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Lynneth posted:I used to be huge into FPS games - but I never ended up liking Halo, nor its story, very much. Instead, I played like a mad lad Aliens vs Predator 2, and got sucked into Half-Life and later Call of Duty before shifting to Mass Effect. I played Halo's PC release shortly after it became available, and always wondered what people found so great about it. Predictably, I didn't play any of the sequels. To be honest, the original Halo was never designed to compete with games like Half Life, AvP2, or Unreal Tournament or the like; it could never have competed with those games on PC because it was designed from the outset for console. The fact you can only carry two weapons (compared with the dozen or so common in PC shooters at the time) was so that you could use a single button to switch weapons instead of having to cycle through them. It had pretty good AI - arguably comparable with that of Half Life - and used auto aim to make up for the fact that you didn't have the precision of a mouse. As a result, with a controller, it was one of the best feeling console shooters ever made. I can't imagine it having been particularly great on PC, however, in large part due to it being designed around the limitations of console gaming. Personally, I really liked this game - but mostly for the split screen coop and deathmatch play. I mean, I played through the campaign a few times, and found the shooting fairly enjoyable and the sci-fi horror stuff to be suitably horrific, but sitting on a friend's couch, eating Chinese and sharing a few beers while blowing the poo poo out of each other with tanks and rocket launchers (and getting the sticky grenade to connect) was the kind of experience that I really miss from console games of that era, and as far as I'm concerned, no console shooter did split screen multiplayer better than the Halo series. It's worth noting that there is a second spartan on the ship if you play coop too - you both get your own pod. Also, if one of you dies but the other doesn't, the one that died respawns near the other, so there's a minimum of sitting around doing nothing if you die in a hard fight, and the better player doesn't get punished with a game over.
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Jan 15, 2021 00:28
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White Coke posted:Why didn't they use the D-pad to squeeze in a few more guns? And who invented the weapon wheel? To answer the first question, I don't think it had really occurred to anybody in the late 90s and up to 2001 that the dpad could be used for things other than movement or precision aiming, so for many games of the time, it just wasn't used at all. It's worth remembering that the two stick controller format became mainstream with the Dual Shock controller for the PS1, but wasn't standard controller design until the PS2 and XBox generation; as such, games on the playstation had to be playable with only the dpad for movement and aiming (usually with a button for the latter, and what are now considered the triggers for strafing if the game included that style of movement). As such, game designers still couldn't really use it for anything essential until the following generation, when they could assume that everybody had two analogue sticks. At that point, it just took a while for someone to find a use for it. It's also worth remembering that one stick for movement, the other for aiming wasn't really standardised until a year or two into the PS2/XBox generation; many shooters prior to that also (and even by default) offered left stick for forward/backward movement and turning, right stick for strafing and looking up/down (kind of like how in the mid to late 90s, PC games typically used the arrow keys for movement - or even the number pad in the case of the first two Thief games and the first Hitman game). I think KOTOR (released in 2003) might have been the first time I saw the dpad used for aspects of gameplay other than movement and aiming, but even that was selecting between options on a command bar. The first time I saw it used for selecting weapons in a shooter was in Republic Commando (released in 2005). Of course, just because something was the first time I saw it, doesn't mean it was the first time it was done, and I'd be interested to hear any earlier examples of the dpad used as extra buttons. To answer the second question, I have no idea. That said, I understand Ratchet and Clank (released in 2002) used an early version of the weapon wheel, but I've never played it so I couldn't tell you. malkav11 posted:The two weapon limit is a very deliberate design choice, IIRC to try and push players into regularly mixing up their arsenal. Personally I found it had the opposite effect and I hate it having become practically default in the genre subsequently. Entirely fair. I'm fine with it in games that want to appeal to authenticity like Call of Duty or Battlefield, and I like it in Halo, but sometimes you just want to have a huge arsenal of weapons that there's no way you could physically carry and just not worry about it. hectorgrey fucked around with this message at 02:32 on Jan 15, 2021 |
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Jan 15, 2021 02:27
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EggsAisle posted:I always got a kick out of how the humans have FTL drives and AI and all kinds of super-technology, but their weapons systems are all poo poo that existed in like the 1990s. It's obviously a gameplay concession- it helps distinguish the human and alien factions, and lets the alien ray guns "seem" more advanced, even if they're fairly balanced in gameplay terms. But yeah, if the Covenant weapons are truly meant to be plasma-based, then getting hit by a plasma rifle shot should be like standing in the flame of a giant cutting torch. To be fair, hurling small pieces of metal at supersonic speeds is a pretty efficient way of doing serious damage to living beings, and if it's not broke, there's not really a good reason to fix it. We'd need two reasons to seriously change the kinds of weapons we're using (which, over the last 70 years, have changed in the internals and the bullet calibres but haven't really changed in terms of what they do) - either they would have to provide a sufficient tactical advantage in combat, or they'd have to provide a sufficient strategic advantage in terms of logistics and training - where sufficient is based on the cost of replacing one's current stock of weaponry with the new technology. The main reason that the AR-15 is still the primary assault rifle of the US army is that nothing that has been made in the 70 years since has been sufficiently better to justify the cost of replacing them - in spite of a number of weapons trials over the years. In the west, we replaced bolt action and semi-automatic rifles with fully automatic rifles because miniaturisation made it feasible and because fully automatic fire is a huge tactical advantage at the closer ranges we were seeing towards the end of the second world war. We replaced wood and metal with polymer in both rifles and handguns because it made production cheaper. We went for smaller rounds because they were lighter, providing a logistical advantage. We went with double stack magazines because having more ammunition in the firearm is a good thing. All of these things were done because they either provided a huge tactical advantage or because they made logistics easier. The most recent attempt to significantly update the assault rifle was an attempt to make a rifle where a two or three round burst can be fired such that the final round leaves the barrel before the recoil from the first round has been felt - thus increasing accuracy. This is where the AN-94 and H&K G11 came from. Neither was really adopted by the militaries they were designed for (Russian and US, respectively) because they were too complex for ease of field maintenance, and didn't provide sufficient advantage over what they already had. In terms of more advanced weaponry, railguns and lasers are worth considering for naval vessels which engage (and are most commonly engaged by) targets well over the horizon, so a railgun can potentially fire a lighter projectile a similar distance using velocity to generate force while lasers aimed by computers might be useful for taking out incoming ordinance. At those distances, if you overpenetrate then you're probably going to do so below the water line, and thus you haven't really wasted any of that energy. Such weapons will be more complex to repair and maintain than traditional gunpowder weapons, but a ship will have dedicated engineers. At the personal scale, a weapon needs to be decently reliable, decently accurate to the expected engagement range (it doesn't matter how accurate the weapon is a mile out if you're only engaging people at a hundred yards), light enough to carry both it and its ammunition comfortably, rugged enough to handle the rigours of combat, and simple enough to repair the most common kinds of malfunction in the middle of a firefight. In addition, overpenetration is more of a problem partially because it doesn't matter how much energy the projectile carries if not enough of it is imparted to the target, and partially because there's more likely to be something behind the target that you might not want to hit. So yeah; we might well be using gunpowder (or similar) weapons on the personal scale for almost as long as we used bows and spears before them, regardless of how far we advance in other areas, for no other reason than because nothing else is better enough to replace them. The materials used in the cartridges may change, as may the propellant, but until a more advanced form of personal weapon comes out that makes modern rifles obsolete in the same way that platforms like the AK-47 and the AR15 made bolt action battle rifles obsolete, there's very little chance of that basic design being abandoned. Infodump ends.
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Jan 16, 2021 07:11
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To be fair to the hunters, their weak spot is a lot harder to hit when you're using a controller, which is what the game was originally designed around. With a controller, I find it much easier to melee them to death. Edit: Removed the quote; that was a fuckup. hectorgrey fucked around with this message at 15:41 on Jan 31, 2021 |
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Jan 30, 2021 21:17
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Ablative posted:...Eh? I was talking about terrain geometry. Sorry; I have no idea why I quoted you. I must have misclicked and not noticed.
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Jan 31, 2021 15:41
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