Jake

Idle Thumbs 312: Hashtag Nick Nod

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Idle Thumbs 312:

Idle Thumbs 312


Hashtag Nick Nod
It's like he can see you, the little face in the corner of your screen. Your cursor hovers over a unit you think looks cool - a little plastic orb car you bet you'd have fun riding around in if this wasn't a game - and he frowns. Correction: He looks you in the eye, and frowns. He sighs. "You're going to pick that? Really that one?" You roll your cursor over a few others and he holds his breath, clearly not wanting to say whatever he's thinking about your choices, because they're clearly not nice. Finally, you scroll a few pages back in the build list and come across a fancy visitor's center, some brightly colored automated safari vehicles, and accompanying tour track. You watch him for any reaction, and it happens so quickly, so subtly, you barely notice it, but it was there: a quick bob of the head, an affirmative. You drag the units onto the map, arrange them in a pleasant way, and are immediately killed by a dinosaur then swept away by an unprecedented tropical storm.

Discussed: Heat Signature, nightmarish self-imposed social media torture channel, StarCraft II, nightmarish multiplayer voice chat, ninth anniversary of the Idle Thumbs Podcast, Heat Signature launch trailer, Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy, Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy announcement trailer, infomercial-like Rockstar Games trailers, Red Dead Redemption 2, Thimbleweed Park, Jurassic World Evolution, hypothetical Jurassic Park Tycoon game, one B.D. Wong unit, the duty of a game to communicate its full systemic depth

 

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Something that Nick and Chris allude to in StarCraft: a lot of StarCraft professionals mask their identity when playing online so that their strategies don't get revealed too early. Either so that opponents don't immediately counter them by knowing a specific player's playstyle or so that a new tactic they are developing is not leaked before a tournament. Dedicated fans and other players take replay data and analyse the command group hotkeys that a pro player makes and sort of uses that as a sort of "signature" to help unmask a pro's identity when they are trying to learn their strategies. 

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I definitely want to see some more ridiculous SC2 match-ups! Nick, you should rematch Superhiero with Janel!

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8 hours ago, SL128 said:

I definitely want to see some more ridiculous SC2 match-ups! Nick, you should rematch Superhiero with Janel!

 

An Archon mode game where I go up against Nick+Janel could be interesting :thinking:

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haha, jake talking about tf2 "..someone who is either destroying me or I'm being destroyed by...". Even unconsciously, he makes no bones about his tf2 prowess.

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6 hours ago, voxn said:

haha, jake talking about tf2 "..someone who is either destroying me or I'm being destroyed by...". Even unconsciously, he makes no bones about his tf2 prowess.

Haha too accurate. I like tf2 so much and am trash at it. 

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Regarding the final question here about the designer's duty to force their players to engage with systems, there was a good video that Mark Brown recently made on a similar topic:

 

 

It was interesting to hear the discussion on the podcast, but here, Mark reasons that designers do have a duty to fight against the kind of system laziness that many gamers have to prioritize tedious things over taking risks. He reasons that you shouldn't punish players, but reward them for being riskier, and brings up some of the same systems you all talked about in the episode.

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Regarding Mark Brown's video, he points out Blizzard's "rest bonus" to XP as a case in which a mechanic intended to discourage certain behavior (overplaying) was transformed into a mechanic to encourage logging off. This flip makes me think of training dogs with positive reinforcement (clicker training). The general idea there is to set the dog up to succeed by getting them to perform behaviors they are rewarded for rather than by punishing them for doing what they aren't supposed to do. I really like how this discussion of protecting players against themselves (a negative approach) essentially boils down to how gameplay tends to be determined by the game's design (a positive approach). Beyond scoring systems or "perks" awarded for trying different guns (Wolfenstein: The New Order), there are also narrative-based examples. I'm thinking of playing Dishonored and wanting to play according to dialogue from characters. In Dishonored 2, I played as a high chaos Emily because I had heard her voice over better matched that style.

Happy Dishonored Halloween!

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Playing through my FPSes, I wish more designers would 'protect me from myself'. As I mentioned in my thread, all too often the easiest path is to stick to shotgun/machine-gun depending on ammo, pistol if you're desperate. A lot of games give you all these fancy weapons and never encourage their use.

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I am often the same way, Ben X. I remember Rob and Danielle discussing this exact issue on Idle Weekend. The player keeps holding off using that BFG or whatever for when it's really necessary...and then the game ends without the player having used it. This is a funny case of what Problem Machine in their link calls the Tyranny of Optimal Play (the idea that the player figures out the optimal strategy and proceeds without variation): the player abstains from a certain behavior in order to do it when its usage would be most optimal. I recently played through Titanfall 2's campaign and found the presented play style of rapidly swapping weapons for whatever shows up to be a decent way to encourage variety (at least in that FPS). Granted, the weapons were not all that different from one another.

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I think FPS games should just have all guns operate on a cooldown system - once you fire them enough, they're out of ammo until they recharge passively on their own. That way you can use whatever gun you want whenever you want without worrying about running out of ammo when you need it, but you still have limited ammo in the sense that you can't just fire a gun forever. So you'd have to swap weapons and also you'd be fine with swapping weapons.

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1 hour ago, TychoCelchuuu said:

I think FPS games should just have all guns operate on a cooldown system - once you fire them enough, they're out of ammo until they recharge passively on their own. That way you can use whatever gun you want whenever you want without worrying about running out of ammo when you need it, but you still have limited ammo in the sense that you can't just fire a gun forever. So you'd have to swap weapons and also you'd be fine with swapping weapons.

 

I remember liking that in the first Mass Effect game and disliking the change in the following games.  Even the narrative reason bugged me.  The idea was that ammunition was tiny fragments shaved off a block of metal and fired out at extremely high velocity (using the mass effect), thus ammo was effectively infinite.  In ME1 the cooldown was literally the weapon cooling down from the friction buildup and you had to wait for the heat to dissipate. This got changed in the subsequent games to requiring disposable heatsinks that functioned as ammo.

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16 hours ago, SuperBiasedMan said:

I really like how Breath of the Wild fixed this and I hope games steal from it.

If you're referring to the durability system, I kind of disagree - Making weapons expend themselves makes me treat them like consumables, ie. hoard them instead of using them. I realise that's on me though.

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1 hour ago, osmosisch said:

If you're referring to the durability system, I kind of disagree - Making weapons expend themselves makes me treat them like consumables, ie. hoard them instead of using them. I realise that's on me though.

 

I would normally be the same, but in Zelda that doesn't work since you also have limited carrying capacity. You can still have some swords that you keep forever, but you will have to use up your good ones eventually.

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It mostly works for keeping me churning through different options, but by the midgame I definitely found myself hoarding certain weapons, like powerful elemental swords. I think those kind of specialized effects would've been better served as some kind of expendable item you could apply to a weapon instead of taking up inventory slots.

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On 10/18/2017 at 7:38 AM, SuperBiasedMan said:

I really like how Breath of the Wild fixed this and I hope games steal from it.

 

Regarding the limited life weapons in BotW, I think that the reason people hoard things is that:

 

1) They think they're going to need it for something big

2) They think that it's rare

 

So, I ended up hoarding like, elemental rods, and not using them, until I realized that that the game had not yet communicated the other side of these two concepts:

 

1) What is "something big?" What types of enemies are you going to going up against for which these weapons would be properly effective (not overkill, but not too weak)

2) How often can you find another one of these weapons?

 

So, for elemental rods, once I realized that I was able to find them plentifully from those flying whizzrobe jerks, I started using them more often. Also, the game eventually opened up enough to give me an idea of the scale of the enemy strengths, teaching me where these weapons fit in. At that point, I found the right balance between hoarding certain weapons and just trying things out. 

 

Video games need to communicate more to the player than game designers think they do. If they want to encourage you to use items, you need to let the player know if they're gonna be able to get another one, and let them know where that item is going to be a useful and fun tool. If the game doesn't do either of those things effectively, you end up either hoarding things, or without some key item because you didn't realize you were about to waste it. 

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5 hours ago, RubixsQube said:

Video games need to communicate more to the player than game designers think they do. If they want to encourage you to use items, you need to let the player know if they're gonna be able to get another one, and let them know where that item is going to be a useful and fun tool. If the game doesn't do either of those things effectively, you end up either hoarding things, or without some key item because you didn't realize you were about to waste it. 

 

This is the part that gets me. Often, game devs are so eager to communicate how fun and cool various items in their game are, through art and other aesthetics, that they make every non-ubiquitous item seem at least somewhat powerful and rare. Outside of RPGs, where I'm usually given the chance to see a game assign a monetary value to most items, I tend to have to rely on an impressionistic assessment of their ubiquity and utility, which is often wrong given the aforesaid efforts to make everything fun and cool.

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Transistor has a pretty interesting way to encourage switching up your weapon loadout. If you used a given ability in enough fights you would unlock what were essentially lore dumps about the game world, but there was no mechanical incentive other than that. I though the content of those lore dumps were one of the weakest parts of that game, but somehow it still worked on me. Maybe it's because on some level I know that playing around with all the different builds is fun, so it only takes the slightest push to get me to do that.

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I would like to point out that Nick still has not revealed the piece of knowledge he hinted at having that would ruin Breath of the Wild for everyone. I really need to hear that some day.

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15 hours ago, Kyir said:

I would like to point out that Nick still has not revealed the piece of knowledge he hinted at having that would ruin Breath of the Wild for everyone. I really need to hear that some day.

I'm going to guess that A. it is broadly known at this point and B. it mostly just ruined it for Nick, not everyone. But I also want to know it now!

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