BlackCapedManX on 20/11/2008 at 10:38
Grenade climbing has turned a "very replayable" game, into an "infinitely replayable" game. I'd be quite upset if DX3 doesn't have it. (Devs: but we have tentacle arms to let you scale walls, it's awesome. Me: those let me scale walls when you want me to, grenade climbing let me climb any damn wall I pleased, when I want to.)
René on 20/11/2008 at 20:04
I'm around. I just posted in a different thread so I won't repeat the same thing. I'm not allowed to say anything more right now and I can't argue/explain the existing points any further. So I guess wait for more info, new screens, videos, etc.
Chade on 20/11/2008 at 21:41
Quote Posted by BlackCapedManX
Grenade climbing has turned a "very replayable" game, into an "infinitely replayable" game. I'd be quite upset if DX3 doesn't have it. (Devs: but we have tentacle arms to let you scale walls, it's
awesome. Me: those let me scale walls when
you want me to, grenade climbing let me climb any damn wall I pleased, when
I want to.)
Grenade climbing was a bug, not a feature ... a potentially game breaking bug, for that matter.
Which doesn't mean it wasn't cool, and breaking games sure is a fun thing for hardcore gamers to do, but geez ... have some perspective here!
BlackCapedManX on 21/11/2008 at 04:38
Oh I know it was a bug, but as Bob Ross would say "it's a happy accident," and the trend is usually to take what are seen as bugs and "fix" them, even if they make the game less interesting (I'd call grenade climbing more of an "oversight" than bug, but that's semantics, so whatever.) One of the reasons I've never been fully satisfied with Oblivion was that Morrowind was so broken you could rip it appart and reshape it to your whim (levitation, seriously? you think I'm not going to abuse that?). Oblivion put silly things in like jump ceilings that got rid of some of the coolest parts of Morrowind (those scrolls you get at the beginning of the game are hilarious and quite fun) because they were too abusable in Morrowind. But the hardcore player lives on that edge of gameplay abuse, because the game as a dev envisioned it will always be far more limited than what the players want to do with it, and things the devs don't see to try and "correct" often make for some of the most enjoyable gameplay.
Sure some of these things may break the game, but you usually don't run into them until after you've played the game through at least once, and the unintended "meta-games" that a player can play within the game are what warrent more than one playthrough. Essentially I'm not a fan of "over-polish" because I think it reduces the level of investigation a player will have in the game. (for what it's worth, as an artist, a lot of my work has very intentional ambiguities, I have messages and imagery that I want to get across, but I also think it's important for the viewer to put some of themselves into the art and take their own meaning from it, because they'll be a lot more invested in it than if I simply spoonfeed them what I intend for them to see.)
Chade on 21/11/2008 at 04:47
I completely agree on the benefits of not completely locking down the game ... just doing it enough to stop casual abuse, and letting determined people have their fun.
I guess I tend to automatically assume that people are having a big rant on the state of modern gaming as soon as I hear phrases like "those let me scale walls when you want me to, grenade climbing let me climb any damn wall I pleased".
DDL on 21/11/2008 at 15:58
Let's just hope we can still stack boxes in DX3. Where there's a will, there's a way...
(though box stacking is fucking tricky in engines that actually attempt a semblance of realistic physics)
BlackCapedManX on 22/11/2008 at 01:42
Yeah, I guess it's less that I want "grenade climbing" per say, and more that I want to be assured that the entire game isn't so boxed in that you're stuffed into a corridor. I was horrified with Doom3, in this sense, because will all of the neat modeling and structuring of the levels, all of that architecture isn't actually physical, since your hallways had invisible wall all of the way around, giving them perfectly square or rectangular cross-sections. Tather than being able to jump up on pipes and and actually explore all of that minutia as environment, it simply becomes really detailed wallpaper. That's a trend I'm uncomfortable with, if you're going to go through all of the effort to make such a detailed environment, why not leave it open enough that a determined player can break through that environment (figuratively speaking, though on the other hand Red Faction actually had a number of very amusing things you could do in this regard literally, which were then often hampered by decisively non-destructable environments, like they were offering the player a whole spectrum of ways to re-approach the game, and then decided this wasn't optimal and took it away)?
I think devs often get so wrapped up in what they want the player experience to be like, that they forget that they don't need to funnel it in for us. Most players, on the first play through of a game, are going to do it more or less the way the devs intended (in a well designed game anyway, game flow usually progresses in a semi-forward direction, on the other hand I've spent more than 120 combined hours with morrowind and oblivion and haven't beaten the main quests with either game), but what will keep players coming back is all of the things devs didn't intend. The myraid bugs in DX are a good example of this, for example, you can save right before you hit the ground from a very long fall, load that save, and land safely with no damage. Coupled with grenade climbing, this means you can play the entire game far more "vertically" than the designers intended. Sure, you can fall off the wrong sides of levels doing this (Tonoichi road being a prime example of some weird "off sides" shit, and it-he.org claims you can go into the video game equivalent of a nether world in Vandenburg, though I've yet to try this myself) but it's not like that's going to spoil the experience for you. DX was an incredible example of a game that could be ridiculously broken to the point of almost unrecognizability, but it was designed well enough with so many things considered that you'd have to play it through at least a couple times before you became aware of this, everything else just fit together well enough. Bioshock, on the otherhand, had so much potential to open up and let the player do some very ridiculous things with the environment (potential being more the setting than say, the engine) but put everything into corridors and chambers. How sweet would it be if there were places you could get outside of Rapture (which DX clearly laid down a precedent for with the sub-base level)? But as far as I recall you couldn't even swim (underwater anyway) in Bioshock to begin with.
Okay, I'm given to ranting, and will do so on a regular basis, so this post is going to stop before I go on any more than I should (which I'm pretty sure I've already failed at anyway, I think the first sentance would have gotten my point across.)
lost_soul on 23/11/2008 at 03:47
If there are indeed developers lurking around and reading these posts, could you please consider releasing this game for GNU/Linux? I read somewhere a wile back that this game will use the crystal engine or something like that, which was used in Tomb Raider Legends/Anniversary. I've already run both of those games using Wine, so how hard could it be to officially support something like that?
DaBeast on 23/11/2008 at 18:55
Quote Posted by lost_soul
If there are indeed developers lurking around and reading these posts, could you please consider releasing this game for GNU/Linux? I read somewhere a wile back that this game will use the crystal engine or something like that, which was used in Tomb Raider Legends/Anniversary. I've already run both of those games using Wine, so how hard could it be to officially support something like that?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't Wine a windows emulator? So effectively you're running it on windows?
Making a game cross platform isn't exactly easy. Considering there is such a piss poor market for games on linux there's not really much point.
Chade on 23/11/2008 at 21:32
Quote Posted by BlackCapedManX
Most players, on the first play through of a game, are going to do it more or less the way the devs intended ... but what will keep players coming back is all of the things devs didn't intend.
No arguments here ...
