Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Graknorke]

I will say in less serious games, obsessive blood and ogre is great but ones that are supposed to simulate 'the modern battlefield' you shouldn't do that crap. I also hate when those kinds of games just depict the guy getting shot, no physical signs of harm, then falling over dead. At least show a spurt of blood or them falling realistically or something.

but cod of dooty so rilistik.

[Neonivek]

I will say in less serious games, obsessive blood and ogre is great but ones that are supposed to simulate 'the modern battlefield' you shouldn't do that crap. I also hate when those kinds of games just depict the guy getting shot, no physical signs of harm, then falling over dead. At least show a spurt of blood or them falling realistically or something.

You are aware that is actually kind of realistic right?

At least more realistic then blood spurting Fighting game KO death.

People tend to just collapse.

[Cryxis, Prince of Doom]

Ya but there is usualy a hole or exit wound or something to show that they got shot

[Neonivek]

Ya but there is usualy a hole or exit wound or something to show that they got shot

Which is often tiny.

To an extent where it isn't unusual to be shot and show no signs of it.

[Cryxis, Prince of Doom]

That and usually someone doesn't drop dead instantly after getting shot in the gut
I mean even getting shot in the lung or heart won't kill you instantly like games depict (for NPCs not players, for some reason player characters are god compared to everybody else)

[Neonivek]

Yeah, sometimes they will just run away as if they weren't shot at all.

It is all very interesting.

[Rolan7]

Player characters need advantages, because they're expected to kill dozens or hundreds of enemies between checkpoints.  That's generally not fun if the PC dies in one shot, unless it's an excessively stealth and patience based game.  Or dying doesn't reset progress, like in Unreal Tournament.

And a FPS needs lots of enemies in order to have any length of gameplay.  The closest exception would be something like ARMA I guess, where there's a lot of tedious travel between the relatively few incredibly deadly enemies.  Which is realistic, and apparently fun to some.

[flame99]

Player characters need advantages, because they're expected to kill dozens or hundreds of enemies between checkpoints.  That's generally not fun if the PC dies in one shot, unless it's an excessively stealth and patience based game.  Or dying doesn't reset progress, like in Unreal Tournament.

And a FPS needs lots of enemies in order to have any length of gameplay.  The closest exception would be something like ARMA I guess, where there's a lot of tedious travel between the relatively few incredibly deadly enemies.  Which is realistic, and apparently fun to some.

This.

Ultimately, there are two kinds of games that don't really thrive on making the player feel empowered: Horror, and stealth (kinda). For almost every other game, the player is there to feel like a badass. In CoD, it comes from mowing down waves of faceless mooks. In Nethack, it comes from finally getting the Amulet of Yendor. There are exceptions, of course; Dark Souls is a bit of a special case, blending stealth's thing (Being far weaker than the enemy, but getting through regardless) and a dose of standard empowerment, and with Dwarf Fortress, it almost seems to draw more from horror's form of enjoyment (HOLY SHIT EVERYTHING IS FUCKED FOR EVER, AND THE MOST I CAN DO IS MAKE IT MILDLY LESS FUCKED). However, most games still thrive off of making the player feel awesome.

As such, this usually means fighting very large amounts of enemies, and winning. This is absolutely insane if the computer is evenly matched to the player, because that means that there's an approximately 50% chance of the player losing in any encounter against a single foe, and becomes higher with more foes.

Now, do most games take it too far? Almost certainly. I'd prefer to fight less enemies but die faster in most FPS games over lots of enemies and apparently being made of titanium. But you can't expect a game to have equal strength players and enemies, because that results in extremely difficult gameplay that will probably just yield a ragequit, a crushed controller, and a shattered TV.

[Parsely]

I always loved games that gave you hordes of buddies to help you. There's not a lot of games outside of RTS where you have large groups of things working together, I always wanted a fun game where you were leading a LARGE GROUP of NPC allies who were useful and you had to rely on.

A few that have done this in a way I liked: The Outfit where there were piles of allies hanging around fighting alongside defending themselves and you could parachute in a squad of riflemen to hang around you whenever you want. And if you weren't crewing a vehicle the NPCs would man it on their own and attack nearby enemies. In Battletanx: Global Domination there were piles of NPCs on all sides that all used the same AI and fought to destroy the enemy base whether you participated or not. I love the NPCs in EDF, you can can often rely on them to hold their own for short amounts of time depending on their loadouts, and in any level you want to rescue as many as possible to multiply your firepower. Lost Planet 2 is a game that I would have liked even more than I already do if there were larger groups of NPC buddies helping out, there's a few on some levels but never in the numbers that are represented in cutscenes.

Something I always like in a game that takes place on the battlefield is that feeling of a larger conflict taking place around you, that the other grunts are fighting and dying and you have a similar vulnerability.

[flame99]

...I think you're on the wrong thread, GUNIN. This is kinda the opposite of that.

Though, I have to agree. It's amazing having large hordes fight with you. Even if they aren't necessarily very smart or strong, there's something amazing about having an army waging war against the enemy while you carve through the lines.

[Parsely]

...I think you're on the wrong thread, GUNIN. This is kinda the opposite of that.

No I meant to post here. My peeve is that a lot of games just have paper cutouts running around that don't do anything.

Though, I have to agree. It's amazing having large hordes fight with you. Even if they aren't necessarily very smart or strong, there's something amazing about having an army waging war against the enemy while you carve through the lines.

This.

[MaximumZero]

I seem to have missed this thread until now. I'm PTWing.

[Rolan7]

I forgot to mention games where you get a squad, but it's true in some games you even have an army!  Mount & Blade is the main example I think of.  I think Dynasty Warriors is like this too.

And a freeware game which took way too long for me to find, because I was positive it was called Independence War.  It's actually called Liberation Army.  It's an old top-down space mecha shooter where each battle mostly consists of hundreds of troops plinking away at each other.  The actual spaceships are big, slow, and expensive, but they slaughter troopers with siege weapons as they get in range.  These capital ships are vulnerable to advanced mechas such as the player character.  These advanced mechas are nimble but not very tough, and damage repairs slowly between battles (forcing you to play carefully, or be forced to cycle between characters).  Enemy troopers are too numerous for the player to dodge their shots, so charging the enemy line yourself is suicide.

The main strategy is to punch a hole in the enemy line by focusing your capital ships on a certain area.  Then your nimble but vulnerable mech can slip through to assassinate enemy carriers (who hang far back spawning troops), or flank the enemy line from behind (which causes them to turn their backs on your troopers, which gets them slaughtered by critical hits).  Later you do unlock weapons of mass destruction, but for most of the game you're really just enabling the hundreds of friendly mooks to actually win the battle.

[Cowboy Colt]

There's definitely an art to balancing the effectiveness of friendly AI so as not to make them too powerful, removing the challenge, or too weak, diminishing their purpose.

Most games just use them for set dressing or in-game indications of what's occurring (i.e. tactical shoutouts)

[Cryxis, Prince of Doom]

I saw hordes of buddies helping and there is only one FPS I thought of, battle field.
It does that better than CoD in my opinion. That and some of the fire fights I get into on there rely heavily on the persistence of medics. And I'm usualy my squads support gunner sooo needless to say if I go down there's no suppression fire


That game has some great online play

Anyway, pet peeve with it is that BF4 had litteraly 4~5 short missions in it's single player campaign. Took me 3 hours to finish. THATS NOT A CAMPAIGN! THATS A SHORT STORY LUNE AS TO WHAT MAPS ARE IN THE MULTIPLAYER