Video Games

[Juton]

Oh, and you have to be a caster, because the melee system resembles drunk jousting.

I don't get this at all. I play as a melee character, the only enemies I have to put any thought into fighting at all are giants. And by thought I mean I have to drink a few healing potions. I know combat isn't hard with a mage either, it just seems to go quicker in melee so that's what I went with.

[PhoneLobster]

I think you are sporting a massive persecution complex.

A number of fan boys I could count on the fingers of one hand without even getting half way still whining about how much I trashed Mass Effect to this day posting complaints within the same page as I mentioned it is a persecution complex? A massive one?

Really now?

I'm sorry but nine billion years later still complaining about how mean I was to Mass Effect when you guys yourselves never put forward anything more than "but I likes it!" to counter some rather specific and concrete criticisms that really does make you fan boys. And it doesn't make you a conspiracy or out to get me. It sure as hell doesn't make you guys "massive".

It just makes you fan boys.

But drop the "you disagree with me? FANBOY!!!111!11!" shit. That's really obnoxious.

Then stop sounding like a fan boy.

Here is a hint. What you did with the Skyrim argument is very very fan boy.

You followed a process like this...

1) OMG you complained about Skyrim! I shall not in fact mention that you are largely right, I shall instead rabidly attack your suggestion that a specific aspect that is representative of feature shrinkage is in fact incorrect and therefore imply you are entirely wrong.

2)Flight, FLIGHT? They HAD to remove flight, it's unpossible for balance and programerizing!

3) OK so I don't know anything about programeratiation. But it's unpossible for balance!

4) OK so they used to have flight and it wasn't unpossible for programity or balanceness. But if totally ruined those games, man everyone always complained about flight I mean it made those games unplayable!

5) Well OK not unplayable but you could totally get flight real cheap like and...

6) Well OK so you couldn't get it cheap but it was still completely game breakingly...

7) I AM NOT A FAN BOY! See I was agreeing with your all along Everything you said about feature shrinkage is true!

8) Except for flight you are totally wrong about that because we just have to agree to disagree.

That process makes you a fan boy. That argument sucked. The way you represented it sucked. You proceeded with an agenda that was not born out by even a consistent argument. Your conclusion was determined before the ever shifting reasoning that lead to it. The most likely explanation for that is, sadly, fan boy.

You want to not sound like a fan boy and not have me call you one, here are some of my recommendations.

1) Never start an argument with the conclusion that "I trust completely that was NO OTHER WAY and the developer tried their bestest!" then present shifting rationalizations for that conclusion.

2) If you largely agree with a critical review of the game then do not spend like two pages of thread attacking it before backing down churlishly agreeing with it and actually saying "See look I'm not a fan boy and this proves it!".

3) If you like something despite it's flaws just say so. It's OK, it MIGHT make you look stupid or at least uncritical, but it certainly sounds a lot less fan boy, though it would help if you could enumerate some actual positive points. I mean for instance you COULD instead focus on the fact that the character advancement system is certainly much improved in Skyrim. Even if nothing else is.

4)Never start complaining that everyone thinks you are a fan boy and is framing you as part of a "massive conspiracy against them". It makes you sound like a paranoid fan boy. If you aren't looking like a fan boy you won't have to tell people you aren't one. When YOU start feeling the need to declare repeatedly your anti-fanboy credentials something has already gone horribly wrong.

5) Try not to spend excessive time gushing over a game that is actually kinda crap and disappointing.

[Kaelik]

I'm sorry but nine billion years later still complaining about how mean I was to Mass Effect when you guys yourselves never put forward anything more than "but I likes it!" to counter some rather specific and concrete criticisms that really does make you fan boys.

I'm not a psychiatrist, but maybe failing to distinguish between different groups of people is in fact a sign of a persecution complex.

DSM didn't even exist on this forum when you criticized Mass Effect. I certainly didn't defend it, because I have never played it. Who are these mysterious Mass Effect supporters who you are so concerned about persecuting you PL?

[name_here]

Newsflash: I have not played Skyrim, and I do not think Oblivion is especially good. However, you pissed me off by posting points that are stupid.

You claim to be a computer scientist and yet really can't understand how there might be a problem with increasing the number of things that are loaded into memory at once? Do you really have that poor an understanding of how these things work?

Here's the simple explanation of the practical problem with flight:

Allowing flight would mean that at some point in time the game would have to load both the town and the monsters outside of town into memory at once. Oblivion and presumably Skyrim do not do this, and so if you manage to leap the walls and avoid the loading screen at the gate you will end up in the geometry that is stored in memory for when you can see past the walls but with nothing in it. This is what actually happens when people manage to scale the walls by exploiting jumping.

Since each creature is an object, adding more creatures to be loaded into memory at once will require allocating more creature-sized hunks of memory, and since the creatures in Oblivion are relatively complex that's a lot of memory per creature. And you can't Moore's Law your way out of this because as machines become more powerful the complexity expected per creature goes up.

Now, this doesn't mean including flight is impossible. You could simply have fewer townspeople or simplify their schedules and reduce their polygon counts and change the way loading is handled. Of course, then you would in fact run into the problem that flight and ground-bound melee enemies do not coexist, which is why most people who bitch about Oblivion being worse than Morrowind do not include losing flight as a reason. They complain about auto-leveling or the smaller world or the writing being worse instead.

Anyway, the reason why people get angry at you is not because you like stuff that we don't like but because you feel the need to buttress your personal opinion with statements that are wrong. Specifically, you remind me of the person who wrote the 1UP review of Sword Of The Stars that complained about how virtually none of the techs were randomized, a statement so incredibly, stupidly untrue that it should have gotten him laughed off the internet. You are sounding like that guy!

That is why I was less irritated by PseudoStupidity, despite him going after a game I played and that I like somewhat better than Oblivion, because his points were entirely accurate and I liked Assassin's Creed anyway. Your points are not.

[Count Arioch the 28th]

Can we request that PL stop bitching about Skyrim? It's annoying that dozens of pages are dedicated to his bitching.

Okay, bro. You don't like skyrim. We get it.

Here is a thread I started just for you, PL. Please go there, and stop flooding this thread with your sperg-rage.

http://tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?p=240885#240885

[Avoraciopoctules]

Speaking of Skyrim:

http://www.somethingawful.com/d/video-g ... andits.php

[Doom]

I'm certainly playing the heck out of Skyrim...just finished the Unusually Large Dungeon of Annoyingly Heavy Loot. Yes, I'm playing basically the same game as Oblivion/Morrowind, but still tons o' mindless fun.

[DSMatticus]

I'm sorry but nine billion years later still complaining about how mean I was to Mass Effect when you guys yourselves never put forward anything more than "but I likes it!" to counter some rather specific and concrete criticisms that really does make you fan boys.

See, this is what I mean by persecution complex. I want you to look at my join date. Okay, so now that we've trivially established that little detail, the lump accusals of everyone who disagrees with you as a homogenous group with a personal vendetta should look pretty fucking stupid. It also happens to be a pretty descriptive symptom for actual fucking persecution complexes. As in you are being fucking insane or stupid.

Your description of the Skyrim conversation is equally stupid, but at this point that's expected because you are trying to fulfill the ridiculous narrative that everyone who disagrees with you is a mindless fanboy. Count made a thread, I'll highlight some of the stuff that was dumb enough to annoy me there.

[Maxus]

For the record:

I like Mass Effect 1 for the freedom of the combat system. Biotics give more rooms for shenanigans (Singularity + Warp + Overload/Sabotage/Generic Grenade in the middle of them, Lift + Throw, Lift + Throw from three people at once) but as far as I've seen, none of the player classes are completely useless.

Then some of the weapon mods make interesting effects. Take one sniper rifle, add damage increasers and exploding bullet ammo. Use the Assassination power to make your target and the people on either side of him perform a try at the gold medal for "synchronized cartwheels while on fire" routine at the Olympics.

Or the ever-popular spectre assault rifle + two of the high-end cooldown items so the gun never overheats.

Mass Effect 2's combat was less varied for me. More reliance on guns and doing the same thing...taking the same approach for every fight, when in ME1 I could give Garrus and Wrex weapons with the explosive rounds and derive much cheap entertainment by running support for those two. OR I could make a party of at least two biotics and combine biotic powers for some fun. I once lifted and threw a geth colossus by doing a combined Lift with the rest of the party, and the triple-throw actually did a nice bit of damage when it hit the hill behind it.

Or I could instruct Tali to hack the rocket-launcher geth and then back HIM up as he rampages through half-a-dozen other geth before he's killed by a geth colossus, who is now facing the wrong direction and he's just had his guns turned off by some complete bastard so he has to spend the next twenty seconds sort of shuffling around while being shot at.

The combat gets a pass from me on the basis of "I can fuck around and find things not immediately obvious and find out the game's rules to exploit them." It's not a tabletop game like D&D, but there's something of the same feeling there--rewarding experimentation and rational thought and combination of effects and tactics, while not making them flat-out necessary to win. Hell, I've beaten Mass Effect 2 and I've spent the past two weeks off-and-on replaying Mass Effect 1 just for the satisfaction of fucking around and seeing what new tricks turn up.

The setting is interesting. They at the very least made the effort to think of what life's like, how tech has evolved, and little details that they didn't have to include. ME2 actually did a better job of that one. But, hey, I'm in for the combat combos.

[Avoraciopoctules]

My second-favorite fighting game after Smash Bros:

http://serio.piiym.net/CVBla/

Kinda unbalanced, but I see it primarily as a co-op boss rush game, so that's less of a big deal than might otherwise have been the case. And it's free, so I certainly can't complain about the value.

[Koumei]

Started playing Atelier Totori. Six hours later I remembered I was hungry.

This is a gorgeous game. From the character design to the cel-shading to the music to the character interactions. Everyone stop playing Skyrim and go play this instead.

[A Man In Black]

Wait. People defend Mass Effect 2?

Because that shit was awful.

[Maxus]

Wait. People defend Mass Effect 2?

Because that shit was awful.

Combat system boiled down to "I do same thing every fight". Less room to interact with the environment and combine powers for shenanigans. Inventory/items were bleh.

I liked the characterization and the various things you could hear walking around the worlds. Each class was, at least, made to feel like it's own thing without terribly much overlap. So sentinel plays way different from vangard who plays differently from infiltrator who plays differently from soldier.

So, Combat worse, setting better. Now if they could just pull the 'combat quality' slider over to where the 'setting' bit was.

[Ikeren]

I think Skyrim is mechanically done very poorly, but if you enjoy wandering around in a world and can avoid all the mechanical screw-ups, it's pretty good. Oh, and you have to be a caster, because the melee system resembles drunk jousting. So I guess this is a vote in favour?

Wait, what? This post genuinely confuses me. I suspect you and I are seeing 'mechanically' as two completely different things here. What'd you mean exactly? I would also say melee is easier to do than casting, and all in all probably also more satisfying. Spending the majority of my time as a mage backpedalling has never felt very... heroic. Do you mean the controls/animations are unresponsive/sluggish? Cause, yeah. The animation times are pretty long. I can see that.

I don't get this at all. I play as a melee character, the only enemies I have to put any thought into fighting at all are giants. And by thought I mean I have to drink a few healing potions. I know combat isn't hard with a mage either, it just seems to go quicker in melee so that's what I went with.

My apologies for being unclear.

What I meant was a number of severe mechanical issues, such as:
1) Pots on peoples heads means stealing whatever you want
2) Over-levelling non combat skills (not the crafting, but sneak, speechcraft, lockpicking), even by accident, can screw you
3) Over-levelling crafting (enchanting and smithing) can make you insanely powerful by level 15.

Aren't really a problem if you avoid them.

As for the critique of melee, it seems to me that whenever I'm in melee I don't stay in place, even if I leave my arrow keys alone. Instead I slide forward and sometimes past the enemies, and they run around erratically as well. Melee combat seems to be "frantically left click and hope my character doesn't wander around too much" whereas casting combat actually involves somewhat entertaining targetting and spell usage tactics.

Dunno, maybe it's cause I'm on a 400$ laptop with an intel HD integrated graphics card?

[Blicero]

My apologies for being unclear.

What I meant was a number of severe mechanical issues, such as:
1) Pots on peoples heads means stealing whatever you want
2) Over-levelling non combat skills (not the crafting, but sneak, speechcraft, lockpicking), even by accident, can screw you
3) Over-levelling crafting (enchanting and smithing) can make you insanely powerful by level 15.

Aren't really a problem if you avoid them.

As for the critique of melee, it seems to me that whenever I'm in melee I don't stay in place, even if I leave my arrow keys alone. Instead I slide forward and sometimes past the enemies, and they run around erratically as well. Melee combat seems to be "frantically left click and hope my character doesn't wander around too much" whereas casting combat actually involves somewhat entertaining targetting and spell usage tactics.

Dunno, maybe it's cause I'm on a 400$ laptop with an intel HD integrated graphics card?

It's probably technical issues. I too am playing on a substandard computer, and I try to avoid melee against more than two foes as a result. But I've seen melee played on consoles without nearly as many problems. It could just be a player skill issue, but I imagine a fair amount is from slowdown and shit.

Regarding levelscaling, the degree to which scaling kicks your ass is not nearly as bad as it was in Oblivion. But, because there are no miscellaneous skills, it's a lot easier to fuck yourself over just by experimenting a lot with the game. My main character's at like level 20, but his highest skills are still only in the 40-50 range. And I'm really getting tired of tigers randomly killing me.

Seriously Bethesda, how hard would it be to this: Wilderness areas are not scaled. At all. Along roads and near cities, you'll usually encounter shitty bandits and wolves. No matter how strong you are. As you leave civilized areas you might run into trolls and tigers and whatever. Now, sometimes you'll accidentally run into a superpowerful Death Tiger at level 1, even in a lowlevel area. In which case you can sneak around it, or run away, or try to find NPC guards, or whatever.

If your hardon for scaling necessitates that you include it, then the place to do it is in the main quest line. And even then, it'd be within parameters. So maybe the first fourth of the questline would have something like [MINIMUM LEVEL SCALING: 3; MAX LEVEL SCALING: 8]. So if you jump into the quests immediately, it will be hard. Because your character is a weakling. But if you take your time and explore a bit, then you'll still have a challenge, but the fights will feel natural. And if you end up with a level 100 character who should be able to rape anything, then you will have a level 100 character who can rape anything. Because you've invested the time. And if being able to rape everything bores you, then you make a new fucking character. Preferably without having to go through an hourlong wannabe CoD introduction.

[Juton]

In that vane, I can't believe it took until 2011 for Bethesda to add horses to one of their games. It would be great if you could fight from horseback, or if you didn't get swarmed every 30 seconds while riding anywhere. Mounting/dismounting is so clunky and so frequent I've gone back to traveling on foot.

[Kaelik]

In that vane, I can't believe it took until 2011 for Bethesda to add horses to one of their games. It would be great if you could fight from horseback, or if you didn't get swarmed every 30 seconds while riding anywhere. Mounting/dismounting is so clunky and so frequent I've gone back to traveling on foot.

They added horses in 2006.

[Falgund]

There were horses in Daggerfall, back in 1996.

[Doom]

Yeah, horsies have been around a long time...unfortunately, they've uniformly sucked, and it's never made any sense when, if you're not exploring, you can 'fast travel' (and time doesn't matter anyway), and are useless when you're exploring.

[Neeeek]

So I was in the beta for Star Wars: The Old Republic over the weekend, and they've removed the NDI gag order regarding the game, so if anyone wants to ask anything about it, I'll answer if I can.

[Chamomile]

Is it good?

[Parthenon]

My biggest problem with Skyrim is that you don't get enough interesting shouts and theres too little required use of them. The ethereal jaunt/whirlwind sprint/slow time are interesting but underused extra movement methods; the most use I ever got out of ethereal jaunt is to use it before jumping off a mountain to save time getting down.

You should get shouts that make you extremely strong, making melee hugely more effective for a couple of seconds or allowing you to move scenery or obstacles. You should be able to do shouts from horseback, and get shouts that do odd things like freeze water so you can walk on water in a straight line for a while. Shouts that let you make huge jumps, or see where magic items are, or set an enemy on fire for a long period. And the cooldown time for shouts should be reduced, and should be an enchant effect you can make yourself.

The obvious objection to this is the possibility of coming across a quest that requires a shout you don't have, but this is bullshit. Each shout has three places you can get it. You can have the fourth Fighters guild quest require ethereal jaunt as well as the second Mages college quest require it if you make sure that the second Fighters quest has it and the first Mages quest has it. And its completely fine to have a chest or two require super strength or whirlwind sprint in an early dungeon- after all you still get Master level locked doors in dungeons and you don't necessarily get them the first time round.

---

And then perks should be more varied- less increasing of numbers and instead more interesting effects that work with others, like doubling the length that fire spells set enemies on fire, or perks that enourage use of sword and spell at the same time.

[Doom]

I'm fairly unimpressed with shouts, too. I hardly ever use them (there are a few caches that are impossible without shouts).

It is funny how 'real time melee combat' has yet to work in any game. Does anyone know a turn based game with good melee combat? I can think of a few flip books that were kind of fun, but certainly not a computer game.

[DSMatticus]

I basically just equipped the slowtime shout and used that anytime I felt the need.

[Juton]

I'm fairly unimpressed with shouts, too. I hardly ever use them (there are a few caches that are impossible without shouts).

It is funny how 'real time melee combat' has yet to work in any game. Does anyone know a turn based game with good melee combat? I can think of a few flip books that were kind of fun, but certainly not a computer game.

For real time melee combat I think Demon Souls/Dark Souls and Mount and Blade do an excellent job. Also I recall the first three Quest for Glory games and the Ultima Underworld series. All these games rely on a timing aspect that is easy to learn but difficult to master and have more than one attack type.

For turn based melee combat I think Betrayal at Krondor had probably the best system I've ever played.