Jake

Idle Thumbs 282: Winnie the Putin

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Idle Thumbs 282:

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Winnie the Putin

Slap on your 3D scanned face, check your latest upgrades, don some really expensive stupid sunglasses, and hit the streets: it's time for Deus Ex: Mankind Divided. Then, slap on your 3D scanned face, check your latest upgrades, don some really expensive stupid sunglasses, and hit the streets: it's time for NBA 2K17. We do all of these things, and tell you how it went.

Discussed: Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, Deus Ex: System Rift DLC, NBA 2K17, BioShock Remastered, Resident Evil 4

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Ghost Minitaur is terrifying.

 

Also, Nick's NBA corner should just be a fixed segment in the podcast, his description of how to maximize efficiency in team practices was the best thing.

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In the latest Hitman level an NPC is playing Kayne and Lynch 2 so Square Enix is totally not above that kind of joke.

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It's one of the writers from Creed, Aaron Covington, who worked on the story mode in NBA 2K17.

Ah thanks! It was hard to find any information when Michael B Jordan was taking up all the news about any Hollywood crossovers into story mode.

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Chris, I think the app includes your statistics from all the modern Deus Ex games. Is it possible that you had an abortive run as a sniper in Human Revolution?

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I think it's funny that Nick brought up Resident Evil 4 as an example of an old game without crafting or upgrades or stats, since that game had stats for the guns, upgrades and (albeit very rudimentary) crafting. So I guess nick needs to play RE4 again?

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I think it's funny that Nick brought up Resident Evil 4 as an example of an old game without crafting or upgrades or stats, since that game had stats for the guns, upgrades and (albeit very rudimentary) crafting. So I guess nick needs to play RE4 again?

Haha, email [email protected]

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I love numbers in video games, but then I had both a Math and Physics minor in college so I'm weird like that. At the same time, the weird abstracted numbers that we get these days are horribly useless. At least for "10% more damange" you can take a look at how many hits it takes to kill something then assume it'll be about 10% less, but what does 10% more accurate mean or, even worse, +5 accuracy.

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I think the show the numbers philosophy of modern game design comes down to appealing to the sensibilities of people that enjoy the min-maxing aspect of games. And it isn't something I normally enjoy, but if I get deep enough into a game like DOTA or one of the Souls game I find I really appreciate being able to look up the numbers for things and figure out if I'm playing efficiently or not.

 

But I actually have an alternative theory I suppose, which is that the numbers quickly reveal how inspired or uninspired the overall game design is. If the game systems aren't that interesting, the numbers probably tell a story about that. A game like Imbroglio, on the other hand, has a designer obsessed with the number 4 (see blog post: http://mightyvision.blogspot.com/2016/06/imbroglio-notes-3-monsters.html ) that is clearly the result of divine/infernal inspiration, and the number in its systems reflects something beautiful about the world.

 

PC strategy games used to obfuscate a lot of numbers to the players which gave the impression of depth, but thanks to the board game renaissance the trend is towards transparency which allow us to more quickly evaluate whether a game is any good or not.

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For the longest time I liked Zelda because I thought "here's an action game that doesn't need numbers" but then I realised, of course there are numbers, they're just completely opaque. The upcoming Zelda game has numbers shown since there is a larger variety of weapons and thus the differences between them need to be made more clear. In previous Zelda games usually there are only a handful of swords so it is easy to see how much damage each of them do without presenting the actual number to you. And of course crafting is going to be a big part of Breath of the Wild it seems, though the roots of that were already present in Skyward Sword (and maybe others?)

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This is all I could think of when Nick was talking about his character skipping practice:

 

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So, the thing about numbers in games, is how well designed they are, specially how feedback works. What happens, is that some games, you have some systems, but you aren´t well told or explained how their work, so you can´t have a full picture of how of them as one thing. Also, because many of them also work in very small increments, depend of how the feedback (or don´t) work, you have no idea what you are doing or what is improving. Example, in many space 4x games you often research things like "improved laser" that make them do 2,5% more of damage, but you often had no idea of what exactly your laser used to do of damage and that 2.5% maybe is just too small to make noticeable difference.

 

By least there is the problem of lack of "trade offs", they are maybe one reason Nick said that tech/skill trees are better, what happen is that when well designed, they are all about trade offs, you are choosing A instead of B or C. However, when not very well designed you hey became what I like to call the "warrior/mage/thief" problem, where you told you can be either one of them, but for some reason (you have too much points, the game demands certain skills) you always became all of them no matter what.

 

Now, I like some numbers in certain games, and do understand that maybe the whole thing getting a bit of control, like in some older rpg games, like Daggerfall, Realms or Arkania (or Drakensang), when done right - they can be really good and improve a lot of the "self-expression" when creating characters (good examples might be some older AD&D games, some jrpgs have interesting systems, a couple of old-school rpgs).

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It should be made clear that when chris talked about deus ex mankind divided ending with a "ten minute video", he wasn't talking about a ten minute cutscene. It was literally a slow zoom on a talking head news broadcast that lists all the results of your choices over the game with really really bad news broadcaster dialogue, for ten marfing minutes

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It should be made clear that when chris talked about deus ex mankind divided ending with a "ten minute video", he wasn't talking about a ten minute cutscene. It was literally a slow zoom on a talking head news broadcast that lists all the results of your choices over the game with really really bad news broadcaster dialogue, for ten marfing minutes

 

Ha ha wow.  Though Chris might have liked it more if it was a local news broadcast filled with errors.

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Ha ha wow. Though Chris might have liked it more if it was a local news broadcast filled with errors.

YESSSSSSSS

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In the latest Hitman level an NPC is playing Kayne and Lynch 2 so Square Enix is totally not above that kind of joke.

 

That's an IO Interactive game, just like Hitman. Like Remedy hid some Max Payne easter eggs in Alan Wake. I wouldn't expect that across Square Enix studios.

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It should be made clear that when chris talked about deus ex mankind divided ending with a "ten minute video", he wasn't talking about a ten minute cutscene. It was literally a slow zoom on a talking head news broadcast that lists all the results of your choices over the game with really really bad news broadcaster dialogue, for ten marfing minutes

 

I mean that's the Fallout ending right? It seems like I've seen a lot of games with that type of ending, some better than others.

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there's only this one static image on the DLC Chris was playing, and I can understand his confusion

 

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there's only this one static image on the DLC Chris was playing, and I can understand his confusion

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Right??

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there's only this one static image on the DLC Chris was playing, and I can understand his confusion

 

Presumably, they still have the 3D assets that were used for the game's marketing, but they choose to use some low-grade anime stylings for the art instead. The girl is fine but bland, Jensen looks strangely Lupin-like, and Pritchard is the stretched-out lovechild of Togusa from Ghost in the Shell and Zolf Kimblee from Fullmetal Alchemist. It wasn't a good call, whoever's call it was.

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re: discussion of exposing numerical stats

 

Whenever I come across a numerical 'health bars' in video games it feels intrusively and annoyingly artificial to me. Whether or not the health value is exposed to users, it so often leads to situations where players quickly learn that enemy type X requires exactly Y shots from weapon Z.

 

There's are other ideas that aren't new, but i think could be used more widely, in even the simplest of games:

 

1. Scrap even having a 'health' stat altogether.

 

2. Do probabilistic damage. For example, each shot has a 50% probability of killing an entity.

 

3. Damage could manifest in various ways other than just sudden death. Taking hits could affect speed, rate of fire, accuracy of aiming, etc, until a unit is eventually rendered harmless.

 

In particular, don't have entities just suddenly die or explode and be removed from the map when they reach some "health" threshold. This feels ridiculously repetitive and sterile to me.

 

I'm not saying that health bars are a bad mechanic, just that they seem massively over-used .Ideas like those above could provide more variation and unexpectedly emotional scenarios (Wow, look at that last infantry unit go! OMG, I was bested by a crippled tank which could hardly even move! etc) with relatively little effort.

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