Print

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

[Niveras]

I almost forgot about the skyworld option in early builds of Minecraft!  Is there a good mod for those?  Certain types of Mystcraft age can be kinda similar, but not really the same...

There are a bunch of "start with nothing but a couple patches of dirt and tree" modpacks. I haven't tried any of them to know if they're "good", but a couple popular ones are:

Project Ozone 2
Regrowth (not quite "start with near-nothing")
Sky Factory 2.5
Infinity Evolved Skyblock

Hmm, but maybe you were meaning as a world gen option only instead of a quest-based modpack.

[Rolan7]

I really enjoyed AgrarianSkies, which is like that!
But yeah, I meant options which generated floating islands in the sky.

[Neonivek]

Ok here is one for fighting games

Insanely difficult yet essential moves!

Far FAR too many fighting games have taken it upon themselves to make super moves not only absolutely essential but also rather difficult to pull off. Soul Calibur 5 for example requires an excessive button push.

And I know the defense is usually "But Neonivek, How long it takes is part of the balance" except I should state that this never affects "Pros" who can pretty much do it near instantly anyhow and the computer can pull it off instantly as well.

And that isn't even the only type of move that is often needlessly difficult to pull off. Sidesteps in Tekken while certainly not the most difficult, easily could have been applied to a single button.

There are 2 REAL reasons for this
1) It is to give players a false sense of competence and achievement just for pulling it off.
2) As an artificial barrier between regular play and competent play.

Basically I have no respect for fighting games, however good they are, for making moves difficult to pull off for no other reason then to make them difficult to pull off. I'll learn the moves, I'll learn the combos... But there better not be a move that requires 12 direction inputs (yes these exist) unless your so absolutely packed that there is no choice.

[MrRoboto75]

Those pretzel motions tho

I remember Rising Thunder had one button special moves

[Damiac]

To be fair, most of the extremely complicated moves like you talk about aren't even really good moves most of the time. I remember in soul caliber 1, yoshimitsu had a move that had insane movements and timing, and all it did was a crappy little crouching punch.

Ivy had a throw that was pretty damn complicated, and I suppose it was a little better than a normal throw.

In tekken the combos can be kind of crazy, but as for moves the only really bad ones were usually the combo throws.  Screw those damn combo throws...


Still, I agree with your general complaint I think.  There is a difference between a deep game and a game with an extremely high skill ceiling.  Just making things hard for the sake of making them hard increases the skill ceiling, but makes the game no more deep.  Starcraft 2 is an excellent example of that, with the needing to click a button every 30 seconds without fail to maintain maximum productivity.  There's no strategy to it, either you do it and gain the advantage or you don't.

I prefer when games are simple enough to do everything in, so the differentiation between a good player and a not so good player is that the good player uses those simple moves in a better way, not that the good player is able to do them at all.

[Sergius]

Ok, this really grinds my... wheels? Chops? Busts? This annoys me.

Like, when, in the name of "immersion", open worldness, stuff, we get tiny scaled down stuff. When we already have transitions that divide sections of cities anyway, this idea that, if you can't visit every square inch of a city, this isn't "immersive", so for extra "immersiverness" we make the whole city big enough to house 30 people, and there's like two dozen buildings in total including public buildings. I prefer 100x times to have a subset of a city, travel transitions, parts that you'll never see (that simply aren't modeled), even random instanced alleys or something for encounters if you're traveling from point A to point B in a HUGE city.

It's like I'm taking crazy pills, like, nobody feels it is non-immersive to have tiny capital cities, but everyone feels it's un-immersive to abstract travel or have only points of interest in a city be actually mapped out? Ugh.

[Rolan7]

Huh, that's a really good point.

[itisnotlogical]

You can actually get lost in Arena's and Daggerfall's cities, which I thought was the coolest thing ever playing those games. Every guild center is identical, there's three or four house interiors and three or four shop interiors. But it feels so much larger than that because there's almost no reason to go in 90% of those buildings, most of which are houses with nothing in them or low-quality shops.

[Krevsin]

Ok, this really grinds my... wheels? Chops? Busts? This annoys me.

Like, when, in the name of "immersion", open worldness, stuff, we get tiny scaled down stuff. When we already have transitions that divide sections of cities anyway, this idea that, if you can't visit every square inch of a city, this isn't "immersive", so for extra "immersiverness" we make the whole city big enough to house 30 people, and there's like two dozen buildings in total including public buildings. I prefer 100x times to have a subset of a city, travel transitions, parts that you'll never see (that simply aren't modeled), even random instanced alleys or something for encounters if you're traveling from point A to point B in a HUGE city.

It's like I'm taking crazy pills, like, nobody feels it is non-immersive to have tiny capital cities, but everyone feels it's un-immersive to abstract travel or have only points of interest in a city be actually mapped out? Ugh.

This. So much this.

Though I do get it (lore-wise) for some games, like some Fallout games but even then it's really stretching it when the glowing metropolis of the wasteland has only 20 people in (looking at you, Diamond City) or if the busy overcrowded slums of Freeside in New Vegas only have 30 people wandering around a quite sizeable map.

(I know part of it is simple resource management but come on you really could've made Freeside smaller to make it feel more crowded and busy)

[Neonivek]

It is because what a developer says and what they truly think are two different things.

Which takes more work? Making a very tiny city

Or making a huge city but with a few select important points?

[itisnotlogical]

A lot of Daggerfall's content was randomly-generated though. Not in the roguelike sense, it was randomly generated during development and then baked into the world. I think just a (relative) handful of locations are handmade in the entire game.

[Darkmere]

Wasn't that one of the complaints leveled against it though? That most of the content felt like generic, completely uninteresting filler? Coz apparently that's what it was.

There's exceptions but quality > quantity most of the time.

[Krevsin]

It is because what a developer says and what they truly think are two different things.

Which takes more work? Making a very tiny city

Or making a huge city but with a few select important points?

The thing is, you can make a small sandbox feel bigger relatively easily (i.e. for less effort than it takes to make a large, emptier one). Smaller locations with a small amount of NPCs oftentimes feel bigger than they actually are if you are willing to lead the player down less straight paths to get to important locations or having the location crisscrossed with smaller passageways. Surrounding the area with a large wall type thing also works, as does adding a certain amount of verticality to the whole arrangement.

It's a matter of layout, not so much adding more locations and/or NPCs. If you want to make your cities feel bigger than they are, it helps a bunch.

(also this slightly extends into discussing the merits of smaller, denser sandboxes as compared to larger, more sparse ones)

[Neonivek]

Ohh I didn't even mean being able to explore that larger city.

[Persus13]

Wasn't there a big fuss when they changed siege battles to be a section of the city in Total War: Warhammer instead of the whole city scaled down?