Re: The Ranting/Debate Thread
MMO's are known to attract idiots, nothing can be done about it.
~The following may contain spoilers that I am too lazy to hide.~
A rant about games in general.
If your game has controls that needs me to use my nose to press the right combination of keys, then -You're doing it wrong-. Controls should not be what makes a game hard, having hard controls only makes the game less enjoyable. So if someone is driving something, say, a tank, then the least you can do is make sure you can actually drive the damn thing, and if possible shoot at the same time, especially if you give the player that tank so he can drive after and shoot something that's running from him. It is very frustrating if you can't aim the damn thing without having the tank do a fucking backflip and land off the road upside down, or against a building to the side.
Chase scenes, they can be good, but for fucks sake, don't make the thing you're chasing faster then the player can ever be, unless you know exactly what you're doing. It sucks to fail something when the enemy was just faster then you for no reason, just because he was. End of story. That sucks. This is just faking difficulty by crippling the player.
Controls again..If you make something that appears on the screen to show you all the weapons you have to easily select the one you want, don't make the player have to move the mouse in 3 directions at once just to get to a weapon that just happens to be up top. Seriously, I do not want to move my mouse left, right, and then down-left to move the cursor up. I want to just move my mouse up. If you fail to understand that, then maybe you should let others do the thinking.
Boss fights..The one excuse to just get something random a shitton of hp, stats, whatever, and still call it fair. Ok, so it's stronger, better, and a challenge, that's not too bad, they usually have an opening in that impenetrable defence that seems to be there just for the player. That's fine, the player still has to beat it and go on, but seriously, reconsider the whole huge stats thing, if something has 10000 hp, and does 0.1damage, it is not fun to spend time beating on it. Example, prototype, one of the first few bosses, after the first 'boss' the game went downhill for a while, but that's for later in this post, the bosses which I've found so far(Not counting the first) can all be put in 2 classes.
Strong idiots and weak with high hp.
The strong idiots have a lot of attack power, can kill in a few hits, and are in general badass...Except that they seem to have internal bleeding in that head clogging up all the blood, making them unable to think past the classic -Hit stuff with fists-, yep, just keep doing that one attack cycle, I'll be standing right here, just outside of range charging an attack that will kick your ass once you stop the only combo you know.
So, besides that, there was one boss that had a LOT of health to take down, but there was next to no attack power. My cat scratched me once, that means he outdamaged a boss. If you not only get free health potion/shield combo's orbitting you, but also have a boss which does no damage at all, then it's not a fun fight. I felt like I was slowly beating up a toddles with a foam bat. I felt sorry for the boss, and in general, if you can go into one of those boss fights, and come out with more hp then you went in with, something is not done right.
So then on to other stuff, the movies in games.
Fuck. That. There are ways to get cutscenes in your game without screwing up the gameplay, look at half-life 2, scenes, but it works great, sets a good mood, and better still, the cutscenes, with no shooting(In a shooting game), can be -fun-. Compare that to just showing a movie of a couple of characters talking, and in general doing nothing. Get your cutscenes right, it is ok to take a quick the controls away for a little scene, but if I want to watch a damn movie, I'll go get a movie, cutscenes should not, under ANY circumstance be longer then 5 minutes.
Still reading? I doubt it, but anyway, the big, epic boss fights, great, a boss, special action that will hopefully be done right and last a while, first off, no huge monologues, I just spend a while ranting on that(See movies), so at least make it possible to skip that. Besides that, don't make extremely obscure methods the only way to win. I do not want to carefully reposition the entire room's desks, chairs, and tables for a special bouncing toy ball to hit the opponent, strangely completely decimating him and only leaving ashes when I have a huge rocket launcher.
And it's not an epic boss fight if you line up a load of bosses and just get the player to fight them one at a time, that's just boss fights, and instead of going "Wow, this is great, what do I need to do to beat this guy" players will go "Aw crap, another one of those oversized retards, I wonder what kind of lame trick I have to pull to win this time." It's only epic when it's rare, otherwise it's just a bigger version of the random monster you have to club over the head to move on.
Last point, taking away the player's controls, powers, or whatever.
It can be done right, but dear fuck if you are going to take away most of the player's stuff without him being able to do anything about it, leave him an alternative. I do not want to spend a long time on getting a special weapon or unlocking an area just to have everything taken without anything I can do. That's just cheap. From my recent-ish memory, again, Half-life did this right, and Overlord 2* did a good job too. (*Sure, you lose some minions, but you're still a huge man in armour, with a weapon, and you can shoot lightning, and not to mention you get everything back later.)
Randomly fucking with the controls is bad too, if an enemy's special attack exists of changing your keyboard settings, then he sucks. People will always try to avoid these monsters because suddenly the challenge isn't gameplay, it's getting your character or whatever to do what you want them to do. Being stunned isn't fun either, especially if the game had the area designed so that just as you lose the stun you get hit again.
In short, just use common sense, don't fuck up on purpose.
..Well, wall of text, I should probably not post at 2 am.