
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Apr 10, 2023 11:39
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Simply Simon posted:This is a bit of a weird statement to me, because the answer to me is obviously the last point to figure out the second, with micro being a baseline skill that is simply always expected of you. I'm with Cythereal here, trial-and-error gameplay requiring full resets of entire missions/scenarios to figure out hidden bullshit and surprises is not good game design in my opinion. A good game should always be designed so anything can technically be completed on the first go just with the information you have and can gather on the first try. And if it's how games were done back in the era? Yeah, sure. That's probably true. But we've learned since then that it's bad game design, it makes it understandable game design that it was of the era, but it still makes it bad.
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Apr 10, 2023 11:41
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PurpleXVI posted:A good game should always be designed so anything can technically be completed on the first go just with the information you have and can gather on the first try. Which is not my cup of tea. However, one of the best games that came out recently, Hades, builds on that concept and with meta-progression, story tied to deaths and lots of smart ideas makes an incredibly compelling package. (I realize it's rather a Roguelite). Back to RTS, yes, you can design a mission like this to be beatable first try. That would require hints, highlights, safe scouting opportunities and failsafes. One of my favorite RTS, Red Alert 2, works heavily with these things to make it a little less arbitrary if you'll glean the necessary insight or not. The core idea, do the mission the intended way or have a much harder/impossible time, is still there though. To meet you in the middle: would WC2 be a much better game if it had done things like flash in a line of Alleria going "hey, we should defend the eastern side of the base"? From a modern perspective, absolutely. Was the technology OR the game design philosophy there at the time? Probably not. Does the omission make the game BAD? That's the real question here. Ultimately, one has to ask themselves: can I enjoy this? Do I need to change my mindset? Do I want to? Obviously, lots of people would say "no". But if you can answer these questions with "yes" for yourself, is it not a good game that is fun to play, for you?
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Apr 10, 2023 12:14
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PurpleXVI posted:And if it's how games were done back in the era? Yeah, sure. That's probably true. But we've learned since then that it's bad game design, it makes it understandable game design that it was of the era, but it still makes it bad. This is my view, and doubly true for remakes. I lost one friend when a certain other game from the early 90s got a remake, and the remake chose to keep the most important female character wearing only a bikini. I feel that the remake should have changed that. My former friend in question argued that she should have stayed the same to be true to the original, and it's perfectly fine that this character prances around in a bikini in a video game made in 2022 because that's how things were in the early 90s. The past should stay there, in my eyes. Just because it's how things were done then doesn't mean it's how they should be done now.
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Apr 10, 2023 12:17
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Personally I prefer my female RPG characters in wizard robes or form fitting plate mail. Bikinis and leather just don’t seem as sensible when I think about it.
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Apr 10, 2023 13:19
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I’m of the opinion of equal opportunity skimpiness, myself. If you’re going to make the ladies dress like that, the equivalent dudes should also dress like that.
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Apr 10, 2023 13:43
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Simply Simon posted:Which is not my cup of tea. However, one of the best games that came out recently, Hades, builds on that concept and with meta-progression, story tied to deaths and lots of smart ideas makes an incredibly compelling package. (I realize it's rather a Roguelite). Just gonna say that Hades is like 2.5 years old at this point, not sure if that still falls under the umbrella of 'recently'.
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Apr 10, 2023 13:55
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The important thing about Hades is the progression happens regardless of you dying, therefore dying isn't so much a punishment as it is a mechanic. Critically, it makes losing fun. THATs good game design.
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Apr 10, 2023 14:03
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Keldulas posted:I’m of the opinion of equal opportunity skimpiness, myself. If you’re going to make the ladies dress like that, the equivalent dudes should also dress like that. My view is this, and for PCs that it be a thing you can do if you choose, not the default. I don't have an issue with it if it's something the player can opt into, less so if it's something you have to go out of your way to opt out of. I almost exclusively play female characters in MMOs, probably to no one's surprise, and I tend to have both skimpy and reasonable transmogs I swap between as the mood strikes me.
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Apr 10, 2023 14:35
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ApplesandOranges posted:Just gonna say that Hades is like 2.5 years old at this point, not sure if that still falls under the umbrella of 'recently'.
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Apr 10, 2023 15:07
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Simply Simon posted:Which is not my cup of tea. However, one of the best games that came out recently, Hades, builds on that concept and with meta-progression, story tied to deaths and lots of smart ideas makes an incredibly compelling package. (I realize it's rather a Roguelite). That's not Hades, though. The equation changes every time. You're being tasked with mastering mechanics, not with remembering to bring a Skull Key for the Skull Door on level 5 of the Skull Caverns in Castle Skull, because otherwise your progress is blocked and you have to fight the Skullomancer for his backup Skull Keyring... and then after that learning that there's a Skull Orc on the other side of the Skull Door so you're going to need to bring a Skull Mace to smash him with for the next run. That's without even getting into the metaprogression's effect on things. In games with completely fixed stuff, trial-and-error gameplay is a test of your patience, not your mastery or understanding of anything. As for Warcraft 2, the game clearly had support for invisible units. If players had some invisible scouts, so they could start off with some understanding of the lay of the land, and some advance warning on assaults, so they could actually relocate troops to respond to them, rather than just "time to reload and psychically predict that five minutes in the ogres are arriving here," a basic mechanic like that would've made a huge difference. Then being warned in advance is still a result of the player's action, of understanding the need to have scouts and early warning present, not just an NPC telling them what they need to do.
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Apr 10, 2023 19:51
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PurpleXVI posted:I would disagree. Simply add sliders for... Just to pick something from your list at random and how much of a headache it is to actually implement; Enemies moving at 0.x speed will mess up attack timings so all of those need to be evaluated to make sure there's no situations where two bases that are supposed to send alternating waves end up having arrivals at the same time because one is further away and delayed more. Or the initial attack wave that's supposed to be fought by the player's starting army right after the opening cutscene ends up delayed enough that the player has time to move out and start clearing outposts so the wave hits an undefended base. And perhaps there's an in-game cutscene that expects enemy units to be somewhere at a certain point in time and ends up softlocking the game when they aren't. Bazam indeed. There's a reason that every strategy game that does numerical difficulty has a tiny handful of known good* presets and the major games with the budget to do so switch to custom scripting per difficulty/map. And it's not because they want to gatekeep people in the gaps between difficulty levels. The existing model of cheat codes that provide specific on-demand advantages to players is the best you're going to see for an RTS in the forseeable future. *may or may not actually be any good on higher difficulties because high skill players for games that aren't even out yet aren't exactly common so small studios can end up with none on their QA staff.
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Apr 10, 2023 20:13
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Asehujiko posted:I don't think you have any real concept of just how much work and thought goes into making outwardly trivial parts of games because what you're proposing is anything but simple in any major strategy game I can think of and would absolutely require major revisions or even full redesigns on both technical and gameplay levels. For what it's worth, I've seen RTS games with exactly that kind of suggested modular difficulty. When you go into custom difficulty settings for one of them, the game flat out warns you that your choices may result in unexpected consequences so you take matters into your own hands playing with them. And you know what? Yes I've had the occasional cutscene glitch using custom settings, but I don't mind because the game is letting me play how I want in the fashion I enjoy. I don't crave a completely polished experience from the games I play. I crave an enjoyable experience. And to be blunt, many of the games I consider to be legitimately great in terms of how much I like and enjoy them have more than a little jank and bugginess to them.
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Apr 10, 2023 20:23
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Cythereal posted:Beyond the Dark Portal has felt to me like it expects flawless micro, reading the devs' mind, numerous reloads, or some or all of the above. Sounds like my experience with Starcraft: Mass Recall except Starcraft is much better game than BtDP so I was willing to endure constant save&load.
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Apr 10, 2023 20:26
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Asehujiko posted:There's a reason that every strategy game that does numerical difficulty has a tiny handful of known good* presets and the major games with the budget to do so switch to custom scripting per difficulty/map. And it's not because they want to gatekeep people in the gaps between difficulty levels. The existing model of cheat codes that provide specific on-demand advantages to players is the best you're going to see for an RTS in the forseeable future. There is one very granular change you can comfortably make and indeed games in this era did offer (including WC2 I think?) - simulation speed. By universally slowing down everything you don't impact any of the balance, but you do give the player much more time to think about their plans and react to things happening. It's also a very straightforward choice between a more difficult game and a more boring one, since you're also waiting longer for everything to happen, which isn't ideal but is a very reasonable concession to make.
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Apr 10, 2023 20:39
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Tenebrais posted:There is one very granular change you can comfortably make and indeed games in this era did offer (including WC2 I think?) - simulation speed. By universally slowing down everything you don't impact any of the balance, but you do give the player much more time to think about their plans and react to things happening. It's also a very straightforward choice between a more difficult game and a more boring one, since you're also waiting longer for everything to happen, which isn't ideal but is a very reasonable concession to make. Running the whole game in slow motion does indeed run into the problem of it making everything but micro-intensive fights incredibly boring. IIRC it was one of the Gemcraft devblogs where it was mentioned that the players that shared their metrics had played about 70% of the game on normal, 30% on fast forward and <1% on slow motion.
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Apr 10, 2023 20:54
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I would enjoy rts more if I could pause time
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Apr 11, 2023 14:47
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Warcraft 2 has speed settings, yeah.
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Apr 11, 2023 15:50
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Watermelon Daiquiri posted:I would enjoy rts more if I could pause time
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Apr 11, 2023 19:09
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Also I should note that command and conquer actually did have an easy mode: what's more is that you can actually change the settings granularly with notepad if that's not enough.
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Apr 13, 2023 01:59
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NewMars posted:Also I should note that command and conquer actually did have an easy mode: what's more is that you can actually change the settings granularly with notepad if that's not enough. Plaintext configuration files, save files, unit stat files, etc. are the work of divinely blessed and inspired developers.
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Apr 13, 2023 02:08
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yeah the easy mode was called mass tanks
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Apr 13, 2023 03:31
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PurpleXVI posted:Plaintext configuration files, save files, unit stat files, etc. are the work of divinely blessed and inspired developers. Rules.txt was amazing and my first brush with modding as a kid. Why yes, I would like my cruisers to fire fireballs, or dogs. I would like my riflemen to do negative damage and thus heal each other (which was hilarious in mission when an AI controlled pack of riflemen would just stand there and heal each other while you lobbed rockets or grenades or whatever at them). Paradox games are great about this too - being able to go in and modify any of the text files is wonderful, especially since all of the relevant information is there in plaintext if you're willing to dive through the code long enough.
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Apr 13, 2023 03:37
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Simply Simon posted:I didn't play WC2, but I played Command and Conquer, the remaster of the first two to be precise, and that's exactly how they work. Especially in the first game, you often do not even have more resources than what's absolutely necessary to build up the exact army you need to beat the mission. That is true brutality, and I am convinced that the devs thought "well, they're just gonna reload after a failed push, so on the one hand this forces a complete restart if the army was built wrong from the get-go, countering the reload, or the push itself can require tight micro because you can erase execution gently caress-ups. My experience of the first one in 1995 was that once you got past the first five minutes and managed to get a decently defended base set up, there wasn't much threat left, and even if the gap between that and finishing the level might be huge, you could often just attrite out a win. And the nature of Tiberium spread meant that you could rarely be completely out of resources the same way that you might be in WC. Those first five minutes, though, those could take a few tries. Although I did have a personal bad habit of reloading every time a push resulted in any kind of loss, even if it was a success overall. I don't like it when my virtual men die... I still do that. (I do acknowledge, though, that the remasters changed some of the AI behaviour to 'intended', even if it made things much harder. GDI airstrikes in particular were changed from pathetic to hideously lethal.) berryjon posted:Are we talking Command and Conquer: Covert Ops levels of puzzle solving here? Nothing's harder than the first five minutes of a Covert Ops mission. I may have been able to do all the original missions, but I only ever managed two or three of those back in the day.
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Apr 13, 2023 12:13
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I liked Revendreth a lot, but it was one of those things where Aesthetically they were pleasing, and their story was engaging ish, but the gameplay loop and removal of a lot of conveniences made it so I just stopped caring and stopped engaging.
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Apr 13, 2023 13:42
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I remember playing Command&Conquer as a kid I'd abuse the AI thing where it never destroyed sandbags so you could just wall the enemy into their base while you build up a massive force
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Apr 13, 2023 17:13
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Qwertycoatl posted:I remember playing Command&Conquer as a kid I'd abuse the AI thing where it never destroyed sandbags so you could just wall the enemy into their base while you build up a massive force Oh lord, was that a thing?! I feel like I played those games all wrong now.
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Apr 13, 2023 17:39
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I think it only worked in C&C95, by Red Alert they had built the AI a bit better. You could still do weird things to throw off where/how the AI would throw its super weapons though.
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Apr 13, 2023 17:44
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stryth posted:Oh lord, was that a thing?! I feel like I played those games all wrong now.
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Apr 13, 2023 18:12
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Weird thing about outlining the next lore update is, I keep hitting points and having thoughts that this could have been a really cool thing, if it had been thought through and executed well. If.
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Apr 13, 2023 19:31
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Cythereal posted:this could have been a really cool thing, if it had been thought through and executed well. (other part is "what if woman but CORRUPTED")
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Apr 13, 2023 19:33
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Szarrukin posted:Sounds like significant part of Blizzard writing. To be fair, the driving force behind almost every single plot point in Warcraft is "and then the person got corrupted." Blizzard has a poo poo track record with women in virtually every regard, but at least the corruption was generally equal-opportunity.
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Apr 13, 2023 19:45
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And to be fair, people have a tendency to corrupt!
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Apr 13, 2023 20:06
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