How would you improve Shock? An exercise in armchair game design. - by The_Raven
Gwenaelle on 14/12/2007 at 01:55
Firing range practice with 12 gauge hurts? I have an 8 gauge in my room, in the corner. I can't fire it without falling down.
More suggestions, maybe someone will make them into a mod!
AP shotgun ammunition needs to do more damage per pellet, I'd say double it. Same with the laser pistol: I found it taking over 20 hits to kill an annelid. The sad part is that I set the difficulty to easy just before this. And no, it doesn't do decent damage to robots/cyborgs. It did literally none when I was cavorting with the assassins in Rec or at least too little to see. Cryokinesis was doing significantly more either way. :x
Hacking is fun but tends to be too difficult and not fun ENOUGH to justify such difficulty. It feels like you're gambling; and when you're low on health trying to disable a security alert with 70% difficulty, it gets to be rather.. painful. That doesn't mean I don't hack everything I see, though... But it still needs a better minigame thing.
Brainstorm just gave way to clear skies. Will continue later.
Alinestra Covelia on 14/12/2007 at 03:37
Well... the laser pistol is intended to do little damage to annelids. All energy weapons are intended to be less effective than normals against the Many's creatures. I figure it's one weapon where ammunition isn't going to exhaust too easily, so they probably thought it's okay to make the entire Energy category less powerful against organics.
I hear ya on shotgun pellets though! I made this point about a year ago but I think I ruffled a few feathers in doing so.
An eight gauge?! :eek: I wanted to give my cousin's 10-gauge a try but he refused, saying in that shooting range you had to have special training so you could deal with the recoil. I can only imagine what an eight-gauge would do to me...
(Fun fact: once when I was on the beach in Hawaii my brother put a water pistol on my lower back without me realizing it and I ended up with a pale tanline just under my bikini strap that looked like a Glock. My boyfriend teased me about it for months.)
A few other things I was thinking about:
The game's levels are kind of static, in that you can't really affect the scenery that much. Here are a few things that I thought might help:
* In Med/Sci you can bash conduits and pipes and they fall down, but later on in the Rickenbacker even that dynamic has been removed. Given that the ammo in the game is extremely sparse, perhaps you could build in a few voxel-based structural designs to replicate damaging the level?
* Doors might be damageable so they won't slide anymore if you inflict a moderate bit of damage on them. This might be good to seal a door open, or closed. Closed would be favorite if there's lots of nasties around and you need to hack something. Inflicting more damage might actually blow the door to pieces.
* Why do doors open automatically anyway? Why not put buttons for all doors? Shooting the buttons will fix the door in place unless you can REPAIR the button plate. Shooting the door generally doesn't do much unless you're using a Heavy weapon, in which case it'll eventually destroy the door.
* Lighting isn't dynamic, which is a pity. The game Jedi Knight came out just before this one did and it's got dynamic lighting in it. (Your lightsaber lights up the area around you - the Laser Rapier might do the same.)
* The blood trails and splotches on the walls are amazing, but they're fixed. It shouldn't be too hard to add blood into the game when you kill an enemy. A few blood trails on the floors or on the walls from injuries, etc.
* A stealth element like in Thief could be lots of fun. Instead of just leaving bodies where they fall, you could drag them away and hide them. This could be done by right clicking and holding the button down, which will put away your weapon and bring the body over your shoulder. (Technically I can see why this would not be so great in a game where monsters respawn constantly, unlike in Thief where the number of enemies is fixed.)
* Pandas. Because pandas are black AND white thus appealing to multiple racial demographics.
Gwenaelle on 14/12/2007 at 03:50
Say you're in a room, and there is a Cyborg Assassin right on top of you. You have an assault rifle loaded with say, 30 shots of AP. You had it on burst, by accident, when it was across the room, so you SHOT OUT THE DAMN DOOR PANEL. It's the ONLY door out. You're low on health and you just ran out of ammunition, and you have no repair skill. Not to mention you'd be repairing the door RIGHT BESIDE the evil cyborg ninja that is going to rape your ass. No. No breakable doors. NO.
Blood was done in one mod, wasn't it? I can't remember but I'm PRETTY SURE it was.
I don't break things. And I haven't reached the Rickenbacker. I DO know that I hate when debris FALLS IN YOUR PATH. And you can't get anywhere anymore, goddamn it, without breaking said debris to bits. Which requires a melee weapon. As OSA, I tend not to carry my wrench with me, and the psi weapon is a hassle when you run face first into a camera a few seconds later. There were, perhaps, design reasons for removing breakable environments.
Stealth would be awesome, but you'd have to have a no-respawn mod on with it..
Ixnay on the andaspay. We can't let people know that they're the most socially acceptable animal! SUPPRESS AND TERMINATE ALL DATA.
Gwenaelle on 14/12/2007 at 11:40
Oh, man, I just know someone's gonna want to kill me for this.
I'd like to play SS2 in third person.
No, not with weapons... With Psi. Metacreative barriers for all!
catbarf on 14/12/2007 at 20:45
Quote Posted by Gwenaelle
Firing range practice with 12 gauge hurts? I have an 8 gauge in my room, in the corner. I can't fire it without falling down.
Hint, hint: 12 gauge is SMALLER than 8 gauge.
Quote Posted by Gwenaelle
AP shotgun ammunition needs to do more damage per pellet, I'd say double it. Same with the laser pistol: I found it taking over 20 hits to kill an annelid. The sad part is that I set the difficulty to easy just before this. And no, it doesn't do decent damage to robots/cyborgs. It did literally none when I was cavorting with the assassins in Rec or at least too little to see. Cryokinesis was doing significantly more either way. :x
Laser pistol- does not rely on ammo. Sure, it's weak, but since you will never run out of bullets it's balanced.
Shotgun- Yeah, pellets need work, but increasing damage isn't the way to go. Then it's overpowered at short range.
Quote Posted by Gwenaelle
Hacking is fun but tends to be too difficult and not fun ENOUGH to justify such difficulty. It feels like you're gambling; and when you're low on health trying to disable a security alert with 70% difficulty, it gets to be rather.. painful. That doesn't mean I don't hack everything I see, though... But it still needs a better minigame thing.
It's different, but it isn't totally random like gambling. Only the ICE nodes will potentially kill you...
Alinestra: I would have loved that game.
catbarf on 15/12/2007 at 00:03
Quote Posted by Alinestra Covelia
I think Gwen knows that. I took her point to mean "You think 12 gauge hurts, you should try 8 gauge, which'll knock you flat from the recoil."
Oops, my bad.
Of course, when you absolutely must kill every living thing in the room, there's the Russian KS-23. Here's a pic of the KS-23's rounds compared to 10-gauge:
Inline Image:
http://img441.imageshack.us/img441/976/2ga001ch2.jpgThat right there is a 4-gauge shell. This gun is also used for launching grenades.
The barrels are constructed from salvaged 23mm anti-aircraft cannons.
Gwenaelle on 15/12/2007 at 00:16
Uh, Alinestra got it. Firing 8-gauge is like taking a sledgehammer to the shoulder.
You can run out of ENERGY though. Sure, recharges are free, but they aren't everywhere you go.
I wasn't thinking about HOW, I just made one suggestion that, at the time, seemed like a good off-the-top-of-my-head suggestion to give.
ICE nodes are the only ones that will kill you, sure, but ... SECURITY ALERT. Enemies, EVERYWHERE. You're clicking that thing like all hell and you're getting NOTHING. As OSA, I tend to leave my endurance slip and not hack alot, but it kind of really hurts me when I'm a freaking moron and BAM run into a camera.
ZylonBane on 15/12/2007 at 00:37
Quote Posted by Gwenaelle
Hacking is fun but tends to be too difficult and not fun ENOUGH to justify such difficulty. It feels like you're gambling; and when you're low on health trying to disable a security alert with 70% difficulty, it gets to be rather.. painful.
What are you going on about? It doesn't take any hacking at all to terminate a security alert.
Gwenaelle on 15/12/2007 at 02:14
....That's not what my experience has led me to believe. Maybe more mod issues. Fucking mods.
catbarf on 15/12/2007 at 02:50
Quote Posted by Gwenaelle
You can run out of ENERGY though. Sure, recharges are free, but they aren't everywhere you go.
I wasn't thinking about HOW, I just made one suggestion that, at the time, seemed like a good off-the-top-of-my-head suggestion to give.
But, unlike ammunition, every time you find a recharge station you can use it to charge a laser pistol. There's no finding pistol ammo when your shotgun is low, or needing anti-personnel ammo and getting armor-piercing. You always, ALWAYS know that recharge station = full ammo.
On top of that, it can recharge infinitely. Ammo does not respawn. If you run out of ammo and there's none left on the level, you're screwed. If you run out of energy, there's always more to be found.
