System Shock 3. Yup it's coming. - by icemann
Starker on 8/12/2015 at 15:18
Quote Posted by Manwe
What we got so far is a scripted, linear, in-engine video with a cartoony art-style and a ridiculous console-style fov. And a buggy demo level with barely functioning mechanics and no art whatsoever.
Games look and play like ass most of the way until completion, though. What you see at trade shows are usually really carefully polished scripted demos made for that one exact purpose and not actual games in their current state.
Manwe on 8/12/2015 at 18:40
Oh for fuck's sake people, we've been screwed over so many times, not just here at TTLG but through Kickstarter too, yet you guys still blindly eat up all the bullshit. I'm a backer of Underworld Ascendant and I haven't seen anything from them to prove me they're able to achieve what they promised. And what they are promising is bullshit on the level of Oblivion's Radiant A.I. "What if all the creatures in our world had a life of their own, with their own needs and desires, and they all interacted with each other and the environment in realistic and meaningful ways in order to create a vibrant ecosystem that could be influenced by the player's actions such as breaking the food chain by killing all the creatures of a certain species which would result in new stronger creatures taking their place which would in turn disturb the fauna and...". That's the kind of bullshit I get from them in my in-box every once in a while.
If they ever do release Underworld Ascendant, and it's a proper expansive RPG taking advantage of PC gaming strengths and designed to be played with a keyboard and mouse, I'll eat my hat. If they go on to make System Shock 3 and it turns out to be as great as we all hoped it would be, I'll eat another hat. I'll be counting on you guys to remind me of that. In the meantime allow me to be cautiously pessimistic.
That being said the demo they released was indeed a step in the right direction. But I'm still skeptical they can pull off the level of interactivity they're aiming for on such a massive scale. Destroyable bridges, sure that's a great idea, but then you need an alternate way to cross that lava pit. Doors that can be burnt down, fantastic, but then you can't have too many of those in your game anyway, there might as well be no doors. If fire behaves like in real life, that means you either can't have too many wooden structures in your game, or you need a fully destructible environment which is not an easy thing to make and has trivial benefits. You might even say it's detrimental to the experience as you then allow the player to completely break your carefully crafted game.
How do other games deal with game breaking scenarios? Morrowind provided you with a message telling you you should probably reload or you were screwed once you killed certain characters. Real immersive. From Oblivion onwards, they simply made NPCs immortal (Deus Ex did that too). Not that many games try to provide a scenario for every possible player action. That's because the player's imagination is limitless, while the developer's resources are finite.
The Nameless Mod is one game which tried to have full player freedom and consequence. But even that came up short, and players still managed to break the game. But that was in development for 7+ years and they had no funding problems as it was a bunch of amateurs on their free time. This is a commercial project with a finite budget and probably a release date somewhere down the line. They can't just work on it forever and make the best game ever. That doesn't work in the real world, as we saw with DNF. If Star Citizen's latest update is anything to go by though, I might be proven wrong. That shit does look mind-blowing.
But I think sometimes having too much freedom is not a good thing. Constraints can help make a project more focused and tight. Maybe SS2 is such a great game precisely because of those constraints and not in spite of them. Also stop deluding yourselves in thinking kickstarted projects have nobody to answer to. Sometimes a fanbase can be much more fickle than the worst publishers out there.
Melan on 8/12/2015 at 18:45
Quote Posted by Starker
Games look and play like ass most of the way until completion, though. What you see at trade shows are usually really carefully polished scripted demos made for that one exact purpose and not actual games in their current state.
Anyone who has ever made a substantial fan mission knows that there is a long, long phase where things are clunky, flat and not much fun. The sound doesn't work yet, texturing is questionable, lighting doesn't work as intended, and things are plain broken. That's how thing are when you have
a completed game to work with.
The original Thief was a project that looked like abject failure to its creators until its final year, when somehow, everything fell into its place, and it turned out the clunky and weird gameplay was actually smooth and revolutionary. Because the people behind it was Looking Glass. That's out best hope here, as well.
Pyrian on 8/12/2015 at 18:50
Quote Posted by Manwe
How do other games deal with game breaking scenarios? Morrowind provided you with a message telling you you should probably reload or you were screwed, once you killed certain characters, real immersive.
Half-Life 1 (and quite few others) did that. If you killed NPC's that you needed to open doors, the game just ended with some quip about misusing human resources.
And... I like it.
You were stupid and you lost the game. You weren't magically prevented from losing the game. You weren't allowed to keep playing the game after you'd already lost, looking endlessly for a way out that doesn't exist, a la Infocom games. It may not be some glorified idealist solution, but it's the best practical solution.
And I don't see it as being any more immersion breaking than the death/reload cycle we're all used to. Big deal. Someone crucial to advancing the game died, so the game is over. Inappropriate immortality (nevermind the cavalcade of indestructible objects) is way more immersion breaking to me.
Manwe on 8/12/2015 at 19:30
Quote Posted by Pyrian
And I don't see it as being any more immersion breaking than the death/reload cycle we're all used to.
I'm not necessarily saying that one is more immersive than the other, I'm just saying there is no ideal solution to game breaking scenarios. You either tell the player he broke the game, or you don't make the game breakable. The latter is achieved either by limiting the player agency as much as possible (Half-Life), or by providing a solution to every possible action the player can think of. This is what TNM tried to do, it worked great most of the time, but it's really costly to develop for very little payback (oftentimes to a very tiny portion of the player base). Or you cheat your way out Bethesda-style by making a game that's falsely interactive.
Starker on 9/12/2015 at 00:58
One of the things I did in Thief 2 once I've gotten used to the gameplay was to try to get over a wall at the edge of the level to see what's beyond (in the mission Framed, IIRC). To my surprise, there was no invisible barrier preventing me from doing this and staring at the vast empty nothingness beneath the distant skybox. Did that ruin my immersion? Not one bit.
Immersion is something the player voluntarily engages in and not something that has to be maintained by designers at all costs. When the player engages in play, they step into a magic circle and play by its rules and boundaries.
fetgalningen on 9/12/2015 at 01:19
*Summons ZylonBane*
twisty on 9/12/2015 at 01:29
I was hoping that Eidos Montreal (specifically the T4 team) would get it but anyway Otherside might do an OK job I guess
heywood on 9/12/2015 at 01:36
J
Starker on 9/12/2015 at 01:52
Quote Posted by twisty
I was hoping that Eidos Montreal (specifically the T4 team) would get it but anyway Otherside might do an OK job I guess
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