Shpeshal Nick
aka Collingwood
Son of a
Really?
Mario Kart games made this incredibly obvious.
Mario Kart 64 was the moment I knew.
Son of a
Lots of neat tricks to make the player feel better.
Reminds me of DMC3 where enemies never start an attack offscreen, so no cheap shots. Or how you're invulnerable until the peak of your jump it roll, to give you the feeling of barely escaping.
DMC4 does that as well, as I recall. It's smart design. More action games should have taken the hint.
On the "random numbers that lie" front, modern Fire Emblem games flat out lie about their chances to hit.
A 90% chance is not 90% chance to hit. It's about 98%. It's called True Hit and essentially the game rolls for accuracy twice and takes the average of the two rolls. Meaning numbers higher than 50% get inflated and numbers lower than that get deflated. (Exactly 50% is not a lie, though.) So do take those 80% (~92%) rolls, but avoid taking 20% (~8%) rolls.
Note that this affects both player characters and enemies, and Critical Hit chances are exactly what they say. It's only actually hitting the enemy that's lied about.
For the time I always liked the AI in Goldeneye and Perfect Dark. Especially the bots in Perfect Dark. Low level ones acted like they didn't know where you are while the last two difficulties would go right for you immediately as you spawned. The only thing they never really adjusted for in any difficulty was their ability to use melee/some secondary effects which they just couldn't handle and their near god like use of the lowly grenade launcher. Even the scrubbiest AI knew exactly how to bounce shots to get you every time.
Really?
Mario Kart games made this incredibly obvious.
Mario Kart 64 was the moment I knew.
@FarbsMcFarbs
Every time you open a container in BioShock the game looks at your inventory and fills the container with what it thinks you need.
I wish Monster Hunter did that
Yup. Hated the gold mushroom, couldn't even dump it.I'm really staggered people are shocked at the "turbo doesn't actually give a real speed boost" thing.
This is why my friends and I used to spam the fuck out of the golden mushroom in Mario Kart 64. We figured out the speed boost was effectively negligible so the only way actually make any progress was to spam the ever loving fuck out of it.
I wish Monster Hunter did that
DMC4 does that as well, as I recall. It's smart design. More action games should have taken the hint.
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!
Really?
Mario Kart games made this incredibly obvious.
Mario Kart 64 was the moment I knew.
Enemies in games don't detect things the way humans do. There's no real analog to deriving visual information from a 2D projection of a game world and then contextualizing it, the way people see things on a computer monitor and then react to it.
In other words, AI generally directly pulls player state information (position, etc) then decides what to do with it. Or, in other words, enemies in games are generally all omniscient to begin with, and then crippled in various ways by their algorithms. (e.g. is a player entity in LOS, etc)
Granted, something like a singular, more significant enemy like in Alien Isolation probably has more complex routines than cannon fodder, but yeah.
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.
I'm really staggered people are shocked at the "turbo doesn't actually give a real speed boost" thing.
This is why my friends and I used to spam the fuck out of the golden mushroom in Mario Kart 64. We figured out the speed boost was effectively negligible so the only way actually make any progress was to spam the ever loving fuck out of it.
Ooh, this one's hot!
"The Suikoden's world map is made to not frustrate players. If players walk in a straight line, less enemies will appear, bc they're clearly Trying to go SOMEWHERE and don't want to waste time. If players zig-zag around, more enemies will attack, to help them grind."
Yep. It's not just Halo 2 either. I've been asked that in quite a few games.
for a thread of praise i have to drop a line as an indie dev and a >>>compentent<<< video game player i notice all of these and they patronize me really hard and its a good way to buy your game a steam refund because i'm not a moron
e: the fat majority of these are designed to solve problems with shooting games and fps which are boring to the core because they can't actually offer the player a real challenge and have to resort to this AAA level fake gameplay garbage
I always wondered if enemy AI were just recordings done by the developers playing as the enemy? Is that true at all?
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.
for a thread of praise i have to drop a line as an indie dev and a >>>compentent<<< video game player i notice all of these and they patronize me really hard and its a good way to buy your game a steam refund because i'm not a moron
e: the fat majority of these are designed to solve problems with shooting games and fps which are boring to the core because they can't actually offer the player a real challenge and have to resort to this AAA level fake gameplay garbage
I can't look it up at the moment but the guy who did the Battletoads arcade game admitted that the last boss didn't actually take any damage (no matter how much you shot at him) for the first few minutes or so of the fight, just so it would suck more quarters out of you.
Whoa, awesome.Ooh, this one's hot!
"The Suikoden's world map is made to not frustrate players. If players walk in a straight line, less enemies will appear, bc they're clearly Trying to go SOMEWHERE and don't want to waste time. If players zig-zag around, more enemies will attack, to help them grind."
Except it kinda wasn't.
A lot of the criticisms thrown at Isolation had to do with the AI obviously knowing where you are at times. You can definitely feel the gears turning in the background. The double AI thing doesn't feel very hidden.
for a thread of praise i have to drop a line as an indie dev and a >>>compentent<<< video game player i notice all of these and they patronize me really hard and its a good way to buy your game a steam refund because i'm not a moron
e: the fat majority of these are designed to solve problems with shooting games and fps which are boring to the core because they can't actually offer the player a real challenge and have to resort to this AAA level fake gameplay garbage
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.
This is really obvious in arcade racers with a speedometer; you hit the boost and get the nice motion blur and fisheye effect but only go like 10MPH faster than top speed. Boost tends to be most effective at low speeds, since it increases acceleration and lets you reach top speed much earlier.Son of a