Thirith on 11/6/2017 at 06:38
Definitely the most strenuous coop session yet; once I started ducking and getting down on my knees to present less of a target, my survival rate went up considerably. Great fun, though I thought that the sic-fi scenario worked better than the fantasy one. Anyway, looking forward to more VR coop as well!
Malf on 11/6/2017 at 08:29
I think as a concept, the fantasy one has great potential for someone to take it and run with it. Being able to swing swords, block with shields and adjust an arrow's distance properly were all great fun. Adding some gesture-driven spells through picking up a spellbook that you can flip through the pages of would be awesome. The action just needs to scale more gently, and it needs to allow for saving. With a graphical change, something like that has the chance to be the ultimate reproduction of a pen and paper dungeon crawl. Add in classic clerics and rogues, drop in traps, secrets and locked doors, oh my.
Thirith on 11/6/2017 at 08:36
Agreed. There's a lot they could add while still keeping it simple: savepoints, as you've said, perhaps some very basic leveling up (to go with the nerdy, homespun D&D atmosphere), perhaps even some very basic coop puzzles (having to press several buttons or stand on several pressure plates at the same time). Something between basic D&D and Gauntlet.
I'm not entirely sold on the teleport option in Rec Room; it works okay, but I would like to see an option to move with the sticks. At the very least I'd like to be able to turn smoothly instead of only in 90° turns.
Malf on 11/6/2017 at 08:44
Yeah, same here, really not convinced that teleport is the best method of movement. Okay, they've discovered some people get easily nauseated with more traditional control methods, but at least give us the option to try them.
henke on 11/6/2017 at 10:45
I think the teleport and 90 degree turns work well. I also see why they'd stick to just one type of movement. Of course they wanna have the same kind of locomotion across all the game modes to keep it intuitive for even the most casual of gamers, but there's also a bit of a competetive element to every mode(even the co-op quests have leaderboards), and different movement modes would inevitably lead to an uneven playing field.
As for savepoints, not so sure. I think if they had those it might reduce replayablitiy drastically. As it is I think it took us around 25 min to reach the end of the Jumbotron quest. With savepoints we'd beat the thing no problem, but without them the challenge becomes surviving till the end in one go. And we are going to keep replaying this until we've beaten it, right? :)
Thirith on 11/6/2017 at 10:58
I agree on the competitive thing, henke; movement does have an impact on overall balancing. At the same time, Rec Room isn't a finely tuned, balanced game as it is; it's mainly a playground for people to have fun in, so I don't think that (at least for the cooperative modes) it would change the game in major ways to offer more options. I could imagine that having free movement could cause latency issues, though; as it is now, the player's exact position only changes every second or though. Anyway, for me it'd be more important to have the option of smoother turns, because most of the game spaces are rectangular, yet their orientation was off with respect to the orientation of the space I have available for playing, so I'd always end up against a wall or in a corner. If I could've fine-tuned my in-game orientation, it would've worked much better with the space I have to play in.
I also agree with you that save points would make it too easy to beat the quest, but I honestly got a bit bored with the D&D-style quest after a few restarts. There'd be different ways of improving this, e.g. a better quest design, or simply more variety, but replaying the first 1 1/2 stages got old for me. I didn't mind in the sci-fi mission, because I thought that the different guns and their strengths and weaknesses made for more interesting and fun gameplay than the sword/shield and bow options in the quest. What would improve replayability would be procedural generation; the levels are simplistic enough that it'd be possible to auto-generate variations. I think that's my main thing here: I greatly enjoyed our Rec Room session, but IMO it's very much a case of the combination of VR and coop being great fun. The game itself isn't particularly well designed (it's functional but kind of awkward), and it most definitely isn't polished; take something like this and polish it and you'll have an absolute winner on your hands.
henke on 11/6/2017 at 13:23
Quote Posted by Thirith
Anyway, for me it'd be more important to have the option of smoother turns, because most of the game spaces are rectangular, yet their orientation was off with respect to the orientation of the space I have available for playing, so I'd always end up against a wall or in a corner.
Ah, that sucks. The orientation of things worked out quite well for me.
Anyway, here's the vid of... THE TIME WE FACED JUMBOTRON!
[video=youtube;fy824n3xgV4]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fy824n3xgV4&feature=youtu.be[/video]
Just like you, Thirith, I ended up crouching through most of it. Part of the reason I think teleport works well for it that this feels like it's really just an evolution on the cover-shooter genre. Most of the moving you're doing is going from cover to cover, so largely you're stationary in the playspace.
Thirith on 11/6/2017 at 14:37
I'd definitely say that teleporting worked better in the Jumbotron mission - though sometimes the distance you can actually teleport meant that I'd just about not reach the next bit of cover.
How was the bow and arrow for you guys? I found it pretty difficult to handle, but perhaps that's because I was simply bad at it.
henke on 11/6/2017 at 15:34
It was ok! Definitely took a couple rounds to get used to it, but towards the end I had killstreaks where I felt like a reglar Legolas.
Thirith on 13/6/2017 at 06:18
Quick update re: Rec Room: I wrote to the developers with some feedback - and they're now putting in save points and stick movement, completely ruining the balancing! Mwahahaha!
Actually, they are thinking about refining the quests and having to restart from scratch every time, but they haven't decided anything yet. However, with respect to movement and turning they told me that while they're sticking to teleport only for the moment (which makes sense from the point of view of balancing versus modes), you can switch the turns to 45° in the options, and there's also an option (grip turn, I think) that allows for smooth turns. Gotta check in the menu how to activate them.
