Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
If you have an email ending in @hotmail.com, @live.com or @outlook.com (or any other Microsoft-related domain), please consider changing it to another email provider; Microsoft decided to instantly block the server's IP, so emails can't be sent to these addresses.
If you use an @yahoo.com email or any related Yahoo services, they have blocked us also due to "user complaints"
-UE
If you use an @yahoo.com email or any related Yahoo services, they have blocked us also due to "user complaints"
-UE
Comments
she didn't kill my dog
and my dog did not kill her
the villain killed my wife and my dog
dog = new Death();
wife = new Death();
villain = new Aggressor();
dog.Kill -= wife;
villain.Kill -= wife;
dog = villain
villain.Kill -= dog
so
it was a murder suicide
Did they kick the dog? Preferably Kamen Rider style?
i do not know if they kicked it, i forget
So I really wish more games would use DLC to tell new short story 'vignettes' like Bioware did and like Arkham City is going to release soon. It's a good way to make new stories in a world that are 'just right' in length and can be priced accordingly.
my poor wallet
Did you get any games for it?
The new first-person aiming system is amazing.
It may not be terribly convenient for road trips, but it's merely an option.
Yeah, I'd agree with this. Although I suppose many studios get shunted from game to game, pretty much. In any case, this can be great stuff because the developers don't need to create many additional game assets -- they already have the toolset, digital resources and systems they need, which pretty much destroys a huge part of the development cycle. Not that putting down a few extra areas isn't hard work in and of itself, but this isn't a stage where anyone's fretting over concept art, music, compatibility and all that stuff that isn't the game itself.
On the other hand, additional singleplayer content DLC is today's analogue to the expansion packs of ten years ago. Expansion packs (and DLC, too, come to think of it) have a troubled history. There's a lot that can go wrong, especially if the main game wrapped up the story effectively.
What it comes down to is context, I guess. Arkham City and Mass Effect are pretty open games where you can move around the settings as you please, so adding new content to that structure isn't particularly complex and can empower a whole re-run through the game.
I was thinking about this kind of thing yesterday, because I finished the Gothic 4 expansion pack. Gothic 4 was not a good game. It wasn't awful, either, but there were some severe flaws in pretty much anything that wasn't the core gameplay or the visuals. Basically, the writing was standard high fantasy fare, the voice acting was terrible and you've played the entire game at about two hours in, because it never provides anything new. The expansion took those flaws another step, which pretty much culminated in the final boss battle.
Goddamn, this boss.
It might just be the worst boss.
Don't get me wrong -- it wasn't difficult. It was just boring, and I'll take a mildly frustrating boss over a boring one any day of the week. So it's name is the "Archdemon" in a blistering spurt of creativity. Dark red muscled skin, toned muscles, bat wings -- they pretty much went all out with cliche, and not in a fun way. The Archdemon's strategy is to teleport between pillars in the arena and shoot you with lightning bolts, occasionally deciding to jump down for some hand-to-hand combat. It seems to prefer spamming an area-of-effect knockdown attack rather than actually engaging in anything interesting, but the attack is easily avoidable. That means the fight was pretty much me rolling out of the way, charging a power attack, hitting him and repeating the process until he went back to his pillars. This takes a while, since he's got quite a bit of health.
So, we've got:
- Extremely high health.
- Boring ranged attack pattern.
- Boring, time-consuming close combat tactics, which are too easily avoided to do anything but waste my time.
- Uncreative boss and arena.
If you wanted to check off more of that "bad boss design list" you've got there, the Archdemon pretty much seals the deal by summoning enemies throughout the battle. He summons a wave made of two skeletons (one of which shoots fireballs), one golem and two crystal spider thingies. You have to fight this wave twice of all things before you get to go a round of combat with the Archdemon, do a tiny amount of damage while easily avoiding his attacks and then wait for the cycle to repeat.
It's almost like they were trying to create the absolute worst boss battle possible. I think this expansion was released in 2005 or so, which is pretty much past the "experimenting with boss battles" stage of collective game design. Not that the main game was that much better with its final boss. In fact, they were almost exactly the same conceptually -- but the previous boss only summons one wave of enemies every so often and has much, much less HP. So even though both are shitty boss battles, the original wins out because it wasted less of my time.
I get that designing a good boss battle isn't as easy as, say, making spaghetti, but it's not exactly rocket science either. What a lot of designers don't seem to get, though, is that a boss battle is supposed to alter the conditions as compared to a regular engagement and force an alteration to one's tactics. Funnily enough, the Archdemon wasn't the first major demon I had slain in the game, and its patterns were only superficially different to the others. In practise, it was the same enemy with a bunch of health -- not that many of the enemies in this game are significantly different.
Which brings me to another major design flaw, but I've already gone off on this boss tangent so
^^Well, yeah, it would kinda suck if you couldn't turn it off. But under circumstances when you can use it, it's pretty awesome.
Take that Shooting Gallery in Kakariko, for example. It's far easier with the motion controls, because you can react more naturally to the targets.
1. I'm feeling a stupid amount of nostalgia's but that's to be expected.
2. Before today, I was pretty skeptical of the 3D part of the 3DS. After actually playing with it for a little while, though, I'm really sold on it. Even if it is kind of tiring on the eyes, I feel like it really adds something to the game without being super in-your-face about it.
3. I really, really want a Majora's Mask rerelease/update for the 3DS.
Does it cause eye strain or headaches?
I know I've gotten headaches from playing FPS games like TF2 and Portal.
As with anything that involves staring at a screen, it depends on how long you do it (and on you specifically). But there's a slider that lets you screw with the intensity or turn it off, so it's never a problem; if it starts to be a strain, a quick finger movement can turn it off instantly.
I actually wonder if the "true 3D" effect might make it less disorienting, but I'm not sure.
And I would guess that the effect probably works fine for people who wear glasses?
I...can't think of any reason why it wouldn't.
And I haven't gotten a headache or disoriented yet. Which is surprising, considering how prone to them I am. :P
I got a headache after playing pretty much every FPS game I've played.
That said, I've also played TF2 quite a bit and the headache problem has decreased over time.
Navi is harassing me to stop playing and take a break.
nintendo, y u do this to me
Because parents get angry if they have to raise their kids themselves.
Any of the three would be appropriate, in my opinion.
Make a Tabletop thread.
I would certainly use a game design thread, although I think there should be a guideline noting that it should be more about principle than specific ideas. A lot of the time, people will come in with their ideas -- which might be great in a narrative sense -- without commenting on the "why" of it all. I think it's permissible to use one's own idea as context for a discussion or a "what if?", but the discussion should in general be biased in favour of discussing core design rather than getting too locked into specific project ideas.
^That's a good point, though what I was going to talk about was a more specific idea, since it was about a game I'm working on, so maybe even if we wind up using both threads, I should keep that in the general tabletop thread.