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Comments
So the first Pacific Rim (AKA what looks like Evangelion by way of Guillermo del Toro) trailer is out, and I just cannot get over the fact that the robot AI is literally GLaDOS.
Looks pretty promising though.
Fuck programs that I cannot resize and do not respect my DPI settings. I hate having text and options cut off just because I want to be able to read text without straining my eyes.
The particular inane observations being related to a barbershop that serves complimentary whiskey. I didn't realize that when I came in, but it's already the best decision I've made all day. (Well, convincing a stranger to give to charity might be better but it remains to be seen if he'll follow through.)
Are there good monitors out there that are 8.5"x11" or 17"x11"?
They would REALLY facilitate reading PDFs.
^^ I think it just came back.
^^Not that I know of.
Sat outside and read the last quarter of Dark Force Rising over the course of the past hour-and-a-half. When I wasn't punching the air going "Fuck yeah Leia/Wedge/Luke/Han/Lando/Karrde/Mara" I was melting into a puddle of water.
Man, that's speciesist! No love for Ruhk, who fucking Gordion Knotted the whole plot tangle.
Alex,
I am glad you seemed to find that worth reading. I guess I am a little surprised that someone who is as knowledgeable as you are about all of that stuff would actually believe that it was possible to have realistic swordplay with videogame controls. What you said makes a lot of sense to me though.
This is probably a bad analogy, but the idea of swordsmen making sword systems complex by their skill kind of reminds me of how people can take some games with pretty simple controls and develop tons of different combos and strategies and such. If you think of sword combat like that, having controls based on its individual elements certainly seem possible.
Anywho, I do not really have anything to add to that idea, but do you think something really similar to the control scheme you set up would ever actually be used in a game (assuming it has not already)?
^^I had more appreciation for Khabarakh and the simple fact he didn't just fall apart when Thrawn confronted him (though the fact that Thrawn miscalculated certainly helped his chances). Or the maitrakh who actually gave Leia the chance to swing the Noghri away from the Empire's side - which she did magnificently.
Oh hell, I forgot about Artoo and the part where he first trolls Mara by carrying her on the X-Wing's landing skids and then damn-near blasts C'Baoth into a fine mist with the X-Wing's laser cannons.
I already know how The Last Command ends, but goddamn it's going to be awesome anyway.
Graaaaaaaaaaah this author! I first read Outbound Flight years ago and I've loved Zahn ever since. No author I have other than GRRM writing Tyrion chapters makes me so enthusiastic about what's happening in the book, or makes me punch the air going "Fuck yeah!" so much.
So it is! App's just screwed up.
Also, I am now 100% less embeardened than I was as of my previous post.
You actually made an excellent analogy. In terms of principle, swordsmanship isn't much different to any simple game. Chess is a fantastic example; there are six different kinds of pieces, each type makes a different kind of move and you may make one move with one piece per a turn. If your piece ends up conflicting the placement of an enemy piece, you take it if you made that move. The game ends when a king piece is threatened and has no moves or cannot be defended. And that's pretty much all of chess.
But a professional chess player turns those simple, versatile rules into something very complex indeed, to the extent that we have preset "plays" that are built upon as a game progresses. Swordsmanship is no different -- you begin with a small handful of established techniques and build upon those with improvisation as the need arises. The medieval German system (my favourite and the core of my martial studies) only has seventeen sword techniques, but all of them have synchronicity with the others and can be sequenced, melded and improvised according to an individual swordsman's skill, intelligence and so on.
I think it would if there were game designers who were also swordsmen of my kind. There are probably game designers who have done sport fencing or kendo, but those forms of swordsmanship are restricted by strict rules that the real thing isn't subject to.
In any case, many of the individual elements of my proposed system have already been used in games, so I think there's some theoretical proof of concept in existence for it. The issue, as I see it, is twofold:
The second point will always be a legitimate reason to shy away from implementing something approaching the real thing in games. For instance, I wouldn't think that Devil May Cry would be any better for having a real system of swordsmanship. On the other hand, many games have something of a "gap" where a strong weapons combat system ought to be.
I think the recent Dishonoured is a good example of that, since its sword combat was really bare-bones, which was disappointing for a game that forces you to have a sword in your right hand most of the time. Being a stealth game, it would also benefit from the "micromanagement" that a real sword system would entail, since fighting multiple enemies at once would be much more challenging, and single combat would be much more rewarding in terms of player accomplishment and systematic engagement.
Specifically, however, I envision my proposed system as an element of a wider experience, to the extent of being optional. Like being part of an RPG where selecting a particular trait or binary skill would open it up, which would allow players who prefer a simpler experience to use a parred-down system (at the expense of having less potential in close combat). Games are meant to be fun, after all, and forcing a system on players like the one I described wouldn't meet with that objective. They would have to willingly engage with it, which is why I see its strongest potential context to be in a game where it can be ignored or used at a player's will.
It's a stealth game. The sword is there for two situations: either you want to kill someone who doesn't know you're there, or you fucked up and will die unless you do melee combat. A detailed sword system isn't really necessary for either of those.
I will admit that the game probably shouldn't have had it be your primary piece of equipment though. It would have done fine as just another piece of gear (maybe allowing you to have one equipment item of your choice in each hand, allowing for more variety).
In my experience in the game, if you're in a fight with multiple enemies and you're relying on the sword, you've got about a 50/50 chance of dying very quickly.
A knife probably would have been better there. Which the sword in the game is basically an oversized version of.
Dishonoured specifically put itself in a setting where the use of swords is a common thing and then forced you to have one out most of the time. And then it had a really bad combat system. Does not thematically compute.
Anyway, stealth games can have good combat. In some cases, it's entirely appropriate. The Metal Gear series is a good example; as finicky as its CQC inputs can be, the idea is that you have a variety of takedowns at your disposal for various purposes, and the stealthy context of the games means that they see a lot of use by skilled players. While there's no defensive measures, with the combat being based entirely on initiative, the fact that Kojima went as far to look more like give the player a variety of combat options says a lot. Especially given that for all their failings, the Metal Gear games are mechanically solid most of the time and the combat works very well.
Consider a hypothetical game, though -- an actual good LotR game about Aragorn. He's a ranger. So he has to sneak around and track stuff, necessitating an emphasis on stealth-based game mechanics. But he's also a master swordsman, so it would be a waste not to have a strong combat system to back that up. This is a character for whom advanced swordsmanship and stealth aren't mutually exclusive, and I'd argue that this should apply to Corvo of Dishonoured as well. After all, wasn't he a bodyguard before he was an assassin? As far as I understand things, he was reverse-engineering his bodyguard skills to do what he did (plus magic). So it would make sense that he would have a lot of nifty sword tricks up his sleeve, and that the game would have a more advanced system of swordplay as a result.
Also, it would have made your showdown with the antagonist(s) potentially good rather than major letdowns. The game does, after all, force you at points you fight your way out of situations (or through them, or into them, and so on).
Setting with swords =/= gameplay must be swords. And besides, it's an industrial civilization. Swords are kind of on the way out. Half the time when I try to use mine, my opponents just start shooting at me.
And again, I agree that having one out at all times was stupid (even given that it's actually just a large knife).
No disagreement here. But I don't think Dishonored is really one that particularly needs it. It's very much not a combat-focused game.
Okay, I'm only up to right after deposing the Lord Regent, but I do have to say that I feel you're missing the point of the game. Corvo doesn't want to have showdowns with his opponents. He wants to destroy them. So with the antagonists I'm up through at least, you have two options: you can insert a weapon into their skulls or, if you want to put up extra effort to be nice, you can find some other way to remove them. Talking to them isn't really a priority, and neither is fighting them (especially when most of them are politicians -- trained soldier versus lazy noble isn't much of a fight).
The point is that they specifically chose to have the sword as a constant active piece of equipment and didn't follow that up with a system that supported it. I agree that having the right-hand item be variable would be one acceptable solution to this, but the way they've currently imposed the weapon, I think they were shooting for sword combat being a more relevant thing than it was in-game.
That's a good point, but at the same time, you can make choices that ensure there will be a showdown (whether you know it or not). Again, this isn't a case of things being mutually exclusive; having a better combat system wouldn't mean that going for a stealthy solution wouldn't work. But it would make those fights, if they happen, much more interesting and climactic.
Anyway, I should provide a caveat at this point:
Irrespective of how it handled sword combat, I thought Dishonoured was mediocre and sometimes outright sucked. This is bound to bias me against it to some degree, and the lacklustre experience I had probably led me to play in a particular way rather than getting the most out it. A vicious cycle, I guess.
It would defeat the purpose of the game to include engaging combat in it. It's a game about a good assassin; murdering people is bad, and getting caught is bad, and the game's themes and gameplay both support this.
It's already contradicted itself, then.
Like I said, though, good stealth and good combat aren't mutually exclusive. Besides, the developers obviously intended for the swordplay to be something more relevant than it actually was because of the inclusion of slow-mo kills, nasty execution animations, instakills after perfect parries and so on. They also ensured that most enemies carried a sword, too.
It's easy to read the developers' intentions in this case and easy to see where they failed. And as much as the game likes to move you away from killing people, the alternatives aren't much better (or are even worse, depending on your moral compass); cutting out their tongues and forcing them into slave labour, giving a woman to an unrequited lover as essentially a prisoner and so on. For a game that tries to make a moral point, Dishonoured is still exceedingly cruel and two-faced about it.
I get that putting the "killing is bad" message into a game about killing people is always going to be a challenge, but the themes of the game were handled quite gracelessly, even taking that into account. Especially if you take into consideration all the cool ways you could actually kill people, between the special animations, reducing their bodies to ash, calling a swarm of rats to consume them, using time manipulation to line up a broadside of projectiles and so on. For a game allegedly about how killing is bad, it has a remarkable variety of ways to end another person's life, and gleefully at that.
Mind you, I'm not saying the combat system ought to have been the system I proposed some posts back or similarly complex. I'm saying it ought to have been much more thoughtful and engaging than the one we got.
Sorry, I should have clarified. 'Murdering people other than your target is bad.
Yes. It has a lot of ways to instantaneously murder people (Please note the instantaneously there). And the more you do, the worse off everything gets. Which does fit into other themes of the game; you're constantly being encouraged to go and murder people. You are not meant to risk your own life at any stage, however; that's an important qualifier.
I haven't played through the game myself, as I don't get it until Christmas, so I'll leave it to Clockwork to fo into deeper detail. However, I do think that you've missed at least part of the point of the game, and how the mechanics of the game filter into that part.
Murdering your target is bad too. It's more a game about an angry stealth agent than an assassin; if you go the assassin route, you get a bad ending.
Basically...the fact that the possibility of melee combat is omnipresent doesn't mean it's the focus of the game. It's more a thing for impatient people to do and frequently be punished for.
Is it just me or do we quite often seem to discuss video game design philosophy here? It's kind of a weirdly specific topic to keep returning to.
This is unrelated, but an excellent point.
^Like half of the forum just happens to be interested in it.
I am not entirely certain, but I'm fairly confident Dutch has more in common with English than it does German.
I think so to but I don't know Dutch or German de geso.
No they're not. Only you, Alex, and maybe Nova are actively interested in it. It just looks the other way because of how many words get thrown around between you guys.
I am too. I just don't really talk about it much.
On the contrary, I think I've hit on major thematic gaps in the game. Because it doesn't actually punish you in any significant way for going the murderous route (and I've played that route). Sometimes there are more rats, but they're easily dealt with. Apart from that, you get the "bad" ending. If you don't care about the characters (and I certainly didn't, because I found them wooden and guessed a very obvious plot twist halfway through the game), then getting the bad ending is irrelevant anyway.
On the bright side for the murderous route is permanently taking enemies out of your way, opening up more freeform exploration (and thereby more easily acquiring items on the field).
It's not just the possibility, though. It's the resources the developers sunk into the combat. Let me list what they did to enforce the notion of entering into close combat:
It seems pretty simple to me -- the game always ensures you have a tool for close combat equipped, brings the fighting into close quarters, give you special kill animations as rewards for skillful manipulation of the system, limits your capacity to fight at range and with non-lethal means, and punishes failed sneaking attempts with close-range combat... which is easily won, anyway, in most cases.
Doesn't this imply that it's your last resort once you're out of ammo for your good weapons?
Unless you run away.
I'm not saying you don't have valid points about poorly-done priorities. But the game does use every form of reinforcement possible to get you to avoid using melee, including explicitly telling you not to use it if you want a good ending.
>mfw people on an OddFuture forum care more about Waka Flocka Flame's shitty freestyles than Earl's new album