Henroid

The easiest way to describe and attribute difficulty in video games is how much room for error you give the player. The more complex your game, the more systems you have to take into account on that rule. The simplest expression of difficulty in this way (room for error) is as follows: Peggle ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Kaizo Super Mario Bros. (In case people don't know it: Kaizo Mario is a super-strict, super-precise ROM hack of Super Mario World) On one end of the spectrum you have as much room for "error" as you want (Peggle is probably a poor example, but screw it). On the other end, there is no room for any error whatsoever. In Kaizo, you have to move at precise momentum, precise jump heights, etc. etc. etc. and failing at any moment just means overall failure, rather than setback. As a more explicit example of this level of difficulty (no room for error) let me present to you some images from Mega Man 5, from the NES. Now if anyone remembers, vertical scrolling in Mega Man was broken up by hard screen transitions (game pauses, scrolls, then resumes). So here's my game for you guys: Pick the side Mega Man should fall from - left, or right. Got a side chosen? Okay, let's go to what the screen transition looks like. The problem with no room for error at all is that it's incredibly frustrating. It can be balanced out with another aspect; foresight. Foresight can come within a second or minutes. But in the demonstration above, foresight is left out of the equation altogether. Such bullshit. Foresight is a problem too, by the way. Games that are static suffer from a problem where playing on an easy difficulty will grant the player as much foresight as they can remember, even if its in generalities (okay, buncha dudes here) vs. specifics (two guys up top, one on the right behind a crate, etc.). Anyway, that's it for my own personal take on difficulty (and it going too far), lemme get to some things here more relevant to Sno's target point for the thread. The concept of "pushing players past their limits" is a very sound one. Granted, it's what people have to be seeking. But it has an inherent flaw; person to person, limits in a video game range among a vast expanse and emerge in different ways. Using Halo as an example, one person might be the most pin-point, twitchy gunslinger. But that same person may suck ass at avoiding taking hits. Meanwhile, there's another person out there who is the opposite; very good with their foresight to avoid taking damage, but can't aim for squat. These players face different problems, and choosing between easy, medium, and hard isn't necessarily going to solve their problems without making their strength make the game too easy. The general idea behind ramping up difficulty in games is enhancing all characteristics of the enemies while detracting things that benefit the player as a whole. There's no individual difficulty sliders for ammo availability, enemy health or strength, etc. It's a lot of complexity and implementing such things may take a lot of time or result in very awkward game experiences that aren't necessarily rewarding. The Halo example had some very good notes when it comes to shaping your playstyle and tactics as the difficulty goes up. A key factor to increasing tactical play is not just to make ammo more scarce, enemies hit harder and take more damage, etc. The player has to retain the emphasized benefits of the tools they're given to overcome things. When those emphasized points take as hard a hit as anything else when you scale the difficulty, it's suddenly not about being tactical at all - no matter what you bring to the table, you're weak. Even if the edge in a tool brought to a situation is small, it has to be retained. It gives the tool value. If you're limited in how many tools you can bring, now you're thinking about frequency of use, odds of replacing or changing tools out, etc. I'll have more later, probably.

Obviously Chris should have been doing math in his head during the demo experience.

Spell drops are kinda haphazard tankadillo. I usually find one once in a great while, or I find a few within a few minutes of each other in the same great-while. So I beat the game today. Seeing how great Act 3 was pushed me into overdrive and I really ran at the game hard, and soon enough I was fighting the Alchemist and everything. I actually wasn't aware of how far along I was in the game until I was told to go get him directly. Anyway, time for some spoiler type stuff, regarding what happens when you beat the game and all. Anyway, serious spoiler talk aside, I came across an easter egg but I'll tag it too in case people like to discover this sorta thing. Though this is randomly found.

Damn that's a great example. In fact, it became the thing to do with my friends and I in the computer lab in gradeschool. Thanks for bringing this up, those were great times.

Wow, Act 3 is really substantial. I was worried about it for a bit because of the first dungeon being really bland regarding the types of enemies fought, but everything past that has been so cool to look at. I even managed to die while being wowed by something. My first thought after "OH GOD" was "Torchlight 2's roguelike face finally showed itself to me, and taught me to respect the game."

Well, this showed up on the internet. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZR6Cw_3q1Pg

Biden is one of those guys where I know nothing about his professional history in lawmaking, but I see him speak and not only does he say the right things but he has charisma going on. Plus he was on the Colbert Report that one time serving food to a unit from the US Armed Forces that was sitting there as the audience.

Some content spoilers for the desert / Act 2, based on what you just said about the desert Murdoc.

Hot Scoops. Kick off the Remo shoes. Hey, Famous, watch out for Phaedrus Jake, Rodkin- I give up, writing parody songs is harder than I thought.

I'm convinced that I found either a bug or hidden property to Blood Hunger, the passive for Berserkers (available at level 1) that grants healing on crits. I started a new Berserker today, with an emphasis on actives to begin with rather than building on passives right away. I've also decided to wait on Blood Hunger until my crit chances are higher later in the game. But in waiting on taking it up, I've noticed that I'm living way easier and not encountering any near-death experiences (which is a typical constant for me as a Berserker). It's not that I'm killing things faster - I've literally just sat there with a pack of mobs wailing on me and my health decayed gradually, rather than the usual sharp spiking down that I'm used to seeing. I'm pretty sure that Blood Hunger is bugged or has the passive trait of nullifying your armor and probably your element shielding too. I'll give it a more direct test later today, but my survivability suddenly being that of a tank can't be any sort of coincidence.

Now we need Chris to get on board with Gunga Galunga.

This assumes Steve wants Scoops. Doesn't he hate this sorta thing?

How do you pronounce it? I'm pretty sure that's the right way.

Can I assume a Dr. Pepper endorsement was actually cut from somewhere in there?

In that second anecdote I thought Chris was going to break out with more intense guitar as the story continued but it just stopped. Edit - I would buy that Scoops shirt. Any of the ones described.

Digging this up because there's some news on this game. You can pay (minimum) $30 to get in on the alpha build of the game now. http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=KDDzSOS0vzc

Act 1 is less of a foresty area and more of the base of a mountain, leading up to actual mountain range. Act 3 is

http://tinycartridge.com/post/32293893769/latest-3ds-update-manages-to-block-almost-all-existing So hey, Nintendo put out a firmware update that blocked any and all use of flash carts for the 3DS. A manufacturer of the flashcarts is commenting that the update was so effective that they have to start from the ground up if they want to get around it. As in new hardware. Usually circumvention of this sorta thing doesn't get that sort of reaction, it's usually shrugged off (from what I see, at any rate). This isn't strictly industry news but Bioware is putting out a Mass Effect bundle for the PS3 this holiday season. November is apparently the 5 year mark following the first game's release which likely is the end point of Microsoft's exclusive hold on the first game (since they published it, I guess?). I'm not sure how Bioware got roped into offering the bundle for one system only. And there's a full launch title list for the Wii U:

It kinda made me realize I hate desert settings in general. If a desert gets used as a sort of gauntlet to get through, that's fine, but once it's put into an open-area exploration use, it's just bland as shit. I mean, to the credit of Runic Games they were able to fill the desert areas with more interesting things and unique features at least. The relation to Diablo 2 is one thing, but earlier this year I was playing WoW in earnest and ended up doing a lot of desert and Indiana Jones temple type stuff. So I'm a little overloaded with that theme and setting. I feel like deserts can only really be one thing thematically, whereas anything else can at least have more robust variations. My mouse's connection points for clicking being super busted has finally made me lose my shit, I'm tired of trying to endure it. 24 houred myself a new mouse so that I can actually play this game without difficulty.

They are randomly generated, yes.

I started an experiment on my Berserker, using axes instead of claws, and it's way easier getting through things. Though, I found a unique axe when I started this and didn't realize that its high damage for its level is limited by the stipulation that it does no arc'ing secondary damage. Still, claw weapons lack a lot of the oomph other weapons bring. I'm still trying to get used to the fact that Berserkers have less HP than Embermages. Anyway, I had it pointed out to me last night that the album for the game is free, and it's included in the Steam download (in your steamapps folder). I've decided to stop referring to this sound of music as being "like Diablo 2" and just calling it Matt Uelman's style. Because nobody else can really replicate it, the guy is just really talented.

I would equate the stated goal to giving an MMO-feel to exploring the world. Like in WoW, you could traverse the entire continent without load screens. But the world isn't all loaded up at once. It's loading as you move around, not that you can see it happening. It's less an open-world hint and more of a continuous moving through the game.

I'm not willing to bite into the open-world theory. I forget who it was from Idle Thumbs, but Valve tends to design their games to be linear, and even in Left 4 Dead while it was "random" it was still the devs being in control of the game pacing and such. Open-world is not really their style.

"Gordon, you've contracted malaria!"

I need to take a moment to really jot down how much I appreciate this game. The obvious point is how accessible it is for me to play. But the game is so smart in some many ways. One of my biggest complaints about Torchlight was that dual-wielding didn't really provide any benefit. Performing regular attacks didn't swing the weapons independently of each other; they were on shared time with each other, there was no unison. Plus, skills that derived damage from your weapon damage only derived damage from the main hand. It meant that playing with a single weapon and shield or a two-handed weapon was the only real choice. I "solved" this issue for myself by getting a mod that added a skill for dual-wielding, which increased your damage output and your swing speeds. It was still really a bandaid over everything. But in Torchlight 2, it's all wrapped up in a really satisfactory way - execution strikes. Swinging both weapons at the same time mixed in with your normal swing mashing. And I've seen it add up on the high-end of execution rate, and it's so gratifying. I'm not a big math guy in games; maybe it's still less optimal or maybe it is more. That doesn't matter to me. The point is, it feels like I'm succeeding no matter what choice I make. The other thing is how well designed passives are, to the point that playing a passive-strong character build is viable. Hell, even the embermage can pull this off (Elemental Affinity + the level 14 passives that grant you bonus damage if enemies are afflicted by particular ailments). It's another piece in the puzzle to dual-wielding being given an excellent shake and a chance to shine. The active skills having tiers of boosted effects is another thing that makes me grin. Not all of them turn the world upside down and some of them are probably lacking, sure, but it's all generally aimed in the right direction. It kinda reminded me of Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow on the DS. When you gather souls (skills) from enemies, there were plenty of cases where multiple souls would yield stronger effects or changes in graphics to skills, that sorta thing. Only in this game, TL2, during those in-between phases you're still making a skill stronger. Probably the most important thing though is that all skills are generally unique. Like the embermage doesn't just have the fireball, then the iceball, etc. And even the skills available at level 1 are going to benefit you in ways that the final skills won't. More importantly, there's no BS happening where a later skill is a literal more powerful version of a skill you already picked up. Though, that was something Torchlight 1 brought to the table. I'm not sure if Diablo 3 does this, or any other games, but TL2 granting weapon swings an AoE arc that follows their swing is a bit of a "finally!" for me. Gives two handed weapons one hell of an advantage (since I was kissing the butt of dual-wielding so much there). I know other games have done this, for sure, I'm just not sure if the sort of click-and-slash game has done it yet. I'm not going to say this game is perfect. Nothing is perfect, as we all know. I'm just saying this game is well made, but more importantly, it addressed a lot of problems I've had with the genre. My biggest complaint after sinking so much time into it is that the soft-targeting seems really, really odd. You can't interact with things if monsters are simply nearby, and I often have problems of my character running around when I'm trying to swing into a group of enemies (holding shift has pretty much made this a non-issue) (I know about holding ctrl by that seems like a bit much in the other direction of the problem I'm having). I haven't been able to play a lot of games that came out this year, and the year has yet to wrap up, but I'm just so confident in this game being a GOTY, even looking back at things I wanted to play. Edit - Goodness, I forgot to mention stats gaining benefits regardless of what kind of character you want to play. I wrote too much already though, people know what I mean with that.