Off topic: How are games failing you?

[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".

[Sombre]

Originally Posted by Endoperez

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".

Why not just play TA then?

[Endoperez]

Originally Posted by Sombre

Why not just play TA then?

Perhaps I should!

However, Spring has big explosions, so I might be able to play it in school. It just takes a few people to start the first game, then other people come to look at the explosions, then they try it, and we have a huge war.
That's what happened with Aliens versus Predator, any way. Studying for "game development" is fun.

Also, when I tried TA, I didn't know what to do, never built tier 2 construction unit, and gave up when the campaign didn't work right.


How does Oblivion compare to Morrowind? I tried Morrowind, but 1) the world felt empty 2) everything encouraged minmaxing and grinding 3) the character growth was too heavily based on character creation.

I think mods could fix 1 and 2 might have been a flashback to Daggerfall, but 3 is a real failure. In fact, it fits this thread perfectly.



How am I supposed to create a character that works for the whole game, BEFORE I start the game? Dominions circumvents this the same way as some roguelikes: learning to create a character is a big part of the game itself and part of what makes a good player. This doesn't work for plot-based games that try to tell a story.

Worst are the games where you press "roll random stats" until you get high everything. You don't know what's good enough, so you never feel comfortable stopping...
Then comes Morrowind, in which you choose which skills you will have to increase to level up, and how easy it is to increase those skills. If you choose the wrong skills, you level up without getting better at fighting; or you don't level up without grinding; or you don't like how the skills work (stealth, stealing) and have to start over.

Then come games where you have a set of classes to choose from, before you know how they work and with no chance of changing the choice later.

[Tifone]

Originally Posted by Endoperez

[...] Spring has big explosions [...] other people come to look at the explosions, then they try it [...]

I may admit this looks pretty funny

http://it.youtube.com/watch?v=6udIo5SmwWA

[Omnirizon]

Originally Posted by Endoperez

Worst are the games where you press "roll random stats" until you get high everything. You don't know what's good enough, so you never feel comfortable stopping...
Then comes Morrowind, in which you choose which skills you will have to increase to level up, and how easy it is to increase those skills. If you choose the wrong skills, you level up without getting better at fighting; or you don't level up without grinding; or you don't like how the skills work (stealth, stealing) and have to start over.

this is why i hate random stat stuff. yet at the same time hate 'choose your own' because they encourage min-maxing. i think that the randomizers should be given a number of 'points' that they spend the same way a player does. i think the player (or some factor the player can choose) should influence how stats are randomly selected. thus, the 'class' influences stat selection, or the player can assign weights to stats and those will be favored by the randomizer.

this is just how FA stats selecter works.

also, stat usage shouldn't be so unidimensional, that will help alleviate that problem of min-maxing. if a mental stat like 'memory' or 'psyche' influences the ease with which skill is gained, while a stat like strength is a factor in how effective a skill is; then there suddenly become dynamics in how characters should be designed. no longer is a 'strong' character better than a smart one with a melee weapon, because the brainy character may outrun strength in the sort of mid-run by being more skilled. however, if _all_ your character will ever do is swing a sword, then high str at the expense of other stats may pay off because they won't learn to do anything but swing a sword, and poor attributes that factor into skilling up won't be so important. but then you lose out on gaining other skills.

i also hate how strength is considered an absolute measure of 'strength'. this means that giants have huge strengths but typical other stats. all stats have a sort of 'norm' except for strength. that just isn't very aesthetically pleasing (when it comes to how 'beautiful' a system is ).

rather, strength should represent intrinsic ability to perform acts of strength. the absolute 'how much can i lift' should be an interaction of body size and strength. a smaller character with a higher strength may not actually be as 'strong' as a larger character with a lower strength. however the smaller character may be able better to handle the weight and usage of a weapon that is large relative to their size, while the larger character will have trouble handling a weapon with the same 'weapon to body size' ratio. this allows the size of things relative to body size to be given a constant effect, rather then just the size of a thing having a constant effect. this is more pleasing to real world modeling too.

again, this is how the FA strength stat works

[analytic_kernel]

Some of the 'bands (Angband family of the roguelikes) provide alternatives for stat selection: rolling (with target values pinned to certain stats) or points assignment.

I'm going to have to try out Dungeon Crawl. I've tried ToME (another 'band) before, but thought it was a hodge-podge of too many different themes hacked together - quite unbalanced and quite exploitable.

In addition to overhead view, single-character RPGs, I also like turn-based ones with a first person POV and entire parties under player control. The old classic, Interplay's Tales of the Unknown: The Bard's Tale, comes readily to mind.

To answer the original poster's question, I would like to see more turn-based RPGs that allowed for switching between first person POV (with beautiful, 3D-rendered dungeon-scapes and opponents) and overhead view (2D map with either sprites or 3D models for units/characters). Such games would ideally allow multiple players to control certain characters in the same party, or for one player to control the entire party. (There was once an attempt to make a 'band like this; I believe that is was called mangband.) Also would be good to be skill-based (much like the concept of Dungeon Crawl) rather than class-based, and simply have classes be predefined (hopefully balanced and useful) bundles of skills.

[rdonj]

Heeeey, betrayal at krondor. I have that laying around somewhere. And several of the series relating to the setting. Actually we got the game long after we got the books.

Hmm... well, like I said, jump puzzles tend to annoy me quite a bit, I've always had issues with those. Mostly it's the kind of puzzle that requires you to have some random item or collection of random items to complete, coupled with not having any idea what sort of items you'll need to do it. I also hate a certain kind of puzzle that pops up in final fantasy 7... the "where in the heck do I go now" puzzle. Maybe I just wasn't paying enough attention, but it seems like in that game after a certain point you basically have to just wander around until you stumble upon where you need to be.

I'd not heard about Lugaru. Thanks for the mention... I'll check it out. I don't suppose in Spring they fixed the minor issue of, well, the pathing AI? That was one of the most frustrating things about total annihilation for me, especially since back then I used to like playing on the metal maps, and they tended to have horrible chokepoints.

[capnq]

Originally Posted by rdonj

Strategy games: [...] 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.

IMO, "Real-Time Strategy" is an oxymoron. I've tried a couple of "pausable" RTS titles (Star Wars Rebellion, Europa Universalis II), and still found that there was just too much to keep track of. AI opponents aren't handicapped by the need to physically manipulate the interface the way a human player has to, either.

[rdonj]

Originally Posted by capnq

IMO, "Real-Time Strategy" is an oxymoron. I've tried a couple of "pausable" RTS titles (Star Wars Rebellion, Europa Universalis II), and still found that there was just too much to keep track of. AI opponents aren't handicapped by the need to physically manipulate the interface the way a human player has to, either.

Originally Posted by Aezeal

Rdonj, try the warhammer 40K dawn of war games.. much less focus on base builing (the upcoming part 2 even less I hear) and more on units and taking territory. Also a very nice setting, some rpg feel (for RTS with leveling troops and commanders etc). From the same makers there is that WW II game which is very good too.. taking points on the map for unit caps etc is a good idea and used much more these days.

I find it somewhat interesting to see those one after the other . I've got WH 40k, and the soulstorm expansion (never played multiplayer so winter assault wasn't a big deal for me), and I agree, the way they handle resources is a nice break from games like starcraft or age of empires which you can have to micromanage to ridiculous levels. Yet while it is focused a lot on action I found myself pausing frequently to speed myself up. The big thing in that game is upgrades. You have to capture nodes, build on them, later upgrade those buildings. Then there's research later, another upgrade, and then more research. And that's just the upgrades on one of your buildings, most others also have upgrades you have to deal with as well, and may be timing-critical to your strategy.

Then all of your units have upgrades as well, and in the middle of combat it can be hard to be sure which units are reinforcing at the time and which have finished reinforcing and are now dropping again. Then you have all sorts of different commander and unit abilities you have to keep track of. I enjoy the game, but that's a lot of things to watch. So I frequently end up pausing to give myself some time to breathe.


I've been thinking about it a bit, and I've come to the conclusion that basically, one of the biggest problems RTS games have is that the basic AI for units is terrible. In starcraft you had to either babysit your units to make sure they didn't run off and get killed by someone kiting them into ambushes. Or set them to hold position and watch them just stand there and slowly die. In some games (AoE or dawn of war for example) they'll give you a "defensive stance" option, where the units will chase attackers for a while and then return to something like their original positions. This is a step in the right direction, but it's still abusable. And what do you do when you have to run off and deal with some problem with your base, or set workers to a new resource? Well, when you have a large amount of units you'll eventually end up with a large percentage who will just stand there, watching your enemies kill their comrades in arms because they're too far away for the defensive stance's aggression trigger to be reached. And if you set them on attack, well, then they'll just go and do some of those foolish things that you get in starcraft chasing things through enemy bases and getting themselves shot up.

Why is there no way of setting units to stay as a cohesive group and fight as a whole? It would also be great if we could do something like temporarily give control to the AI and say, give it an area we authorize it to operate in if we have to go and deal with some crisis somewhere else.

Edit: I've not played relic's WW2 game though (or at least I assume it's relic's).