Chris

Idle Thumbs 259: Breckon's Similar Sausage Face

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I'd be curious to see a more strict set of visualizations in that style -- those maps seem to be exaggerating DS1s complexity quite a bit, and selling DS2 a bit short.

 

eirdly enough though, so far, I think I would take the DS2/Demon's overall world design over the DS3 design.  Each individual area in DS3 is better than the individual areas of 2 (not counting DLC), but I still appreciate the ability to have multiple paths from the beginning that I can pursue rather than a fairly lengthy linear path that 3 mandates before it starts offering branching options (and some of the branches in 3 aren't really branches, in that in one case there is a key at the end of a branch that is required for future progress, so that branch is functionally part of the straight linear path). 

 

I feel the same way. I'm still in the first half of DS3 (I think?) but so far it's felt more linear. Though I do really enjoy how 3 presents the world as a more "real" physical space with lots of vistas that foreshadow future areas.

I'd be curious to see a more strict set of visualizations in that style -- those maps seem to be exaggerating DS1s complexity quite a bit, and selling DS2 a bit short.

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I'd be curious to see a more strict set of visualizations in that style -- those maps seem to be exaggerating DS1s complexity quite a bit, and selling DS2 a bit short.

 

 

I had the same initial reaction, but I think as a visualization it succeeds in matching people's perceptions of each game experience really well, even if DS1 isn't actually that complex.  DS1 is that complex up until about Anor Londo, then it becomes like DS2's hub, which is represented in the DS1 drawing (the X right before the end), but that shift to hub-style linearity gets lost in the noise of the first half of the game. 

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I didn't play much of the Doom beta but I had a fairly good time with it. I'm not sure it'll be mega popular but it's not a bad game by any means. I've also seen people compare it to Halo and that comparison bugs me for two reasons. One, it doesn't play anything like Halo, the only similarity is that you have an armoured space marine guy, which is a ridiculous comparison because Doom had an armoured space marine guy.

 

Two, when people make this sort of comparison to Halo they're usually doing it in a negative way, which I can't stand because Halo is a really good game. What people are really mad about is how Halo popularised a new style of shooter that worked well on consoles and inadvertently brought an end to the wild west era of late 90's/early 2000's PC shooters which didn't really have a unifying design philosophy behind them. When people talk shit about Halo they're really taking an elitist stance against dumb console shooters for babies and lamenting how modern shooters aren't like the Good Old Days. But there have been shooters that tried to recapture the old-school style (The Rise of the Triad remake comes to mind) that all seem to have missed the mark, because it's so easy to throw the baby out with the bathwater when you intentionally try to eschew modern design conventions. Because modern design conventions are fun! And if they weren't fun they wouldn't be design conventions!

 

With that attitude, I don't see how Doom can win. If it features modern conventions like weapon loadouts then it's a dumb baby shooter for console kiddies, but if it tries to be a faithful recreation of days gone by then it risks just not being very good because modern video games have far more mechanics to consider than games from 1995.

I don't really entirely disagree, and I'm someone who never liked Halo at all and didn't really care for the new DOOM beta.

 

I think new DOOM is in a weird position because given that its called DOOM its likely going to try to hearken back to some old school sensibilities but its also going to have to incorporate some new stuff and the question becomes "which new things to add and which old things to keep" and everyone will respond differently.  Different people feel that different parts of DOOM made it DOOM.  You have people like me who still play DOOM deathmatch online via various source ports like ZDaemon and Zandronum and love the speed and weapons of DOOM 1 and 2, who love the whole crowd management an projectile dodging and enemy types of the single player game and don't see stuff like Brutal DOOM as really being DOOM anymore.  You have people who will say that DOOM is all about the atmosphere and the scariness and I think DOOM3 was an attempt at making that DOOM and I respected that even if it wasn't the DOOM I wanted in the end.  You have people who see something like Brutal DOOM as being more DOOM than even DOOM was.  At this point DOOM is this weird cipher obscured by age and its meaning in terms of what makes it good is decoded differently by different people and there isn't any right answer.  I think if you find yourself making a new DOOM game you have to make the game that fulfills your vision of what made DOOM good and ignore everyone else...then let the chips fall where they may...but I imagine that's not even remotely easy when you're a group of people with differing ideas of that working for a large publisher.

 

I think the Halo comparisons come from the fact that Certain Affinity (a company created by ex-Bungie employees who developed the multiplayer for Halo 4) designed DOOM 2016's multiplayer combined with it being a little floaty.  I also found it to be a bit slow, but I will admit that I tend to like my FPS games faster than most people and think that UT4 is also slower than it needs to be so take that with a grain of salt.  I don't think it feels like Halo at all, but I haven't played Halo in a long time. 

 

My biggest gripes with new DOOM weren't that it was at all like Halo, and more that the weapons felt a bit weak (a rocket or shotgun blast right in someone's face took their health down by about half as I remember), and that the run speed was a little slow compared to past id games and there wasn't a means of locomotion to gain speed over time (which is something that I like and that id games in the past have had, whether it be strafe running and wall running in DOOM, bunnyhopping in Quake1 and QW, strafe jumping in Q2 and Q3 (and in DOOM3 for that matter), or what-have-you).  But those are both more about my preferences and they don't make new DOOM a bad multiplayer game...they just make it a game that isn't for me which is fine.  There are games out there that I like for multiplayer (Quake Live, Tribes Ascend, Titanfall, Reflex, UT4, and others) and I think a lot of the backlash about DOOM 2016 comes down to people expecting this to be a game for them because they loved the original or loved past id games, but I think it needs to be evaluated on its own merits rather than as a continuation of the tradition of id shooters.  Its not really the same people at this point and its a different game.  I was harder on it myself when it first came out largely because I heard people talking about how fast it was and how much a return to its roots it was...but I sort of realized that different people see DOOM in different ways and I have to realize that different people making that comparison will mean different things.

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When I hear someone say "explore more" in a Souls game, I take that more as try to look and poke around everywhere you can and less internalize everything. There is a lot of stuff tucked away in these levels. Hidden weapons and armors and items, rare enemies, optional bosses, unique NPCs and quest givers and vendors, shortcuts and sometimes entire swaths of levels. All of this and more you can miss out on if you don't explore, which is a large part of why I love these games. I like digging around for stuff and trying every possible path at least once. Even as a stubborn explorer type who is still not close to done with the game, I've missed a lot of stuff in Dark Soul 3 the first time through this world. A few days ago I went back to some of the initial larger areas and explored some more (with less fear of being killed as I had leveled up my guy and weapons some) and ended up finding hours of content I had straight up missed. And I was fucking thrilled. This game is amazing.

 

I haven't done a lot of coop in DS3, but I did a ton of it in DS2. There's nothing to worry about there. It's a great way to become embered as well if you are short on ember consumables and want that extra health or the ability to summon folks. If you put your sign down and are summoned to someone else's game and beat the boss, you are sent back to your world embered and with some extra souls. And if you die and fail, you're just put back to where you were summoned with no penalty. It's not like dying in your own world. There is literally no downside to joining coop. Hosting coop is a bit different when you die - it's the same as normal, but know that the people you summon have no penalty on failure as mentioned. If anything, getting them in your game will help them learn the fight for their own world in a stress free scenario, possibly get them some extra souls, or if successful, embered status. The only downside to coop is the bosses are given more HP, but with 2-3 people hitting them instead it evens out. There are also some NPCs you can summon for various boss fights when you are embered. You can even re-do bosses you have already beaten by putting your sign down and helping others, again a great way to get free ember or earn some extra souls. You'll know the fight so it will be easier, and if you die it doesn't matter at all.

 

Yeah, just wanted to further reinforce that when people say "Explore more!" they do literally mean to walk around the levels instead of barreling straight down the critical path without ever looking back, with the purpose being to collect all of the valuable items that can be found as a result.  

 

I wonder if this misunderstanding is the result of the different interpretations of video game conventions we all bring into a game with us, as touched on in the podcast.  Those of us who grew up with games like Zelda or Metroid and learned to scour the world for E-Tanks and pieces of heart come in primed to appreciate the material value of exploration in a game like Dark Souls, but for someone who doesn't have that experience it might not be immediately apparent how much there is to gain from taking a brief detour down a side path.

 

Yes, but there are other challenging games that don't cause their players to choose near-impossible paths through the content and assume that it's developer intent for them to be having such difficulty. People playing Fallout: New Vegas, to choose a bad example, don't head north, run into deathclaws from the endgame, and still keep going. They turn around. Somehow, the same sequence doesn't happen to people going into the Catacombs in the first Dark Souls. Something has been communicated about the game's difficulty, before they even start playing, that makes virtually any gameplay experience, no matter how failure-ridden, be interpreted as "normal" for the game. It's a really interesting phenomenon and doesn't deserve to be flattened down to just raw difficulty.

 

To be fair, I don't think that catacombs scenario is actually that common.  We hear about it every time it happens because we're on the internet and it's a thing of note, but from what I can tell the vast majority of people either encountered the skeletons, realized that fighting them was futile and turned around, or didn't even find them at all until much later, but we never hear about that because it's unremarkable.  I remember making an early-mid game excursion into the catacombs and getting into an early encounter with Patches the Hyena (best NPC, by the way!), only to realize that hardly anyone knew what I was talking about, because going down there even as early as I did was a rarity.  Most people completely missed that encounter because they didn't bother doing the catacombs until long after Patches had moved on to the next area.

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To be fair, I don't think that catacombs scenario is actually that common. We hear about it every time it happens because we're on the internet and it's a thing of note, but from what I can tell the vast majority of people either encountered the skeletons, realized that fighting them was futile and turned around, or didn't even find them at all until much later, but we never hear about that because it's unremarkable. I remember making an early-mid game excursion into the catacombs and getting into an early encounter with Patches the Hyena (best NPC, by the way!), only to realize that hardly anyone knew what I was talking about, because going down there even as early as I did was a rarity. Most people completely missed that encounter because they didn't bother doing the catacombs until long after Patches had moved on to the next area.

True, although my friend did go from the Undead Parish to Darkroot Basin and broke his own spirit there to the point that he quit the game, only to have me tell him about the Sewers and Blighttown. He thought the latter was an internet nickname for part of Darkroot.

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I wish that DS2 map showed more loops, deadends, and such. While I'll certainly acknowledge that it's based around a hub, perhaps to the detrement of the world, it's a fair bit more complicated than that. Especially having just played it with the DLC, there's a lot of different paths to take.

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I don't really entirely disagree, and I'm someone who never liked Halo at all and didn't really care for the new DOOM beta.

 

I think new DOOM is in a weird position because given that its called DOOM its likely going to try to hearken back to some old school sensibilities but its also going to have to incorporate some new stuff and the question becomes "which new things to add and which old things to keep" and everyone will respond differently.  Different people feel that different parts of DOOM made it DOOM.  You have people like me who still play DOOM deathmatch online via various source ports like ZDaemon and Zandronum and love the speed and weapons of DOOM 1 and 2, who love the whole crowd management an projectile dodging and enemy types of the single player game and don't see stuff like Brutal DOOM as really being DOOM anymore.  You have people who will say that DOOM is all about the atmosphere and the scariness and I think DOOM3 was an attempt at making that DOOM and I respected that even if it wasn't the DOOM I wanted in the end.  You have people who see something like Brutal DOOM as being more DOOM than even DOOM was.  At this point DOOM is this weird cipher obscured by age and its meaning in terms of what makes it good is decoded differently by different people and there isn't any right answer.  I think if you find yourself making a new DOOM game you have to make the game that fulfills your vision of what made DOOM good and ignore everyone else...then let the chips fall where they may...but I imagine that's not even remotely easy when you're a group of people with differing ideas of that working for a large publisher.

 

This, very much so - Doom was "simple" enough (and yet did enough different things "right") and long enough ago that there's too many different perspectives on what makes Doom, Doom for any new Doom to satisfy everyone.

As another person who's very much in the camp that the real feel of Doom is in its "arcade FPS" feel - the speed, evasion and enemy management being deliberately "unrealistic" in order to favour an almost bullet-hell feel - I don't think anyone is going to make that version of Doom again. (It would probably have to sacrifice "graphical fidelity" for performance, for a start, and it's actually not clear if being fully 3d actually helps a game be purely arcadey. Doom's 2d aiming helps you to hit things that you'd find much harder to nail with a second axis to aim on, and really does help with the kinetics of the whole experience.) To be honest, although it's feel is more Quake (which is fine with me - I prefer Quake's aesthetics anyway), we already have something close to that version of Doom (in Demo-sized form) in Devil Daggers...

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I think the presence of weapon loadouts has a deleterious effect on Doom. I don't think I'm simply being a Doom purist or CoD-hater (I've played and enjoyed almost all of the Calls of Duty), here.

 

The fact that you can start the match with a rocket launcher means that it can't be an awesomely powerful (and dangerous to the user) item, because it has to be balanced against all other weapons. Call of Duty deals with that issue by making everything quite lethal. (It also helps that fictionally, you'd expect most small arms to have about the same effect.) In Doom, they've tried to make everyone fairly survivable; it's a potentially valid choice on its own, but combined with the above decisions, it leads to all the weapons feeling weak, whether they shoot bullets, plasma bolts or explosive rockets. 

 

But the other, probably worse knock-on effect is the way it makes map navigation sort of directionless. In the classic id shooters, you'd spawn into the world and have a few options. Maybe you'd want to go try to get the rocket launcher, but you'd have to weigh that against the fact that it's in a dead end that turns into a total meat grinder (dead ends being another thing that has been largely designed out of shooters). Perhaps it'd be better to take a cautious approach and see if you can ambush someone else who had the same thought. Or, fuck it, let's get the super shotgun and maybe a supercharge if it's respawned.

 

In this new Doom, you just... pick a direction and start running in the hopes that you'll find people to shoot. Once in a while the demonic rune appears, but the game announces this, so you know not to waste your effort looking for items the rest of the time. Continuing the comparison to Call of Duty, I actually think this is a problem in those games, too. Appearing in the world and thinking, "OK, I guess I'll run in the direction I'm already facing... or I could turn around and run the other way for no real reason!" is just... I don't know, it gives me a sense of ennui. 

 

Of course, I'm not taking objective-based modes into account, but if you're going to include straight deathmatch, it should be fun.

 

The objection that Doom shouldn't have loadouts sounds like a curmudgeonly "not in my demonic murder simulator!" position, but I think the argument can be made that it's a poor decision for this game, nostalgia aside.

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I only played a match or two of Doom, and I would say that the defining element of Doom should be "physical projectiles" which I think this had.

 

The big groaner moment for me was the hard man posedown after the match, which felt un-Doomy. 

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This feels super misrepresentative of DSII. While it does broadly only have 4 paths, the over-world has more connectivity than transcribed. Conversely, DSIII is more linear than represented. A lot of the branching in the figure is purely intra-level connectivity - if you gave the same treatment to the DSII figure it would look similar.

I appreciate that DSII is the most divisive in the series, but this just feel like propaganda from the anti-DSII camp.

dark-souls-2-world-map.jpg

 

It doesn't make for good radio, but Judson Cowan did a very nice visualization for the various Dark Souls' world structures that I thought encapsulated things really well:

 

CgPeoGkWEAAANdi.jpg

 

(That middle one for DSII could just as easily be Demon's Souls as well)

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speaking of dark souls maps, and that email from nels (hi nels), I tried drawing undeadburg from memory until I ran out of paper

 

ik9WZLh.jpg

 

Godddddd yes, this is delicious. Well done!

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The solution to the question on the email about  character generators would be simple having a good amount of well done presets, therefore, you would have best of both worlds, with good amount of designed presets for those wish it, and the tools for those which to use them, while the good preset might offer a good starting canvas.

I am on the side with people love character generators, however I do see often some of them elements that could affect the whole thing: such as light - yes, the light on the character during the process affect how you see and maybe mislead you, the perfect exemple of this would be in Dragon Age Inquisition, where during it, there was a really outerworld kind of light in the scene, that made difficult to see exactly what the colors or details you choose. The result that often after you done it you realize that you choose the wrong color or didn´t look so good as you expect (I remember there was even a comic about that).

The second is a issue, where you only have one time access to the generator - For a while, until a patch, in Dragon Age Inquisition, you had only one chance. Before that you had to restart the game and watch rather long cutscenes/gameplay sections again and again, and even after the patch, you only had access to a place to adjust you character very late on. The Elder Scrolls games dodge this issue, since you could use the "showracemenu" console command to made adjustments or change everything on the fly. In Oblivion, you also had a chance to review and change everything before you leave the tutorial dungeon, and the place had a very good light. Which meant, that you could just use a savegame at the very end of the tutorial and just experiment as you see fit. And since you would leave the dungeon you could quickly see how your character look in normal day/night outside light. Skyrim however, didn´t feature a review option in the end, but put you in a similar place at the end (so you could use console commands).

 

The third one, is well... how powerful/versatile the tools where, or how mod friendly is, overall, games like Elder Scrolls, which the default tools might be not that good or versatile, but feature a good mod community or some asian mmos, even if the art style might not fit for everybody taste, often feature really powerful tools (games, such as AION, Perfect World, Black Desert), are good examples.

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So I am finally listening to this episode, and Nick made a comment about how it must be awful to watch someone terrible at the Dark Souls games. However I'm 100% certain that even if chat is whining about horrible decisions being made, they are enjoying the experience on some level. Jeff Green has streamed every Dark Souls game (and Bloodborne), and he is completely awful at the game, and has a dedicated audience watching him go through this ordeal. He eventually prevails because unless you lack a rudimentary sense of timing just about every human being has the capacity to get through these games if they put in the time and effort, which is why these games have such a dedicated audience. There is the version of the game where people are total lords and able to just own everything without getting hit while playing the game with a rock band guitar controller or whatever, and then there is also the version of the game that feels like Sisyphus pushing up the rock, only eventually you actually complete the task instead of being doomed to repeat it for eternity, and that's also a triumphant feeling.

 

And I think there is always going to be an audience for people playing video games badly. I watched my wife play Hitman recently, and she wasn't getting along with the controls for that game, so I watched her accidentally stab a guy in the neck with a screwdriver, and then panic and scramble to safety with security swarming her and I hadn't laughed that hard in a long time. There's a DOTA personality named Purge who used to do a youtube series where he would cast games of DOTA 2 as played by super low skilled players with lots of sublimely hilarious moments for anyone with a basic familiarity with the game.

 

Hyper competence is certainly impressive to watch, but there's also something special about bumbling your way through a thing. I think the thing that actually kills the entertainment value of watching someone play a game is just kind of basic competence, something that there's low risk of achieving on your first playthrough of a Souls game.

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While I do watch a person or two on Youtube who are perfectionist mechanics lords, I watch far more people who are either just learning a game for the first time, or just plain bad at the game. You get better conversations that way :)

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Stephen's Sausage Roll reminds me a bit of DROD - you have puzzles that are scrupulously fair, with a held object that rotates around you and has a surprising amount of depth to it; the games don't look very good although they have a very deliberate art style; and that certain segments of the gaming community hold them in very high regard when most of the mainstream absolutely do not understand what people see in it.

 

I've been playing Ratchet & Clank, and one of the things I've noticed about it is how much puzzle design comes down to anticipating what players are thinking. Insomniac are really bad at puzzle design - most of their puzzles in all the Ratchet and Clank games are either fairly straightforward once you've internalised the layout. There's usually one, and only one, puzzle in each game that's actually difficult, and usually it's more complex than being clever. I compare that to The Witness, or even better The Talos Principle - usually there's one, non-intuitive concept, you need to grasp, and it really doesn't matter what the mechanics are if the designer is anticipating what the player is thinking and is designing puzzles to confound their initial assumptions. (The Talos Principle is my favourite recent puzzle game - I really liked The Witness, but honestly I find 'work out lots of different ways to communicate the rules of the puzzle' way less ambitious than 'take the same rules and find fifty different ways to apply them'.)

 

I think that's why Stephen's Sausage Roll is so impressive to some people: there's a real beauty in a set of simple, elegant rules that can be stretched astonishingly far. It's like a magic trick.

 

I know Terry Cavanaugh is a fan of DROD, and would not be surprised to find out that Stephen Lavelle's also played it.

 

(DROD's biggest problem, as a puzzle game, is that often a puzzle ends up involving having to clear enemies by swiping the sword back and forth. You can't really fix this, but it's kind of a blemish on the design.)

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I feel like DROD has a massive edge in that it is not based around Sokoban mechanics. (I hate Sokoban so much.)

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I bought Stephen's Sausage Roll on the Steam sale and like any good reader, revisited the discussion in this episode after playing for a while. I more or less landed where Chris did after a few puzzles (ie, I like it, it's tough but fair, it's clever, but I don't get the extraordinary praise). I just want to say that it really started to astound me after a few more hours. And there's nothing to spoil about why that is; there's no one moment or reveal. It just keeps showing you more of what is possible within its very simple set of rules, over and over, without filler, without simple variations on the same "trick" before moving onto a new one. I find this kind of progression from puzzle to puzzle amazing. It's subtle, it's confident, it expresses so much through its mechanics in a way that really has to be experienced. I have had more moments of discovery and joy working through this game's puzzles than I have in anything I have ever played. Finding solutions has even made me laugh out loud on several occasions. Certainly the designers who really love this game can make a better case for why it's brilliant, but I feel like I get it now, the high praise is totally warranted. Play it!

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