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Author Topic: Game Features that used to excite you, but make you Groan now  (Read 21477 times)

itisnotlogical

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Re: Game Features that used to excite you, but make you Groan now
« Reply #180 on: June 30, 2014, 08:45:10 am »

In a perfect world, DLC would just be the new word for "Expansion Pack". Unfortunately, it seems like modern DLC just adds tiny features that should have been in the game at launch or not at all. And "weapon pack"-type DLC is the worst, at that point just make it a microtransaction with a little advert that pops up between levels like a damn Facebook game.
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Retropunch

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Re: Game Features that used to excite you, but make you Groan now
« Reply #181 on: June 30, 2014, 09:13:52 am »

In a perfect world, DLC would just be the new word for "Expansion Pack". Unfortunately, it seems like modern DLC just adds tiny features that should have been in the game at launch or not at all. And "weapon pack"-type DLC is the worst, at that point just make it a microtransaction with a little advert that pops up between levels like a damn Facebook game.

Agreed, they really should just be expansion packs. I think they'd make a lot more money doing that as well, but after looking at the steam figures of how many people actually complete games these days it's probably seen as less financially viable to have content that needs to be accessed after completion.

I don't mind weapon/armor/stuff packs as long as they're not too heavily advertised in game - there's nothing worse than buying a game and seeing 'locked: buy footerriblefoo to unlock fooarmour of foo!' in your inventory.



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With enough work and polish, it could have been a forgettable flash game on Kongregate.

Arbinire

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Re: Game Features that used to excite you, but make you Groan now
« Reply #182 on: June 30, 2014, 09:23:35 am »

Voice-acting.
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Funk

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Re: Game Features that used to excite you, but make you Groan now
« Reply #183 on: June 30, 2014, 11:44:37 am »

Crafting or more accurately what passes for crafting, i really love createing stuff and working out how to get then some thing.

Add the blue and red herbs togeater to make a +1 health potion is not crafting it's grinding.
Real crafting is more complex and open, minecraft real draw is what you can make with it, not makeing a diamond pick axe.
 
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Agree, plus that's about the LAST thing *I* want to see from this kind of game - author spending valuable development time on useless graphics.

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Sergarr

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Re: Game Features that used to excite you, but make you Groan now
« Reply #184 on: June 30, 2014, 12:13:41 pm »

Crafting stuff in games is really hindered by the fact that it is so discrete, compared to the continuous game world. If there was a way to make items work based on something continuous, that would change everything.

EDIT: Good example of that is making sword in games. Usually you only need a smelter, fuel, iron ore and some time. In real life, you need to control temperature (too low and the material cannot be easily deformed by hammer strikes, too high and it goes full liquid) by controlling the amount of burning fuel and creating an air current, then you use your hammer to deform the material the way you wants, each hammer strike also making the material at the impact point somewhat different by creating dislocation and texture, then you cool it off in the cold water so fast that the high-temperature defects cannot escape from material in time, which makes it less deformable...

See how actually involved that process is? I wish the games actually had something like that...
« Last Edit: June 30, 2014, 12:24:21 pm by Sergarr »
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GavJ

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Re: Game Features that used to excite you, but make you Groan now
« Reply #185 on: June 30, 2014, 01:12:29 pm »

Crafting stuff in games is really hindered by the fact that it is so discrete, compared to the continuous game world. If there was a way to make items work based on something continuous, that would change everything.

EDIT: Good example of that is making sword in games. Usually you only need a smelter, fuel, iron ore and some time. In real life, you need to control temperature (too low and the material cannot be easily deformed by hammer strikes, too high and it goes full liquid) by controlling the amount of burning fuel and creating an air current, then you use your hammer to deform the material the way you wants, each hammer strike also making the material at the impact point somewhat different by creating dislocation and texture, then you cool it off in the cold water so fast that the high-temperature defects cannot escape from material in time, which makes it less deformable...

See how actually involved that process is? I wish the games actually had something like that...

There are multiple ways of doing this in a skill based and a less-discrete fashion. Two examples:

1) Physics engines. Actually model at some degree of abstraction an item as a physical model. And then require some number of variables controlled during construction. If your quenching was incorrect, don't stop you from doing it, just give you a more brittle or soft sword, that actually is more likely to snap or bend in combat. Etc. A sufficiently advanced physics engine could even let you invent things the programmers never envisioned based on your actual craftiness. Like "grab an old power cord and rip a piece off of a garbage can and bend it and lash it to a broom, to make a thin steel shovel." The engine provides actual environmental materials + an interface for tying and bending and otherwise manipulating things. Then when you actually go to dig with the thing, the engine calculates its failure from actual physical stresses.

2) Gonna throw out puzzle pirates again as an example. It is a rigid system with rules, but still rewards skill and actual craft of a sort. In that game, players "craft" all the cannonballs and rum and ships and swords and clothing and everything themselves. Every single industry has its own puzzle. The puzzle is an abstracted logic type game of the flavor of the industry (distilling, for example, is a bubble swapping game where you work out impurities and try to blend in spices and things into cleared rows). The better you do, the better quality grades the finished goods have OR the longer it takes you (more puzzling sessions), depending on the industry (some goods don't have qualities, so it does time). So there is actual player skill involved in every industry, and hundreds or thousands of discrete levels of points that are meaningful in terms of quality or speed of production that make you more or less competitive as a businessperson.
« Last Edit: June 30, 2014, 01:15:17 pm by GavJ »
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Dwarf fortress in 50 words: You start with seven alcoholic, manic-depressive dwarves. You build a fortress in the wilderness where EVERYTHING tries to kill you, including your own dwarves. Usually, your chief imports are immigrants, beer, and optimism. Your chief exports are misery, limestone violins, forest fires, elf tallow soap, and carved kitten bone.

itisnotlogical

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Re: Game Features that used to excite you, but make you Groan now
« Reply #186 on: June 30, 2014, 01:14:56 pm »

In real life, you need to control temperature (too low and the material cannot be easily deformed by hammer strikes, too high and it goes full liquid) by controlling the amount of burning fuel and creating an air current, then you use your hammer to deform the material the way you wants, each hammer strike also making the material at the impact point somewhat different by creating dislocation and texture, then you cool it off in the cold water so fast that the high-temperature defects cannot escape from material in time, which makes it less deformable...

I'm content to watch an animation and just make-believe that that's what's happening under the hood. A system that complex in addition to whatever game is underneath that is just too much added complexity for what is supposed to be a side-feature. I say leave *craft the way it is, and make Blacksmith Simulator 2014 for those that will appreciate it.

EDIT: Or what GavJ said about puzzles.
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Darkmere

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Re: Game Features that used to excite you, but make you Groan now
« Reply #187 on: June 30, 2014, 01:22:25 pm »

I'm in agreement with the previous crafting discussion... the best games about crafting have emergent play associated with it, with an underlying traditional discrete method as backing. Minecraft, the dwarf!puter, that kind of thing. I also liked building houses in Terraria... cavern city and sky pirate airships are go!

And to be honest I *hated* Minecraft's crafting interface where you had to "guess" (look up on a wiki) where in the grid to place your crap to get something useful. It just struck me as a waste of time and energy that would have been better spent on meaningful content with a more minimalistic item crafting mechanic.
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And then, they will be weaponized. Like everything in this game, from kittens to babies, everything is a potential device of murder.
So if baseless speculation is all we have, we might as well treat it like fact.

Retropunch

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Re: Game Features that used to excite you, but make you Groan now
« Reply #188 on: June 30, 2014, 02:02:05 pm »

Too complicated crafting does get a bit tedious. I remember playing an online browser game a while back with ultra-indepth crafting, and it felt a bit tedious.

Having crafting with emergent results would be super awesome, especially with a good enough physics engine to back it up, but I feel we're a way off that technically (/motivationally)
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aristabulus

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Re: Game Features that used to excite you, but make you Groan now
« Reply #189 on: June 30, 2014, 02:22:45 pm »

Too complicated crafting does get a bit tedious. I remember playing an online browser game a while back with ultra-indepth crafting, and it felt a bit tedious.

Having crafting with emergent results would be super awesome, especially with a good enough physics engine to back it up, but I feel we're a way off that technically (/motivationally)

I'm not sure we'll ever get there.  Anything the programmers don't include in the code, the computer doesn't know those things even exist.  As such, complex systems are _really_ hard to model (even harder to do well), especially under the budget / time constraints of a commercial product, AAA or not.

I've rambled on about scale and scope issues in the past, but I've not seen a more succinct explanation than this dev blog post on Gamasutra.  It was written to help describe what a designer actually does, but it's also a peek behind the curtain for how much goes into seemingly simple ideas (like doors).

Now extrapolate for a robust and deep crafting system....  yyyyyeah.  >_>
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Funk

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Re: Game Features that used to excite you, but make you Groan now
« Reply #190 on: June 30, 2014, 02:26:25 pm »

Im happy to have the tedious work of makeing the item be shoved in to a video or a minigame.
Thats not the fun part it, the createing, picking and choses of parts and comeing up with ideas.

Crafting should not be just the second part of a item hunt, it should involve choices that mean something , even if thats just picking whever to make a sword of +5 vs orcs or +1 critical hits
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Agree, plus that's about the LAST thing *I* want to see from this kind of game - author spending valuable development time on useless graphics.

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GavJ

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Re: Game Features that used to excite you, but make you Groan now
« Reply #191 on: June 30, 2014, 02:29:19 pm »

Quote
I'm not sure we'll ever get there.  Anything the programmers don't include in the code, the computer doesn't know those things even exist.  As such, complex systems are _really_ hard to model (even harder to do well), especially under the budget / time constraints of a commercial product, AAA or not.

IMO this is sort of like saying "we'll never get 3D graphics, because it's way too hard of a system to invent from scratch for a game designer under other constraints."

Yeah, it was. But it wasn't too much for dozens of game designers to incrementally work on as a community, leading to the creation of engines and code libraries that make all that complexity entirely doable now for every decently funded game that wants to.

Realistic physics allowing crafting as a side effect should follow the same route through history. Eventually, the engine and hardware will just BE there for you, and as a game designer, you just populate your world with objects and tools that afford the sorts of craftiness you want for your game. Without having to worry at all about making a new physics engine from scratch specifically for crafting. It will already be there someday, as a starting point.



...because physics works the same in (almost) every time period and game environment, so you only need one or a small handful of engines for everybody.
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Cauliflower Labs – Geologically realistic world generator devblog

Dwarf fortress in 50 words: You start with seven alcoholic, manic-depressive dwarves. You build a fortress in the wilderness where EVERYTHING tries to kill you, including your own dwarves. Usually, your chief imports are immigrants, beer, and optimism. Your chief exports are misery, limestone violins, forest fires, elf tallow soap, and carved kitten bone.

Mindmaker

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Re: Game Features that used to excite you, but make you Groan now
« Reply #192 on: June 30, 2014, 02:33:14 pm »

Basically everything going on in Kingdoms of Alamur: The Reckoning. There is literally nothing going on in the first 30 minutes of the game that hasn't elicited pained and angry noises from me. Even the tropes, mechanics and sub-systems I like are done so blandly and generically here, it's making me hate the entire design history of RPGs since the 80s that allowed it to be.
Better late than never:
I didn't find it too bad. It had a decent setting, interesting quests and some good dialogue.
Main problem is that the combat isn't deep, the game not difficult at all and due to the sheer amount of content it really becomes a drag.

I dropped it in one of the last areas (Klurikon).

Edit:
Well okay, you were mostly refering to the start of the game, but 30 minutes really isn't a good amount of time to properly judge a game in most cases.
« Last Edit: June 30, 2014, 02:36:16 pm by Mindmaker »
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Sergarr

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Re: Game Features that used to excite you, but make you Groan now
« Reply #193 on: June 30, 2014, 02:36:39 pm »

Modeling physics is the simple part, the harder part is creating proper hardware for it. Normal computers have a serious problem of utilizing discrete numbers and operating in discrete manner, which leads to all sorts of weird edge-case problems.

I'm sure it will be solved pretty soon. Maybe 10 years in the future.
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aristabulus

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Re: Game Features that used to excite you, but make you Groan now
« Reply #194 on: June 30, 2014, 03:44:30 pm »

....
IMO this is sort of like saying "we'll never get 3D graphics, because it's way too hard of a system to invent from scratch for a game designer under other constraints."
....

No, you're talking about a different problem.  Compared to emergent gameplay systems (especially emergent crafting), 3D graphics are a cakewalk.  Drawing a bunch of polygons and slapping textures & lighting on them is just doing a lot of math, quickly enough to maintain a reasonable framerate for your desired quality.  Hardware does damn near all of that for 3D graphics now, but it has taken decades to get here.  Parallelism is great for math, and even moreso for the math used in graphics; that's why the newest GPUs have a whole lotta cores (thousands).  Parallelism is not so useful for systems that are more than a strict numbers game.

Engines... that's still just math.  It's conveniently packaged math for hooking into the hardware and drawing polygons, so you don't have to reinvent the wheel.  Some of the nicer ones may also model some physics.  It's not gonna build your crafting system for you.

For hardware-level-physics as a foundation?  We're kinda already on that road... but piggybacking on Moore's Law won't get us to the destination, because that ride is coming to an end.  There's not much more process shrinking with current materials that can be done before the atoms start saying "lol, nope".  (depending on who you believe, we may already be there)  It will take a paradigm shattering discovery to get past that; quantum computing climbing out of its crib, new materials becoming mature and economical to use... something.

Normal computers have a serious problem of utilizing discrete numbers and operating in discrete manner, which leads to all sorts of weird edge-case problems.

Indeed.... computers do weird things often, in spite of good programming.
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If iron is to become steel, it must feel fire! --ancient Dwarven proverb

What is steel compared to the hand that wields it?  --Thulsa Doom
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