tegan

I Had a Random Thought (About Video Games)

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How do people go about choosing the scale of numbers they use in video games? For instance, kill an enemy in an MMO and you might get 100-200 experience. Get the top of the flag pole in Mario and get 5000 points. Start a new character in an RPG and start with something like 100 HP.

 

Is there a good reason why developers don't just tend to start out with the smallest numbers and scale from there? Why not have 1 XP granted for killing a lower level enemy, 2 for the same level enemy, and 3 for a higher level enemy in an MMO? Why not have your character start with 5 HP and have beginning enemies do 1 damage per attack? Why not 1 point for breaking a brick block in Mario, 5 points for killing an enemy, and 25 points for getting the top of the flag pole?

 

It drives me crazy. I just want small, obvious, and simple to understand numbers.

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Number inflation caused some issues for World of Warcraft, to the point where they implemented the Stat Squish to reduce the numbers on everything.

 

Additionally, bosses have run into issues where their maximum health has grown too high. WoW stores health values in signed 32-bit integers, which have a maximum value of 2^31 - 1, or 2,147,483,647. Ra-den, the heroic-only boss of Throne of Thunder, starts at roughly 1,500,000,000 health in 25-player mode. As part of the fight, if players make mistakes his health could increase to the point where it would overflow. In order to avoid repeating the problem, Garrosh Hellscream must heal (from 10% to full) several times with a smaller maximum health pool than would otherwise be necessary.

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That is pretty damn fascinating. I stopped playing in the middle of Cataclysm and I remember wondering how crazy the numbers would end up getting a few years out based on the scaling I saw in the couple years I played.

 

If an MMO was faced with the option to either scale numbers up with each release or scale old content down whenever new content is released to keep the high end caps roughly the same (I guess Destiny kind of went this route where 365 used to be max attack and the current max is 320), I wonder if there would be a noticeable difference in how players perceive the scaling and if they perceive the latter as less compelling simply because they are using the same number ranges. I kind of feel like my initial gut reaction to the Destiny re-scaling was slightly negative upon seeing all of the new numbers being lower or around the same as the numbers in year 1. But obviously that was fleeting and my brain pretty quickly adjusted to the new scale.

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I realize this could also go into the pedantry thread because it's orbiting around semantics, but I didn't make the comment about what I like or dislike, or my feelings on how media should or should not be consumed. It's a desire and not a necessity. That's the long and the short of my comment. Sometimes I like digging in and saying "look at all the games I played!"  I tend to orient my goals towards accomplishments in a single game rather than spreading them out (Destiny folks can probably vouch for that from me), but I acknowledge it's my choice to do so and I could spread out my play time more for sure.

 

Sorry, I was not in the best mood when I wrote my response. I have been wrestling with the issues you're touching on in therapy of all things, so it hit a sore spot. I think there's a psychological component that makes a grey area between necessity and desire in your statement. Getting away from that though, and comparing to a couple of other hobbies I've dabbled in over the years, would you complain about a painter who has a bunch of half-finished paintings who said that they have to finish one before the end of the year, or a movie buff who needs to see all the best picture nominees before the Oscars?  

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Sorry, I was not in the best mood when I wrote my response. I have been wrestling with the issues you're touching on in therapy of all things, so it hit a sore spot. I think there's a psychological component that makes a grey area between necessity and desire in your statement. Getting away from that though, and comparing to a couple of other hobbies I've dabbled in over the years, would you complain about a painter who has a bunch of half-finished paintings who said that they have to finish one before the end of the year, or a movie buff who needs to see all the best picture nominees before the Oscars?  

 

I feel like sometimes people feel the need to complete games regardless of how little motivation they have besides the actual feeling of completion.

 

It's hard to make a game actually have a steady flow of engaging a player either by leading them on narratively/mechanically. Frankly to me lots of games peter out, or are stretched out, or have totally negligible stories coupled with fun but limited mechanics. A few hours of Bioshock gave me a nice dip into an interesting world, and then I left before the mechanics and story got too stale. I do this with games all the time, I'm more surprised when I'm keen to stick through to a game's end. I'm definitely more fickle than most people this way, but there are absolutely people who will slog through a game for the sake of hitting the end point even if realistically they've gotten 95% of what they'll get out of a game. That's what I thought of when reading Badfinger's post, though I don't know for certain if that's what he was getting at.

 

It's all grey area as you say, but I've certainly perceived a trend in gaming where there's this idea that completion has inherent value even if most other value to the game has evaporated. Course I'm viewing people through the lens of my brain, so I might be way off with this.

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I'm someone who is just dipping in and out of games; often just abandoning them for months until I feel an itch for them again. It feels quite normal especially when I usually run one game as my 'main' and everything else is a side dish. I do feel bad about it sometimes especially when I end up so busy with the main game that I never seem to play anything else. Oh and it kills my HDD space to have Pillars of Eternity, DA:I, Witcher 3, etc all waiting to be picked up again which is slowly forcing me to only install when I've completed.

I agree with SBM, when I let half these games go it's because I've already gotten a pretty good run out of them. Like I was zone clearing in DA:I because that's the way I was role playing my Inquisitor but at about 5-8 hours a zone I was kinda tired by the last third of the game.

Maybe Shadow of Mordor is a better example, it was fun, but when I opened up the second map that was when I decided I'd already played enough of the game to that point.

With the current meta focused around completion and providing half your life worth of 'content' it's easier to lose respect for a game that doesn't manage player time well. It's at the point where I think of it like the Thumbs think of lore. It's just there, it stops adding, it's chewing up the bits I like ahhhhhhh.

Even MGSV gets this response, the rinse repeat to summon my chopper, wait as it arrives, wait for it to fly to international waters, then redeploy somewhere else in the map is really annoying. I wish they'd just given more cigars up front to change the day night cycle. It might sound funny complaining about this when as a series the games were long and had movie length cutscenes but I liked those, the constant simulation of my heli arriving and going out is something I want to opt in and out of.

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I don't understand why anybody likes Tomb Raider :/

The old ones, the slightly newer ones, or the new ones?

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Hmm, I was full of Tomb Raider hate and felt Lara Croft was pretty flat (she still is sort of). Plus all that trumped up sexuality from the original series didn't help my perception. However the new game got me curious about the former Crystal Dynamic ones and I had to go for it, since it's basically the same gameplay as the Ubisoft Princaperjas but with shitty gunplay. However that trilogy completely scratched that "cinematic platformer" itch and had some harder puzzle environments that I enjoy compared to the easy peasy Uncharteds. It matched some of the stuff in terms of difficulty and inventiveness of Warrior Within (the only redeeming factor in that fucking mess of a game) however they didn't have the fun timing jump stuff of Forgotten Sands, but I guess nothing really does. Also pretty much no one played Forgotten Sands. Tomb Raider Legend was pretty easy though, it's probably the worst one, but I really enjoyed Anniversary and Underworld.

 

I suppose a big part of it is liking the gameplay. Besides one part in Legend she was never overtly sexualized besides stupid bikini skins you could unlock by doing time trial stuff, which I did not expect. That version of Lara Croft was fun almost like a female Solid Snake type vibe.

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The ones I've played I haven't liked, for different reasons. TR1, 2 and 3, cos they're ugly as sin and just moving around in them is a pain in the arse. There might be some incredible sights to see and mysteries to unravel in this level, but I'll never see them because I can't be bothered lining myself up just so for this jump, and then having Lara fall down into a bottomless pit/pit of spikes anyway because she's too slow to respond to my inputs. I also don't like Lara's curt "No". How about a bit of Yes, you sour-faced cow? What I remember of the music was quite good, tho.

 

The new TR game (not the new new one, the old new one) marooned you on a really dull, nondescript island, flung millions of baddies at you, littered every location with pointless shinies to grab, and then made me not care about the story or any of the characters. Why should I care that my shipmates are still alive out there somewhere? The only time I've seen them is in the opening cinematic, and they were so flat they may as well have been made from cardboard. The actual tombs were made into smaller, discrete locations, and usually it was immediately obvious what you had to do, vastly diminishing any sense of achievement. Just generally, you don't get the opportunity to explore much, and I would have liked to. The QTEs are...wank.

 

I thought the hour or so I spent with Anniversary was okay.

 

Edit: Speaking of a bit of Yes

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The ones I've played I haven't liked, for different reasons. TR1, 2 and 3, cos they're ugly as sin and just moving around in them is a pain in the arse. There might be some incredible sights to see and mysteries to unravel in this level, but I'll never see them because I can't be bothered lining myself up just so for this jump, and then having Lara fall down into a bottomless pit/pit of spikes anyway because she's too slow to respond to my inputs. I also don't like Lara's curt "No". How about a bit of Yes, you sour-faced cow? What I remember of the music was quite good, tho.

I've been working my way through the old games (currently most of the way through the fourth one) and I still find them very enjoyable despite not having played them in 15 years. The control scheme is strange compared to modern games, but it's actually very precise. I don't fault you for not coming to grips with them, once you do however the response time of the character is a non-issue, because the game isn't played like that. This video explains it well:

 

Controls aside, I think the basic framework of those old games is great. It's just you, alone in a large environment without a bunch of distractions to ruin the atmosphere, with a focus on moderately challenging platforming and exploration. Nobody makes games even resembling that anymore. The original games all have their problems, the first one has a moveset that's too limited and the tech wasn't quit there yet, the second one has way too much combat and began the trend of bad vehicle sections, the third one is probably the best overall but still has large chunks that don't feel like they belong (London) and the fourth one goes too far into adventure game territory with annoying puzzles.

 

I would love for someone to make a modern game in this mold. Anniversary got quite close, but the new ones are just action games with some very light platforming and puzzle solving. I want a game that's 99% exploration / platforming and 1% combat if it has any at all. I'm not sure how you'd do something quite like TR now though, just with regards to the platforming. The thing is that the blocky geometry of the old games actually worked really well in terms of gameplay. A piece of geometry with a certain shape always behaves the same way, and that's what brings the puzzle element to the platforming. When you increase the level of graphical fidelity it becomes much harder to communicate what parts of the environment you can perform certain actions on, and it seems like most games resort to labelling them almost explicitly. It becomes much less interesting to play in and explore those environments.

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Isn't there an indie first person platformer that's on kickstarter right now that's mostly about moving around and exploring?  Like indie mirror's edge but less guidance and more exploring.

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Enjoyed watching my sister-in-law play Don't Starve more than I enjoyed playing it myself. I'm a bit too impatient and made rash decisions which got me killed, but she was very methodical and experimented with the different tools and creatures in a safe(ish) way. The game is just amazing to look at and the music is great, and there are lots of little details which bring it together. A shame, then, that whenever you die and have to restart it necessarily entails clicking on millions of twigs and bundles of grass before you get to create things and make stuff really happen.

 

Probably there are mods that can help alleviate that sort of busywork, so I bought it. 

 

Edit: Cheers for posting that vid Eot, I haven't seen it yet but will do so soon and report back

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I learned that there is a sort of voluntary search and rescue squad in Elite Dangerous. If you run out fuel in space they'll give you instructions on how to disable your space ship and enter life support mode, fly to wherever you are (which might be real-time hours away? I gather) and sort you out. Video gaaaaaaames. This dispatch chat log is amazing. 

 

http://pastebin.com/U98wePRA

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So, following on from the A-B-Y-X talk from a few pages back, I made a little chart following the evolution of the buttons since the third generation of (mainstream) home consoles. I've gone into more depth on my blog but just seeing the variations side-by-side is interesting. Well, to me  :)

HomeConsoles_zpseon2ijl1.jpg

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This evening, at 6 CST, Ninety-Three and I are going to try to play a learning game of Crusader Kings 2. If it's okay with him, which I cannot imagine it not being, others are welcome to join in or watch me stream it. My Steam username is Gormongous, same on this forum!

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I will not be home yet, but would love to watch a stream. Especially convenient if you could set it to archive so I can watch it later. :)

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I will be asleep at 1am, but would also like an archive. Where are you planning on starting from? If that's decided and not a surprise.

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I will be asleep at 1am, but would also like an archive. Where are you planning on starting from? If that's decided and not a surprise.

 

Probably an Irish/Scottish start, although I think that both being dukes in the Holy Roman Empire would be good. There are a lot of strong starts at 1066, in general, and I figured we'd decide on the fly.

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Multiplayer a success! Once we figured our way around a desync-inducing player action and cleared our caches several dozen times, that is. We've also determined that it's probably better moving forward for the student to stream and the teacher to hang out on voice chat, since I have trouble explaining some of the interface elements where CK2's vital information is located.

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Oblivion has the best pacing of all the Bethesda RPGs. You are guided to play through the story until all the Oblivion gates open up in front of all the cities, at which point you realize closing Oblivion gates its boring and you are fully ready to screw off into the open world. 

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Nah, Morrowind has better pacing with your one contact turning out to be your new employer and telling you to get a cover story by joining some guilds or getting some minor renown/notoriety. And then the 10 hours of running around and politic-ing it up as your end game.

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