Digital Nightfall on 10/10/2008 at 07:24
On the topic of SS1 difficulty settings....
Story, Combat, Puzzles, Cyberspace
Story 1: No logs, no plot elements, just a shooter
Story 2: Only basic plot logs and emails and quest events
Story 3: Complete plot and quest events
Story 4: Same as above, but with a time limit
The rest were just difficulty sliders. Combat 1 meant that no enemies ever attacked you, and no new enemies ever appeared. Like story, 3 was considered normal, and 4 was brutal.
Puzzles dealt only with the little hacking minigames that were everywhere, and had a similar pattern to combat as 1 = doesn't exist and 3 being normal difficulty, with 4 nigh impossible.
I don't remember how cyberspace went, but I think it followed along with the pattern of the above two.
But yes... we're long overdue for another game to use this kind of difficulty tuning.
BlackCapedManX on 10/10/2008 at 07:45
Quote Posted by heywood
Making best use of limited resources, inventory management, skills and character development, location specific damage and healing, etc. were all very important parts of DX1 for me. If resource management is just an annoyance to you, why play hybrid FPS/RPG games?
The "health-resource management" aspect of DX1 is hardly engaging enough on any difficulty to be something noteworthy of writing home about. Medkits take up
one spot, and that one spot holds 15 of the things. There's no "management" there because finding one spot in your inventory doesn't require some messianic epiphany. My gripe is the boredom involved in replenishing that one stack of medkits, the "oh no, I've been in a 15 second firefight and took 50 points of damage (out of the 600 health you had), now I have to spend 8 minutes going back through load screens and levels to find the last medbot/health kit I saw back wherever that was back in the sewers or wherever" formula that plays out. That's just stupid. I'm not saying get rid of locational damage, or remove the inventory, or any of the other things you seem to keep suggesting, I'm saying keep the RPG elements that work, and nix the one that was hardly applicable to DX1 to begin with (health wasn't a "limited" resource in that game, medkits were everywhere, they were usually just stashed away in some out of the way corner, or you had to find the one medbot on what were otherwise thankfully pretty massive levels.)
I'm also not saying you shouldn't have medkits for when you're in a firefight that's obviously more than what the character can handle naturally (although, in all honesty, the insta-heal medkit staple of FPS games is realistically pretty stupid.) I'm just saying it's really dumb to exhaust resources to deal with what would amount to minor cuts and scrapes (I don't go scrambling for the first aid kit when I trip and scrape my arms, why would an
augmented warrior do the same for what, a bullet graze?) It's the tedium involved in depleting resources for minor inconveniences that doesn't do anything more than tack on hours to the game, but I guess if tedious actions are what're contributes good games, than that would explain the popularity of MMORPGs.
Also, I think the developers are totally right to not "want people exploring levels just for health packs." People should be exploring because
the level design is interesting and engaging. Of course exploration is important, but we liked DX because it made us explore to that more powerful weapon stashed away in an arms locker, or an oven full of saleable drugs, or some interesting little exchange between NPCs that you would have otherwise missed. Think of all the other FPS MoH-and-the-like clones that do make you go out of your way to find that one little medpack in an otherwise totally uninteresting attic or basement, are those explorations interesting and rewarding, or simply time consuming? Like is that honestly what's important to everyone here defending that?
DDL on 10/10/2008 at 08:07
I can't help but think that if you trawl back through multiple maps just to heal 50 points of damage..then your doing it wrong.
Sure, if that's what you want to do, then fine: but doing that deliberately and then complaining that it's tiresome seems..a bit confused.
Trawling back through multiple maps when you've only got 50 points left, now that I could understand, but using a medkit or hunting for a medbot just to heal a tiny scrape is a pointless waste: you need to take quite a lot of damage to significantly impair yourself, so why worry over scrapes?
Now, if they implement autoheal, it's either going to be so fast that it breaks the game completely for those of us who hate the idea anyway (a la Halo), or slowed down to a point whereby you'd have to sit and wait to recover for a sufficient length of time that, to be honest, you might as well have just trawled back through multiple maps to find the medbot: at least that way you'd be actually playing rather than simply sitting and "watching the red bar refill".
rachel on 10/10/2008 at 08:43
Darn, I came here to mention SS1's difficulty tuning, but Fafhrd and Digi beat me to it. :) Now with all slides to level 4, that's what I call "Impossible"!
Quote Posted by DDL
at least that way you'd be actually
playing rather than simply sitting and "watching the red bar refill".
Perhaps the player could take advantage of this moment to recap his logs, check his inventory or whatever, provided time doesn't stop when we open the interface. SS2 is the only game I've played where the gameworld lived on while you did that... Personnally I'd like to see it more, it's more logical.
My point being, if we can't avoid it, they might as well offer the opportunity to do something useful at the same time.
BlackCapedManX on 10/10/2008 at 09:25
Quote Posted by DDL
I can't help but think that if you trawl back through multiple maps just to heal 50 points of damage..then your doing it wrong.
It's just frustrating because it's half of your health for any one location, and if that happens to be your chest or head, that can mean a single shot away from death. And for the compulsive packrats, it feels more reasonable to be able to say, walk into a bar and talk to NPCs or whatever while your health refils (doing nothing while you wait would also be pretty stupid.) I mean you could potentially run into scenarios where you would be critically damaged, and your only health in the immediate level is through hostile territory, even though there is, say a totally non-hostile bar, and you could be laying on the floor bleeding to death but the game would prefer you go find health kits. It doesn't need to be game breaking (I mean, clearly it shouldn't be,) but not having to keep track of all your little scrapes before they add up to something serious would be a godsend in some games.
And maybe it is simply because I'm obsessive about topping off supplies and health, but I think it's possible to keep a simple system that works. Diablo II for example (for everything I think it did wrong) had regenerating mana (and with the right item or two, regenerating health) but the rate was always so incredibly slow that it would be crazy not to carry potions with you, but on the other hand if you're wandering around an area cleared out entirely of enemies you don't have to waste those potions when it isn't combat critical. Which I guess is my point, I think inventory use has its uses in combat, and outside of combat you shouldn't be penalized into using "combat items" when any competent soldier should be able to manage without significantly wasting resources, given enough time (your health should be something you worry about during combat, and not while you're dealing with the social aspect of the game, I think). I just think it's an old, outmodded standard that has potential to be examined and revised.
On the other hand, a GoW, 5 second heal, is very likely not to be the thing that a "Deus Ex" game would benefit from. The grand summary of my whole "acceptance" of auto-heal is that I hate scouring for medkits when I could be doing other things, and I'll readily appreciate attempts to find work arounds to that. And going back to my original post on the topic, I think there are a number of ways it could be approached, and ways that the player could be given customization over how it operates (though it's wishful thinking to assume developers would give us leeway to play a game to our suiting,) and that to simply dismiss it is shortsighted and really kind of stubborn.
DDL on 10/10/2008 at 09:50
Ok, I see where you're coming from, and I think it just comes down to our completely different playstyles:
I almost never use medkits while actually in combat (not because pausing midfight is cheap, I'm simply too busy trying to shoot people to stop and consider it), and since a single head hit from anything greater than an assault rifle is lethal (and near enough critical to the torso, come to that), the option rarely presents itself anyway. At best, my "in-combat" usage would be from behind a wall I dived over hurriedly, following timing a patrol wrong and losing both arms before getting a shot off.
I always view medkits as something for recovering after the fight, if you survive. Or before a fight, if you really don't think you'll make it otherwise. Not as 'combat items only'.
I guess if regen was slow enough, and only worked if there were no enemies around, it could be at least 'not massively intrusive', but then I suspect it would simply annoy those who would prefer to get back into the action ASAP. I'm not sure there is a happy middleground, here.
Ultimately, it's just that...automatic regeneration doesn't make much sense.
Sure, you could argue that taking a sniper round to the leg is not something you can simply 'repair' with a few bandages and some soothing antiseptic cream, but it's still a slightly more plausible situation than one where the mangled oozing leg just magically repairs itself unaided.
rachel on 10/10/2008 at 10:10
And given the game is a prequel set before the nano-age, there's no satisfying in-game explanation for it either.
Matthew on 10/10/2008 at 10:50
Quote Posted by Papy
Which leads me to one of my eternal question about gaming development : why developers don't do it? I'm really puzzled by this.
That reminds me of Indy Jones and the Fate of Atlantis actually, with the branching that took place at a certain point. I suppose nowadays the answers given would be 'no time', 'publisher didn't like it', 'need to get the thing out the door to earn some cash' or similar.
DDL on 10/10/2008 at 11:24
It's gonna be law of diminishing returns: putting X amount of effort into a game satisfies Y customers. Putting X*4 amount of effort into a game satisfies Y customers + die-hard curmudgeons at TTLG.
It's usually not financially worthwhile to make a great, memorable, GOTY-winning game of this type when, for a fraction of the effort, you can make an acceptable and highly profitable one.
Sadly.
Ostriig on 10/10/2008 at 11:29
A little more news. I asked René about whether the PC would see a more mouse & keyboard oriented UI and if anything could be shared about the inventory system. Here's what he had to say in regard to this:
Quote Posted by René
I can't give away too much since the magazines have to be able to tell their story without having details of it leak, but I can say that there is a PC interface being built separately for the mouse and keyboard layout.
The Inventory is also returning to its roots. Sorry about having to hold back on details right now, but think along the lines of the first game's grid-based mechanic.
Sounds good to me. And before anyone goes down the "Bioshock had a PC interface too lol" path, just because 2K cocked it up doesn't mean Eidos will necessarily make the same mistake. Maybe I'm just setting myself up for a big let-down, but right now I think it's not too risky to be optimistic in relation to a fairly appropriate PC control scheme.
Quote Posted by raph
And given the game is a prequel set before the nano-age, there's no satisfying in-game explanation for it either.
I don't think this is an issue of in-game explanations, as the devs could easily make up some reasonably consistent excuses for either mechanic within the context of the game world. I believe that the only concerns that factored into the decision of auto-heal versus item-heal were of a gameplay nature. But while auto-heal may work very nicely in a pure action game, I think that the form of resource management that is item-based healing would've been preferable for an RPG.
