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VostokProgram posted:there are many legitimate criticisms of starfield but if you can't remember what ammo a gun takes that's a skill issue lol Right since you should just be using melee weapons like every game with them.
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Dec 28, 2023 17:31
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If you dump everything into laser weapons it apparently makes the cutter a viable combat option, never worry about ammo again.
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Dec 28, 2023 17:36
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DarkHorse posted:I never noticed the "enemies pause space combat when boarding" because I always blew up all but the one ship that I wanted to board because of course it would be stupid to leave yourself undefended from attackers in the middle of a fight There are a few events where you get waves of ships sent at you, where you can kill/disable an entire wave and board one before the next wave spawns in. Or maybe they spawn while the boarding animation is playing or while you're boarded. Even then, they helpfully wait for you to finish murdering everyone aboard the boarded ship, get back to your ship with your loot, and undock, before they open fire.
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Dec 28, 2023 17:42
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In an interview Todd referenced ship combat as something they rebuilt over and over again and that they wanted to rebuild it again but decided not to. He shared it as an anecdote about game design and decision making, but it explains a lot about why ship combat is the way it is. It ties back into the lack of a design document or at least a centralized vision of what the game should be. No one knew what space combat was supposed to look like so you end up with absurdities like giving the player a system where they individually allocate power in a high tempo dog fight.
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Dec 28, 2023 17:43
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DarkHorse posted:I never noticed the "enemies pause space combat when boarding" because I always blew up all but the one ship that I wanted to board because of course it would be stupid to leave yourself undefended from attackers in the middle of a fight What’s really funny is they “solved” the risk of getting exploded by making all enemy ships stop shooting if you’re not in the pilot’s chair. You can still get killed by in-flight projectiles but if you want a breather to recharge your shields you can just stand up in the middle of a dogfight and wait a little bit. Maybe have a little snack to restore .05 percent of your HP.
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Dec 28, 2023 17:50
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Ursine Catastrophe posted:I'd prefer that they kept space in, the problem is they half-assed it (quarter assed it?) so badly that it's not unreasonable to view it as fundamentally unfixable (or, at least, assume that they'll never decide to put in the time to fix it). Compare intra-system and on-planet travel to: you can bruteforce a lot of that via consoles as is. They probably wanted to add stuff to the game. Like both skyrim and fallout 4 were supposed to have arenas you could fight people in but were cut out despite the audio files and scenes being in the game.
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Dec 28, 2023 17:51
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Pinely posted:In an interview Todd referenced ship combat as something they rebuilt over and over again and that they wanted to rebuild it again but decided not to. He shared it as an anecdote about game design and decision making, but it explains a lot about why ship combat is the way it is. Power allocation mid-fight can be an interesting mechanic to add stress to an otherwise simple as gently caress sim if done right. The OG X-Wing and Tie Fighter games are a good example of this. Lots of balancing speed vs suitability vs. DPS. And that's a game from the loving stone age. The real problem with power allocation as they built it is that it isn't an interesting choice. Combat is so poo poo that there isn't a moment when you're like "I need to boost shields and engines and GTFO of this bad situation" or "I need to boost shields temporarily to over power them, then cut them to zero and eat the drain, while maxing weapons and engines so I can make a slashing attack run at this capital ship without dying." No matter how your ship is built you very quickly find an optimal set of settings and just leave it alone. It's the vestigial nub of an interesting design mechanic that better games have made a core component of their space flight, but which here is basically window dressing that once in a blue moon you need to interact with - namely when you remember that you straight up turned off the jump drive and need to give it one power because you're jumping to a system you haven't been to yet, rather than fast traveling (which lets you do so without power allocated to jump drives lol)
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Dec 28, 2023 17:53
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Ugly In The Morning posted:What’s really funny is they “solved” the risk of getting exploded by making all enemy ships stop shooting if you’re not in the pilot’s chair. You can still get killed by in-flight projectiles but if you want a breather to recharge your shields you can just stand up in the middle of a dogfight and wait a little bit. Maybe have a little snack to restore .05 percent of your HP. The first time someone said this I was sure it wasn't true because I died multiple times from accidentally getting out of my chair, but it's been confirmed by so many people that I must have been either hit by missiles or attacked while the chair animation is playing.
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Dec 28, 2023 17:53
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is the design document thing real or is this another one of those memes like "you can climb that mountain."
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Dec 28, 2023 17:55
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DarkHorse posted:I never noticed the "enemies pause space combat when boarding" because I always blew up all but the one ship that I wanted to board because of course it would be stupid to leave yourself undefended from attackers in the middle of a fight I am suddenly thinking of Infinite Space (though its space combat was kind of bad, and I think it wasn't entirely turn based?) as a RPG game that nailed space exploration stuff (though of course it didn't have a looter shooter part...)
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Dec 28, 2023 17:55
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Cyrano4747 posted:
It’s not an interesting choice and there’s too many bars to click through so it ends up being boring with no choices while also being entirely too fiddly. Those sims all had three power bars- weapons, shields, engines. Usually you could quickly juggle them while doing other things. Starfield has what, seven or eight bars, each with seven or eight notches? Managing power for a fight takes no thought but simultaneously a lot of attention.
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Dec 28, 2023 17:59
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all those ship dials are such a slog to go through on controller, and sometimes the game just decides you should get no grav drive blips when you just got done grav driving
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Dec 28, 2023 18:07
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Ugly In The Morning posted:It’s not an interesting choice and there’s too many bars to click through so it ends up being boring with no choices while also being entirely too fiddly. Oh yeah agreed. I"m just saying that as a mechanic power allocation can be interesting and contribute to making gameplay feel more involved. It's just a horribly implemented version here.
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Dec 28, 2023 18:15
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Cyrano4747 posted:Oh yeah agreed. I"m just saying that as a mechanic power allocation can be interesting and contribute to making gameplay feel more involved. Yeah if you want a current(ish) gen example of a game that actually implements that and demands that you use it, Elite Dangerous is right there at specific high tiers of PvP or maybe thargoid combat, everything else you can basically gear up and set your pips to 3-2-1 and forget about them forever, and even with "3 systems, max 4 pips in each no matter what your actual equipment is, and a distinct button to reset to 2-2-2" it still gets flak for not allowing pip presets so you can 4-2-0 or 4-0-2 in one button press This pip system got "better" once I realized that holding down up/down on one pip category fully fills or dumps (you know, after accidentally holding alt instead of space and dumping all the pips out of shields instead of manuvering), but at this point I just go all pips to shields/engines and "whatever's leftover" to weapons and leave it be Just about the only "interesting" pip management is panicking to dump pips out of weapons and into your grav drive when you jump to a planet and forget you have your pockets full of sneeple propaganda
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Dec 28, 2023 18:27
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Pinely posted:In an interview Todd referenced ship combat as something they rebuilt over and over again and that they wanted to rebuild it again but decided not to. He shared it as an anecdote about game design and decision making, but it explains a lot about why ship combat is the way it is. I mean really it feels like "Fallout 76's issues with multiplayer"-- specifically, the stories about them not wanting to listen to the people who've done multiplayer games before and saying "yeah we can handle this ourselves" I wonder if they actually talked to or hired people with any amount of space flight sim development experience or just said "yeah gently caress it we've got this" Tankbuster posted:is the design document thing real or is this another one of those memes like "you can climb that mountain." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bi51-wjcwp8&t=957s Emil Pagliarulo, writer and lead designer of Fallout 4 and Skyrim posted:We are at a state now, in the development of the studio-- we don't have a lot of extensive design documentation. We found that...probably after we hit Fallout 3, the design docs that we had became outdated very quickly because we knew we needed to get stuff in the game, and play it, and then change it. We needed to iterate on it. So we would have these extensive 50 page design documents that were completely outdated, and the time it took to maintain those just wasn't worth it. Ursine Catastrophe fucked around with this message at 18:44 on Dec 28, 2023 |
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Dec 28, 2023 18:35
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my wife and I tried playing FO76 and I remember thinking I had hosed something up or lost connection to the server or something, because if you have two people in a party on the same quest that sends you to an instanced dungeon, only the party leader gets credit for the quest and you have to switch off and do everything twice lmao
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Dec 28, 2023 18:37
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Tankbuster posted:is the design document thing real or is this another one of those memes like "you can climb that mountain." One of them once said they don't like design documents, so that clearly means the entire company doesn't use them at all under any circumstance
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Dec 28, 2023 18:39
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Cyrano4747 posted:Power allocation mid-fight can be an interesting mechanic to add stress to an otherwise simple as gently caress sim if done right. The OG X-Wing and Tie Fighter games are a good example of this. Lots of balancing speed vs suitability vs. DPS. And that's a game from the loving stone age. I think it's supposed to also tie into ship repairs mid-fight, where allocating power can restore a damaged system. Which sounds cool but I don't think I've seen it work like that. There is a mechanic where power impacts reload speeds that's mildly interesting, my ship load out uses 1 power apiece for two kinds of high-impact missile so you can torpedo enemies a few times per fight but don't ever reload during combat. It's unfortunately not even close to something like a mech sim, you only get 3 weapon types max per ship, which reduces options for interesting power management for weapons beyond that basic ROF/magazine impact. Lot of things that are very nearly very interesting but fall short. And what's there isn't explained worth a drat!
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Dec 28, 2023 18:43
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Cyrano4747 posted:4) Missile lock on is a terrible mechanic as it stands. There is nothing in the way of counter measures, your only way to break lock is to go 90 degrees off your current axis and boost. Even then I don't know if that evades missiles already in the air. Also nothing in the way of ECM components etc that i"ve noticed to increase enemy lock on times etc. You can break locks by spending 4 points in Engine Systems, making you immune to lock-ons while boosting. Of course, given the way boosting works in Starfield, that means the optimal strategy is to flash your boosters once a second after getting that perk.
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Dec 28, 2023 18:46
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Magmarashi posted:One of them once said they don't like design documents, so that clearly means the entire company doesn't use them at all under any circumstance The lead designer said the company as a whole doesn't bother with "extensive" design docs because they're not worth keeping up to date. Your definition of "extensive" may vary but there's a pretty big difference between "some random designer said that" and "the guy in charge of designing the game as a whole said that". That said I will be Very Curious about the GDQ postmortem of starfield in like 5 years, once people start feeling like they can actually talk about it
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Dec 28, 2023 18:49
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isndl posted:You can break locks by spending 4 points in Engine Systems, making you immune to lock-ons while boosting. Of course, given the way boosting works in Starfield, that means the optimal strategy is to flash your boosters once a second after getting that perk. I can't tell if this is just a flat out lie by the game, or if the NPCs "aren't technically locking on" when they're aimbotting you while you're boosting (also the 4 points into engine perk that forces NPCs to disengage doesn't actually seem to do jack poo poo lol)
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Dec 28, 2023 18:51
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Ursine Catastrophe posted:
This goes beyond hiring people with experience designing these systems. These are basic problems that anyone who has played a space flight sim since the days of loving XWing and Wing Commander 1 would recognize. I seriously think they were trying to build systems for a game type that they had never actually played. Like if they'd just decided to stick an EA Madden game clone in the middle of it all but had never actually so much as touched a sports game, up to and including dropping a quarter into NBA Jam in the 90s. This is poo poo that is immediately apparent to people who have just casually played these kinds of games in the past. You don't need to be a trained automotive engineer to understand why the Homermobile sucks.
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Dec 28, 2023 18:52
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Ursine Catastrophe posted:The lead designer said the company as a whole doesn't bother with "extensive" design docs because they're not worth keeping up to date. Your definition of "extensive" may vary but there's a pretty big difference between "some random designer said that" and "the guy in charge of designing the game as a whole said that". Presumably a coherent vision of how the systems fit together would be a bit smaller than "extensive"?
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Dec 28, 2023 18:56
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Cyrano4747 posted:
Starfield really is just the Homermobile, it's uncanny
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Dec 28, 2023 18:59
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DarkHorse posted:Starfield really is just the Homermobile, it's uncanny 
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Dec 28, 2023 19:05
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Magmarashi posted:One of them once said they don't like design documents, so that clearly means the entire company doesn't use them at all under any circumstance figures.
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Dec 28, 2023 19:09
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why did the mountain thing become a meme anyway. afaik you can in fact climb any mountain in skyrim
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Dec 28, 2023 19:12
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Man I am loving deep into my third attempt to at least finish a play through. At launch I did the intro poo poo and I think the space cowboys. A few months later I picked it back up and did Team Blue not-Federation. The ones where you need to fight I just did the pirates and the corpo "We have Cyberpunk at home" storyline, plus a few companions. Internet said that snake lady is the best romance and lmao if that is "best." At this point it's just sheer bloody minded determination to beat a game I bought at launch like a chump. If nothing else this exercise will teach me to never, ever buy on launch day.
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Dec 28, 2023 19:12
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VostokProgram posted:why did the mountain thing become a meme anyway. afaik you can in fact climb any mountain in skyrim Weren't there a poo poo ton of invisible walls at launch? To prevent you doing poo poo like shimmy-jumping up a mountain from the starter zone and getting into a higher tier one or meeting the dragon shout guys early? I'm pretty sure an invisible wall remover is one of the go-to mods.
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Dec 28, 2023 19:13
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in 12 years I've never seen an invisible wall apart from the map edges and I've never heard of a mod to remove invisible walls
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Dec 28, 2023 19:15
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The design document thing stands out to me because Bethesda's games have been so disjointed. Maybe Emil is talking about himself only and Bethesda does use them or maybe design documents aren't necessary anymore with modern development. Regardless, the end result isn't a cohesive game and Bethesda seems to have far more issues with it than other AAA developers.
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Dec 28, 2023 19:18
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VostokProgram posted:in 12 years I've never seen an invisible wall apart from the map edges and I've never heard of a mod to remove invisible walls same though I have never been much of a "just climb over the mountain" kind of guy. always felt like more trouble than it was worth
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Dec 28, 2023 19:18
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VostokProgram posted:in 12 years I've never seen an invisible wall apart from the map edges and I've never heard of a mod to remove invisible walls https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/6713 I just lazily googled "skyrim invisible walls mod" so I don't know if that's the one everyone uses with max upvotes and some nexus mod superstar mod author or whatever.
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Dec 28, 2023 19:18
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Cyrano4747 posted:Weren't there a poo poo ton of invisible walls at launch? To prevent you doing poo poo like shimmy-jumping up a mountain from the starter zone and getting into a higher tier one or meeting the dragon shout guys early? I'm pretty sure an invisible wall remover is one of the go-to mods. Skyrim didn't have any aside from the map edges that I can recall, the zones were scaled according to your level when you entered them so they didn't have any specific starter zones per se. The slopes usually prevented you from climbing mountains and that's how the mountain pony meme became a thing, letting you ride up nearly vertical slopes. New Vegas did have invisible walls to keep you on their intended route, I believe.
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Dec 28, 2023 19:20
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Cyrano4747 posted:This goes beyond hiring people with experience designing these systems. These are basic problems that anyone who has played a space flight sim since the days of loving XWing and Wing Commander 1 would recognize. I mean if they redid it 4 times and only didn't redo it a 5th time because of time constraints, it doesn't sound like they weren't unaware that it sucks, it just sounds like they were fundamentally incapable of figuring out how to make it not suck. The pip management is bad on the face of it, but it's not like changing the pips to a 4-4-4 model would have made the rest of the flight model better, and since the current pip functionality is also doing double duty as "the method by which the game decides how to limit how many of which specific engines/weapons you can glue on your ship" they probably couldn't have changed that without fundamentally changing the ship building on top of trying to get the flight model into a spot of not sucking Oh and there's the reactor buff talent so changing pips would have had to gently caress with the talent system as well, good luck with that after you've already delayed a year lol OddObserver posted:Presumably a coherent vision of how the systems fit together would be a bit smaller than "extensive"? If they were changing those systems up until the 11th hour (and in some cases, cutting them out completely) it sounds like a coherent vision of how everything should fit together counted as "too extensive to be worth maintaining", yes
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Dec 28, 2023 19:23
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isndl posted:
To keep the deathclaws in so they don’t kill a bunch of low level NPCs. The player can still take the spicy route away from the breadcrumbs but if they don’t know what they’re doing they’re gonna die a lot.
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Dec 28, 2023 19:24
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Cyrano4747 posted:https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/6713 this is really not a thing dude, this mod is letting you stand on ledges and poo poo where there otherwise would not be any level geometry in city zones, like on the perimeter walls of whiterun. and I don't think there is a more popular mod with max upvotes and a superstar mod author because this is genuinely not something that most people who play skyrim give a poo poo about. and to go back to the original point: quote:shimmy-jumping up a mountain from the starter zone and getting into a higher tier one or meeting the dragon shout guys early this is not a problem either. in helgen, specifically, you cannot escape, but that is a scripted tutorial/intro sequence. the second you leave the cave into the wilderness around riverwood you have absolute freedom to go wherever the gently caress you want in the map, no invisible walls at all. you will only be limited by actual barriers like locked doors or terrain that is too steep to walk on (and as others have said, horses have magnet feet and can scale a 90 degree cliff so even that isnt a barrier) have you actually played skyrim
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Dec 28, 2023 19:33
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Ugly In The Morning posted:To keep the deathclaws in so they don’t kill a bunch of low level NPCs. The player can still take the spicy route away from the breadcrumbs but if they don’t know what they’re doing they’re gonna die a lot. As I remember, as a player you had the choice of going north into deathclaw territory or south along the story path. You couldn't go straight east over the mountain because they walled it.
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Dec 28, 2023 19:36
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VostokProgram posted:
yeah, a bunch, maybe I just misremembered. *shrug* It's been a year or two. I probably just mixed it up with NV.
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Dec 28, 2023 19:38
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Ugly In The Morning posted:To keep the deathclaws in so they don’t kill a bunch of low level NPCs. I play NV with the walls modded out and this doesn't happen
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Dec 28, 2023 19:49
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