Weekend Discussion
You have no idea what you're missing--it should keep you entertained all weekend.
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So is Arkham Asylum really that good?
I have yet to get the demo, but I'm planning on it (terrible download speed)-
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it's also not related to TDK at all, it's tied to the comics more than anything else, though most of the characters have new designs for the game. it seems to be also pretty heavily influenced by the 90s animated series with a lot of the voice actors reprising their roles from that series. Kevin Conroy, Mark Hammil and Arleen Sorkin (Harley Quinn) just from the demo, also Commissioner Gordon is the same guy as well though he's not in the demo (though I thought he was) .
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I kept hoping Prototype would end up being a bit like that and it never did.
Don't understand why anybody hasn't though of it yet. Aside from the main plot line, you could deviate by roaming around the city and delving into randomized "crime events" that show up on your radar.
Cleaning up neighborhoods results in less randomized crime happening there. Ignoring others creates more. The occasional mid-league super-villain shows up every so often in random areas to cause general mid-scale chaos.
Maybe even crime / villainy syndicates that you can research and take out in side-mission plot lines. -
My Vision for a Batman game is like that but there would be two sides of a same coin, Batman at night and during the day you can choose to go around as Bruce Wayne and do things from his perspective. Switching between the two would be a player choice. But that wouldn't deny you of being Batman during the day or being Bruce Wayne at night.
It'd be like TAS where you are at an event as Bruce Wayne then the mission happens and you switch to Batman by running into the restroom to change.
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The last game demo that caught my attention as much as Arkham Asylum that I hadn't been looking forward to was System Shock 2.
System Shock 2 is one of, if not my favorite games of all time. If it even comes close to that, it will be well worth the purchase.
The graphics and sound design seem amazing. I get the feeling based off of the demo that there will be multiple viable approaches to siturations, and and interest world to explore. I definitely plan on turning the difficulty up all of the way for the main game. -
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If you get a .NET Error, here is the fix: http://forums.eidosgames.com/showthread.php?t=92273
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the gametrailer write up for it is pretty good. i especially liked when they said something along the lines of if somebody was watching you'd play, they'd think... wow, this guy must be good at video games.. the fighting looks so in depth and crazy!! but really you're just pressing one button the whole time it is eye candy really.
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Hijack
For those who believe the game will be repetitive, what, specifically, causes you to think this? The combat*? The stealth mechanics? I'd like to discuss the latter.
As a fan of the stealth genre, I have to say that there always seems to be some linearity built into stealth games. Not all of them, certainly; the last Hitman was very open-ended in terms of how you could complete your objectives. But I can't say I feel the same for many others. As much as I love MGS and Splinter Cell, you still progress through the games in a linear fashion. Sure, you can enter an area--be it a room, a courtyard, or an overgrown jungle--and take down bad guys in different fashions... but I'm assuming you'll be able to do that in Batman: AA as well.
I've played the AA demo a ridiculous number of times, and each time I devised different methods of dispatching the thugs in the last room. Yeah, that's right: "almost every time", but it is just one room, after all; we still have an entire game to explore. The same thing tends to happen in every stealth game ever made: everything seems so dynamic at first, until you find yourself doing the same thing ad nauseum every time you arrive at a certain juncture -- strangle that guy first, hide his body before creeping over to the guard taking a leak in the corner, choke him out, then sidle along the side of the building, slide through the grass and wait for the dude to poke his head out of the cabin window so you and your silenced pistol can blow it to chunks...
I guess another manner of phrasing my original question is, are you worried about repetition in Batman: AA specifically, or because you find the genre itself to be repetitive? Because judging solely by what I played--which was the same thing as all of you--there seems to be lots of room for experimentation in terms of how you progress, even if you're ultimately moving from Point A to Point Z.
* I acknowledge the concerns about the combat, but I'm not going to type them up here (though I do want to discuss them at some point).-
the main issue is likely that there may not be much room to grow. how do you make the opponents harder without simply "cheating" (i.e. more damage and faster attacks)? I suspect some enemies will block attacks more effectively, but there's the worry there won't be much complexity since most of what you do involves hitting a single button.
also, there's not much immediate sign that there will be more to stealth than climbing up and glide kicks (or the occasional grab-from-above takedown).
it could end up being somewhat like X-Men Origins: Wolverine as a result: very good basic mechanic, but one that never really changes through the rest of the game.-
The opponents are going to be harder I assume by different placements of bad guys, probably going to be grouped together, each with automatic weapons where if you don't do a good job of taking them out then you'll get chewed up by their gunfire. Even now if you don't do things properly you'll take a few hits while taking out one guy because someone else sees you and opens fire.
As for takedowns, there are quite a few more than glide kicks and silent takedowns. So far I've managed inverted takedowns ( hang from a gargoyle and wait for an enemy to walk underneath you ), "body" takedowns ( do an inverted takedown, wait for someone to walk underneath the body that's left hanging, hit the rope with your batarang ), and glass takedowns. I'm not quick on the batarang so I don't know if it's possible to hit someone as they're climbing up a ladder with the batarang to get them to fall off but still it's fun to try. I assume once you have a few more toys to play with that you can be even more creative with the takedowns.
I'm sure some things might get repetitive by the end of it but even good games have stuff that gets repetitive. The combat system is probably so simple because you don't need to use it that often.
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David I think this game was designed to be all style, eye candy and to make you 'feel' like a badass while playing. Don't get me wrong, it is going to do well I am sure - and judging by the demo I would probably buy it. It definitely doesn't lack polish and has a very badassery feel to it. The actual dynamics are pretty simple though. Very simple. It is all cinematic eye candy in the batman universe which isn't neccessarily a bad thing to some people.
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This is the cam I speak of
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o11kdTp4hU0
it's not listed in key bindings.
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I disagree. Batman typically takes it slow, striding forward into every situation because he thinks things through and he relies on intimidation. Having him run automatically would be antithetical to his character. More importantly, I think he runs too fast, and in stealth games, you don't go bursting into rooms at a full sprint unless you want to get your head blown off.
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I was somewhat disappointed by the typical videogame concessions to idiots and children. There's no need to highlight giant air-vent grates, and for Batman to say things like "I really should look for a way out of here!" I mean, seriously? I miss the days of games like System Shock 2 and Deus Ex, where the developer didn't assume that every player was a complete moron.
On the other hand, the animations, AI, sound, and ambience are incredible. It really nails the "feeling" of being Batman (or at least what I imagine being Batman would be like :D). Hopefully the concessions to newbies trickle off as the game goes on.
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It's basically to the point that you might as well not even being playing a game. You're basically just watching a movie that involves occasionally pushing a button to proceed. Speaking of which, the new "Splinter Cell" appears to be going this exact route. You don't even control Sam Fischer anymore, you just highlight which enemies to attack, push a button, and a canned sequence of animations play for your enjoyment. Yuck. Whatever happened to games letting you do things on your own, or using your imagination?
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Nintendo patented that last year. I'm not joking.
http://www.edge-online.com/news/nintendo-patent-balances-game-difficulty-
Something like that has already been done. I remember seeing a review or story about a Barney (as in the purple dinosaur that eats scares sings to kids) game for some old system, probably NES or SNES. It was a 2D sidescroller in any case. Since it was for little kids, if they didn't know what to do or even just didn't push any buttons, it would give hints or whatever and then eventually the game would take over and Barney would just start going through the level on his own.
Maybe the difference is that Nintendo's system is player-directed while this one wasn't.
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It's a fine line. Think about all the people who say they were turned off by the very first mission in Deus Ex, and all the people who say that when they were finally badgered into getting past that mission they loved the game. Obviously giving some guidance isn't bad...
But, I'll join the crotchety-old-man club with you and complain about modern games too. Actually I'll go further: the problem that nags at me in modern AAA games is that they're hyper-focussed about always making sure the player has a short-term goal in hand. Usually with an obvious way to accomplish it. They polish that aspect so much that you can roll through the game just sort of reacting to whatever task is in front of you, and you're never much engaged in making plans or thinking about the overall shape and progress of the game. And the "local" focus means the developers may not have been thinking much about such things either, which doesn't help.
When you pop out the other side of the final cutscene, it's probably been a fun rollercoaster ride but perhaps not the most memorable experience.
I had been thinking about this recently when I saw a video of someone playing through a portion of Dead Space. It reminded me that I had liked that game a lot, and the individual bits of it were great -- visuals, sound design, combat. But it didn't really stick with me. I'd guess that's because in Dead Space you're a gofer shuttled quickly from setpiece to setpiece, with not much feeling of agency and not much sense of some structure or narrative building through to the conclusion.
Dead Space would have been a truly great game if it could have managed to at least give you the illusion of really exploring that huge horrible ship and figuring out what to do. I'd hope it's possible to provide that sort of experience and still have enough occasional guidance to keep players from quitting in frustration.
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Great observations. I think you've hit the nail on the head. Most modern games assume that you want the developer standing behind you and telling you exactly what to do. Flashing arrows tell you which direction to turn, the player character utters 'hints' if you stop moving for a minute, and of course modern level design (Half-Life being one of the worst, sadly) is just an obvious straight line tunnel, filled with locked doors and invisible barriers. It makes most games feel more like a carnival funhouse than an immersive world.
Deus Ex, Thief, System Shock 2, are great examples of how you can make an awesome action game that doesn't need to be a funhouse ride. People are generally intelligent enough to take a vague objective, and approach a problem to solve it. For example, in Deus Ex, you often had to infiltrate a secure building to gather intelligence. You start off in the street outside the building, and the whole world around it is rendered somewhat logically. Climb to the roof, break a window, talk to the guard outside. You could solve the "problem" in any logical manner.
Nowadays, it seems it's just much easier for the developer to glue a gun in the player's hand, put them in a straight hallway with one obvious door and say , "PUSH THE BUTTON TO OPEN THE DOOR!" Half-Life, Call of Duty, Halo, Splinter Cell, and really just about any of the big franchise series are guilty of this.
I wish Warren Spector still made games :(-
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I would argue the intent of the design in games like Half-Life or Halo are different from games like Deus Ex of System Shock. Dues Ex is a hybrid sort of FPS/RPG. There are very large portions of that game where you are just walking around among non-violent (or non-agressive) NPCs or doing stuff like infiltrating a building where your objective is to just get to a certain point. It's set up much much differently than Half-Life and it's not really fair to compare the two in such a way.
Half-Life is purely an action game and I think it necessitates being linear. The idea with Half-Life is you want to keep the action going, throwing stuff at the player at a fairly constant rate without too much slowdown. There are a few portions where you have to do a series of things to actually get to the next area, but even those (the tentacle monster part and the time you meet the first gargantua) there's a fairly constant stream of enemies.
Half-Life was never really hand holdy either. The game was very linear, but whatever mini objectives you had were usually yours to figure out based on what NPCs told you or signs around the level or whatever. So in that way it's the same as Deus Ex, which was always very explicit in telling you exactly what needed to be done. Dues Ex was actually extremely linear from a narrative standpoint; almost as linear as Half-Life (there were only a few minor deviations it could take and they didn't affect the overall story). Every level required you to get from point A to B, and aside from the multiple endings there was never any deviation from that. The path you could take between those points could vary, which was the major draw of Deus Ex. You could build a guy who was a great sniper, or great for combat, or great at hacking, or great at sneaking around and there was always a path you could take, but you always had the same end goal regardless of how you tackled a situation.
So if you're complaining that games like Deus Ex don't really exist any more, I guess that's a fair complaint. Dues Ex is an extremely difficult type of game to make, however, and I don't know if anything like it could exist today. It's largely a product of the time period it was made during. There are games without any RPG elements such as Far Cry 2 that take a very non-linear approach to narrative and missions, but again I don't know if it's fair to compare that game to Half-Life 2 or Bioshock or something that sets out to tell a linear story with a narrative. They're just different types of games even though they are all within what might be considered the FPS genre.-
Personally I wouldn't argue with much of that. I don't think that either "linear" or "nonlinear" games are inherently good or bad (along with being poorly defined), and I think the illusion of agency in a game is about as good as the real thing.
The thing I happened to be screeding about is the problem of game design that is a continuous sequence of "hey! do this! now hey! do this!" without letting the player mentally chew on things. When you don't have as much opportunity to make plans and decisions.
The Half-Life games have fallen into that mode occasionally, but not consistently; they're often pretty good at tricking you into naturally deciding on the only option that's really available. (Half-Life games have also usually been good at the other thing I mentioned, which was having a nice visible & sensible progression through the game.) I wouldn't bitch at Halo either, at least not the first Halo, and not too much at Halo 3.
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I don't disagree with that. I've always been an advocate of games not using cutscenes to tell the story (which is part of why I think the Half-Life series and BioShock are awesome) but at the same time I don't immediately dismiss a game if it utilizes cutscenes. I love the God of War series, for example.
I don't think the "hey do this! okay now do that!!" method of game design is necessarily bad though. I think perhaps when it's noticeable it cane become a distraction. Dead Space was particularly guilty of this. That game was a constant stream of "oh shit I fucked something up, you'd better go all the way across this area to get a thing to unlock the next level" and my brain ended up breaking it down to "you need the blue key to open this door" and the design of that game because absurdly obvious to me in a weird sort of way. I still enjoyed it, but it was very blatant about being a video game, if that makes any sense.
So in that way I think Half-Life and to an even better extent Half-Life 2 are very good at guiding the player without making it absurdly obvious exactly what the designers want you to experience. Rather than someone constantly talking in your ear and saying "oh, go here now and hit this switch" it's more of a vague suggestion with a lot of visual cues sort of hinting at where you can go (even though there's generally only one way to go).-
Dead Space was particularly guilty of this.
So true it's hilarious. I just finished a main chapter objective last night, and I was thinking, "Alright, now tell me what else has gone wrong." And sure enough, the girl comes on the radio to tell me what a great job I did, but now communications has gone out. I mean, I'm having a great time with it, but I just wanted to laugh when I heard that.-
yeah Dead Space was kind of horrible in that way. it was just a string of poorly explained things going wrong on the ship. as a rule I don't generally care much about the story of a game (because if I did my brain would melt) but once in a while a game seems like it's trying so hard to make some kind of interesting story but is just failing utterly without realizing it. Dead Space was fun but man the storytelling was awful in almost every way.
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BTW if I were to name more "offenders" like Dead Space I would include games like Gears 2 and (most of) Crysis Warhead -- which again are games that I liked quite a bit -- and those are indeed "linear" games.
Now that I think about it a bit I'd also say that Assassin's Creed has large sections that suffer from this problem. Most people would call this a "nonlinear" game; it's certainly an open-world game and you can do lots of objectives in whatever order you wish. But those objectives are all laid out on your minimap, and the order in which you do them doesn't matter at all, so much of the game devolves into running straight for the nearest icon on the minimap, then repeat. Once you tunnel-focus on Pavlovian minimap-icon-chasing the game flattens out, and it only brightens back up when occasionally there is some difficulty in actually finding a path to that minimap icon.
Obviously the designers of AC thought that most players would be lost and frustrated without the minimap icons, and that's probably correct. I know you can turn off portions of the HUD; I didn't try removing the icons because for me I think that would have swapped one set of problems for another set. IMO it's not a simple question of "icons or not"; the game needed more baking to find some solution that help guide the player while still allowing them to be an explorer rather than an icon-chaser.-
yeah it's kind of a problem when the only solutions are "tell the player where to go" and "don't tell the player where to go but now he had no fucking clue what to do"
I have issues with the second thing in particular because games that do that sort of thing I tend to get completely lost in. I will use Twilight Princess as an example here just because it was the first one that came to mind. Obviously it's not really an action game, but this sort of thing doesn't tend to happen in action games. For the most part that game was pretty good about telling you where to go next, but sometimes you just wouldn't have a clear idea where to go. There was one point where I needed those steel boots in order to get past a part, but I had no idea about the boots (partly because I had only played one previous Zelda game, Minish Cap) but apparently they were back in my home town, which I had never visited once since I 'escaped' from it. So I just kind of wandered around the world being immensely bored until I looked up what I had to do.
And with action games I think the main problem is you don't generally want the player to have that much downtime. So if you want an open world, and you want the player to just do some shit then you have to tell him where to go. A lot of open world games run into that issue you mentioned, which is smacking a totally linear story and missions into an open world. So it ends up being almost as on rails as a game like Half-Life or Dead Space and the open world aspect almost seems pointless.
I don't really have a remedy for that either. Maybe open world games just aren't good at utilizing the world. I mean, Far Cry 2 (I AM INCAPABLE OF NOT MENTIONING IT) had an extremely open world but it was still extremely blatant about "okay go to this point on the map". It could have easily just said "alright go to this town and kill this guy" and then left it up to you but having the map was a nice way to keep from getting lost since you often had to traverse very large distances.
Prototype is the most recent game I played where it totally failed to utilize the open world. The map in that game is massive and populated with a fuckton of stuff, but it's ultimately soulless and worthless. The people don't ever do anything except walk or shoot you, the cars obey traffic laws etc. And it runs into the same issues you mentioned with Assassin's Creed, which is you just plow through each mission in the order given to you. There's no incentive to explore in that game at all, there's not even really an incentive to fuck shit up and that's what that game is almost exclusively built around.-
If I were to put on my Monday-morning-quarterback game designer hat and handwave some vague fixes for Assassin's Creed objectives:
- First, don't put the vantage points on the minimap. They're huge towers and stuff; the player should be able to see them "in the world" and decide to go climb them, just because they look like good recon positions.
- Second, don't instantly reveal the various objectives on the map once you climb a nearby vantage point. Instead the player can get an objective marked on the map by looking at it (again, "in the world") and pushing a button. Kinda like marking stuff with the binoculars in Crysis. And if you can see an objective you can mark it; you don't have to be on top of a designated vantage point, but the vantage point (being a tower or whatever) would give you the best chance to see lots of stuff, and perhaps a bit of a zoom effect from your "eagle eye" ability.
Those two changes would get the player thinking more about where to go, and examining the lay of the city. For substantial improvements, you'd also need to give the small objectives more interaction with the primary assasination goal, and perhaps with each other. So that the main goal and some of the small objectives would give you clues about where to look for more of the small objectives; and after finding multiple objectives you might want to consider which to do first (some might even be mutually exclusive).
Maybe the result would be a big bag o' crap, what do I know. :-) I do think there's a better solution somewhere in the design space, compared to what they released.
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I wouldn't place Crysis Warhead in the same league as GoW2. Warhead, for what it's worth, while pretty linear, also happened to have level design that allowed, for the most part, for multiple approaches to every scenario. Not the mine/frost/train levels mind you, but, say, the first few and the last levels.
On the other hand, even in co-op, I could hardly bring myself to enjoy GoW2 because the whole game, from start to end felt like that train ride level from Warhead. It's just linear to the point of annoying me and making me ignore any merits it might have, while in Warhead, the linear levels felt just like a change of pace. -
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I think it varies depending on the game. There could be a central location to get missions, you could be told about a mission and figure out where to go, etc. I don't think marking things on a map is necessarily bad either, it just sort of feels like a way to artificially extend a game. Like even in GTA4 you get map locations, you go to one, and then you get a mission and are told where to go for that mission. I don't think it's a bad method of making a game, the issue (for me at least) is that open world games tend to be almost artificially open. Crackdown is the only recent example I can think of where you are pretty much just told "go kill these guys" and then it's up to you to figure it out.
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The only game that can live up to DX/Thief/SS2 standards of non-handholding in SP games today is probably the STALKER series. Which I love for precisely that reason: no handholding at all, just you, a hostile environment and a pistol with a bunch of bullets. Everything else you get to figure out by yourself.
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Back then, developers could do what they wanted, now their moneyhatted publishers tell them what to do.
Ever watch the credits (payroll list) that roll at the end of games these days? The deveoper accounts for maybe 50-150 of the names in the credits, while it looks like the other 1000+ paychecks go to middlemen.
Who's wearing the pants again? -
I really wish there was a "Novice mode" switch that you could turn off, and then a number of things like HUD hints, dialogue hints, quicktime-event hints, and objective hints would be disabled. I'd like it to be separate from the skill level selected, as there are many veterans who want a cakewalk through a game, as well as beginners who may want to start at the hardest difficulty and work down.
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My main complaint about Bioshock was less about highlighting(you could turn that off, at least on the PC version), but rather that you just had so much ADAM, so many plasmid slots that it was impossible to choose something wrong. You just chose everything in the game at the same time! It felt like if you had three times the normal amount of cybermodules in SS2, or like if you could pick every augmentation at the same time in Deus Ex. And that was on Hard.
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The trade-off here from a design standpoint would be (I'd think) that you create a lot of content ... odds are that most people won't play through your game, or even play it all the way through in the first place. So, should you make it all accessible in one playthrough?
I finish most games that I buy, but I don't think that reflects the general state of the gaming population. Deus Ex was a fairly long game, and a very long game by modern console game length standards. I played Deus Ex three times, and it was only on the third playthrough that I felt like I'd experienced everything that the game had to offer.
Just something to ponder...-
You wouldn't need to create a lot of content to add heavy specializations to Bioshock. You just would need to jack up ADAM prices and change the levelling structure.
Obviously, not having to put any thought into replayability is something that makes the designers' job easier, but it doesn't make it right. And it's always fun to chat with your friends about those kinds of games, and learn that you completed the same level in a completely, utterly different way than the other guy. The last game like that for me was probably Crysis.
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The best thing about the demo is that it truly gives you the feeling of being the badass within a movie, far better than any other game I've played in that regard. Sure, in Quake 2 I feel like a badass with my SSG, but the main difference is that here you also feel like you are within a movie. And it's simply fantastic! Might be a bit linear etc (see points of PenicilliinX57) but I don't think you can easily merge sandbox and movie - at least not in the it's iteration. To achieve the movie main character feeling, I think scripting is pretty much a prerequisite for now.