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RBA Starblade posted:Weapon balance is the same as ever, which is to say, it doesn't exist and never did. ACS is an attempt to address that and partially succeeds, but I'm still not using the dinky rifles or handguns (I tried them and they just don't do much). Yeah, this is always important to remember. It's fine to decry the existence of dual minis/dual stun needlers as the First-Order-Optimal build for bosses, but it's important to remember that there were always weapons/builds that were broken as gently caress throughout the series (for example, AC1: Just use the Karasawa for everything, Karasawa melts all.) and that's always kind of been The Point. All that being said, the way stagger is implemented (especially in boss fights) means that it's really your only option if you want to deal appreciable damage to bosses in any amount of time, and that's likely because their HP is way too overtuned against regular damage (ricochet plays a big part in this as well) and direct hits are also overtuned in terms of the damage they deal. Stagger or die is the game, but that's less of a Doom 2016 thing and more of a Sekiro thing that made it into this game. ACES CURE PLANES posted:Beyond mechanics heavy stuff like that though, certain bits of mission structure stuff doesn't hit the same either. For all the hay people make about 'oh man my repair and ammunition costs, how will i make ends meet for parts', it is exceptionally difficult to go into the red in AC6. Older ACs very rarely had extra rewards for killing stuff outside of mission critical stuff, and picking your targets was especially important to either save stuff for whatever might come at the end or just save your wallet, but every other mission now seems to have per-kill bonuses. I think it's fair to point out that the overall economy of AC6 is laughably non-existent. You never, ever, ever need to worry about money. If you don't have enough for a part, just grind a mission you recently completed for some extra dosh. Ammunition costs are not really all that big a deal - they just ever-so-slightly eat into your end of mission profit, because as noted you have to be trying in order to go into the red. Even AC repair costs don't really hit that hard, mostly because you can wipe out those costs with a checkpoint reset and if there is a flat-cost penalty for restarts, it's exceedingly minimal. The answer would be to punish restarts more severely with a flat -50,000 credits per restart (or something to that effect), but that likely never made it into the game because they put up skill checks like Balteus at the end of Chapter 1 when you don't have as much access to exceedingly lucrative missions to replay for profit. At that point, it's also fair to ask - what is even the point of having money when it functionally doesn't matter? I'm guessing they really did think about having everything unlocked with them just adding weapons/parts as you went through the missions, but found out that it definitely did not go over well with the fanbase because it threw out too much of the old gameflow that is part of the series.
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Sep 5, 2023 16:59
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Expo I respect your opinions and discussions here. I've been playing Armored Core since Armored Core 2 for ps2 and I'm probably the forum's biggest From Software fan. I'll in good faith engage any questions or discussions you may have, especially pertaining to ac6. I do feel like this game rewards the whole stagger system too well and there is a lot of DNA from their soulsbourne games as well. At the end of the day though, I think From Software still wants to sell millions of copies (that's the kind of studio they are now) and I'm sure they've been advised by Bandai Namco on things like how hard it is to actually be in debt, make parts sell for as much as you paid and other harsh gameplay elements. Accessibility has gone way up in this game to help engage more players but that means certain things got dumbed down. They've definitely made encounters fun and exciting but I totally get that it's far different than what it used to be. Armored Core VI is really more of a mech action game than a mech simulator. I think we can all agree on that. I also did read your steam review and there's lots of valid points. Definitely missed the music too. AC6 is like the sekiro of mech games if that makes sense. (look at what sekiro is versus the tenchu games) Ineffiable fucked around with this message at 17:10 on Sep 5, 2023 |
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Sep 5, 2023 17:06
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Ineffiable posted:Expo I respect your opinions and discussions here. My history goes back to Interactive Sampler CD Volume 4 with a demo of AC1. I went back to 2 in college with a friend, then did 4th gen, then did all of 3rd gen after being disappointed by 5th gen. While I would agree the mechanics are Sekiro, the balancing is Bloodborne: The game is obsessed with push forwards and burst damage. If you don't want to play that way, the game wants nothing to do with you. AC classically feels like, as I said, a problem looking for a solution in terms of game design. "We have lots of customization, but what are we using it for?" 1st gen: "You are the game designer, you choose how you play and you learn the game's systems." 2nd gen: "We're going to hard filter you into novelty for a few missions, but tanks are very strong" 3rd gen: "We honestly have no idea, so we let you decide. Also gently caress these nice new controls making the games easier, heat nerf." 4th gen: "My skill ceiling is on Jupiter. You can run heavy but you'd better be good." 5th gen: "I am defined by my weapons, not by my robots" I have this sort of mental koan about how I think AC game into existence, back when it was called ZAMS-K3 when their engine was a mess, and prior to Kingsfield with Nabeshima at the helm: quote:There are two of FROM, working side by side: A designer, and a programmer. Anyway quote:At the end of the day though, I think From Software still wants to sell millions of copies (that's the kind of studio they are now) and I'm sure they've been advised by Bandai Namco on things like how hard it is to actually be in debt, make parts sell for as much as you paid and other harsh gameplay elements. Accessibility has gone way up in this game to help engage more players but that means certain things got dumbed down. They've definitely made encounters fun and exciting but I totally get that it's far different than what it used to be. Its actually for this reason that I'm doubling down on the simmish elements in my own private game design/programming research work. I should qualify: that doesn't mean a lower gamespeed, it means studying what a simulation of a high speed omnidirectional vehicle even is. Its uncharted territory, and its clear to me that nobody has ever "been here" before. I'm not a very skilled programmer, but as a designer I'm already making massive inroads to solving AC's design problems. One for example for making rifles viable at long range is adding proximity fusing with an arming distance. This makes rifles less viable up close (with lower damage) without completely nerfing them, but it gives melee a use by having players get inside the minimum range and stay there where they can do well in DPS racing. Same with missiles. Another recent discovery researching turn-rates was varying it based on speed but also having the aim arc of each arm being slightly skewed, so if you're turning and side on with someone, you can use the weapon on that side. It makes arm weapons much much more important in turn-fights, and that feels very natural with how they behave. Finally, flat out ignoring turn-rates for blade acquisition, because of the speeds and proximities and relative geometries: That just becomes part of the swing animation ultimately. The net result is some really nice geometries start emerging with combat, where the various ranges start feeling really good. Another was having a weapon-class which varies its rate of fire based on the distance of a target, so as it gets further away, the round-velocity increases, and the rate of fire drops. Adding this as a feature to a lot of weapons with obvious caps seriously helped keep gunplay relevant at longer ranges when coupled with arming, and keeps the threat between respective combatants intense even at longer ranges, but means there's a huge positive incentives to push forward to up the dps. Lots of happy discoveries. LuiCypher posted:
A lesson I learned recently is you can incentivise "fair engagement" with abstract systems like this through the use of positioning and space to de-abstract things (for example, using range banding to indicate approximate and ideal engagement ranges for weapons which is something AC has never done and I'm genuinely shocked by this as it helps player onboarding enormously for picking good ranging choices). If it were applied here, I think, for this to work you'd need some sort of second game model outside of mission encounters, akin to a tactics game where meeting and overlapping with events, threats or locations and such triggers an encounter. Given AC's speed, I think it would have to be realtime rather than turn-based (with some time dilation), but with the option to pause time when in mapscreen, so you can go into the garage and tinker a bit, or when halting elements so you can consider your next action carefully would work extremely well. In this way, there's both the mission encounter system, and also the potential of a persistent emergent set of events. Where a fight happens for example, becomes something you can influence, and that would add a lot of depth to decisions like why you'd want to run certain leg-types and things like that. What would be neat is if assets on the map could project into an encounter -- providing support fire, or things like that. I think Starfox II did something similar? Obviously you'd still have big setpieces and duels -- the idea of getting rid of those fundamentally goes against the entire design of the games, Reflecting, in this way, money essentially becomes health in such an encounter system. At that point, I think you'd need some sort of support ship to justify your ability to build replacement parts or things like that. I'll have to reflect more on this. Expo70 fucked around with this message at 17:42 on Sep 5, 2023 |
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Sep 5, 2023 17:28
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Expo70 posted:My history goes back to Interactive Sampler CD Volume 4 with a demo of AC1. I went back to 2 in college with a friend, then did 4th gen, then did all of 3rd gen after being disappointed by 5th gen. Yes the game is just too focused on that stagger/burst damage phase Especially since outlasting bosses tends to be a damage race. It's different from Dark Souls where you can easily dance your way around boss attacks, with things like invincibility windows in the rolls. But you can't put that into Armored Core (unless there's some kind of next Gen with coral phasing). You only get 3 heals and that's it. Meaning it's always superior to get in there and blast face and make them die before you take too much damage. I hope you make the game you wanted. Did you have any thoughts on Steel Battalion or Chrome hounds? I think at the end of the day Armored Core isn't necessary a bad game but it is definitely going to be debatable in terms of 'is it a good armored core game' and 'what even is Armored core? ' At least it's not V all over again. Let's never go back to that era.
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Sep 5, 2023 17:38
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I'd say more than anything the PS2 gens were defined by the actions they took over time to make slower builds competitive vs speedy ones. AC2 had the Hand of God which made even the lightest of mechs able to put out enough damage to delete the heaviest of builds, and from there it was just do what they could to try and nerf mobility and airtime, and give heavier builds similar performance like with the early third gen quad leg changes. And of course by late third gen that came to a 'we are no longer asking' point with the booster heat mess.
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Sep 5, 2023 17:44
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Ineffiable posted:Yes the game is just too focused on that stagger/burst damage phase Edited my post and added something you might want to read, including a delightful koan about how I think AC came into existence. Reading your post now. On Steel Batallion/Tekki So Steel Batallion/Tekki isn't really that complex a game design beyond the player-fantasy and input design schema, which I think is extremely cool and shows the limits of controller design as we face it now. A common issue we run into is its not really possible to independently manage a body, a frame of reference, and a preferred vector of action (such as pointing a gun or a sword) which is why games now have to actually use a ton of dirty tricks to solve for this -- fire-control, bullet-magnetism, homing/lunges, etc. SB doesn't do ANY of this stuff, and it leaves skill expression entirely up to the player and I think this is a magical part of game design we've sincerely lost because controller design hasn't fundamentally changed from a human factors engineering standpoint in nearly 20 years. Its a very very grand experiment, and I think of it as Capcom's Hifumi Kono and Atsushi Inaba protesting at the current state of control design and input design rapidly homogenising into paths of least resistance now gaming was being cemented as something which primarily happens at home rather than in the arcade. Its a last gasp of bravery we just don't see anymore. In summary, Steel Batallion/Tekki is proof "we still have places to go". I'd love to team up with a goon some day and design an actual "controller specifically for mech games", and then build a game around that control scheme that's a bit faster than Steel Batallion, but still leans very heavily into the skill expression parts of the game. I've already designed a few controllers like this, though I don't know enough about CAD or electronics to do this and if anybody would be willing to give me some suggestions or ask some questions privately about how to do certain things I'd be happy to. The problems for anybody who would want to drop into my DMs and answer are: - I need to wire multiplexers to a microcontroller and while I'm happy writing the code for this - The wiring order still confuses the crap out of me - And likewise, I'm struggling a bit with CAD because I need a gimball to work from: - I've already done measurements and heuristic clay-testing for shapes and forms, I just need to get it into CAD - And finally, I don't really know how to do pressure sensitive triggers properly This is Steel Batallion, for anybody curious: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rGgxRsaGdcA&t=138s On Chromehounds So this game is absolutely peak Nabeshima-core FROM. I think 5th gen's core identity conflict stems from "We need to make the between mission second gameloop feel significant" and "we have this amazing set of game design principles we've learned about voting, and player expression through democratic methodology and victory modelling in game theory that we would like to apply to something" -- and as always, AC's game design is a solution in search of a problem. Using this as a frame of reference, Chromehounds did a lot of incredible things simply not seen in 5th gen: If you lose the capital, but manage to take it back, you spawn a super-weapon for example which can help you win the war to do a clutch recovery. You can vote for parts to become available for a given season. The territories you control influence the costing and availability of parts, which shunt the factions into strategies modelled around the three-hands of game-design -- ie, a fancy way of saying "rock/scissors/paper" in terms of damage racing, movement and acquisition. Even something as simple as simultaneous cameras via Picture-in-Picture is something we just don't see now, and I utterly adore it. Its frankly magical, because it means you can always make good attack and mobility decisions instead of being groomed into committing to one over the other. Like what is a mecha, if not a weapon which "lets you have your cake and eat it", and then discovers entirely new emergent problems which their designs then have to solve for? Ironically Chromehounds feels more like my romantacized imagery of tanking than my experiences with wargames in real tanks have at historical events! That's BONKERS! Likewise, the voice communication system's use as a resource is just choice levels of genius. The fact that players optimized it out by connecting to parties is frankly heart-breaking, which tells me there's an unsolved issue there in terms of how the game knows if players are doing this or not. I think a good partial fix would be some sort of secondary bonus for engaging with the communications system, like improved fire control, tracking or other attack bonuses and the capacity to relay or tag targets and send that information to other players, so then the natural flow of combat resumes normally. Chromehounds is proof that game design is always a prisoner's dilemma of "will the player undermine the game's systems with a human opponent, or run the game in good faith?" -- Soren Johnson's response is "Given the opportunity, players always optimize the fun out of a game" -- my response is "they only do this when they think they are losing on unfair terms". This is Chromehounds, for anybody curious: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZuv8Cu7sjg Unfortunately, the players are talking primarily using the party system, so a lot of the game's special sauce is missing, which massively diminishes the game. Essentially, players take control of comms towers, which enable them to talk to eachother and pass information. They also snipe over enormous distances at eachother, in robots which are built like AC on steroids, where you can just mount a gun whereveer the hell you want. Chromehounds is as close to MT simulator as you are ever ever EVER going to get, and it was a magical game while it was still live. On game design with FROM overall: In this way, good game design should become an inverse prisoner's dilemma, where the incentive to playing "in good faith" is that playing "in bad faith" punishes the player by making them less effective, because making the game less fun isn't a good enough motive: So-called Type-A personalities care much more about winning than fun, and these are the monsters who ruin perfectly good games. Often the psychological trick is they attach their sense of self-esteem to winning, and they diminish their perception of shame because they view not playing the way they do as an idiot's choice, because they care more about optimums than fun. You solve this by making it abundantly clear that their choice is the one nobody likes: My favourite response to this has been to give certain parts an invisible "cheapness" score, so if you kill someone with a high cheapness score in their build, you score a second kill. The economics of gameplay thus mean its no longer an optimum strategy, because the number the Type-A is chasing is no longer aligned with the lazy play-style. A player who cares more about fun however, won't be bothered by this. I think FROM needs to recognize this, as do most game designers if I'm honest: You are the game designer, and at the end of the day, you get the final say on what's considered a victory or a loss, not your players. I think a good example of this would be something like AC's money system: Money is attached to unfair parts, so they become high risk/high reward in the games where money is the game's second health system and a game-over is possible. When that mechanic went away, that was no longer possible. The debt mechanic is a second health system, but a menu doesn't feel like a videogame to most players. That's an unsolved problem in AC's loop which would likely fix most of its wider problems. FROM has clearly tried to do this before, and Chromehounds WAS that attempt. The following is a supremely hot and smelly take as I'm zooming on ritalin and my opinion. Don't take it seriously, its 100% weirdcore and I'm exaggerating a bunch in the hope you'll get the vibe I'm trying to go for That fundamental issue of needing good faith is why I think the bitter tonality of FROM as a company emerges in their expression of storytelling and general attitude. Its why they're sadistic (alongside the obvious masochism of the designers themselves, who are very clearly bored with everything they come into contact with), and its why they deliberately neglect PVP, as if to say "If PVP is pain, its your fault for being bad actors and falling into lovely habits". edit: gently caress it, I'm going full Banana.mp4  A major change of attitude in the company unfolded when AC went online, as if we were seeing a company who had enormous trepidation and enthusiasm for the burgeoning pvp market watched their eldest child, that thing which emerged from ZAMS-K3, turn to hard drugs. If I had to describe FROM as a company, I'd call them heartbroken, and that's exactly how they want you to feel when you play their games. Anybody who is depressed, buried in learned helplessness and drowning in apathy and heartbreak with modern living becomes hopelessly romantically involved with their games in a way that's very hard to describe. It seems weird for games, yet the moment you bring it up about a film-maker, or maybe a novel series -- say, Richard Adams' Watership Down having a special significance in someone's life or Siergo Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West, it doesn't seem quite so far-fetched and goes from seeming creepy and weird to lilting, soft and sentimental. Y'know. Human. You see this with people who spend billions of years of their lives drudging through lore and story and digging the games up and turning them inside out for the slightest crumb of meaning. You have endless videos of "Dark Souls cured my depression" and very very weird poo poo like that on youtube. Like yeah, in today's era of course heartbreak is going to feel very relatable to an absolute fuckton of people. But I didn't fall for FROM during their heartbreak arc with Miyazaki: I fell for FROM during their Nabeshima enthusiasm "OK let's make like, make Patlabor and Gunhed into a videogame, that would be so drat cool" bloomer era. Its very easy to forget that a lot of the best works of fiction have been written by authors in various states of heartbreak, and I don't think FROM is an exception to this rule. Weird creepy unhealthy parasocial observation? Sure, I'll give you that. Is it rational or scientific an observation? gently caress no, its practically jibberish. But do I believe it?: I feel it in my guts, clear as day, 100% I don't think FROM know yet that money doesn't solve grief. This makes me ask a very important question: What happens when the well runs dry? And in truth? AC6 is the beginning of that very thing. I feel it in my guts, clear as day. 100%. So I put this to you, Ineffiable: Can you feel it? Expo70 fucked around with this message at 18:41 on Sep 5, 2023 |
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Sep 5, 2023 17:59
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Also this is the AC I'm running right now. Currently stuck on AAP03 Enforcer. The game is trying to say to me, "OK, the game is now about picking a meta build, not a playstyle, use building to problemsolve" -- and again, the only problem to solve in this game is one: Burst damage which is really really really boring... So I'm trying to make it interesting in any way I possibly can. I desperately wish I could circumvent stagger, or at least have a fair shake at ranged gunplay. I want to play Armored Core, not Mekiro. I hated the splitting of boost and ascend into different buttons as its murder on my right hand (thumb was ripped off in an accident as a kid and reattached and its hurt ever since), so I'm deliberately not running any right side weapons just out of sheer frustration, and I color the AC's arm to communicate that. No clue why it keeps defaulting to keyboard indicators: I'm using a controller.   The thing I'm most angry about is the boss gets priority even if I attack first in his animations which is frankly bullshit, meaning the windows are absurdly tight. Right now, AC feels more like Dark Souls than AC. I loving hate AC6, but its AC so I have to beat it.
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Sep 5, 2023 18:52
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quote:No clue why it keeps defaulting to keyboard indicators: I'm using a controller. That's a bug, you can adjust the inputs it shows you in the options menu, I usually have to every time I alt-tab
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Sep 5, 2023 18:59
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It's interesting to see some in depth analysis from people who aren't vibing with AC6 outside of the main thread, which just isn't a useful place to have the discussion amongst tons of people who are happy with what the game's doing (I assume vibes are still high anyway, stopped reading after a while). The biggest reason this is interesting for me is that there were enough details pre-launch that made me unsure about the new game that I still haven't played it. At some point I will, but it was enough to become a wait and see. One of the biggest things that hit me following along with that thread was that it's drat near only discussion of bosses, and very few other challenges with the game mechanics/levels themselves. I'm really skeptical on how well the game is gonna hit if it's mostly boiling down to epic boss battles for all the peak moments. Missions that were much more of a battle of attrition against weaker enemies, both against your AP and your funds, meant as much to me as any big boss in the older games. As cool as a unique boss MT could be, to me it felt like more of a peak when opposing ACs were your "oh poo poo" moments, be that arena fights or missions. The aforementioned discussion of the game economy itself no longer being meaningful is just a little mind boggling. Freely repeating old missions to farm $$$ mid-game just sounds like a serious immersion killer. Still gonna hope that the game hits enough to be a fun play when I get there, but it may just be a case where From has landed on a formula that hits strongly for their mass market appeal and goes away from the mechanics that a minority enjoyed about the earlier gens. The337th fucked around with this message at 22:33 on Sep 5, 2023 |
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Sep 5, 2023 22:30
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The337th posted:It's interesting to see some in depth analysis from people who aren't vibing with AC6 outside of the main thread, which just isn't a useful place to have the discussion amongst tons of people who are happy with what the game's doing (I assume vibes are still high anyway, stopped reading after a while). What I'm seeing is FROM don't know how to make AC work for a modern audience, so they didn't and made something else which looks like AC, but doesn't play like AC. Specifically, AC is an optimization problem, where you can make the difficulty slightly easier by running more optimized parts, or slightly harder but more fun by running more preferred parts as a form of skill expression. This then in the arena becomes a secondary loop, where the builds avoid having hard counters, where specialization grants regime-dominance at the cost of losing counterplays and generalization at the cost of that regime-dominance. A major part of the balancing was the game's costing system, where money was essentially your health or continue system. If you wanted to take less risks and have an easier time, you could spend that "health", and try to make made more than you lost. As a result, running something slightly overpowered always felt fair because you were making other types of strategic decisions to ground things. Unfortunately, FROM never really improved the second gameloop of costing and resource management so as a result it got left behind as a vestigial organ in favour of bigger setpieces and harder fights. Where difficulty initially rose from the limitations of control design and movement with 3D programming as somewhat new to Japanese game developers, it became clear players wanted the difficulty and so when improvements to control design were made difficulty was added in other areas... Right up until it wasn't anymore. I think that's kind of the problem: It became an action game, and an action game "held back" by an economy system isn't fun to players, so they just made it less and less relevant until it was removed alltogether. Then next, they came for the more simmish elements, replacing them for big action game spectacles. Now, I don't even think FROM know what AC is anymore, or what made it either work or not work in terms of what it originally was. They just know "action game". Which is fine for 90% of players, who just want "robot action game". I'm not part of that 90%, so I feel a bit left behind.
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Sep 5, 2023 23:32
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I think the thing about the other thread that summed it up best was someone sarcastically going 'yeah man, i hate feeling powerful, i wanna spend three years turning and get killed by a basic mook'. I feel like something like that sums up the experience for a lot of people. It's not about simulating playing a combat robot (and the inevitable learning curve that would come with it), or the really feeling the ins and outs of the game economy/setting through gameplay and story integration, its about having the combat robot aesthetics applied to a game that you can carry conventional action game principles forward into. And I say that as someone who really likes the game despite hating the 4th and 5th gens. It's kinda why I sideeye comments about 'it feels like I never left' or 'a return to form' or whatnot. It just seems like it's the aesthetics of it more than anything else.
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Sep 5, 2023 23:46
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ACES CURE PLANES posted:I think the thing about the other thread that summed it up best was someone sarcastically going 'yeah man, i hate feeling powerful, i wanna spend three years turning and get killed by a basic mook'. If you don't mind me asking, can you expand these points a bit? I'm quite fascinated but I'm not sure I completely get it. Can you explain further what you mean by "combat robot aesthetics that you can carry conventional action game principles into"? What I think you mean is the nature of movement, attack and defence, over any kind of deeper simulation, so the control is responsive, but weighted and grounded and that action feels intuitive and natural? I'd also like to know more about what you dislike in 4th's movement. This is very interesting to me, and I'd like to understand: I agree that its flawed, but its also very nice in some other ways, and I have an interest in bridging that gap, to solve said flaws. Expo70 fucked around with this message at 00:01 on Sep 6, 2023 |
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Sep 5, 2023 23:53
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I don't really know how much I can explain it more honestly. Something that has the skin of a robot game but plays like any other third person action game. Think comparing like ace combat to a flight sim, or a more immersive driving simulator game to like burnout or something. Familiarity that you can apply from other games to this, take a shot, flick the mouse, and shoot right behind you, that sort of thing. Another example I could think of in the mech genre was gundam evolution getting flak for being basically just a gundam skin on top of a standard fps. That sort of thing. ACES CURE PLANES fucked around with this message at 00:06 on Sep 6, 2023 |
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Sep 6, 2023 00:03
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ACES CURE PLANES posted:I don't really know how much I can explain it more honestly. Something that has the skin of a robot game but plays like any other third person action game. Think comparing like ace combat to a flight sim, or a more immersive driving simulator game to like burnout or something. Familiarity that you can apply from other games to this, take a shot, flick the mouse, and shoot right behind you, that sort of thing. I'd say that's right, and that's likely why I'm so unhappy with AC6. It feels like a character-action game which is skinned as a robot game and slowed down to add an artificial perception of momentum where none exists because of the false perception that momentum and unresponsiveness are the same thing. I do want to play a mech sim -- but I want to play a nimble and smooth mech sim, where nice tight movement and finesse of making it dance come down to a feeling of mastery. Like, I love the input and control scheme of AC4, but I think the general speeds are too high and the ACs are too uncontrollable in enclosed spaces and enclosed spaces are where most of the fun with oldgen was and often what some of the most interesting map designs were. I want to feel like I'm driving the robot. Even if its fairly nimble, I want to feel like there's something somewhere between me and it that I have to conquer. That's what I love about Nabeshima's era of AC: He 100% understood this. I know this is sacrilege, but I want the robot to be able to kneel, or go prone, or lean and balance, or pirouette or even to trip over and it feel like its a mix of some automatic systems, and then me pushing those systems to their safe or unsafe limits to get the robot to do things its not really meant to do. This is the fantasy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BcvIDoewsHc&t=91s I want to redline the robot, and know if it explodes, that's my fault and I pushed it too hard, or I didn't build it well enough and that I have much to learn. I want to commit reactor crimes. I want to get through a mission with the meters and dials screaming at me that I've damaged things to try and keep up with my opponent. I want to see how thin the margins can be between performance and destruction. AC has reliably given me those particular feelings for years. Limiter release, redlining, overheating... Hell yeah. Expo70 fucked around with this message at 00:15 on Sep 6, 2023 |
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Sep 6, 2023 00:09
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And see, for me, my preference is basically entirely localized within the PS2 era of stuff. The rock paper scissors of FCS manipulation getting them to overshoot while locking and unlocking to swap between leading the target and aiming straight at them, using air momentum to conserve energy while maintaining a decent movement speed, using the jump arc to assist in getting shots to miss, purposefully using the landing to stop on a dime, stuff like that. Stuff that kinda all immediately disappeared with quickboosts. But again, I don't think this actively makes AC6 a bad game by any means. It's not the ~platonic ideal~ of what I would like, whatever that means, but it is a fun action game that I enjoy playing, simple as. The main stuff I want in it for what it is on its own merits would just be more options. More parts for the categories that already exist, maybe stuff like Inside and Extension parts in a sequel down the road, definitely could use some more decal slots because man, 20 across my whole AC sure isn't enough. I'm not looking at some ideal super mech game or whatever, just looking to recapture something gone by, but at the same time like, there's a lot of stuff gone by that will probably never be recreated, so its not like something to lose sleep over or be angry about. I got decals to apply instead. 
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Sep 6, 2023 00:35
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ACES CURE PLANES posted:And see, for me, my preference is basically entirely localized within the PS2 era of stuff. The rock paper scissors of FCS manipulation getting them to overshoot while locking and unlocking to swap between leading the target and aiming straight at them, using air momentum to conserve energy while maintaining a decent movement speed, using the jump arc to assist in getting shots to miss, purposefully using the landing to stop on a dime, stuff like that. Stuff that kinda all immediately disappeared with quickboosts. I think this is somewhat my relationship with AC too. 4th gen left a mark on me. I think its slightly too fast, but the nimble and finesses and responsiveness is just magical. The lack of precision though, is just the worst. I keep thinking, "there has to be a way to merge these two together, without compromising on the other", and I realize the answer is giving the player powerful options for acceleration, but those options not instantly changing speed but instead adding velocity to a sum. In testing, sometimes it can take two or more quickboosts to come to a total stop, and it just makes more sense to use aerodynamics and the main booster. Its good for being manoeuvrable, but not the best for going fast. I think at some point I'll have to put a demo up or something, and see what people think, but I just can't let go of that feeling, you know?
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Sep 6, 2023 00:49
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Inside buildings, I think there's some room for a shmuplike focused movement button, or perhaps a range of options, drop your controller and press one to ten on your keyboard, activating any sort of overboost resets to 100% power? E: I will confess I don't really know how to put this together, I did try making a tiny nuclearjettankcube thing game a long while ago and most of my memories of it are that I found in incredibly painful to make fake physics and that real simulation trajectories and behaviours were easier to make than fake ones so I just have a weird brain. SIGSEGV fucked around with this message at 01:47 on Sep 6, 2023 |
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Sep 6, 2023 01:41
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SIGSEGV posted:Inside buildings, I think there's some room for a shmuplike focused movement button, or perhaps a range of options, drop your controller and press one to ten on your keyboard, activating any sort of overboost resets to 100% power? I think I had a stroke reading this. Not sure if its just me. Do you want to try again?
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Sep 6, 2023 01:45
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I don't know, I used to do things like that when I was making things I had a reasonable expectation no one else would ever touch.
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Sep 6, 2023 01:48
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SIGSEGV posted:I don't know, I used to do things like that when I was making things I had a reasonable expectation no one else would ever touch. Reading your edit, and its not too different from my experience. I'm using proportional controllers, airbreaks, thrusters, ground contact affordance, body model and a balancer/alignment system and a state-machine handler. Its interesting but juggling it all as a programmer gets annoying sometimes.
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Sep 6, 2023 02:29
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It's reassuring to know I wasn't the only one to struggle with that, I also thought you were aghast at my aggressively user hostile throttle controls.
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Sep 6, 2023 03:21
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ACES CURE PLANES posted:I think the thing about the other thread that summed it up best was someone sarcastically going 'yeah man, i hate feeling powerful, i wanna spend three years turning and get killed by a basic mook'. yeah...I kinda want to be a little intimidated by the basic mooks in my ideal AC game, whether they're giving enough attrition to my AP and/or my bank account to always feel like a threat
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Sep 6, 2023 03:38
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The337th posted:yeah...I kinda want to be a little intimidated by the basic mooks in my ideal AC game, whether they're giving enough attrition to my AP and/or my bank account to always feel like a threat That sounds like a very different game than Armored Core has ever been, if I may be so blunt. Putting aside the Karasawa, most mooks in AC 1 were still pretty quick and cheap to drop. There were heavy enemies who took enough fire to be an issue while putting out good damage in return, but by the time you had a couple missions under your belt, most basic enemies were dangerous in aggregate, not individually. And the series didn't exactly ditch that as it went, with Last Raven as the arguable peak. (A mission has a boss, it's a shitstorm. No boss, it's a joke. Exception made for the loving burrowing enemies.) There are grunt enemies in 6 who can take out a quarter of your health in a couple shots, and larger grunts like the quadruped can kill an unprepared player in under a minute. It's just you have so many tools by the time those enemies show up that you can kill them before they so much as glance at you if you're on the bounce. The enemies you meet while you're still stumbling aren't likely to cause much trouble
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Sep 6, 2023 07:47
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chiasaur11 posted:That sounds like a very different game than Armored Core has ever been, if I may be so blunt. Yeah, that's where the word attrition comes in, which I already said. If a bunch of enemies can collectively whittle you down that means they have a little bit of an intimidation factor even when they're weak individually. Repeatable mission farming and restart/checkpoints sound like they effectively remove that as a gameplay factor.
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Sep 6, 2023 07:58
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The337th posted:Repeatable mission farming and restart/checkpoints sound like they effectively remove that as a gameplay factor. Not really
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Sep 6, 2023 08:43
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kirbysuperstar posted:Not really I mean it depends on what you define as gameplay: If you define gameplay as an action space with a set of potential responses to player input with win/loss conditions with an intrinsic goal based in complete player autonomy (gently caress bitches, get money -- essentially, playing dolls or action figures with your robots repeatitively), then no we still have gameplay but with very little pressure If we define gameplay as a tactics space with a set of potential strategic choices with win/loss conditions which can actually end the game (closer to say a card or board-game's rules), therefor creating extrinsic motivation (keep the game going), then yes -- this means there is essentially no "gameplay", and that what remains is more like a tech demo. The first is super relaxing and chill, and lets you entirely circumvent strategic risk via farming. The second is super stressful, because if you gently caress up and don't understand the scenarios well enough or the game systems you essentially have to start over or revert to a previous point. The issue fundamentally is that games have leaned harder into the first, and haven't learned how to make the second enjoyable yet because it means being really good at player psychology, telegraphing and onboarding but also making sure risk management and loss (which will basically define the game) feel fair. In a game where attachment is extremely low (Tetris) this is fine. In a game like AC where attachment is huge, that's a massive problem. At this point I just wonder if SA shouldn't do the most SA thing possible and make its own game. For the record, some of the most fun I had in AC6 was hunting the stealth ACs until I realized their patterns are based on fixed waypoints and they don't evade effectively. Being ambushed feels very fun in a game where you're essentially Gulliver, and you're either a giant who crushes everything, or you're small and you have to die repeatedly until you optimize the fun out of the game with your build. Unrelated: This is a fascinating player choice -- just turning the ring hud off entirely. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sw2TY4uzApM I think a player should be able to switch lock-marker (box, ring), or turn it off alltogether. For accessibility this is a really nice decision for people who have trouble with visual clutter. Expo70 fucked around with this message at 13:53 on Sep 6, 2023 |
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Sep 6, 2023 13:45
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The337th posted:yeah...I kinda want to be a little intimidated by the basic mooks in my ideal AC game, whether they're giving enough attrition to my AP and/or my bank account to always feel like a threat  crusader wishes to know your locatioin
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Sep 6, 2023 20:18
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Alright, any tips for Master of Arena? Trap stats/choices, things I should know? I'm a couple missions in and just unlocked the Arena. This will be the first time I've played a Gen 1 AC game since they were new.
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Sep 6, 2023 21:19
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MoA is basically an expansion pack building on another expansion pack, so it kinda expects that you're working off a PP save file which in turn was working off an AC1 save. Though to be fair it isn't quite as mean as certain other expansion games would be. For the gen as a whole, the 1000 shot machinegun is a solid, relatively cheap choice that'll give you plenty of leeway with ammo to cover any surprises you might run into on missions, though at the cost of being a bit wallet heavy depending on the mission/your accuracy. For more economical options, the xc4 laser rifle has decent ammo, and once you get the optional parts to lower energy weapon drain/increase capacitors and increase energy weapon power, it's quite punchy and has tolerable drain. Main thing is it can be rough with lower end generators.
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Sep 6, 2023 21:40
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Kinda wondered if not importing a file would put me at a big disadvantage. I don't have enough time to play them all so I figured I'd pick the "best" of each Gen, which I understand to be MoA. I suppose there's no time limit, so I could just start from AC1. Ultimately they aren't going anywhere
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Sep 6, 2023 21:48
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I started MoA from a save I brought through AC1 and PP and felt overpowered at the start. It took a little time for arena fights and missions to start challenging me. You might be able to get by with a fresh save. Then again there's good stuff in the first two games, no need to skip them. Though MoA feels like a much better version of PP, I'd forgive you for going straight from AC1 to MoA.
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Sep 6, 2023 21:59
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Yeah I can't really say PP adds a ton honestly, it's pretty short and rather straightforward. Though Stinger is kinda cool at least.
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Sep 6, 2023 22:28
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That last battle in PP is like a rave. The story in it isn't very interesting but it's got some cool levels. It can also be beaten in like an hour if that changes anything for you.
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Sep 6, 2023 22:57
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Yeah I'm gonna just scrap and start from 1. It'll be like visiting an old friend. I never got to the final stage so I'm sure that's gonna be awful
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Sep 6, 2023 23:24
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Oh, one thing I can give PP, full power FINGER. That alone might be worth it honestly.
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Sep 7, 2023 00:16
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ACES CURE PLANES posted:It's kinda why I sideeye comments about 'it feels like I never left' or 'a return to form' or whatnot. It just seems like it's the aesthetics of it more than anything else. It's totally fair to sideeye these comments. AC6 is not like the prior AC games - I think it controls like the way someone who played AC1-AC3, wrestled with the controls, had a bad experience, and decided to try and file off everything they saw as a rough edge that got in the way of easily and nimbly controlling their AC in a 3D space (going further beyond the changes made in AC4/AC5). Of course, this is assuming that all of the rough edges are bad and not an intentional part of the game design. I will utter one point in favor of the stagger system, even though there are a fair number of points one can cite against it (e.g., it kind of dumpsters energy weapons because the consistent damage they deal over time is nowhere near the amount that you can just dump into someone during a stagger window with kinetic/explosive weapons, which happen to also be really good at creating the stagger window in the first place). It does level the playing field a bit between players and other ACs. At least in AC1-3 (which I feel more qualified to talk about because I actually played them - can't say the same about AC4-5 or speak to them), players can inadvertently create the 'stagger window' for enemies to dump damage into them by running out of energy, doubly so if they use energy weapons (because then they can't move in ways that can avoid damage, nor can they retaliate effectively against enemies). Recharge windows are on-par if not longer than using the big Coral Generator in AC6, so it's a pretty significant period of vulnerability especially as you need to wait for your energy to get back to full before you can use it again (whereas in AC6, you can start using energy again as soon as it comes back, regardless of whether or not it recharged to full first). The AI doesn't have this issue - it generally has near-perfect energy/boost management to the point where it can often feel unlimited (there are ways to make them run out of energy, iirc, but for them to do it on their own is probably some kind of hard-coded forced error). You can negate this by 'getting gud' at the game and learning to bunny hop effectively, but it still doesn't mitigate the fact that the AI is just flat-out better at this than you and it has far fewer problems keeping you in its FCS reticle (it would be fascinating to see if AI ACs actually follow the same rules as player ones and need to have players in their FCS lock zone in order to actually target them, but in general it feels like as long as you're somewhere in front of them, they have an FCS lock). In other words, there are ample opportunities for players to gently caress up and be left at the mercy of the AI, but few to no ways for the player to force these errors onto the AI itself. At least by adding stagger - even though enemy AC units have absurd amounts of Attitude Stability compared to players - this creates a nominally more level playing field in which players can create vulnerability windows that they can use to punish opposing units, rather than hoping that the AI makes some kind of mistake in its energy and boost management to the point where it runs out of energy and then they can punish it. The problem with this system though, as I've mentioned earlier, is that it rewards the stagger window a little too much, given the high amounts of HP most enemy units have and the big multipliers on direct hits for some weapons. Gameplay-wise, it generally makes energy weapons rather poor AC/boss dueling weapons compared to kinetic/explosive weapons and given that the most difficult missions are the ones with enemy ACs and bosses, this ends up making energy weapons kind of poo-poo. Which is a shame because they are cool, but then again I don't think we need to return to the days where the KARASAWA was the answer to everything.
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Sep 7, 2023 03:15
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Sorry again for these "braindump" posts, I have a lot of complex feelings and I need to put them somewhere and I think they may either be interesting or helpful to others.LuiCypher posted:At least by adding stagger - even though enemy AC units have absurd amounts of Attitude Stability compared to players - this creates a nominally more level playing field in which players can create vulnerability windows that they can use to punish opposing units, rather than hoping that the AI makes some kind of mistake in its energy and boost management to the point where it runs out of energy and then they can punish it. I think stagger is too rewarding and essentially means a lot of the older games niches are just no longer possible which is really saddening if you're coming back to the series -- wheras new players are fine with it. I've spoken to some friends, and the overall sentiment is "I wish I could play with mods online with my friends so we could fix the base game ourselves, because we don't trust FROM to patch it quickly enough" I really hear on on the AI feeling a bit flat: You can't get them to make mistakes the way players do, and it kinda makes the online and offline play feel completely different. Its very clear in repeated playthroughs that the game is tuned for the AI, not the player. The PVP feels like something bolted on. 3rd and 4th gen had similar issues with one or two weapons: Namely the Finger cannons, and the Saline missile launcher which existed to make a specific opponent more threatening. You'd think the AI programming would have been adjusted so the AI makes less mistakes, or capitalizes on trying to push the player into making mistakes but I've noticed there isn't a culture of this kind of programming domestically which is somewhat troubling. A lot of behaviour trees are just running clustered patterns, and the number of observer functions in the AI or inferences is especially low. This also makes me realize why so many of the maps are claustrophobic slices of bigger maps, and why the AI doesn't tend to act very intelligently: Dantelion is still almost exclusively using navigation meshes, and for larger maps they take an absolute age to render and bake, and are completely broken by the smallest things. As a result, they generally have to be kept quite small, and peeking under Dantelion's skirt with ER modding tools, I can see they're attaching jumpable areas together with nodes. Given the three dimensionality of AC, it makes me wonder why FROM isn't using whiskers and voxel based pathfinding, with helper objects. If they really wanted to be aggressively performant with extremely high numbers of enemies with complex behaviours, adding surface vector-fields to objects would also work really well to create flowmaps on maps with lots of complex moving objects. The base CPU cost would be fairly high, but it would scale extremely well because its all just memory access rather than striped compute and write so you get all kinds of nice benefits to cache behaviour. On Japanese technical culture and its possible relation: This kind of highly technical problem-solving isn't really taught or understood domestically (with a preference for making very very clever combinations of extremely well understood systems with excellent craftsmanship usually being the preferred methodology). I say this because it is also something you see in Japanese domestic robotics too which is largely still using fixed servo proportional control and minimizing the number of joints to create an illusion of locomotion rather than functional dynamical locomotion with an active pelvis in its gait (which is where most of the cost savings of locomotion even emerge to begin with), which produces really weird and unstable, unreactive gaits. I remember while 2ch was still active, their users were comparing Asimo to Petman (a robot which existed entirely to test fracture points and weight balancing problems in uniforms and did so using magnetically reactive hydraulic compression to replicate the natural shock absorbsion characteristics of human muscle). They said thing like, "Japan is no longer a leader", and "this brings shame" which felt very bad. I found out about it after asking one about what they thought of Petman's gait and it using hiproll and a simulated segmented torso in conjunction with its joints and the guy immediately apologized and blocked me without any context, which then someone else had to explain to me in private. I felt super super bad for them, but they explained: There is a culture called "kaizen" among Japanese programmers and engineers: that Japan's strong traditional respect and long term perspective prefers incremental changes rather than radical changes and this is fostered by domestic Japanese business culture. To this end, trying a new idea to solve an old problem is seen like "giving up on the old refinement" which is seen as letting something die, and there's a sentimentality there which punishes this behaviour. Likewise, if it doesn't immediately produce better results, investors and bosses aren't interested in its potential. This combined with the culture of risk aversion which makes failure a sign of incompetence rather than a necessary step to making meaningful observations and the perception of shame in turn creates many problems. I do not know very much, but I think some of FROM's expertise leaving meant the old way of doing things - such as with the balance with AC - is not completely understood anymore. I know a similar thing happened with engineers leaving Konami to form Treasure in 1992. I do think though, that many of the problems arise from the AI not being interesting enough, and the game relying on balance (which also applies to players) to attempt to solve for it. There are a lot of moments where decisions become much less important than one's ability to execute a technique properly with incomplete information. Missile evasion for example is significantly harder to learn or identify patterns in without a radar, and I am not entirely sure why FROM made the decision to remove it. One thing which hit me like a ton of bricks speaking with older players who are also game developers were the conversations which began to emerge: Puber posted:I play ac6 in 30min increments and I usually find other things to do to avoid playing it I mentioned I'd been getting housework done, and when I had to pick between mopping and AC6, I chose mopping and the friend agreed, which made us both a bit sad. LittleGigas posted:I go back to Balteus with double trigger assault rifle but I still feel the need to bring a Trueno for burst damage This is also just, a huge huge mood, and I'm going to chalk it up to 6 being the first numbered entry in a generation which is a curse every game has to deal with -- because it takes audience reaction for FROM to properly tune things for the next game or two usually. Here are some more of my quite childish feelings about this game (played/expected/got). Possible spoilers. oh btw Update to the NEXT movement regulation: quote:- Linear Rifles are now acts like Sniper Rifles from Classic Armored Core. You can get it here: AI ACs feel a lot more dangerous, and the bosses a bit less dangerous which was pretty much what was wanted. Next thing to be patched is smoothing out stagger and ensuring EN weapons like lasers and linear rifles have a viable niche.
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Sep 7, 2023 19:23
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Been replaying AC1 lately in the spare time I can get and wanted to grab a side by side of and old MT for the hell of it.  Not so big anymore, are you, lil guy?
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Sep 7, 2023 20:35
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The dogshit situationnal awareness AC6 saddles you with is fine, mostly, but then why also have escort missions? I can't escort anything with a 30° FoV full of muddy colors.
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Sep 8, 2023 18:03
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SIGSEGV posted:The dogshit situationnal awareness AC6 saddles you with is fine, mostly, but then why also have escort missions? I can't escort anything with a 30° FoV full of muddy colors. Yes, I can see how someone would struggle with the situational awareness of an unlocked 360 degree camera, a constant ALLY tag on your on-screen compass (also showing you where enemies are) and a realtime full screen ALLY marker featuring a big arrow and current distance in meters. Definitely makes sense dude.
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Sep 8, 2023 18:36
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