Rate Human Revolution vs. other LGS-inspired franchise games - by heywood
Dia on 16/12/2011 at 13:56
Quote Posted by Papy
It is not about making decision, it is simply about imitating someone else.
More like
becoming someone else. Or at the very least, releasing your inner Warrior Amazon Queen persona.
As the case may be.
Thirith on 16/12/2011 at 14:09
Exactly. For some people RPGs are about the tactics of fighting orcs in dungeons; for others, they're about taking on the part of a heroic paladin or a sneaky half-elf thief etc. etc. Old-school CRPGs were pretty much entirely about the former, completely ignoring the latter. I wasn't roleplaying my Pools of Radiance party in any meaningful sense, just like I'm not roleplaying the pawn, bishop or queen when playing chess.
It's understandable that old-school CRPGs focused on the tactics side of things to the almost complete exclusion of the other kind of gameplay, but it doesn't change the fact that those games *did* exclude half of what makes an RPG what they are.
Anyway, I think I'm running in circles here, so I'll leave it at that in this thread, at least until it moves on to other topics. Happy to hear why my take on this is completely wrong, mind you.
Papy on 16/12/2011 at 22:02
Quote Posted by Dia
More like
becoming someone else.
It is not "more like". It really depends on the player. RPGs are a tool and different people will use this tool differently.
Quote Posted by Thirith
It's understandable that old-school CRPGs focused on the tactics side of things to the almost complete exclusion of the other kind of gameplay, but it doesn't change the fact that those games *did* exclude half of what makes an RPG what they are.
Modern Computer RPG still do exclude the same half of what makes an RPG. Compared to old school CRPG, they have better graphics, which means less imagination is required, but that's about it.
june gloom on 17/12/2011 at 10:14
Yeah, now they exclude the tactics side.
With several exceptions, I think I prefer that, ultimately. I wasn't getting anything satisfactory out of Arcanum because its mechanics are bullshit and I couldn't be bothered to give a damn about the story because the game went downhill in 5 minutes. In contrast, I'm playing through Etrian Odyssey and it's nothing but the tactics end of things, and it hurts so good. But on the other hand, I've tried like 3 times to get into the Witcher and it just wasn't happening, but I'm pretty much a Mass Effect convert despite saying I never would be.
This answer's going nowhere so I'll just sum it up with this: My idea of the perfect cRPG is Fallout 1, which has nothing to do with its mechanics OR role-playing. Make of that what you will.
Papy on 17/12/2011 at 13:23
Quote Posted by dethtoll
Yeah, now they exclude the tactics side.
I meant there is still no "role playing".
heywood on 23/12/2011 at 01:14
Bringing the discussion back to hacking...
Deus Ex had a hacking system based purely on your character stats, and it sucked balls. It wasn't much of a gameplay element because the outcome was already known. You knew how long it would take to hack and how much time you'd have in the hack, so there was no risk to it. Just press a button and wait.
The hacking in SS2 and Human Revolution was also stat-based but included a virtual dice roll, which should be the minimum standard for an RPG (I'm not implying that HR is a true RPG). Both games simulated hacking by making connections on a node network, both were real-time, and neither required any significant player skill - so very similar. I thought the variety of different networks and bonuses made the HR version more interesting and less tedious than SS2's version. But I did like the way SS2 put the hacking control off to the side rather than taking control over the whole screen.
Overall, I still prefer the puzzles from SS1 and the pipe game from Bioshock because they had a real learning curve and required some quick thinking skills. If you take the basic puzzle approach from SS1, keep it real time, and modify it to adjust the difficulty based on character stats, then I think you have the best of both. Koki seems to argue that in an ideal CRPG, the only relevant player skill should be character building. I definitely don't agree with that. Making a CRPG that is little more than an on-screen version of a pen & paper RPG is a waste of the medium. To be a good RPG, building your character and playing your character both have to be satisfying.
DDL on 23/12/2011 at 17:36
I preferred DX's system just because it didn't involve another tedious fucking minigame. By the end of HR I could hack any system I wanted, but I generally just entered a password if I had it because I couldn't be arsed anymore.
Koki on 24/12/2011 at 06:59
Quote Posted by heywood
Deus Ex had a hacking system based purely on your character stats, and it sucked balls. It wasn't much of a gameplay element because the outcome was already known. You knew how long it would take to hack and how much time you'd have in the hack, so there was no risk to it. Just press a button and wait.
Someone forgot DX's hacking didn't pause the game.
Ostriig on 24/12/2011 at 19:52
Quote Posted by DDL
I preferred DX's system just because it didn't involve another tedious fucking minigame.
I agree with this. Minigames just get in the way, they are, practically, just very cut down and often bad implementations of other
types of games shoehorned into the game that you actually want to play. If I bought a Deus Ex game then I want to play an Action RPG, not Uplink. If I'm playing KoTOR I sure as hell don't want my progress in a quasi-turn-based RPG to be halted by my poor twitch skills at shooting down some stupid asteroids.
I liked the original DX in this regard because it didn't throw stuff like that in my way. Sure, hacking wasn't particularly involved or spectacular, but it did work as part of the RPG stats system and there was the element of risk from being caught, like Koki said, and it did this without frustrating me.
DX3 is by no means a particularly bad offender, though. I found its hacking minigame to be tolerable, almost as tolerable as the Thief 3 / Fallout 3 style lockpicking. But stuff like Fallout 3's hacking or Bioshock's plumbing just made me want to hit something.
Matthew on 24/12/2011 at 21:38
Quote Posted by Koki
Someone forgot DX's hacking didn't pause the game.
Indeed, as does HRs, which was an excellent choice that livens it up a bit.
