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[Erheller]

I really wish developer's wouldn't like about the hit chances or obfuscate. Gets real old in X-Com.

The issue is that if you give the player real hit rates, they start complaining about the hit rates being rigged. Heck, it still happens when the game gives the player small bonuses (check out the XCOM OT's). If you're concerned that the game is being made too easy for you, XCOM 2 has mods that can disable that completely. The highest difficulty setting also gets rid of the small bonuses you get on lower difficulties. If you think that the game is cheating against you and making the game harder, well, that doesn't actually happen.

To reiterate, the modern XCOM games do cheat in your favor on hit rolls on difficulty levels below the highest. They never cheat against on hit rolls. (Enemy patrols, however, are a different story)

 

[UnemployedVillain]

I really wish developer's wouldn't like about the hit chances or obfuscate. Gets real old in X-Com.

Why? You guys would just complain. In most cases RNG is manipulated for the player's advantage

 

[Sarcasm]

What mechanic is being talked about exactly?


https://mobile.twitter.com/D3stiny_Sm4sher/status/904154924413362177

 

[Falk]

Sort of similar, a designer friend of mine tells a story (that is true) that goes like this:

A dev team making a racing game had an executive/publisher type come in to try the game. After playing, he told them the game felt too slow.

Instead of changing the cars speed, they changed the car's color to a bright red. They then told the executive they tweaked things, but didn't tell the executive what changes they made.

The guy came back the next day and said it felt much faster, and felt like a great racing game.

Let me tell you about the magic of The Producer Button.

 

[Skelter]

Damn, that xenomorph one is incredible.

 

[opticalmace]

Let me tell you about the magic of The Producer Button.

Now I'm curious, what's the story here?

 

[SatelliteOfLove]

Why? You guys would just complain. In most cases RNG is manipulated for the player's advantage

Can't be quoted enough:

"...so then for the hard modes we had multiple grenades fly in the instant you were in cover..."



Hence the reasoning for these mulligans.

Meier goes into this alot; it's clearly a huge influence in testing for Firaxis.

 

[SMOK3Y]

I remember years ago reading about how during playtesting for the original Borderlands, one of the complaints was that the characters moved too slowly. What they ended up doing was adding more graphical objects and textures to the open areas like small rocks and vegetation so to give a better visual feeling of movement as they scroll towards and past the player character.
They gave the game back to the playtesters and they claimed it was much better!

Its same in real life if you floor it in a car on an open road it dont feel fast like if you do it in a built up area with everything flying past

 

[score01]

Son of a

It's very noticeable in some games like every Mario kart since N64. Hated the effect. The SNES version did it right.

 

[FyreWulff]

In first person games you can make the player feel like they're moving faster just by expanding the FOV and not touching anything else.

A lot of games adjust the FOV in real time while sprinting to make the sprint feel even faster.


A lot of games have enemies shoot just past you or in front of you to make you feel like you're under fire but you're in less danger than you actually are to give the feel of being in a battle.

Long tunnels in video games will often have a hill either natural or made out of destroyed objects halfway through them to hide loading in the rest of the level on the other side. In fact, a lot of 'open' games, any hill or valley you see is often a load zone trigger, intentionally. In Halo 3, the tunnel between the Brute chopper battle and the Cruiser slipspacing over you in Tsavo Highway is an example of this technique, but it's damn near in every game.


This is also why you'll often see this hallway in damn near every 3D game with buildings of some sort:

because it makes the player feel like they were able to walk right into an area, but the developer is just making you walk around a forced loading hallway that appears like an open entrance. Seriously, pretty much any 3D game with transitions has this hallway in it on every console generation starting with PS/N64 up to and including current ones. I call it the vestibull (vestibule + bullshit) (in a loving way) . Even if it's not used to load an area, they still use it to separate visibility portals so that they can give the interior space more graphical density.

 

[Lo_Fi]

What mechanic is being talked about exactly?


https://mobile.twitter.com/D3stiny_Sm4sher/status/904154924413362177

At the beginning of Hellblade, the game says that if you die too many times, your save gets deleted. This was a public thing they announced before the game came out, if I remember correctly.

It's a lie.

But the game lies to you a lot to make you feel unsettled/like you can't trust it, from what I hear. And this specific thing was also to make you feel more tension when in combat.

 

[StoppedInTracks]

"first shot of every enemy misses on purpouse"

"last bit of your health is actually more health than it is displayed"

"last bullet of your gun does double damage"

"if being flanked by 2+ enemies only 2 of them will interact with you"

WAT

If the Souls series did ANY of this SHIT I am officially DONE with gaming.

 

[daevious]

"first shot of every enemy misses on purpouse"

"last bit of your health is actually more health than it is displayed"

"last bullet of your gun does double damage"

"if being flanked by 2+ enemies only 2 of them will interact with you"

WAT

If the Souls series did ANY of this SHIT I am officially DONE with gaming.

It probably has because all of those are good game design choices, and the Souls series certainly follows in the modern tradition of "secretly roll things in the players favour despite telling them otherwise".

 

[Interficium]

I really wish developer's wouldn't lie

If the Souls series did ANY of this SHIT I am officially DONE with gaming.

is there a hidden trick to keep gamers from turning any cool reveal of previously-unknown information (most if not all of which were designed to benefit the player experience) into a negative "devs lied" conversation

 

[Falk]

Now I'm curious, what's the story here?

Ongoing/in-joke in the music recording/production business where a client in studio will ask for something (often to make something "punchier" which is the stupidest, most non-descriptive term ever) and a trick is to hit an important looking button that does nothing then play the material again and ask how it sounds now.

Spoiler

I've been guilty of this

Spoiler

by changing just the filename of a bounce to bump a version number and resending it

Spoiler

please don't fire me

 

[KHlover]

"first shot of every enemy misses on purpouse"

"last bit of your health is actually more health than it is displayed"

"last bullet of your gun does double damage"

"if being flanked by 2+ enemies only 2 of them will interact with you"

WAT

If the Souls series did ANY of this SHIT I am officially DONE with gaming.

Pretty sure enemies in Souls games will attack less frequently and lose aggro pretty fast when they're off-camera, you wouldn't be able to sprint from bonfire to bonfire so easily otherwise.

 

[KittenMaster]

"first shot of every enemy misses on purpouse"

"last bit of your health is actually more health than it is displayed"

"last bullet of your gun does double damage"

"if being flanked by 2+ enemies only 2 of them will interact with you"

WAT

If the Souls series did ANY of this SHIT I am officially DONE with gaming.

Souls games other than 2 do have a little bit of AI forgiveness in it, where you can control what enemies aggro and they move in ways to make sure they don't clump together immediately. I noticed this behavior, because, well, Dark Souls 2 doesn't have it.

Pretty sure enemies in Souls games will attack less frequently and lose aggro pretty fast when they're off-camera, you wouldn't be able to sprint from bonfire to bonfire so easily otherwise.

This too. I think it's also to keep enemies from entering other areas where other enemies could be and causing too much happening at once (I assume for both gameplay and technical reasons).

 

[Ultimadrago]

Ongoing/in-joke in the music recording/production business where a client in studio will ask for something (often to make something "punchier" which is the stupidest, most non-descriptive term ever) and a trick is to hit an important looking button that does nothing then play the material again and ask how it sounds now.

Spoiler

I've been guilty of this

Spoiler

by changing just the filename of a bounce to bump a version number and resending it

Spoiler

please don't fire me

Give it more oomph.

 

[FyreWulff]

is there a hidden trick to keep gamers from turning any cool reveal of previously-unknown information (most if not all of which were designed to benefit the player experience) into a negative "devs lied" conversation

people are weird sometimes

pretty much every successful game 'fudges reality' in some way or another somewhere. Raw inputs and outputs are hardly ever used and would play very rough/badly.

 

[IcyRhythms]

Shouldn't have read some of these. Immersion broken.

 

[Auto-Reply]

The Alien Isolation one was obvious af, to the point where it just annoyed me so much I quit and didn't bother going back. Did anyone who played this genuinely think the AI was in any way intelligent? Cautious play style in that game, which surely is the point, completely exposed the inner workings.

The point was more that the alien wouldn't wander completely off path, which would result in a strange experience for the player. Most people got the feeling early on that the alien would always be around where you are but that didn't mean that you could predict how exactly it was patroulling the environment and that was the important thing, not that it would actually feel like the behaviour of a real alien/animal, I doubt most people would even like the game if that was actually the case when te thing dozes off somewhere in a corner and you play the entire game without ever seeing an alien.

 

[EatChildren]

WAT

If the Souls series did ANY of this SHIT I am officially DONE with gaming.

Games are nothing but illusions.

 

[Auto-Reply]

Ongoing/in-joke in the music recording/production business where a client in studio will ask for something (often to make something "punchier" which is the stupidest, most non-descriptive term ever) and a trick is to hit an important looking button that does nothing then play the material again and ask how it sounds now.

Spoiler

I've been guilty of this

Spoiler

by changing just the filename of a bounce to bump a version number and resending it

Spoiler

please don't fire me

Spoiler

I know that from image editng/designing.
"Can you make the sky look even more dramatic, just a touch"
"The faces need a touch more red without looking visibly red!" etc

I showed them the same image "That's it, perfect!"

 

[redcrayon]

I'm pretty sure a few RPGs with random encounters did this. Remember how I walked a straight line because it felt like it triggers less fights.

That's one thing i love about the Trails games- the roads have magical lampposts that are designed in-universe to keep monsters away, so traders and travellers that stick to the path are generally safe, and adventurers looking to grind just need to step off the path.

 

[shawnbuddy]

I feel like the lack of "coyote time" style tricks is why Crash Bandicoot is so hard. There ain't no pity.

That one about FEAR's AI dialogue was interesting. I believe Half Life's Marines did stuff like that. Like they would yell "he's over there, flank him!" even though the AI couldn't actually do it. They said it to increase tension and keep the player on their toes.

The FEAR AI was definitely more aware than the Half Life AI. One of my biggest slack-jawed gaming moments ever was hiding behind a pipe, hearing one NPC call out to another, "He's hiding behind the pipe!" and having them come after me.

I think the thing where after you fail a couple times the AI dumbs itself down and lets you win seems to happen in a lot of games, because I notice it a lot and I hate it. It's maybe just a glitch and not intentional, but Mass Effect: Andromeda had the worst version of this. If you got ganked a couple of times trying to get to one of the minor objectives or treasures on the world maps, sometimes when you reloaded it the enemies there would just be gone and you could walk over and take it. Those are the hardest fights in the game, because there's often no effective cover on your approach and it's a cover-based shooter, so I died a lot on those.

 

[Apathy]

Let me tell you about the magic of The Producer Button.

Basically make the exec think he had some hand in changing the product and they'll be satisfied

 

[Boy Wander]

"first shot of every enemy misses on purpouse"

"last bit of your health is actually more health than it is displayed"

"last bullet of your gun does double damage"

"if being flanked by 2+ enemies only 2 of them will interact with you"

WAT

If the Souls series did ANY of this SHIT I am officially DONE with gaming.

Basically you're nowhere near as good at games as you thought you were.

 

[SoulUnison]

I really wish developer's wouldn't lie about the hit chances or obfuscate. Gets real old in X-Com.

Yeah, it flies directly in the face of feeling like you're making tactical decisions and weighing your odds.

 

[Sesha]

What mechanic is being talked about exactly?


https://mobile.twitter.com/D3stiny_Sm4sher/status/904154924413362177

Hellblade supposedly has a permadeath mechanic. Senua is cursed with darkrot, which appears as marks on her arm, and will get worse with every death. Die many enough times, and the game will quit you to the menu and delete your save.

However there's been some confusion whether the permadeath actually happens or not.

 

[Tempy]

Levine's addition is great - in Bioshock, the first shot an enemy fires will always miss.

I believe this is a pretty common practice. It's to give players an advance warning that an AI has spotted you - other methods are for the AI to yell out alerts. The reasoning is that players really hate getting shot at by enemies they didn't see. Especially in single player games where you only have one set of eyes and can't rely on teammates to cover all angles. Follow-up shots will increasingly have reduced firing angles.

 

[Lork]

"last bit of your health is actually more health than it is displayed"

WAT

If the Souls series did ANY of this SHIT I am officially DONE with gaming.

I'm 90% sure they do this for both you and the AI. Consider how many times you've seen an enemy miraculously survive an attack and scrape by with a completely empty health bar. If you're like me and a friend who noticed this independently, it has happened often enough that you might conclude that there must be some sort of overkill threshold under which a character will always survive a killing blow with 1 hp.

 

[FyreWulff]

Aim assist/friction in most FPS these days also prioritizes what it deems is the most relevant threat to you if you're aiming near a bunch of enemies/players at once

 

[Booker Dewitt]

Wonder what are the cheats in Mario + Rabbids to be honest, I'm at world 2-7 with predominately perfect ratings. I'd be foolish to believe that some of the last couple of chapters are not giving me a bit of a easy ride since I've made straight up mistakes in movement because of the games lack of confirmation.

 

[StayDead]

Spoiler

I know that from image editng/designing.
"Can you make the sky look even more dramatic, just a touch"
"The faces need a touch more red without looking visibly red!" etc

I showed them the same image "That's it, perfect!"

This is incredible. What on earth!

 

[UnNamed]

Totally random.

 

[Banana Aeon]

I'm 90% sure they do this for both you and the AI. Consider how many times you've seen an enemy miraculously survive an attack and scrape by with a completely empty health bar. If you're like me and a friend who noticed this independently, it has happened often enough that you might conclude that there must be some sort of overkill threshold under which a character will always survive a killing blow with 1 hp.

I'm pretty confident that there's an overkill threshold in the game. The AI not doing anything off camera is super obvious tho.

 

[TheRazielim]

This dawned me when I saw the lootbox drop percentage in Rainbow Six: Siege. Who's to tell that 25% chance of getting a lootbox is actually 25%? I'd be surprised if in any such lootbox featuring game, the % chance you are told is the real deal.

 

[Arozay]

(Not actual hidden trick)

 

[napata]

I'm 90% sure they do this for both you and the AI. Consider how many times you've seen an enemy miraculously survive an attack and scrape by with a completely empty health bar. If you're like me and a friend who noticed this independently, it has happened often enough that you might conclude that there must be some sort of overkill threshold under which a character will always survive a killing blow with 1 hp.

I don't think I've ever noticed this. I've played trough all Souls games multiple times and what you're describing is very rare. I'm pretty sure enemies have fixed HP while weapons always do the same amount of damage if nothing else changes.

 

[Osiris]

Ongoing/in-joke in the music recording/production business where a client in studio will ask for something (often to make something "punchier" which is the stupidest, most non-descriptive term ever) and a trick is to hit an important looking button that does nothing then play the material again and ask how it sounds now.

Spoiler

I've been guilty of this

Spoiler

by changing just the filename of a bounce to bump a version number and resending it

Spoiler

please don't fire me

One of the earliest stories I remember about this is 10CC's engineer / producer, got fed up with the band making foolish choices during mixdown and went to the trouble of having a whole pot added to his desk channels marked "MB", and started to have the band add more "MB" to the mix rather than changing other parameters on the desk when they felt the need to have input on the mix.

MB was of course a placebo pot, connected to nothing. MB stood for "More Better".

As a live engineer I don't even need the pot, when an artist asks for some things sometimes, I'll motion as if I've changed something and change nothing, the usual response is something along the lines of "That's it!, perfect".

 

[Sande]

Why? You guys would just complain. In most cases RNG is manipulated for the player's advantage

I can't speak for others but I'd like to be able to make an informed decision based on the real probability. I know missing a high % hit feels bad, but it's still better than not even knowing the actual numbers.

Pretty sure enemies in Souls games will attack less frequently and lose aggro pretty fast when they're off-camera, you wouldn't be able to sprint from bonfire to bonfire so easily otherwise.

Enemies are slow and have a short aggro range (and small areas they literally cannot exit). I really doubt it has anything to do with your FOV. Overall with Souls games it mostly feels like what you see is what you get.

I'm 90% sure they do this for both you and the AI. Consider how many times you've seen an enemy miraculously survive an attack and scrape by with a completely empty health bar. If you're like me and a friend who noticed this independently, it has happened often enough that you might conclude that there must be some sort of overkill threshold under which a character will always survive a killing blow with 1 hp.

I'm almost certain there's no such thing. I've never noticed a hit doing less damage just because the enemy was low health. Sometimes the numbers just line up and they're left with something like 2 hp.

The AI not doing anything off camera is super obvious tho.

Except hit you in the back if given the chance? Again this comes at least mostly down to the short aggro ranges. You turn your back to an aggro'd enemy and they come lunging.

 

[orava]

It's all just one big lie!

 

[StoppedInTracks]

I'm 90% sure they do this for both you and the AI. Consider how many times you've seen an enemy miraculously survive an attack and scrape by with a completely empty health bar. If you're like me and a friend who noticed this independently, it has happened often enough that you might conclude that there must be some sort of overkill threshold under which a character will always survive a killing blow with 1 hp.

I really, really doubt is as this would have been noticed immediately by guys like Iron Pineapple/ Limit Breakers etc. and there would be a Twitch/ YT shitstorm about it.

Basically you're nowhere near as good at games as you thought you were.

:'(

 

[FlutterPuffs]

Those who think Dark Souls doesn't 'cheat' to give you a slightly easier time, can I remind you for the invincibility frames during a roll.

 

[KittenMaster]

Monster Hunter games have a panic dive that happens when you're running away from a monster with your weapon sheathed. Instead of doing a normal evasive roll, it makes the character do a seemingly useless slow moving dive into the air but in reality actually has the most time of invulnerability of any evasive move which allows "close calls" to happen during moments the player feels unsafe.

Most of the MH games also inflate the attack values of slower weapons to advertise them as having stronger hitting moves to compensate for their lack of speed. This multiplier is never used for actual damage calculation, it only exists to prevent weapons like the Great Sword from seeming weaker than they actually are at first glance. The actual multiplier is based on the move being used and varies as a result.

I don't think this has been mentioned yet, but many old games with high scores would add zeroes to the end of the scores to make it seem like you're getting a higher score than you actually are.

 

[TheRazielim]

Those who think Dark Souls doesn't 'cheat' to give you a slightly easier time, can I remind you for the invincibility frames during a roll.

It's not really cheating though, you get a feel for what's permissible pretty fast. None of this shit is secret.

 

[NaDannMaGoGo]

I dislike the idea of intentionally displaying wrong percentages for hit accuracy and such because this doesn't just affect the players' experience with your own game but also all similar ones.

When you play a game where 80% hit chance is actually 95% and then play a game where the chance is as shown, you'll perceive the second game to be unfair and worse. So, kinda like beauty magazines have escalated the idea of what a beautiful person looks like, you can no longer display the actual, real hit chances because you'd deviate from the standard number fudging that people have become accustomed to.

And of course, it negatively affects actually strategizing and number crunching when you're shown inaccurate information. One way to alleviate at least some of the perceived unfairness from actually accurate calculations would be to keep stats so that the player can at least look up and see "oh well, I did actually hit 90% of the time at this range" or sth along the lines. That still won't help as much because not hitting at 80%+ will always feel like bullshit in a players mind at first but at least you're being honest with your players and avoid potentially affecting other games negatively as described above.

Of course, most developers won't care as long as their game feels empowering and 'fair' compared to the others and if very few players know about the number fudging the userbase at large can keep feeling better about their aided odds at theoretically no cost.

 

[Zvonimir Boban]

Time to load up Surgeon Simulator

 

[Falk]

I dislike the idea of intentionally displaying wrong percentages for hit accuracy and such because this doesn't just affect the players' experience with your own game but also all similar ones.

When you play a game where 80% hit chance is actually 95% and then play a game where the chance is as shown, you'll perceive the second game to be unfair and worse. So, kinda like beauty magazines have escalated the idea of what a beautiful person looks like, you can no longer display the actual, real hit chances because you'd deviate from the standard number fudging that people have become accustomed to.

And of course, it negatively affects actually strategizing and number crunching when you're shown inaccurate information. One way to alleviate at least some of the perceived unfairness from actually accurate calculations would be to keep stats so that the player can at least look up and see "oh well, I did actually hit 90% of the time at this range" or sth along the lines. That still won't help as much because not hitting at 80%+ will always feel like bullshit in a players mind at first but at least you're being honest with your players and avoid potentially affecting other games negatively as described above.

Of course, most developers won't care as long as their game feels empowering and 'fair' compared to the others and if very few players know about the number fudging the userbase at large can keep feeling better about their aided odds at theoretically no cost.

I honestly agree with everything about this post. Obfuscated mechanics that enhance the experience are one thing, but when it's literal discrete numbers shown on screen that aren't correct, this goes against hard number crunching; it's deceptive at best and a slippery slope of shitting the pool in general at worst.

Granted, stuff like this generally gets documented by the people to whom it matters, anyway, so it's a self-correcting problem.

 

[PhantomThief]

One of my favourite episodes of Game Makers Toolkit covers the auto difficulty scaling from Resident Evil 4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFv6KAdQ5SE
Or more importantly, it covers how the game did it and didn't tell you.

I really enjoy Mark Browns stuff, give him a watch if you guys haven't already.

Man... watching this just makes me want to buy RE4 for PS4..even if I already own it twice :x.