Off topic: How are games failing you?

[NKIcan]

Before I begin: can we have a prefix Off Topic tag?

The topic says it all. What are PC games and video games in general NOT doing that you wish they would do. How is the video game market not fulfilling your needs?

I ask this for two reasons: Curiosity and Im doing a bit of research as to what strategy game enthusiasts would like to see in video games.

Any type of game failing will be helpful of course, but I would like a focus on RPG's and Strategy Games. Stories not up to snuff? Combat system just isn't doing it for you? Suggestions on how to succeed where current games fail is also helpful, as is specifics as to WHY you find that they fail.

For me:

I think that one thing no video game has ever struck me as successfully doing is making a Character/Unit creation system that is balanced, creates REAL diversity, and fun. Whether it be class or classless, really most character creation systems have maybe 6-10 REAL choices (crappy choices arent really choices people...as no one who has any interest in being competitive would choose them).

As an example, look up almost every MMORPG out there, ever...as well as the Diablo series. Want to be a rogue? better put your points into 1 or 2 stats and pick the same 10 talents/skills if you want to be effective.

Maybe I can sum it up better this way: I want REAL diversity. I want choice! I want to be able to customize a character or choose from more than the same 3 units in a strategy game without being nearly crippled in viability.

/rant off.

Lets hear your opinions

[llamabeast]

Well you certainly have a lot of choices in Dom3 at least.

[Tifone]

Interesting point. Well I think Dom3 offers real diversity, expecially with CBM (EDIT: llama ninjaed me this )

Also there is a world of indie RPGs (like Avernum) to discover. They will not have the best graphics but often their devs put the souls in those so they often offer much more than the usual Oblivion-kind's choice between big armoured guy or slim magic guy (but hey, with shiny graphics )

If I would love to see something in the PC gaming world, would be more team tactical games. While I enjoy many kinds of games, to me the *real* computer gaming is in games like Jagged Alliance 2, Silent Storm (which had a lot of potential but such poor design choices), and the UFO series (now Sombre will skin me alive but at least they offer something this way). Little teams with specialized members, and turns to organize better ("the guy with the shotgun in the front; the sniper on top of the building; ok now the guy with the explosives blow that wall with dynamite and throw a mustard gas grenade in; you with the machinegun keep ready!" etc.).
But unfortunately really there isn't much of games like these

[Sombre]

CBM (Conceptual Balance Mod) does a lot to introduce variety through balance. In basegame the early and late games particularly in vanilla dom3 tend to dominated by certain strategies.

For example 90% of the pretenders in the basegame are simply worse than the standout 10% so if you pick them for the sake of variety, it's a handicap. But in CBM I don't think this is true.

[NKIcan]

I agree Dom 3 offers more than the usual diversity, hence why I like the game very much! But even with CBM...your choices are expanded but only by a bit.

Also, your choices are VERY much constricted based on the nation you play. If you pick Mictlan, for example, you are almost forced to play a Bless Strategy if you want to be competitive. Yes you may suprise someone with an Awake SC pick but once the shock wears off you quickly find out why it was a sub-optimal pick.

Again, Dom 3 does diversity the BEST but I still feel there is vast room for improvement. Thanks for the comments so far

[Aezeal]

hmmm personally I think Oblivion has better character creation system than most games certainly including Avernum. Fall-out 3 is good too.. but the effect of your choices is somewhat limited pretty soon in the game.
Baldurs gate and neverwinter night.. basicly everything based on DnD certainly has a good character building system.

Personally I'm mostly missing MORE RPG's (I dislike MMORPG where I have to pay everymonth and where I need to invest more time than I have to be competative.. in SP games I'm always the most important person and THA MASTA in the end as it should be. And more good strategy games too though I admit I've not looked very much into them for when I want to play a game I can always do dominions which is just very good.

I'd like to see starcraft 2 though.

back on choices.. I think you shouldn't want for much more options than in dominions.. you have a lot of races.. and between the races you can use a lot of strategies.. sure not each fits each race but that wouldn't be good..

example: if you have an unlimited range of GOOD choices that means that every choice is good.. which means whatever you choose is good.. which means there is basicly no real strategy anymore. (I'm exaggerating of course but it core of it is true.) While most games could use more diversity in the end it's more important that between the best choices for each character there is a good balance than having more choices. (I'm not playing the game but I imagine that going to the highest level in WoW for exmaple, will take quite an effort for most pplz so just having made a decent choice you'll be busy for a while anyway, no need for more choices then.)

[Tifone]

There will always be an "optimal" strategy, in every kind of game you play. Devs are humans, and even through all the balancing, there will always be in every game the most cost-efficient way of spending points, even by a 1%. If you always go for the optimal strategy only, of course you'll have problems finding variety
Often a big part of the fun will be finding ways of playing a game which aren't the most efficient or perfect ones, but make you enjoy and still are somewhat competitive.

[Endoperez]

Originally Posted by NKIcan

I think that one thing no video game has ever struck me as successfully doing is making a Character/Unit creation system that is balanced, creates REAL diversity, and fun. Whether it be class or classless, really most character creation systems have maybe 6-10 REAL choices (crappy choices arent really choices people...as no one who has any interest in being competitive would choose them).

Roguelikes!

Roguelikes are ALL about learning to survive, and the more ways there are to survive, the more people like to play it. I think most roguelikes have pretty free class system. Here are my two favourites:

ADOM: 8 races, several classes. Perhaps 15 or so, varying from barbarian to archer to fighter to monk; from wizard to priest to paladin to elementalist, thief, merchant, farmer, bard etc etc.
It also has a good manual that explains the mechanics. It's worth checking out just for that.


Dungeon Crawl: lots. There are too many to count, but I attached an image.

Crawl is ingenious.
Races are different: different food consumption rates (with unique cases: ghouls eat rotten meat, vampires drink blood), different speeds (spriggans are fast, centaurs run fast, nagas slither slowly), different item slots (human vs minotaur vs naga), some have special abilities (spriggan see invisible, demonspawn mutate, draconians will get more and more powers as they level up) and, most importantly, different skill aptitudes make mountain dwarves and hill dwarves different (melee and casting, or just melee?).

Classes are another layer of skill aptitudes. At first, this seems like it's too little, but it's actually a major choice. Some classes also pre-define the god you worship and starting equipment matters a lot: wizard's first spellbook, good weapon for warrior-types, blood god for a barbarian, etc.

Then you start the game. Skills only increase if you use them and have unused experience. The pool of unused experience increases when you do stuff, mostly kill monsters. To become better at what you do, just keep doing it and it will go up. Learning something new is more difficult. You can learn a low-level spell if you find a book and are lucky and/or high aptitudes, even if you have no skills. Failing to cast a spell will also increase the skill (if you had exp in pool), but can cause magical overload, which makes you glow, which mutates you and isn't good. Similarly, you can go to melee to learn Fighting and to use Axes, but that means you're in melee and you're not good at it.

If you move around in armor, you'll learn Armor skill. If you fight without armor, you'll learn dodging. If you walk around without armor, you'll learn Stealth.
Once you have at least level 1 in a skill, you can turn it "off", so that it will only increase very slowly and as a consequence will leave more experience for your other skills, so your mage won't be good at stealth just because he doesn't wear armor.


In crawl, your skills define you, not race/class. Spellcasting gives more mana and and fighting gives more hp, but you also need spesific skills that concern casting fire spells or fighting with spears. A spell can require more than one magical skill, like Fire and Transmutation for a spell that makes a potion explode, or Necromancy and Transmutation for a spell that turns a corpse into potion of poison.

Transmuters are fun, because they can hurl clouds of steam and poison and confusion everywhere, but hard, because that means their experience is going to be drawn between Spellcasting, Transmutation, Fire and Necromancy they won't have much free experience, and they won't have enough mana to survive without Fighting, Dodging and perhaps some poisoned darts and stealth as well. However, it also means that a transmuter who finds an artifact trident might be able to confuse a group of opponents and then quickly kill several of them before they recover; or a transmuter who finds a Book of Greater Burnination might change gears and focus more on direct damage. Even without such luck, though, the starting Book of Transmutations also lets you change into fast and poisonous Spider form, tougher Ice Beast form, or change your hands into blades that boost your unarmed combat off the scales - but then you'll have to learn Ice or Poison or be good at melee! Devilish!

P.S.
Of course, ANYONE could find a Book of Transmutations.

[rdonj]

Oh, there are so many ways games fail. Take MMOs. The way they're designed tends to make your character powerful in the very beginning, struggle for 10s of levels, and then in the end become a kind of godly character that destroys everything. And has to keep destroying everything in ridiculous number, because you have to kill literally thousands of enemies to level. The balance of the game continually changes which, though it keeps things from becoming stale, can have drastic effects on the way a class is played and in some cases really screw you over if, say, your spec is nerfed into oblivion and your gear set is made completely invalid. You can probably tell, I play World of Warcraft and am bitter about it. The way you fight in MMOs also bothers me. For the most part, melee combat tends to not be very interesting. It's just not interactive enough. You spam buttons, and there's really not that much thinking or skill involved. There's strategic use of abilities, sure, but there should be more than that.

I haven't really found an MMO I like pvp in yet. It's all bunches of people running around constantly, running through groups of people, frequently in some silly mini game like capture the flag. Where's the sense of realism? I admit to liking a fantasy background, but I prefer my fantasy worlds to involve things like realistic objectives, sound military tactics, collision detection, and archers not being able to hit you with instant-shot attacks with perfect accuracy while jumping and doing 360 degree spins. Abilities that make no sense for non-magical classes to have also bug me.

Large amounts of the game tend to be un-fun. When you're leveling you will run into all sorts of fun with questing, or running instances. In WoW, there's this dungeon where I kid you not, I have died more times after defeating the final boss due to enemies respawning on me on the way out than I have at every other point in the instance combined. Respawn rates are a horrible thing. If you need to kill a bunch of a certain type of enemy, it's usually too slow and you'll be hard-pressed to find enough of them. You have to go through a cave, kill some slightly more powerful boss enemy and get back out, the bosses respawn veeery slowly and you may have to wait several minutes for a chance to kill it... and then some other player may come up and attack it right when it respawns, and then you don't get the credit. Then, when you finally do kill it, you have to leave the giant cave full of enemies you don't have to kill who respawned while you were waiting for the boss. And you have to kill them, just to waste your time. Speaking of bosses, why is it that the only powerful bosses are in instances? Again, may just be a WoW thing, I've been playing it for entirely too long, but a "boss" enemy that you find out in the world at large is usually just one level higher than a normal version of that kind of enemy. When a quest tells me about this fearsome enemy that's butchered many people, and I go to kill it and find out that it's just very slightly stronger than it's minions, that's pretty anticlimactic. Enemies that are supposed to be powerful should be a challenge, not just your average encounter but with a name to go with it. And why, when I kill someone I don't have a quest for, can I not just go and turn in the quest for killing them that I'm going to get eventually instead of having to go kill them again in order to prove I killed them? It doesn't make sense, it breaks all sense of continuity. So does seeing them alive again 5 minutes later, for that matter. Of course, if you instance all bosses like some games do it removes that problem. Thanks some games!

MMOs also tend to be far too item-centric. I don't think your gear should be nearly as important as it usually is. It makes the game too focused on acquiring better items... so that you can acquire better items. When you're playing a game to get better items so that you can get better items, it loses a bit of its appeal. I would like to have games be slightly more creative than that.

I have also yet to see a magic system I really like for an MMO, but lets not go there.

RPGs: Well, RPGs are similar to MMOs in their way, except with more coherent storylines, goals, and endless puzzles Puzzles make me sad. Especially jump puzzles. Why oh why do there have to be so many jump puzzles. Combat in RPGs tends to be better than in your average MMO, but they could still use some work. I wonder if anyone here has played Rune. Completely ignoring everything else for the moment, Rune had one of my favorite combat systems for an RPG so far. A reasonable selection of strikes, mostly making sense. Shields that you can actually block with, unlike most games where they just sit there and look pretty. It had some things I didn't like (instant kill attacks in pvp are kind of stupid), but all in all, it mostly worked. Still could have been a lot better though. Of course, I've not really seen magic pulled off right yet in an RPG either. D&D systems have a lot of good ideas, but they're too restrictive. We need a dominions RPG, you could get a pretty decent magic system out of that I still won't be completely happy though until I'm playing in virtual reality, with complete control over every action my character makes.



Strategy games: There are several things modern strategy games do that annoy me. One of the main ones being too much focus on special abilities! In some games, practically every unit has a special ability of some sort. And 90% of the time you're better off manually triggering that ability than letting the computer do it for you. Now, sometimes you can pause a game to do multiple things at once, but this doesn't work in multiplayer and ultimately isn't the best solution. Furthermore, it's too much work. If you want to have a few things with special abilities, well, okay. I can live with that. But you shouldn't spend all your time dealing with special abilities.

I also don't like having to manage resources, production, and combat all at the same time. I can't watch everything at once, and I like to watch the combats and try to organize them. But if you stop paying attention to one thing in favor of another, you're going to suffer for it. You'll run out of resources, or your opponent will pull some trick against your army, or you'll stop producing units... and you can't watch everything all the time. It's just frustrating. And then combine that with special abilities on all your units, oy.

And then there's the fighting itself. There's too much emphasis on pulling silly tricks that take advantage of the mechanics of the game, and using special units with powerful abilities to ruin your opponent without letting him fight back. I want there to be more relevance in maneuvering, terrain, tactics! Like the Total War series (though I think I actually prefer medieval total war to medieval 2. Haven't played the rome or shogun series). If only they didn't rely so much on powerful generals artificially increasing the strength of your armies, it would be perfect.

Anyway this is getting pretty long so I think I'll stop now

Edit: AI design tends to hamper strategy games a lot more than most other game types. Probably because they have to do so much more. In some games it more or less works, but in some games it completely fails. Like in supreme commander, where basically your enemy AIs do nothing but send experimental units at you and build tons of defenses.

[Endoperez]

Originally Posted by rdonj

RPGs:
Puzzles make me sad.

Rune.

Strategy games:
special abilities!

I also don't like having to manage resources, production, and combat all at the same time.

I want there to be more relevance in maneuvering, terrain, tactics!

enemy AIs do nothing but send experimental units at you and build tons of defenses.

What kind of puzzles are bad? I love wordlock-puzzles of Betrayal at Krondor. I still swear I will finish it, one day.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nzHcdb2P4Ck

I've heard about Rune. Have you heard about Lugaru? It's creator was inspired by the former.


For strategy games: try Spring. It's open-source Total Annihilation. You can download TA units into it, but that's only legal if you own the original TA. It has everything you mentioned, and big explosions. By big, I mean "never let you commander be killed in the center of your base". Also known as "this water-filled hole is so big it stops my counterattack".