The Ranting/Debate Thread

[XSI]

Re: The Ranting/Debate Thread

(...) Touhou series, I've only played embodiment of scarlet devil, and even though I can't beat the thing on normal (easy doesn't count), I can still see that it's a good, well-rounded game.

Yes, coming from someone that plays on lunatic, and even finished the game on that setting, it is, it's good.

(...)As for AI.... have you ever tried to program an AI for anything?

No, not yet, though I'm starting school for programming in a few months, so I think I'll find out in the next few years.

(...)fail at programming AI. Just skip the escorts altogether -_-

That was my point, if the difficulty of a mission lies in the "Friendly" AI shooting the player, or the objective that should be defended, then something is wrong, very, very wrong.

@ that one guy... ROFL. You made a guy sell his account because he was so bad? That's the funniest mmo story I've heard in a while.

I liked that game, EvE online, great game, has it's issues, and I really don't like the direction it's going, they should make the world less safe, not safer, last I checked the economy partially collapsed because not enough people were losing equipment, so there was a very large supply, and very little demand.
I have plenty of stories like that from it too, since it was -not- illegal to sell game items on ebay or other sites, and it happened a lot. This means that someone comes from WoW or something, buys high-end things with his real money, and then expects to be the best in the game as soon as he gets it.
Instead, he gets shot down and looted because he fails to understand even the basic controls.


Besides that, more ranting time, today's topic, invisible walls.

I understand you have to somehow limit the player's movement, even if just to save on trying to get an entire world mapped, but there are much better alternatives to being chased by something tough and then running headfirst into an invisible wall, only to get slaughtered seconds after that. it's the same kind of thing as giving the player a missile launcher, explosives, and then having a small, wooden fence mark where the player can't go. So I can use my mininukes to blow up 3 buildings in one shot, but a wooden fence is invincible? I can't even..you know, step -over- the knee height fence?
It's really the same as giving a player special doorbuster explosives, but requiring a key to have him pass the wooden door that leads to the boss, it doesn't make any sense! But ok, that's to keep the story intact I guess, as long as the story is good, that's fine.

But really, even Valve is guilty of the invisible walls, L4D's Dead Air and Death toll campaigns in versus for example, on my first play as infected(Hunter), I jumped against at least 15 invisible walls, not marked, easily reachable, and each tactical spots. I died from dropping mid-air at least 10 of those 15 times. At one point I even found a rooftop without invisible walls around it to pounce from, make the perfectly timed jump, and then in mid-air I bump into an invisible wall that's there for no reason at all, and harmlessly drop down in front of the enemy team. Now, I've played those maps before they 'fixed' them by using the console votes, and the invisible walls weren't there, the map in the 'unfinished' state was better then the finished map. I've already given up on finding a good spot to jump from on those maps, just find the obvious spots and wait to be shot down.

Next topic, sort of fits in a little with the L4D part, making games simpler for the retards to play, and protection for morons.
Of all the things a game can do to fail, this is the worst it can do, sure, simpler controls is good, but changing a large part of the game to make it better for new gamers is not going to work. Nearly every online game did this, or is going to do it, yet they never learn, a few examples.
WoW, it used to be ok, it was a nice game, -War-craft actually had war, and then they decided to change that, because the lower levels(And dumbasses) were getting ganked by a systematic problem that they conveniently overlooked. So, enter the 'honour system', massive guardspawning, and just forget that most of the ganking never actually happened in the towns, and the best part of the game was suddenly impossible. Welcome to World of Peacecraft.

EvE, ok, this is a lot less then the other games, but from what I've seen from updates and chats with friends it's getting fucked over slowly, and it started long before I even joined the game(So I'll skip that part, I wasn't there). Anyway, defence gets a huge bonus already, since they prepare everything, have extra guns(Turrets/platforms), choose the time, and are closer to home. There is more, but I won't list it all. The point is, once a suitably large group takes over an area, it's there to stay and won't move without a gigantic investment of the attackers. So smaller groups of people stop caring for area's, and instead, they just go around, have a good time, maybe shoot some of those idiots that didn't see them coming since 10-30 minutes ago, and in general just have a nice time. But nevermind that, everybody now gets to instantly warp to safety(Unless they really, really fuck up). It was possible before, but add that to the removing of fast ships and there's really nothing that can be done about a group of people living in the so called 'unsafe' areas. And sadly, the most dangerous parts of the world are the places marked as "Safe".

Darkfall
(I only played this one in the beta, a large part of it, and this did not change as far as I know, and I've looked into it)
While being one of the best games for just the ideas used, there are a few parts that aren't really done right.. Like a safe zone in a game that declared it had no safe zones, or having an entire town, but only put in a single NPC, and give that NPC the functions of, but not being limited to:
Quest giver
Quest target
Crafting trainer
Crafting shop
General shop
Guard
Eyecandy

...That's not really a good thing to do when people expect a kind of lively world.

And finally, SWG, a game that wanted to 'be more attractive to new players'. It did so by taking out a lot of features, and completely changing the game, what could possibly go wrong? (Hint, it died a quick but still painful death)

(Extra note on L4D, it actually has a storyline that ties all the campaigns, and even the last survivor map together, but it was removed for some reason, there are still hints, but a lot just got taken out, more details will be provided if asked.)

 

[Alias]

Re: The Ranting/Debate Thread

Hahaha yeah I heard about the fall of SWG. I can't imagine what they were thinking. I never played it, but the idea seemed pretty cool, you play as some sort of grunt with no really special powers, making it as true to the lore as an mmo can be.

Then they brought playable Jedis in.

Really? Really, devs? lol.

 

[Kusanagi]

Re: The Ranting/Debate Thread

I'm planning on joining the world of Eve, mostly because it's what my group plays right now. From what I've seen and been told, we're pretty much pirates, because our 'leader' (seriously, he's the only one that knows wtf he's doing... and he's currently the newest player of the group in Eve until I get up and running) likes to PvP alot.
From what I've seen, this is how it goes: either A) we ransom, and they either pay or lose their ship, B) we pull a dick move because the guy thought he was hot shit, or C) we waste time saving our alliance members because their dumbass leader(s) got them into a fight that wouldn't have been worth it in the first place and they're now getting their asses kicked.
The only reasons I'm hopping on it are 1) It's what my group is playing, and 2) I can pay for it with in-game money.
Since I can simply drive to see our 'leader' - only takes 20 minutes - he's been helping me understand it and getting me set up in a trial. So far, I've picked Caldari as the race because of the bonuses, and I've decided on my PvP and PvE ships: PvP, I'm going annoying-litttle-bitch route and using an ECM ship; PvE, I'm going Volley-Sniper with Torps. Once I get a bit more settled in, I think I'll try for a third ship, possibly a mothership/titan or a bomber.
ANYWAYS.
Yeah, I saw the game before and after the Nano-nerf. Speed got decreased like OMGWTF.
Low-sec is still pretty dangerous. The only areas I hate are the high-sec Concord areas where everyone's a care-bear pussy.


AI..... I used to cut people slack, but then I realized how many people most companies have working on that shit. It can still be hard, I'd think, but not as hard as if it was just one or two people.

 

[XSI]

Re: The Ranting/Debate Thread

(...) C) we waste time saving our alliance members because their dumbass leader(s) got them into a fight that wouldn't have been worth it in the first place and they're now getting their asses kicked.(...)

If your alliance is anything like the ones I was in, this is what you're going to do most. Well, besides just flying around to find non-existent other things.

(...) So far, I've picked Caldari as the race because of the bonuses, and I've decided on my PvP and PvE ships: PvP, I'm going annoying-litttle-bitch route and using an ECM ship; PvE, I'm going Volley-Sniper with Torps. Once I get a bit more settled in, I think I'll try for a third ship, possibly a mothership/titan or a bomber.
(...)

Ok, a few points
Caldari are great for PvE, but not as good as most of the others in PvP, they are however good at the ECM, so as support you will be just fine, and if you can completely jam an opponent solo, you won that.
A mothership/titan is a huge investment of both the group and the player, and these take years to train for and build, do not expect to get in one quickly.
Bombers, those are good, I remember bombing runs on gatecamps with my corp and taking out several ships at low cost, but for anything other then organised bombing the bombs may be too expensive(The missiles are good though). There is also bombers in the large fights with capital ships, which have the bombers doing a lot of damage to everything, but this rarely happens, such fights tend to be very rare, and over very quickly.

Have fun, but remember, highsec space is more dangerous then 0.0

I also have a rant ready, but lost interest in posting it, so I won't..Maybe tonight.

 

[Kusanagi]

Re: The Ranting/Debate Thread

I plan on pretty much farming for a bit in the start unless I get called on for some PvP. Other than that, maybe look for slave-girls and ponies if they come out with that feature that allows you to hop outside of your ship at stations

I know it's a huge investment for the bigger ships. That's why I said that I'd look at them once I got more settled in. Besides, I like to be the support.

My buddy said he'd get me set up with implants to help decrease the training time, as well as set me up with some cash/parts/a ship so that I'm not going in totally helpless >.<

The reason I'm looking at the big ships is because I hardly ever see anyone play them, from my experience. All I ever really see are things like Megathrons, Curses, and drone ships. Maybe a couple of Hurricanes and ... gah, can't remember the name off the top of my head... it looks like it has a spear coming out to the front on the side, like it's jousting or something.
I like to pick stuff that most everybody seems to not use. Now, usually there's a good reason for it, whether it's that it sucks because nobody ever has a group that can work with it right, or because the way the game works it's easy to dismiss it, etc.
The thing is, I can usually find a way to use it that makes people go 'wtf... why aren't I/WE using that ...'

High-sec is only more dangerous because of little punks hiding behind Concord. Take away Concord, and most of the people there will drop quick as hell, from what I can tell; only a few seem to know what they're doing. Seriously, I've only seen my buddies fight maybe two people who were from high-sec that knew what to do - the rest were like that guy who kept dropping his stuff and running >.<

 

[XSI]

Re: The Ranting/Debate Thread

(...) Besides, I like to be the support.

People will love you for that. And you will most likely be targeted first in pvp, most likely getting killed a lot until you find the right setup for staying alive while helping.(Look up logistics cruisers, and cruisers in general, those tend to be support)

it looks like it has a spear coming out to the front on the side, like it's jousting or something.

The Incursus frigate, one of the best ships you can get for a price-efficiency combination. Sadly it's fairly weak. All ships are useful in their own way though, and there are more capital ships out there then people think. The larger alliances will try to hide the number of their capitals, but there are a lot of them, one alliance I know of has at least 15-20 titans, countless motherships, a lot of dreadnoughts, and carriers are common. Most other large alliances will have most likely 5+ carriers, and 2+ dreadnoughts.

(Story time)
As for the Incursus, it's actually rare to see it in action, since it's so small. Everybody moves on to the bigger ships, but I had 10-20 of the things ready to use at all times, usually taking them on long trips which the larger ships couldn't make because they were too slow. This way I found a way into a large hostile alliance's area, passing through an undefended backdoor which was too far from anything to be guarded effectively. In that trip alone, me and my Incursus took down 3 mining ships and a hauler, which was carrying items worth 400 times the price of my ship, not including some blueprints.

After 2-3 of those trips they would always have a group of 2-5 ships ready, specialising in intercepting and taking out small raiding ships like mine, but by then they would have to shoot me down roughly 900 times to break even. Never underestimate the power of small things.
(This is the one time I'm sad I didn't save killmails, would have made a nice addition here)

And a rant, jumping in games.
Now, I understand when you're driving a tank you can't jump, that's fine, makes sense. If you have a racing game that has a small area for a character to walk outside the car, fine, jumping wouldn't be worth the time spend on it, it's a racing game. But if you're making an adventure game, and there are small ledges everywhere, then the least you can do is make sure the players can jump. Seriously, I once played a game where there was no jumping and the damn sidewalk was too high to walk onto from the street, that is not good design. No excuses, if the player is held back by a small ledge people don't even notice when they walk over it, then something is not being done right.
Sure, some games don't need jumping, like overlord, jumping wouldn't add a lot, if anything, to that game, but imagine..Say, Fallout 3 without jumping, not only did you just screw up the immersion and depth of the world, you also missed chances to make a few puzzles, shortcuts, and every single rock will be like a large wall that stops every movement. Kind of a big deal in a world where rocks and debris are everywhere. Besides that, the average fps, every one of them has jumping in a form, it adds to where you can go to pick off your opponents, playing on only one height will get boring after some time, putting in a small thing such as jumping can double, or even triple the lifespan of your game.
Some games have your character automaticly jumping over things when he/she gets to a ledge, that's all fine, until you're in a firefight on top of a building and walk a little too close to the sides...

 

[XSI]

Re: The Ranting/Debate Thread

Double post, but just a short rant.

Just played some prototype, won a mission no problems, final things on my screen is me flying away in a helicopter, mission completed, I'm out safe.
Then suddenly.. random cutscene teleporting me back into the base, cutscene shows my character got shot, and taken captive anyway. Fuck. You.
The least the game can do is acknowledge I escaped the place, no congratulations on a flawless mission, no 'good job, you won', just a 'go fuck yourself, you may have done everything right, but you're getting your ass kicked anyway'. Bullshit, and what else? Well this game seems to be made by the same idiots that designed vista, I need to confirm 3 times before being able to save and exit the game, it's one thing to be helpful and prevent mistakes, but another to completely spam those messages up to the point only a mental retard still likes them.
And for fucks sake, let me skip the damn credits you have to place at startup of the game, I want to play it, not read crap. I understand you want your name on stuff, but seriously, if anybody is interested in it they will go find the old fashioned 'credits' button, if you always jam that name in without being able to skip it before playing the game people will learn to -hate- that name.

 

[Obeliskos]

Re: The Ranting/Debate Thread

Just wanted to put out a shameless plug.

You must be registered to see the links

. The OP is on there, along with a short rant and two other full fledged ones.

 

[Alias]

Re: The Ranting/Debate Thread

Double post, but just a short rant.

Just played some prototype, won a mission no problems, final things on my screen is me flying away in a helicopter, mission completed, I'm out safe.
Then suddenly.. random cutscene teleporting me back into the base, cutscene shows my character got shot, and taken captive anyway. Fuck. You.
The least the game can do is acknowledge I escaped the place, no congratulations on a flawless mission, no 'good job, you won', just a 'go fuck yourself, you may have done everything right, but you're getting your ass kicked anyway'. Bullshit, and what else? Well this game seems to be made by the same idiots that designed vista, I need to confirm 3 times before being able to save and exit the game, it's one thing to be helpful and prevent mistakes, but another to completely spam those messages up to the point only a mental retard still likes them.
And for fucks sake, let me skip the damn credits you have to place at startup of the game, I want to play it, not read crap. I understand you want your name on stuff, but seriously, if anybody is interested in it they will go find the old fashioned 'credits' button, if you always jam that name in without being able to skip it before playing the game people will learn to -hate- that name.

Which mission?

I finished prototype a couple days ago. I actually really liked it. I thought it was one of the more well-rounded games I've played recently. Then and again, I was coming from Mirror's Edge (bleh). I thought the combat system could have been better, and a couple of the bosses suffered from omgtoolongitis, but I loved how I always felt so overpowered, yet still challenged. Nothing like dropping on a tank and making it explode, then hopping into another tank and raping shit. My biggest complaint I think was the rigid combat... there's a lot of stuff you can do but since you can't really change weapons on the fly, you're boxed into one weapon, and your choice of armor or shield, until you're safe enough to switch. Yeah they give you that moment of slow-mo to choose another weapon but the selection, at least with a mouse, is pretty wonky and I always get slammed a couple times before I can highlight what I want.

minor prototype spoilers:

Spoiler

Anyway I ask which mission because if I recall, there's a mission where you destroy a facility of the virus-poison (bloodtox?) and they outline to you several times before you finish that you're supposed to let yourself get caught. If it's that mission you're talking about... well, you can't complain because they did warn you well in advance, gave you a good reason why, and it's not much of an intuitive leap to go from 'I'm safe in a helicopter' to 'I'm now out of the helicopter, letting them catch me.'

 

[XSI]

Re: The Ranting/Debate Thread

Ah, so that's why it was like that.

It came as a surprise to me because I've found the story to be about as interesting as watching paint dry, and I'm playing in a room where there is almost always someone screaming or something so I wouldn't have heard what they said before the mission anyway.

I like the web thing though, that's somewhat nice to collect and try to put together like a puzzle.

The controls of weaponswitching and such are horrible though, and I really don't like that every other soldier has a rocket launcher which will interrupt every combo that I try. Why bother giving me combo attacks when I can't use them?

Same for the controls of a tank, unworkable. Besides that I've found that for about as far as I came, every mission can be won by just throwing things at objectives, or hitting things at long range with whipfist(Hopefully without missiles flying at me) Exception being the stealth missions, but the AI is really not smart enough to work at stealth missions at all, just run up buildings in front of them, it's ok, everybody can do that.

And one time I died because there were..At least 6 missiles flying after me as I tried to get into a helicopter, it blew up during the mini-scenes, during which I was bashing all buttons to see if there was a stop trying and drop down button. Another time I was standing in between a large group of soldiers, all with rocket launchers/grenade thingys. I was stunlocked to death by them from full health.

Overall I'm finding that the enemy only uses cheap tactics, and the only way to win is by doing the same(Stand on a building out of range, tossing things at them, or whipfist, a few missions actually let you go in to have fun, but I don't see those)

Missions I've found were either as easy as possible, or as mentioned above, instant-death when you get close. (I won't say anything about the part where Prototype seems to randomly chrash/ completely freezes, I assume it's a problem with my own computer)

 

[Kusanagi]

Re: The Ranting/Debate Thread

The only weapon you need is the

You must be registered to see the links

.

 

[Sinfulwolf]

Re: The Ranting/Debate Thread

But... if some super mutant thing was running around in real life, the military wouldn't actually give a shit about giving it a fair chance. So they'd go after it as hard as possible. So props to Prototype for being quasi realistic?

 

[Alias]

Re: The Ranting/Debate Thread

Yeah, their detection system is somewhat simplistic. I was shocked to find out that you could sprint, with red shit coming out of your feet, hopping over cars, leaping over buildings, and flying through the air right in front of any military, and as long as you weren't in civvie clothes and inside a base, they wouldn't care at all. It made an even bigger impact coming from playing the first three games of the Hitman series. Wow... what a difference.

But there's a reason for that too. Do you have any idea how long it would take to WALK from one end of manhattan to the other? I'm pretty sure the devs just did that to make it easier on us, rather than more realistic.

Oh and by the way, if you're having trouble with rocket launchers... there's a solution to that. First, air-dodge as much as you can, change directions, be unpredictable. Second... take out the rocket launchers first especially before doing something silly like skyjacking.

Run around and smack the rocket launcher guys, combo, dodge, combo, dodge. If you're playing on a pc, it helps immensely to switch the sprint button to something easy to reach like F, so you can hit it and still have full movement control. Even better, if you have extra buttons on your mouse, use those (Mine never work for some reason). Just tap the sprint button and you dodge/air dodge.

I think you're just approaching the missions wrong, to be honest. I'm having loads of fun, haven't had a hard mission yet, and I'm playing on the hardest difficulty setting. The only parts that have given me trouble were the two main boss fights at the end:

Spoiler

Elizabeth Greene and the Cross guy who turns into the Supreme Hunter

And that was mostly because I was using silly tactics. Example.... I never bought the critical pain devastator. It's SO USEFUL!!! Take out leader hunters in two hits. Having trouble with the timed final boss? Take him down about three times as fast as the blade.

About the freezing... I've had that happen to me once or twice. The most annoying time it occurred for me was right between the cutscenes after the bloodtox mission you were talking about. So I had to redo that entire mission, which was annoying, because the only method I've found so far for doing it isn't all that efficient (steal a heli, blow up a couple and run, repeat until heli is destroyed). But then, I don't remember a PC game that HASN'T frozen once in a while - you can't catch every exception, after all. Hell, even ancients like Warcraft III give me a lockup occasionally.

@kusanagi: is my soul damned if the first thing I thought about when I saw the intro sequence with the tendril barrage devastator was 'man, rule 34 with this guy would be SWEET'?

 

[Kusanagi]

Re: The Ranting/Debate Thread

No, your soul is damned because you started hanging out on here

 

[Alias]

Re: The Ranting/Debate Thread

Oh. Well that's okay then.

In a side note... fuck the 'men like gods' mission. Twice I've had a bug where as soon as I shot the hive, every goddam military in twenty miles is alerted to my presence and shoots me the hell up before I can say 'boo.' Both times I've had to restart my computer to get it working. Also, fuck allied copters. DO YOU SEE THE BIG THING THAT LOOKS LIKE YOU? THE ONE THAT'S RIGHT IN FRONT OF YOU?

DON'T
FUCKING
RUN
INTO
IT

Maybe YOU don't take any fucking collision damage, but I sure as fuck do, and when I have to redo the mission because your stupid fuck ass isn't programmed to NOT FUCKING RUN INTO ME...

well, this is the result.
Seriously. Fuck the devs that thought it was a good idea not to program "AVOID FRIENDLY COPTERS" into the ai.

At least there's plenty of things to do to cool the rage. Like that one 'blow up everything in sight with a supertank' event. Mmmmmm.

 

[XSI]

Re: The Ranting/Debate Thread

When you get a helicopter, fly up as high as you can, then shoot down those 'helping' allies. You should still have more then enough ammo to take out whatever you have, and just flying really high seems to clear the agro thing.

Edit: A little update on how I'm doing in prototype, I finally finished a mission which I previously could not finish because the game would simply crash at some point during the mission. I figured by then I was about 25-40% through the game, but turns out, after that mission there is the (apparently) final boss fight, no save points in between the mission and the boss(Except for a checkpoint which the game won't remember when it crashes). I just crashed after bringing the boss down to needing only a few more hits, and finding it to be a ridiculously easy boss that's suffering from just having a shitload of hp which makes it take ages to actually bring down.

Chances of me ever playing this game again, even to actually beat this boss are slim at best, mostly because I have other games that are interesting, and do not crash every hour(prototype for some reason never runs longer then an hour, maybe hour and a half if I'm lucky, all other games I have give me no problem at all).

To sum it all up, disappointing.

 

[Alias]

Re: The Ranting/Debate Thread

Which boss? There's sort of two final bosses. They both have too much hp although on medium difficulty they're both pretty fast. (tip.... blade air-slice does so much damage it must be broken.... one uncharged hit can take out a tank!!! @_@ )

But yeah that crashing problem sounds odd. I'm sure you've tried updating your video drivers, getting the latest patch (if there is one), blah blah blah, so not sure what to tell you, could be your video card just throws you for a loop. That would make any game pretty unenjoyable though, especially having to do some 20-30 minutes of mission over again. I HATE having to do stuff I've already done, it gets me more frustrated than any in-game difficulty mechanic.

 

[Sinfulwolf]

Re: The Ranting/Debate Thread

Is this all on PC?

 

[Kusanagi]

Re: The Ranting/Debate Thread

I think they're trying to warn us with the name...

'psst, this is a prototype, not the actual game! we were rushed to produce something, but we're not allowed to say anything, or they'll use the electric flail dildo on us! please, send help to... oh no... oh god no... I-I wasn't d-doing anything, I s-swear sirs! ... no, not the flail, NOOOOOO *krrzztt* *transmission lost*'

Or something like that.

 

[XSI]

Re: The Ranting/Debate Thread

Yeah, it's on the PC Sinful.

And I know my graphics card is good enough for prototype, seeing as it handles Crysis without too much issues on the highest settings(Even though the highest settings slow down everything by a lot)

Spoiler

And I'm talking about the guy on the carrier, which can be defeated by simply running and getting helicopters to shoot him with, or just running in general to have the random military that seems to spawn every few seconds take him to next to no hp, then hit him a few times.
Seriously, how many men can you jam into a carrier? I know there's a lot of people in carriers, but still, he must have killed 2000 identical looking soldiers.
And who's the smartass ordering planes to lift off while there's a large monster on the runway hitting people, and ripping off parts of concrete?