Lork

If you consider an achievement to be a significant reward. Have they patched this game yet? I'd like to play it, considering that I paid $60 for it and it looks pretty good, but there's no way I'm replaying it when there's a significant chance that it'll just get bugged and make me lose all my progress again.

One of the things you can do in those games is place a marker on the ground, which other players who come across it can use to summon you into their world. Once in another player's world, your mission is to ensure that they make it safely to the boss of the area they're in, and then help them kill it. If the player you're helping manages to kill a boss with you in tow, you leave their world with a substantial reward. I've never really thought of it in that way, but now that Mington mentioned it, it basically is like an escort mission in any other game, except the person you're escorting is a real human being who (probably) won't get stuck running infinitely into a wall while every enemy in the level bears down on them.

I thought the only people who didn't like Freelancer were crazy grognards who just couldn't let go of their joysticks. The interface/controls in that game were a stroke of genius and a bold step in the right direction for space sims. The way it let you effortlessly switch between flying your ship, freely aiming your guns at any point on the screen, and controlling functions of your ship's computer like targeting and the autopilot all from the same interface, without the need for an expensive hunk of plastic or a keyboard overlay with labels for all 101 keys was brilliant. It's just a shame the game had no actual content beyond the canned story missions in the singleplayer mode. All of the space sims to come after it have either stubbornly refused to use an interface that goes beyond Tie Fighter, or tried to do what Freelancer did and missed the point so badly that they might as well have not even tried (I'm looking at you, X series).

You realize that you literally just described a thing that is happening in the real world now, right? Just remove every reference to whales from your post. It's not exactly the most subtle or nuanced use of allegory I've seen, even by video game standards, but it makes perfect sense. The society depicted in Dishonored let their greed get the best of them and shortsightedly invested everything they had into a limited resource for its short term benefits without stopping to consider the long term consequences, and you can see the unfortunate results of that decision everywhere as you play.

Well, I was enjoying this game up until I did the side mission to poison the bottle street gang's distillery. Now the game crashes every time I try to go back to the main hub for the mission I'm on, and I'm left with no recourse but to wait for a patch that may or may not come at all. Glad to see that Bethesda's reputation extends to games they publish as well as the ones they develop. They wouldn't want to be considered inconsistent, after all.

At least you didn't run into the incredibly "fun" bug that I did. I suppose I should count myself lucky that it lets you restart the mission on ironman rather than dooming your entire campaign. Just one final little middle finger from the game as I send it off, I guess.

Man, I wish I had known about that mod earlier. I started a new campaign on normal and it's way too easy - I'm getting ready to assault the alien base and I've only had one casualty and no countries withdrawn from the project. My success is due in large part to the lack of bullshit invisible modifiers to the hit% and critical% rolls. The game seems to have a relatively solid tactical foundation, I guess I'm just frustrated that the way they decided to make it more difficult was to increase the role that random chance plays in the game. I'd restart with the mod, but I've already come so far, I might as well see this through to the end. Hopefully it'll get harder once I start running into the more advanced alien types. I can play classic with that mod after I've taken a break from the game, or better yet, once they've patched it to be like it should've been in the first place.

I just had a promising campaign ruined because the mouse cursor snapped from "send skyranger to landed UFO" to "Scan for activity" as I clicked on it. I think I might be done with this game. You can maximize your chances for favorable outcomes when playing a slot machine, but it's still gambling. That the game also happens to be full of unintuitive mechanics and bugs like walls phasing in and out of existence and medkits randomly not working is icing on the cake.

So I'm hoping my opinion will change, but I'm actually pretty unhappy with it. Such a high proportion of the gameplay is based purely on luck. The aliens and what they do seem almost entirely irrelevant - your real enemy is the almighty RNG, which can and will give or take entire missions on a whim. It doesn't really matter how well placed your soldiers are when there's a very high chance that the enemies will hit them regardless of how much cover they're behind, while your own soldiers are far more dependent on luck . There has also been fairly well substantiated talk of the hit percentages given by the game being innacurate, and given some of the other bugs I've seen, I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out to be true. Oh, there are many ways to lose an entire team through no fault of your own. For example, I had two missions in quick succession which started out with an alien shooting one of my squad members for minor damage, and my entire team panicked for multiple turns in response. I've also had several instances of my entire squad missing 75%+ accuracy shots multiple times in a row, followed by the aliens systematically one-shotting every squad member through full cover.

So this game has a terrible interface. If you haven't played it yet you'll probably think I'm exaggerating, but it is actually harder to use than the original interface from 1994. I've gotten used to stuff like the confusing, endlessly nesting menus and complete waste of screen real estate, but simply looking around is a constant struggle due to the way it maps your mouse movements to a virtual analog stick instead of scrolling naturally. To add insult to injury, the game won't even let you switch to the gamepad it was obviously designed for unless you shut down the whole game down and turn on the pad before you start the game up again. From what I've heard there's probably a great game hidden in there, but it does not leave a good first impression.

That's kind of the point, though. It's a game where you can fail spectacularly due to hilariously unfair situations like the one you described and still have that be totally OK.

Hey, so I just made of them internet videos about X-Com that you guys may find interesting. It's about the incredibly clever design of X-Com and why I don't think you should be worried about the things mentioned in the OP. You should still be worried though, just not about that. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ue-FSchUpBQ

Hey JP, speaking of X-Com tips... I'm sure a million people have all picked apart every single thing you did "wrong" in the stream by now, but the one thing that really bugged me was that you kept having your guys run around trying to juggle a two handed rifle and a flare or a grenade at the same time. They actually get a pretty significant penalty to your accuracy when they do that, so they could've been much better shots than they were. Sorry, just had to get that off my chest.

I suppose you're right. I've just never heard of anyone having that problem before now. It does seem kind of odd that they don't bother mentioning that stuff at any point. Even a throwaway line of incidental dialogue, like "Try using plasma, it works better against their shields!" would help. I apologize for being overly reductive before, but that's exactly what I was talking about. Reducing the amount of resources available to the player wouldn't help expose the more "fun" mechanics of Bioshock because the most efficient ways to play don't take advantage of them. You'd go from "Eh, I could shoot bees out of my hand, but why bother when I can just use the wrench?" to "I'd better not do anything wasteful like shoot bees out my hand, instead I'll use the wrench." What really needs to be done is to give the player a reason to use bees instead of the wrench sometimes, which is a change that would affect the game regardless of how difficult it was, and so could hardly be called a "difficulty adjustment". To put it another way, a game needs to have a solid core that can be interesting and fun to play regardless of how hard it is. The only thing difficulty can do is enhance or focus that core. If there's something wrong with the core, the only thing "enhancing" it will do is expose the flaws with greater clarity. And you can add me to the list of people who have no idea what Tanukitsune is talking about. Even supposedly "hardcore" games like Super Meat Boy and Spelunky have nothing on the sheer amount of ridiculously over the top difficulty and frustration generated by the likes of Castlevania, Megaman, Ninja Gaiden or Contra. And those aren't AVGN fodder either, they're widely considered to be some of the best games of their generation. Maybe I just haven't played whatever modern games you're thinking of, Tanu. It would help if you could mention a couple specific ones.

I don't think that applies in Halo's case because the gulf between normal and heroic is so wide that it suggests that they're intended for 2 entirely different audiences with very little crossover between them. I doubt that the people who enjoy Halo on normal would ever even want to engage with a game on the level that heroic+ would require them to. That's totally OK though, because both audiences get what they want. Again, different audiences and all that. None of that is required to play though normal, so tutorialising it would only serve to get in the way and maybe even confuse most players. Meanwhile if somebody chooses to play legendary, it's relatively safe to assume that they can figure out that kind of stuff on their own. Unfortunately it's not as simple as just turning up the difficulty. The reason Halo is so satisfying on higher difficulties is that the designers at Bungie went to great pains to make sure that the most effective tactics at any given time are the ones that make full use of all the game's systems, and encourage intelligent risk taking and other interesting, varied gameplay, while discouraging "safe/boring" tactics like standing in a doorway and sniping all the enemies. Turning up the difficulty then enforces the use of these tactics, and makes for a great time if you can handle it.Bioshock on the other hand is not quite so carefully designed, and so the most effective tactics are obvious, repetitive, and do not make good use of the game's overlapping systems. If you were to increase the difficulty without seriously changing the rest of the gameplay, you would end up with the same situation, only worse. The most effective strategies are still the boring ones, so by increasing the pressure to use better strategies, it would only encourage you to fall back on the same old lazy ones even more, or worse, enforce them. It's for this reason that I think very few games can pull off being difficult and fun, and don't usually choose hard mode in games unless I trust the developer to get it right. When they do though, it's like nothing else.

You forgot to mention the best part:

I continue to be baffled by the seemingly near universal complaints about respawning enemies in Far Cry 2. Checkpoints would respawn if, and only if you moved far enough away to unload them from memory. The way I played, I never had any reason to double back on a checkpoint immediately after leaving it. I'm genuinely curious here; what was everybody else doing that I wasn't?

"There is literally nothing in the design of Demon Souls or Dark Souls that inherently favors a gamepad", but you can't imagine playing InFamous or Prince of Persia without a gamepad? You're seriously going to try to make that argument? And your mouse got "stuck"? Are you sure you didn't inadvertently activate the the game's lock-on targeting feature? Really? I mean it didn't prevent me from playing the games, but it sure as hell wasn't the optimal experience. I played Bioshock 2 recently, and it was constantly making me wish I could just use my 360 controller like I could in the original. Too many actions that need to be performed constantly to comfortably bind to a mouse, not enough hotkeys for those that don't, totally nonsensical numbering for the weapon hokeys... I would have grudgingly accepted all of these if it weren't for the terrible mouselook implementation. It felt like I was using a mouse to emulate an analogue stick to emulate mouse to emulate a person's head. Can we throw any more layers of abstraction on there? Again, it was all technically possible to deal with without "problems", but it just felt like a chore just to look around. It's been a lot longer since I played Mass Effect 2, but I remember it being a pretty similar experience.

Does anybody have a video of that scene in the original Half-Life? In my vague memories of the original, the soldiers still went through the same cheesy dialogue but the voice actors at least tried to take it seriously. It could just be the radio filter or nostalgia covering it up, though. I wouldn't worry about it too much. I'm sure somebody will make a mod that restores all the original voices and sound effects, so you can just install that if you can't stand the new ones.

Do you also think it's silly to dismiss people who try to play Street Fighter 4 with a keyboard? Or how about flight sims? Some games are designed with a particular device in mind, and you ignore that at your own peril. What's much worse is when a game was obviously designed for a controller, but for some asinine reason that feature is cut out and you're force to use some half-assed attempt at a KB/M solution instead. See Mass Effect 2 and Bioshock 2.

You can use it to get some cool goodies before you're normally supposed to as long as you're willing to brave some out of depth enemies to get them.

The boss soul weapons tend to be pretty gimmicky, so they're kind of hit and miss as a result. There are definitely some good ones in the pile though.\ Oh, and some very helpful advice for new players - Don't just use all your souls for levelling up. The absolute most effective way to improve your survivability is to upgrade your weapon. The second most is to upgrade your shield. Even going from +0 to +5, which can be done with nothing but titanite shards that can be bought from Andre the Blacksmith, will make a world of difference.

That was my experience on the console version as well. It's hard to tell whether it's people with closed NATs or just the inherent sketchiness of the netcode that causes the failed summons. Also I already know this is going to be a Thumbs approved game because it's all about lording.

I don't know, Blighttown is relatively easy as long as you take it slow and play cautiously. I actually had way more trouble the second time I did it, because I knew where to go and kept trying to rush through it. Now that I'm playing the PC version, I just played carefully and got through it with minimal difficulty.

Running away is definitely an option, but they will chase you surprisingly far, and if you don't know where you're going you'll just end up getting in a fight another set of enemies and have to deal with the original guys at the same time. Your first time through an area you should probably just kill everything that picks a fight with you.