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haveblue posted:More than the majority, the jeep stunt course is about twice the size of the in-game model for the entire ship from the opening movie. Jeez, no wonder the covenant is winning the war.
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Aug 21, 2019 15:04
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That warthog stunt course is 100% nonsense but its so satisfying to basically just drive over anything in your way while frantically trying to escape that other games including its own descendants felt the need to try and rip that off.
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Aug 21, 2019 15:05
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Level design has never been and still isn't Bungie's strong point. They hit their peak with Reach in my opinion. To be fair with Halo, they were running super tight on development time and I think that game had the same problem as Half Life where they had to retool the whole drat thing in a little over a year. The version we got was not what it was "meant" to be when they started development. The levels of any interior are still horrible tho, wowie. I hated the warthog stunt course mostly because the warthog doesn't. go. FAST. ENOUGH. They fixed that for Reach though, ooooh baby the warthog is a badass in that one.
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Aug 21, 2019 15:42
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Rupert Buttermilk posted:I didn't mind the necessary abstraction of Doom levels ('how were people working here? who cares!') likely because I grew up with Wolfenstein, which was even worse for that. But in Halo, specifically the Library, how are we supposed to believe that any of these places had any sort of purpose other than an obstacle course for gunplay? That's what multiplayer is for! If anything Doom's levels being abstract makes them way more fun to play around in. Realism ruins games. In Halo they have a bit of an excuse because its a massive installation in the middle of space built by space aliens and AIs. The Halo ring is a superstructure, and by its very scope and scale you're gonna have tons of huge empty spaces that are just like, structural blocks, and then they could stick something in there like a giant AI computer library.  Makes as much sense as anything to me. Like the Silent Cartographer, there's just these installations dotted across Halo's surface, but then all the ring stuff kicked off and there were oceans and plants and life and that stuff grew over the installations so different ones ended up in different places. Al Cu Ad Solte posted:Level design has never been and still isn't Bungie's strong point. They hit their peak with Reach in my opinion. To be fair with Halo, they were running super tight on development time and I think that game had the same problem as Half Life where they had to retool the whole drat thing in a little over a year. The version we got was not what it was "meant" to be when they started development. When they started development it was a Mac only RTS, and then a third person shooter. Halo, like Half-life, was remade several times during development; and that's why it was so groundbreaking. They explored the game. They took risks and learned things. Most games the budget is so tight you can't even think about that. So sequel after sequel with known gameplay models instead of trying new things. Zaphod42 fucked around with this message at 16:51 on Aug 21, 2019 |
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Aug 21, 2019 16:48
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Zaphod42 posted:If anything Doom's levels being abstract makes them way more fun to play around in. Realism ruins games. I agree with this in general, it just felt like Halo was in this weird spot in between where everything looked like it should be realistic, but it wasn't.
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Aug 21, 2019 17:01
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Rupert Buttermilk posted:I agree with this in general, it just felt like Halo was in this weird spot in between where everything looked like it should be realistic, but it wasn't. Library is inarguably the worst Halo level however we break it down. It was very clearly rushed and isn't super fun. So either way yeah.
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Aug 21, 2019 17:12
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The Kins posted:Basically, limitations (whether that be technological or budget-wise) force you to obscure or hide things. And what the player or viewer's eyes can't see, their mind will all-too-happily fill in to a level of detail that no art director could possibly match. Yeah, this is exactly why Jaws was so scary. The actual shark model looks goofy as hell and Spielberg later said it was a happy accident the thing kept breaking and forced him to improvise.
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Aug 21, 2019 17:14
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KozmoNaut posted:Flat textures with no specular/bump/diffuse/normal mapping is a pretty defining feature, as I think the PS2 doesn't have hardware normal mapping. Xbox 360 and PS3 leaned so heavily on those features that it is one of the defining graphical differences compared to the previous generation of consoles, aside from HD of course. I think the PS2 did have some very basic normal mapping support (hell, even the Dreamcast did), but I have no idea what the technical hurdles were that stopped it from being used. Guessing you’d have to lower your poly count or texture quality more than most studios wanted to or something along those lines.
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Aug 21, 2019 18:08
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Rupert Buttermilk posted:Oddly enough, the multiplayer map 'Library' is the most abstract GE map in the game. Not Complex??
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Aug 21, 2019 18:43
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John Murdoch posted:Not Complex?? I thought about mentioning it, but I always thought it was some sort of structure around a missile silo or nuclear building. But yeah, it's close to being just absolutely weird and non-sensical. Actually, now that I think of it, yeah, it is pretty abstract. I have no idea what it was supposed to be. At least with Library, it's really missing the actual stacks and aisles to look like some sort of government library.
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Aug 21, 2019 18:55
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Still working on ROTH. There's a puzzle at one point that requires you to put one of two feathers you're given in pedestal thing. The "easy" mode of the game automatically grabs the right object from your inventory and uses it. Even as someone who loves point and click adventure games I think it's best to just leave it on easy because the interface is so loving clunky. That's how it works most of the time. In the feather puzzle it will automatically put the red one in there which is wrong, and spawns two enemies. It won't even switch it out after getting through that bit, you have to do it manually. Still, despite the dates rear end in a top hat design I'm still having fun.
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Aug 21, 2019 19:04
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I finished Ion Fury over the weekend and liked it real good. I think that they delivered exactly what was advertised: A new Build game. The level design is the star of the show. It is Build quasi-realistic rendering writ large in unprecedented detail, and voxels, Voxels, VOXELS! I think that one area where the game lets itself down is with enemy variety. The entire campaign leans way to hard on the soldier type enemies. You are fighting these same four guys in every single map, and they are waiting behind nearly every corner. The shotgun and grenade guys are subtle pallete swaps, so for most of the game I thought it was one enemy type using the Disperser weapon the same way that the player does. Ion Fury doesn't have interesting or varied ways to use these soldiers either. A few are placed behind every door or corner and they start shooting at you a half second after they see you. The only exception to this is when the soldiers are scripted to pop out from around a corner or spawn behind you. They each only have one attack, and behave only one way, and it dragged on me to be headshotting these dudes non-stop during extended play sessions. They are also frequently encountered in the dark, at extreme ranges, meaning I was pixel sniping at their tiny glowing eyes a whole lot. There are other enemy types sprinkled around, of course, but from the start of the game to past the midpoint, overwhelmingly, you are running into either soldiers or spiders. In the last third of it's campaign, Ion Fury starts adding more variety in its encounters by increasing the population of the heavier enemies, having more mini boss fights, and introducing two fodder zombie enemies. The combat feels so much more lively from this point on and it is one of the few if only times that I can recall zombie type enemies making a game feel more dynamic. I thought that the weapon loadout was very good, and Ion Fury makes some tweaks to old archetypes to make its weapons stand out. The Loverboy revolver is great and I leaned on the auto-shot for spiders and flyers. The Disperser feels really good in both of it's roles, but I think they handled its two fire modes completely incorrectly. You can instantly swap from another weapon to the Disperser loaded with shotgun shells or grenades, but if you already have the Disperser out and swap to its other mode, you have to go through the animation of dumping the cylinder and reloading it. This means that it is faster to swap from the Shotgun Disperser to the Loverboy and then to the Grenade Disperser than it is to go directly from the Shotgun to the Grenade. So the Grenade Launcher should have just been it's own weapon. It serves nothing for the Disperser to be a dual-ammo weapon. Ion Fury is also one of the rare times when I wished that reloading wasn't necessary. I usually think that having to plan for it needing to react to a weapon running dry makes the shooting more dynamic, but in Ion Fury I always seemed to be swapping to a weapon that was half empty. This is made worse in that you cannot see how much is in the current magazine. Again the Disperser was the chief offender because swapping from shotgun shells to grenades (or vice versa) doesn't give you a full cylinder of grenades. You might wait though the whole ammo changing animation just to end up with one loaded chamber and then have to immediately go through the same reload animation. This is madness, the grenade launcher should be it's own weapon! However, I got around both of these weapon complaints thanks to the bug/decision where you can cancel a reload animation at any point by swapping to a different weapon and still get the full reload. I used Logitech software to bind macros that hit "Reload" immediately before each weapon hotkey so I was actually reloading my weapons each time I put them away! For the Shotgun and Grenade Launcher, I inserted a "2" press into the macro so when I wanted to switch to the Shotgun or Grenade Launcher, the macro would reload whatever weapon was out, start to switch to the Loverboy, but then cancel that switch to bring out the Disperser instead. This was way faster than waiting for Shelly to dump out the shells before loading grenades. I was able to swap to whatever weapon I needed, near instantly, with impunity, and it really smoothed out the combat for me. I didn't like the final boss; I played on the Viscera difficulty setting and the end boss was complete, unmanageable pandemonium. Maybe that was exactly what Voidpoint was going for, but I quicksaved my way through it, and I don't have to do it again. I'm going to do another playthrough, and I think I might drop the difficulty down to normal, pistol start each zone, and try to rely on the game's autosaves instead of doing any scumming.
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Aug 21, 2019 19:38
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Strange Aeons' spider boss is some loving bullshit man  Maybe less so if you found the BFG or lightning gun, but I had to take those fuckers down with nothing but rockets.
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Aug 21, 2019 21:20
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Were there any console-focused shooters that weren't some kind of PC port before Halo that didn't suck? Genuinely at kind of a loss here.
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Aug 21, 2019 21:34
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Yeah Goldeneye. Timesplitters too, I think.
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Aug 21, 2019 21:37
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Perfect Dark and Doom 64 too.
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Aug 21, 2019 21:38
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Perfect Dark
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Aug 21, 2019 21:39
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the turok games as well
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Aug 21, 2019 21:39
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Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire
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Aug 21, 2019 21:48
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Really puts into perspective that the N64 lacked a lot of games compared to the PSX but it surprisingly was really strong in first person shooters. I don't think the Playstation even had a good FPS franchise outside of the Medal of Honor games.
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Aug 21, 2019 21:58
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does forsaken count? if we're doing 1st/3rd hybrids jet force gemini Solaris 2.0 posted:Really puts into perspective that the N64 lacked a lot of games compared to the PSX but it surprisingly was really strong in first person shooters. being the first console with an analog stick was a helluva thing site fucked around with this message at 22:02 on Aug 21, 2019 |
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Aug 21, 2019 21:59
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I returned to the Marathon 2 TC replay I started... sometime last year woops and I'm in the alien ship levels rn but it reminded me of something surprising from way earlier in the run... I actually kind of loved 6000 Feet Under. Like it still kinda sucks (though like a lot of problem M2 levels it would be greatly improved with just good signposting practices, the major bump everyone runs into is the big jump onto a platform you wouldn't think is intended cuz its completely dark, navigating the rest of it was fine for me) but I was completely sold on the atmosphere this time. Something about running around in these ancient ruins with nothing but the alien equivalent of sewer rats reading these last moments before defeat spht diary entries really got to me. In fact there's a number of levels earlier in the game too where you're thrown into some random ruin and Durandal's like "there's nothing but alien deer that eat pipe moss here, don't kill too many or there'll be no one to maintain the sewage system, I need you to run out to random places here" that I really disliked my first time through (where's the action) that I really liked this time. A big part of the fun for me this time has been fully exploring these spaces that feel really alien in a way I haven't felt in other games. It's a combination of the kind of weird garish textures (Infinity has much more normal, nice looking ones) and the fidelity level of the architecture, given context through the story. Besides the semi walking sim levels there's other really bizarre choices for a shooter (definitely of today but maybe even of its time?) like Come and Take Your Medicine being a huge fully explorable level that in plot you're being told to avoid exploring, with an objective you only have to go like 10 feet from spawn to complete. I started this replay just to try fully clearing it on TC and had so much fun I just kept going... I spent a ton of time as a kid running around in the fully textured and traversible "out of bounds" areas in Halo 2 and I feel like this is an early example of the mindset that lead to the explorable OOB areas in halo games. Imagine a modern fps "wasting" that much of a level.
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Aug 21, 2019 22:00
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Solaris 2.0 posted:Really puts into perspective that the N64 lacked a lot of games compared to the PSX but it surprisingly was really strong in first person shooters. The N64 controller with analog controls on the standard controller and button layout worked really well for FPS games, especially if they had Turok-style controls by default or as an option.
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Aug 21, 2019 22:08
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DisDisDis posted:Besides the semi walking sim levels there's other really bizarre choices for a shooter (definitely of today but maybe even of its time?) like Come and Take Your Medicine being a huge fully explorable level that in plot you're being told to avoid exploring, with an objective you only have to go like 10 feet from spawn to complete. I started this replay just to try fully clearing it on TC and had so much fun I just kept going... I spent a ton of time as a kid running around in the fully textured and traversible "out of bounds" areas in Halo 2 and I feel like this is an early example of the mindset that lead to the explorable OOB areas in halo games. Imagine a modern fps "wasting" that much of a level. I’d say that the CATYM thing is particularly weird given the time, even the Vidmaster’s Page is wondering what’s up with that! Though I guess they would be. I also like that level. It’s skippable if you really want to get to the rest of the game for whatever reason, but from a storytelling point of view I like it as a reminder that Durandal’s at cross purposes with you. He’s a man (well, machine) on a mission and you’re just here to have fun. There’s also a fairly kickass hidden(ish) terminal here, containing a message of condolence from one of the Spht you just murdered. “You kill me, but free the unit-whole.”
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Aug 21, 2019 22:09
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skasion posted:I’d say that the CATYM thing is particularly weird given the time, even the Vidmaster’s Page is wondering what’s up with that! Though I guess they would be. It was incredibly memorable to me as a kid, because I of course got hopelessly lost trying to complete the very simple objective and wandering around trying to get back on the beaten path was incredibly tense because I didn't really understand where I was or where enemies would come from and as long as I was lost I couldn't recharge my health. It just shows a commitment to reproducing plot setting in level environment that goes completely against common sense game design. Telling the player "I need you to do something close to your entry point, don't get lost because you're in a huge military base full of enemies" and then actually creating an entire "huge" "military" installation they could get lost in whether intentionally or not. I think the experience I had as a kid was very much working as intended in that sense it's just such a bizarre thing to actually go and do. It's stuff like that that really cements Marathon in its own niche separate from doom and the build games for me though. e; also that terminal tripped me out as a kid cuz a compiler completely got the drop on me right next to it, I managed to kill it then read the terminal and was sort of convinced (though I understood this wasn't possible w/in game logic) that that was a message from the compiler I had killed. Maybe it was positioned right there to give that impression though. double e, CATYM's also a great showcase for how well Marathon's enemies can pathfind around levels, they roam much more freely than monsters from other e fpses ime. DisDisDis fucked around with this message at 22:42 on Aug 21, 2019 |
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Aug 21, 2019 22:38
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How long is Ion Fury's campaign anyway? HLTB says 4 hours which is kinda short even for that type of game, but I dunno if it's accurate, there's few submissions of times.
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Aug 21, 2019 23:03
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Zaphod42 posted:If anything Doom's levels being abstract makes them way more fun to play around in. Realism ruins games. This is ludicrous to state. Rather what we have is that working with realism requires development teams that are willing to put in much more work to make their game systems work with it. As said to it before, GoldenEye's levels have very heavy realism, from Rare being interested in recreating movie sets and real scenes as much as possible. Even though stage sets have some of their own unrealism, it's much closer to realism than random video game levels tend to be. Try to just dump straightforward Quake gameplay into those levels and you will not have a great or fun time!
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Aug 21, 2019 23:04
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Mystic Stylez posted:How long is Ion Fury's campaign anyway? HLTB says 4 hours which is kinda short even for that type of game, but I dunno if it's accurate, there's few submissions of times. Took me around 8ish. At the end of each zone my time markers was between 45 minutes and an hour 10. I didn't search for ANY secrets, though. I didn't blaze through the levels either. I even turned off autorun.
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Aug 21, 2019 23:05
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Plan Z posted:Were there any console-focused shooters that weren't some kind of PC port before Halo that didn't suck? Genuinely at kind of a loss here. Timesplitters my man! And the PC ports could be pretty good too, Quake 3, Unreal Tournament and Half-life on console are all pretty serviceable. nepetaMisekiryoiki posted:This is ludicrous to state. Rather what we have is that working with realism requires development teams that are willing to put in much more work to make their game systems work with it.  its not. Holding all other things constant, if it requires more work, that means something else has to give. Budgets don't just... magically get bigger to account for realism.Developers hands get tied by trying to make things look good, everything takes tons more work and becomes more set-in-stone so they suddenly have to work around the problem instead of just fixing it. I'm obviously using hyperbole though. The point isn't that a realistic game has to suck, its that realism makes it much much harder to make a good game. And as said to it before, GoldenEye's levels are way more confusing than anything in Doom or Quake. And I would say less fun and memorable too, although goldeneye does have a few really memorable setpieces. Zaphod42 fucked around with this message at 23:11 on Aug 21, 2019 |
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Aug 21, 2019 23:08
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Can't believe I forgot all of those. I almost completely missed out on the first generation of 3d consoles. I've only ever touched an N64 about three times at a cousin's house, and the only game I ever played on PS1 was FF7.
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Aug 21, 2019 23:35
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Eh maybe this is just a semantic argument but how many of the new, less fun (well, imo) fps games would you really call realistic in a tangible level design sense. Modern Warfare (as one of my pet hate on games) and most modern fps are skinned to look like realistic environments but their actual gameplay space is fairly abstract, kinda taking the ship of "big hallway with line of sight blockers in it." In some ways Doom 2's city levels in being really twisty to navigate and having lots of vertical enemy placements are much closer to being like a city in terms of a gameplay environment than a lot of modern military fps environments that are skinned that way but aren't too meaningfully different from their indoor environments in terms of gameplay space. If you want to say game's trying to be realistic makes them less fun because you necessarily walk slow and don't get a bfg that's fair and I agree with you but you're mixing that argument with asset and level creation being much more difficult and expensive which is also true but applies just as much to your DO4Ms and Destiny's as it does to CoD.
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Aug 21, 2019 23:41
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So was that Dev post on Twitter about pirating Ion Fury legit? If so I guess we'll see what a 'zero tolerance' policy really means
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Aug 21, 2019 23:42
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Bushmaori posted:So was that Dev post on Twitter about pirating Ion Fury legit? If so I guess we'll see what a 'zero tolerance' policy really means Don't post the tweet or anything
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Aug 21, 2019 23:52
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Fallom posted:Don't post the tweet or anything Splash Attack posted:Ion Fury dev suggests user pirates their game: ‘F*** politics’
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Aug 21, 2019 23:56
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Lol E: the date on that says yesterday but I don't see it on their Tweets & Replies, so deleted? site fucked around with this message at 00:01 on Aug 22, 2019 |
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Aug 21, 2019 23:57
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Fallom posted:Don't post the tweet or anything I checked and it's gone, which is why I was wondering if it was real.
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Aug 21, 2019 23:59
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Boy oh boy I sure do love the peaceful existence of me and my friends and the desire to not being murdered or oppressed being reduced to "politics." Anybody know why the latest versions of Aleph One don't let me choose save files? I'm playing through Marathon 2 again (because I love it  ) and I've been wondering why whenever I use a pattern buffer it just automatically creates a new save, so I just have this grocery list of save files. I like my saves neat and tidy okay. 
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Aug 22, 2019 00:08
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I don't get it, why would the bad [chud] devs be encouraging people to pirate the game? If anything I'd expect it to be the hypothetical "good" devs saying "yeah, I understand why you don't want to give our company money now, but in that case please pirate it just so that you can see what we worked on  "But if it's the bad devs, then their strategy is... what? Encouraging the progressives who don't want to give them money to enjoy the game anyway?
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Aug 22, 2019 00:24
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Al Cu Ad Solte posted:Boy oh boy I sure do love the peaceful existence of me and my friends and the desire to not being murdered or oppressed being reduced to "politics." think it was sort of a game flow + preventing new players (all those new marathon players lol) from owning themselves with bad saving practices. kinda irritating i agree but i've also never checked if you can change it so
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Aug 22, 2019 00:26
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JerryLee posted:I don't get it, why would the bad [chud] devs be encouraging people to pirate the game? I'm assuming that was in response to 3DRealms' PR statement when the chudly types said they wouldn't buy the game now that 3DR has "bent the knee" or some dumb poo poo.
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Aug 22, 2019 00:31
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