SubJeff on 9/10/2008 at 23:23
I'd say it's both possible, and easy. Conceptually at least. It would take more work but if you want something really good, that's what you do.
Take BioShock (and I'm not saying this is a fix-all) - if they had given the option for a deeper rpg layer and altered a few things (optional function of Vita chambers, difficulty levels that removed all the billions of cash and resources everywhere) the game would have been much better. But the current BS game would still be in there.
I think, for games like this, instead of a difficult level they should have play styles. Arcade (current BS), adventure (more like SS2) and simulation, or something (same RPG depth as SS2).
Lets not all be pedantic about just HOW RPG SS2 is. I'm just giving an example of how function could be manipulated to cater for both the mass market and the niche market.
See also my post in some thread about Thief 4 and the possible optional RPG elements. Can't remember which.
Chade on 9/10/2008 at 23:52
That's easy?
EDIT: You're talking substantial changes to the game design here.
SubJeff on 10/10/2008 at 00:01
Conceptually it's easy, yes. Even an amateur team like the Dark Mod team are implementing scalable complexity, as opposed to scalable difficulty. And both! Of course you have to build your levels from the ground up with the idea, and you either have more than one "pass" over a level when designing or you create an engine which implements differences on the fly.
Chade on 10/10/2008 at 00:06
That's the tech side down pat. What about the design side? I think we are talking about a heck of a lot of work here.
SubJeff on 10/10/2008 at 01:29
Take System Shock 2, strip out all the rpg stuff and what are you left with? BioShock. Ta da!
Papy on 10/10/2008 at 02:35
Quote Posted by Subjective Effect
I think, for games like this, instead of a difficult level they should have play styles. Arcade (current BS), adventure (more like SS2) and simulation, or something (same RPG depth as SS2).
Which leads me to one of my eternal question about gaming development : why developers don't do it? I'm really puzzled by this.
heywood on 10/10/2008 at 02:40
Quote Posted by Papy
When I read this : "
the designers didn’t want people exploring levels just for health packs or having to reload to an old save game because they messed up a scenario and couldn’t advance. I know some people actually liked the exact scenario I just described but this is a decision the team made", it looks to me they are already fully aware of what we think. It's just that "we" is obviously not their target audience, so they simply don't care.
The exploration element in DX1 was one of the the most important aspects of the game. And it was driven largely by the need to acquire & replenish resources. Despite its faults, one thing that IW did retain from DX was the incentive to explore for resources & upgrades. I hope that DX3 provides both the opportunities to explore and the incentives to do it. After all, one of the faults of Bioshock was that it provided options with no incentive to really bother with them.
Also, I thought it was understood that the penalty for sucking at combat is having to retreat and scrounge for health? It seems to me that people who get hurt too much in combat but don't want to do any work to heal themselves should just drop down a difficulty level.
Quote Posted by Chade
That's the tech side down pat. What about the design side? I think we are talking about a heck of a lot of work here.
Not really. A couple of examples:
Look at SS2. Practically everything scales with difficultly, including upgrades and resources, without any change to the design. If you play the game on easy, you really don't have to make any hard choices and you don't have to scrounge much. If you play on hard, you have to think about how to develop your character, conserve resources, and be much more careful and tactical in combat.
In DX1, we had localized damage which varied by difficulty level. On realistic for example, damage was very location dependent, making accuracy more important. And you had the option of either applying a med kit to a specific part of the body or just letting the game decide how to apply it. If DX3 adopts something like this, console players who are stuck with thumbstick aiming can have a mode or difficulty where they don't get frustrated by the need to get headshots all the time, and they don't have to navigate an interface to determine what part of their body to heal. But PC players still get the realism they want.
Also, they could make the effect of character skill level on weapon accuracy a function of difficulty. So on lower difficulty, casual players can just shoot as well as they can aim while on higher difficulty, advanced players have an incentive for character specialization.
And finally, the game doesn't need to beat players over the head with insulting obviousness just to ensure the most clueless players will know how to proceed. That kind of extreme hand holding was a notable problem with Bioshock. The game can simply offer hints or maybe even cheats for people who don't want to have to figure anything out.
I honestly don't think it's that difficult to make a single game design work for a variety of players. You simply need to design it around a number of adaptable parameters that can be balanced & tuned through playtesting with different kinds of player groups.
Chade on 10/10/2008 at 05:43
In my opinion the changes to SS2 and DX1 over difficulty levels are nowhere near broad enough to make the game appeal to the sorts of broad demographics we are tlaking about here. There is no way that you can make a hardcore game into a mainstream game by just tweaking paramaters. The entire game needs to be drastically changed, because the players approach games drastically differently.
Have you guys actually sat down and watched a "mainstream gamer" play games like DX? It is an illuminating experience. Or at least: it was for me. Assuming they can progress through the game (not to be assumed lightly), they will almost certainly not be playing in in such a way that they notice the good bits of the game. Wrong playstyles. Not enough exploration. Too quick.
Finally: take out RPG elements from SS2 and you get a crap shooter. You can't just take out parts of a game and hope the rest of it works ok. These things are highly interdependant. If you took out the RPG elements of SS2 you would need to do a tone of work to the rest of the game to make it work well as a straight shooter.
Fafhrd on 10/10/2008 at 06:06
I think you need to look more at the difficulty system in SS1, instead of trying to imagine SS2 with a "RPG On/Off" toggle in the options. SS1's difficulty was extremely tunable, with individual settings for (iirc) puzzles (easy, medium, hard, and off), AI health/damage, AI frequency, and a couple of more that I KNOW I'm forgetting. If you set everything to the lowest setting, you could practically walk through the entire game without even thinking. Turn everything up to high, and just getting out of medical becomes a ridiculously hard struggle. Or you could turn puzzles off, and everything else to medium and never have to worry about being able to open a door, and play the game as a fairly straight shooter, etc.
It's fourteen years on now, I think it may be time to give that sort of difficulty customisation another shot.
demagogue on 10/10/2008 at 07:23
Quote Posted by René
I am a conduit of information between the dev team and the community, and not just the official site, but sites like TTLG.
We're still relevant. :D
I was beginning to think after Ken washed his hands of us that that was the twilight of our relevance to contemporary gaming, of our opinions making an impression I mean. Good to know we haven't lost touch just yet.
Anyway, I'm siding with the camp that thinks niche and mainstream gaming are oil-and-water enough that it won't be practical to try mixing different gameplay styles in one game, not even in an on/off modular way.
I think the mantra is you pick a design agenda and stick to the plan each stage of game production, and adding something like RPG elements is way more on the design agenda side than mere difficulty elements that you could just design a game both with and without it.
Also, there's an old debate I remember, to what extent a game should offer more gameplay than a typical player will see. I was under the impression in mainstream gaming, they don't like it when a game has important parts they don't see ... it's like they're going to the movies and they want to hit all the high points their first run. But if you start adding different gameplay styles, it's like a part of the game they don't see, so isn't likely to fly.
(The point also applies to a distinctive feature of DX that there were entire optional scenes, even maps, you had to go out of your way and explore to even see, and not in a ham-handed way. I gather that way of thinking also runs against mainstream gaming... but now I'm getting off on a tangent so I should stop there.)
