Off topic: How are games failing you?

[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.

[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).

[Tifone]

Of course, Endo, you don't have such an informative and passionate post even for my desire of more tactical team games, yeah?

[Sombre]

Originally Posted by Tifone

Of course, Endo, you don't have such an informative and passionate post even for my desire of more tactical team games, yeah?

Have you tried Soldiers of Anarchy? It was halfway decent in places and since you like the faintly rubbish UFO: After_____ series that should be good enough for you.

I haven't got tired of JA with the unofficial patch and heavily tweaked settings (to create a constant war with lots of challenge and make acquiring weapons a lot harder and therefore more interesting - having to make do with what you have, even if it's a winchester rifle with glaser ammo).

[Agema]

RPGs and strategy games however have always been minority interests to the big beast of action/arcade gaming. When we think of big RPG and strategy games, what has often made them successful is that they have had more and more to do with action gaming. For instance, Starcraft and other RTSs are often not so much about tactics, as just knowing the optimum build queue at the beginning and then clicking your mouse like crazy when the action heats up. At the RPG end it's Diablo, which trades more on its relation to 80s arcade hit Gauntlet than it does on the RPG element from Nethack/Rogue etc.

In major industry terms, with the exception of Bethesda Studios, no-one is making decent RPGs for PC. In terms of strategy, I might have given Creative Associates a nod for Total War, except that as their games get better in graphics and AI, they get worse in design, heart and soul. Possibly the Civ series and related games are still going okay and fairly strategy purist.

Both RPGs and strategy really exist and thrive in the realm of independent publishers and internet retail. There you can really find the sorts of things you are looking for, where teams with more limited means craft what are often unpolished diamonds rather than the polished turds available from major development studios. However, I find it is often much harder to gauge whether the game is actually good, bug-free, and much more, as they attract much less in the way of good critical reviews.

[capnq]

Originally Posted by Agema

Starcraft and other RTSs are often not so much about tactics, as just knowing the optimum build queue at the beginning and then clicking your mouse like crazy when the action heats up.

This is where the current market fails me the most. The more an interface demands real-time actions, the less I enjoy the game. My reflexes weren't all that good even back when I was a teenager, and now I don't have nearly the stamina that I did then, either. I need to be able to take as much time as I want making decisions, and to save the game and exit as necessary.

[Incabulos]

I still enjoy roguelikes and muds over todays offerings.

I like turn based strategy. Very few of those ever come out. Those that do fail me because of the failure to implement a decent multiplayer component.

Although I do play the odd FPS to get out some of the "gamer" in me Playing Biochock at the moment and greatly enjoying that.

But for the most part games today fail me because of lack of options, lack of depth and lack of immersion. Maybe that is why I like games like roguelikes, muds etc.. The less graphics there are the more I am sucked into the game by my own imagination. It is rare that a graphically rich game like Bioshock comes along that actually grips me. (but I can only play that late at night as I have two young sons).

Some games I would probably love if instead of RTS they were TBS.

As a fan of play by mail games back in the day, and recently PBEM I know I am a not the target demographic, so it is up to me to find indy devs that enjoy the same kind of things in games that I do.