Fallout 4 combat analysis and critique
Posted: 22 Dec 2016 03:21 PM PST
DISCLAIMER: this is incredibly lengthy, sort of annoying to read and I'm not at all sure whether this is an appropriate post for the subreddit. But it's the seemingly best place I found after looking around a bit, so here it is. I've been having a lot of thoughts while playing Fallout 4 lately that I felt like getting out. It's, obviously, about the game's combat and why I feel like it's good enough to be worth taking seriously but also suffering from some notable problems holding it back from really being mechanically satisfying.
I'm a big fan of watching analyses and critiques by people like Joseph Anderson (Youtube) and while I'm not in a position to make a video, let alone one that would be halfway tolerable to sit through, I've tried to take inspiration from that very methodical and to-the-point type of analysis in how I think about the issue. I'm not even close to being as informed and observant as that and I'm unsure whether most of this actually makes sense so feel free to absolutely rip into the post if you actually go through with reading it. And that's obviously not the most impressive preface but it's something I have to say due to how little confidence I have in all these assertions.
But despite these forward steps the combat still has many flaws that in my opinion prevent it from being a truly satisfying experience. It's still (usually) fun, fast-paced and visceral, but mechanically I feel as though it's average at best. The reason that's a problem is that Bethesda's games have become increasingly -about- the combat. Other gameplay mechanics or story elements like dialogue and skill checks have been removed or greatly simplified. As such, more than ever these games require good combat to remain satisfying and engaging to play, and while Fallout 4's improvements are welcome I feel as though more are still needed.
The main problems with the combat are as follows: recovering from damage/mistakes is handled poorly; enemy design is still often too repetitive and simplistic; the game lacks ways to fully engage with the enemies' mechanics and reliably avoid damage based on player skill; and damage balancing, both incoming and what you dish out, is poorly balanced. I'm going to go over why I believe these areas to be plagued with issues, why it makes the gameplay less engaging than it could otherwise have been, and suggest some potential improvements.
A few more disclaimers: I'm basing the analysis on a standard, gun-wielding character. Not extreme in any sort of way like ultra-fragile, no combat investments resulting in bottom tier damage etc. However, most of the improvements I go over would benefit other combat styles like melee, heavy weapons and explosives. I will briefly touch on melee combat at some point though.
For the purposes of this analysis I will make a key assumption: the VATS system (slow down time, choose body part to target, distance and accuracy determines hit chance, uses Action Points) is completely optional and an alternative, or a complement if that's how you choose to play it, to real-time combat. Its existence is not an excuse for parts of the combat working poorly in real-time. F4 is surprisingly close to being a good, not just serviceable shooter experience and I think it should pursue that path. Regardless, heavily VATS-focused characters should also have a more enjoyable time with proposed changes.
If healing items were scarce then the negative impact of all these problems may be largely alleviated, but unfortunately they're absolutely everywhere. They have the potential to drop from nearly every enemy in the game, they're found as loot, they're buyable in large chunks. At best you might - might - feel strained to maintain healing supplies very early on in the game.
The Survival difficulty mode tries to address the issue in two main ways: healing is extremely slow, and stimpaks apply debuffs. This still doesn't work in my opinion. The slow healing grinds combat to a halt and forces the player to become inactive. At best there may be some skill involved in avoiding further attacks while your health ticks up, but usually easy cover or space to sprint away from melee enemies is available. If not, unavoidable attacks may end up proving more frustrating than fun but I'll get to that later. Either way, in my opinion faster healing is preferable so as not to ruin the flow of combat - limits should be created in other ways, not by forcing the player into lengthy periods of almost total inactivity. The stimpak debuffs aren't severe enough to outright prevent healing spam - it's not "take 3 in a row and you die" or "take 3 in a row and you suffer a massive debuff to speed or a huge health hit", it's "they increase your thirst, so you'll have to drink more, but water is easy to find".
So in my opinion a decent fix would be just that - make healing limited to stimpaks only (maybe with the exception of a few rare items, like Divine Blessings in Dark Souls) and slap an unavoidable cooldown on them. 1 stimpak every 40 seconds or something. Not so long the player risks being forced into boring inactivity, but long enough to make them carefully consider when to heal. The exact balancing would have to be worked out through testing. Another option would be to extend the healing animation but considering it's usually so easy to be out of harm's way for a pause I'm not sure this would accomplish much. Maybe make it a bit longer so that if you get hit it gets interrupted, forcing slightly more thoughtful usage. I'm not sure about limiting the # of stimpaks carried but that's more on the resource management side and becomes less important with other limitations in place. Finally, stimpaks could still carry debuffs but I'm not sure how these should be implemented or if it's a good idea.
For weapon-using enemies, the different weapons and gear they come equipped with don't provide anywhere near as much variety as they could. They're nearly all just minor variations on the same hitscan attack or the same melee strike. Damage naturally varies but this barely changes anything mechanically. You duck behind cover and shoot, most likely taking some damage as you pop out although enemy accuracy is very inconsistent. Or you run and gun, probably having more fun but inevitably taking damage, which the game allows you to shrug off with the cheesy healing system. In either scenario the damage you take is unpredictable, due to the randomness of enemy accuracy, if they were assigned strong or weak weapons, and if they get any headshots on you (2x damage). This again can result in frustration if they randomly land many good shots with strong weapons. There's no reason to not tweak enemy accuracy and damage to be more consistent, and random hitscan headshots with the potential for instant death just shouldn't be a thing in my opinion.
I'll be moving on to the issue of damage avoidance next as it's closely interlinked with the lack of enemy variety. Fix suggestions and ideas on how to do these things better will be touching on both at the same time, so that stuff will come at the end of the third section.
AOE attacks such as explosives, which zone players with the threat of extreme damage, are often weakly telegraphed and the ability to shoot grenades in enemies' hands in VATS before they're tossed at you has been removed for some reason. This is a main culprit for cheap early game deaths. Even well-telegraphed AOE attacks, like the nuke launcher with its shrill whistle, are often dubiously avoidable because it's not easy to tell where the projectile will actually touch down, meaning it's equally unclear where you need to move to be out of the considerable, typically instant kill blast radius. Imagine that an easily identifiable mark on the ground highlighted the to-be ground zero when you hear the whistle. This would be totally unrealistic but mechanically more sound, as the player could make a snap judgment as to the direction and distance required to move to survive.
For melee enemies, the lack of any sort of dodge mechanic means that, without switching to melee yourself, you're all but impotent when melee enemies get close. You stand there and take it or you avoid attacks in the only way possible, by turning around and sprinting (very few enemies can keep up with your speed). This reduces combat to a totally unengaging "shoot, sprint away, turn around and shoot, sprint away" loop. Alternatively, in classic Skyrim fashion you may opt to put bits of terrain between you and the enemy as the AI is usually incapable of moving over it. You then circle around the bit of terrain repeatedly, shooting the hapless enemy until it is dead. It should go without saying that this is as unengaging mechanically as it feels cheap and stupid to execute.
Other issues are that some melee attacks from enemies are poorly telegraphed, striking too quickly to reasonably react to. They would likely be unavoidable either way due to the lack of a dodge but such attacks can still feel especially cheap. Certain projectile attacks are sent out in erratic patterns that may hit or not hit you. Hugging cover and peeking out out for potshots is the optimal way to avoid them, but this is another boring way to fight and a good example of missed potential. Instead, the projectiles could have been made more consistently avoidable based on observation and player skill. There could have been variations that required moving in different ways to avoid. That sort of approach would then have allowed for a fun fight by staying out in the open and dodging each variation as appropriate while striking back. Especially if other enemies are also involved as is often the case.
Secondly, their attacks need to be predictable enough to be avoidable. I think this should be the norm, with very few - weak - attacks straying from it. Currently too many enemies just barrel into you at frantic speeds, strike erratically and very quickly, and I'm pretty sure the hitboxes are sometimes horrendously inaccurate. The absolute worst offender is enemies that automatically pull you into a cutscene where they hit you just for being near them. This is random and unavoidable. It's incredibly annoying and I'm convinced it only exists because it looked cool in the trailer and nobody thought about whether it was actually a good game mechanic. These "cinematic" attacks would be fine if they were tied to a tell and failure to respond properly resulted in the grab attack.
Obviously it would take diligence to design all or nearly attacks in this way but yeah, making good combat does take a lot of work and it would pay off since Fallout 4 spends the vast majority of its time having you fight enemies.
Thirdly, the primary way to avoid these attacks should probably be a new dodge move. Fast lateral movement is usually enough to avoid damage in Fallout 4 because most enemies don't have a lot of tracking (some do, and it should probably be cut since most melee attacks happen so quickly anyway) - the problem is there simply isn't a way to achieve a fast burst of lateral speed in the current game. I'm not sure if any i-frames would be necessary, it's a testing thing I guess. Maybe i-frames could be baked into leveling up melee skills since melee fighters would need them the most. The dodge should use up some action points just like sprinting does to prevent mindless spam. AP need more utility anyway so it's the ideal choice. Having two different versions of the dodge like Witcher 3 - a fast, cheap side-hop and a much longer, costlier roll/dash - might be cool too.
There are already some cool enemies in Fallout 4 but polish is needed. A dodge feature would go a long way toward letting you have fun and engaging bouts with them. But sometimes the game just goes off the rails, like Radscorpions, which are otherwise cool enemies held back by currently unavoidable attacks, starting to spasm out and teleport around. Fairness clearly goes straight out the window when this happens and hopefully Bethesda's next game will have less of this stuff, it's thankfully not overly common.
Imagine first that humans were split up into a more clearly defined mook/elite, then melee/pistol/auto/shotgun/sniper etc. system like many other games do. I think this makes more sense than the system currently in place because it should make it easier to design and define each enemy and create interesting synergies.
The good parts about F4's melee compared to previous Bethesda games are:
- Attacks usually cause staggers on enemies and
- Blocking requires you to time it properly (the block is active for about a second, then there's a "cooldown" for another second or two) but actually blocks out all damage.
Staggers are great because otherwise a melee character has no way of preventing enemies with guns from continuously shooting, instantly making the combat degenerate into mindless spam and cheesy healing. But it's also balanced so you can't chainstun cheese foes, they recover faster than you can strike again. Against other melee enemies this is equally important to prevent Skyrim-esque "two dudes stand and swing in each others' faces until one dies because the other healed from the pause menu" excuses for duels. It should go without saying why timed 100% protection blocks are better than non-timed blocks where considerable damage still seeps through. Maybe a Soulsesque blocking system could work, but AP recovers far slower than stamina.
The main problems with melee combat are:
- No good way of closing gaps reliably,
- Enemy blocking is broken and
- There's not enough attack variety.
For closing gaps I can see at least two options, both of which would probably be good to implement. The first is a very fast, long-range gap closer that costs some action points. It should be able to clear small to moderate sized obstacles in the way too. Bit like the Vanguard's Charge in Mass Effect 2/3. Upon reaching your destination there's no recovery, you can attack immediately, and if you slam into an enemy directly they'll be staggered and take damage. The second is some kind of sci-fi shield for melee players to equip. It completely blocks projectile attacks but gets continuously weakened as it does. Once a certain threshold is hit it no longer works and there's a lengthy cooldown. Lowering and raising it in-between hits lets it recover quicker like your stamina in Dark Souls, so there's a mechanic with some depth to work with. I think these changes would be necessary to make it feel satisfying to fight gun-toting enemies with melee weapons. As it is, you run headfirst into enemy fire because you have no other option, you get stuck on dumb little obstacles, it's really stupid and not mechanically engaging.
Enemy blocking is broken in two ways. First in that it blocks all damage. Always. No matter what. They hold up their bare fists and your overhead power attack from a rocket-powered sledgehammer literally bounces off. This just needs to be tied into some sort of weight and gear system, like: if you wear proper armor you can block light attacks, medium weight ones seep through with light damage, heavy attacks can only be blocked with power armor. This should be the same for the player, easily blocking Behemoths is a bit stupid.
The second way that enemy blocking is broken is that it's random. Sometimes they block and totally shut you down. Sometimes not. There's nothing you can do to coax out a block and then punish, or target below their block, or anything like that. Even if you wait for them to strike, block so they bounce off, their recovery period before they can block is shorter than the time it takes for you to be able to strike. A naked human might die on the first hit because he did nothing or he might stand there and block 10 in a row. This is really annoying but turns into a trainwreck when there are other enemies around and the one you rushed down wastes your time in this ridiculous way. So if you block first that should definitely leave them open. Targeting their vulnerable legs could be a good idea as well even though "aiming" your melee attacks feels a little wonky sometimes.
Attack variety finally needs to increase. The previous game New Vegas already had several moves with unique effects like knockdown, knockback, increased forward momentum, stagger, setting enemies on fire, a combined block+counter etc. so it's dumb that Fallout 4 mostly doesn't. Stuff like this would be good to bring back, it would allow for better block counters and gap closing alongside what was already said. A disarm move would be perfect for letting melee guys go up against firearm users. I also think differences between weapons need to increase. In F4 every light, medium and heavy weapon swing the exact same way (in -every- way) when there could easily have been much more variety with stuff like the speed, momentum, trajectory and so forth.
F4 does have its "legendary" special effects that are randomly assigned to special loot but this matters less than it should in practice, and the most sought after effects are just overpowered (like permastagger) than particularly well balanced and mechanically engaging.
Combine all the above with the same changes to healing, enemies and dodging discussed above and I think a decent melee system should emerge. I don't think it needs to aim for being amazing since I imagine that's very difficult to do within a largely shooter framework.
Poison damage is poorly balanced, it's excessively high on some enemies and you can't use mods or buy certain armor types to resist it. Radiation damage, which is rare, is similar but better thought out since you can use some of the game's many anti-rad tools to resist it, and it's a good tweak on normal damage how it doesn't just take away health but reduces your maximum health with every hit.
Melee attacks balancing is usually okay since these attacks are more avoidable, even if I wish avoiding them was more interesting than it currently is. Finally, "legendary" enemies gain a damage boost when they go into their buff state. This can sometimes cause what would be reasonably balanced situations to deteriorate. The concept of legendary should really just mean something else than buffed stats, but buffing damage is probably worse than buffing health and there's really no need for it.
On the flip side to all this, with sufficient armor and health the player can become far too resistant to incoming damage, to the point that combat loses any sense of danger when combined with the broken healing system - or sometimes, even without any healing at all. Even when Bethesda raises the damage taken multiplier to a very extreme x4, making the balancing atrocious for weaker and early game characters in the process, it still isn't enough to offset the borderline invincibility the player can achieve. To be fair this may be considered a minor issue because it only really happens after many hours of play and at a higher level, but you could simply put an appropriate, much lower cap on health and armor. Presumably that would help balance all numbers easier.
Many enemies, like super mutants, are highly durable (read: bullet sponges) and rely heavily, sometimes near exclusively on this durability to put up any sort of resistance or differentiate themselves from other gun-toters. This sometimes drags combat down to the old level of spamming attacks until their massive health pools finally hit zero. You can't dodge their hitscan attacks so you poke your head out, shoot and hope you don't get hit, but if you do healing is easy so there are neither stakes nor any real skill-based challenge. It's tedious. This can really drag on too if the enemy is a legendary (1.5x effective health) on a high difficulty.
Durability is also why the above-mentioned "shoot, sprint, shoot, sprint" loop exists - it's often the only way to deal with tough melee-only enemies that soak up tons of bullets, like Fog Crawlers, or a particularly bullet-spongey legendary or high level enemy you might end up running into. Since you can't avoid attacks head-on the combat degenerates into mindless juke cheese instead of these miniboss-esque enemies being fun and engaging encounters. There's no value to a bullet spongey ghoul (fast zombie) having 4-5 different melee strikes if they're all equally unavoidable and you either kill it before it comes close or with one of the many flavors of cheese. It's a shame that some really visually cool enemy designs are held back by this issue.
Again on the flip side, it's certainly possible to circumvent all this sponginess by using some of the game's hilariously overpowered weapons and abilities. Some of these can only be found randomly which is sort of okay I guess. It's a very rare, very strong reward which is exciting. But others, like a fast-firing submachine gun that causes an explosion with every hit, can be bought for a moderate sum an hour into the game. This really shouldn't work the way it does. You can avoid the op stuff but that's still a worse option than it being balanced.
Either way the real issue is that if you're using overpowered stuff to counter bloated health bars then you're just back where you started and nothing of value has been added (from a mechanical, action-focused standpoint; there's certainly value in the feeling of progression, even if that progression is kind of a lie). The player has to eventually hunt down this overpowered stuff or get left behind the curve, but they're still doing the same exact thing before and after. Instead, like with armor, Bethesda should have kept numbers lower to make it all more manageable. I don't think this is a huge issue though and I imagine balancing for such an open, massive game is not an easy task, so I won't delve any further into it.
I know I've ignored some things in order to focus on these four core points. Drugs can be horribly broken but I feel like they're separate enough from the core mechanics to not be necessary to discuss here. They're not an integral part of it like the healing system, which is why the latter being broken is a massive problem. Maybe you could argue that I'm missing the point with all this talk of dodging and you're meant to kill enemies before they reach you. But I'd argue that doesn't really make sense. What should be the punishment for them getting close, then? Death? That would certainly put a razor sharp focus on the shooting but it's way too excessive. If not death but not staying in and dodging either, then the options seem to be the ones I've discussed - healing cheese or just running away. And I hope I've made clear why I don't think either option is mechanically engaging, nowhere near as much as staying in close and dodging based on skill and quick decision making anyway.
In any case, thanks again if you made it down here, and feel absolutely free to explain why I might be utterly off the mark - I really just felt like getting my thoughts out there and seeing if I'm nuts or if these problems I'm experiencing while playing the game are pretty legit and my instinctive solutions make some sense.
submitted by /u/Coruscated I'm a big fan of watching analyses and critiques by people like Joseph Anderson (Youtube) and while I'm not in a position to make a video, let alone one that would be halfway tolerable to sit through, I've tried to take inspiration from that very methodical and to-the-point type of analysis in how I think about the issue. I'm not even close to being as informed and observant as that and I'm unsure whether most of this actually makes sense so feel free to absolutely rip into the post if you actually go through with reading it. And that's obviously not the most impressive preface but it's something I have to say due to how little confidence I have in all these assertions.
Opening
Fallout 4 has the best combat of any Bethesda game to date. The improvements over the previous games are numerous and substantial. Movement and attacks are that little bit more responsive. Core features like aiming for guns or blocking for melee weapons has been made more player skill-based rather than depending on player stats and weapon attributes. Enemy designs and AI have been made much more varied, complex and challenging. These enemies are placed into more interesting and varied setpieces and situations than before.But despite these forward steps the combat still has many flaws that in my opinion prevent it from being a truly satisfying experience. It's still (usually) fun, fast-paced and visceral, but mechanically I feel as though it's average at best. The reason that's a problem is that Bethesda's games have become increasingly -about- the combat. Other gameplay mechanics or story elements like dialogue and skill checks have been removed or greatly simplified. As such, more than ever these games require good combat to remain satisfying and engaging to play, and while Fallout 4's improvements are welcome I feel as though more are still needed.
The main problems with the combat are as follows: recovering from damage/mistakes is handled poorly; enemy design is still often too repetitive and simplistic; the game lacks ways to fully engage with the enemies' mechanics and reliably avoid damage based on player skill; and damage balancing, both incoming and what you dish out, is poorly balanced. I'm going to go over why I believe these areas to be plagued with issues, why it makes the gameplay less engaging than it could otherwise have been, and suggest some potential improvements.
A few more disclaimers: I'm basing the analysis on a standard, gun-wielding character. Not extreme in any sort of way like ultra-fragile, no combat investments resulting in bottom tier damage etc. However, most of the improvements I go over would benefit other combat styles like melee, heavy weapons and explosives. I will briefly touch on melee combat at some point though.
For the purposes of this analysis I will make a key assumption: the VATS system (slow down time, choose body part to target, distance and accuracy determines hit chance, uses Action Points) is completely optional and an alternative, or a complement if that's how you choose to play it, to real-time combat. Its existence is not an excuse for parts of the combat working poorly in real-time. F4 is surprisingly close to being a good, not just serviceable shooter experience and I think it should pursue that path. Regardless, heavily VATS-focused characters should also have a more enjoyable time with proposed changes.
1) How mistakes are punished.
The Problem
Put simply, healing is far too easy. You're allowed to open the menu at any time and spam as many healing items as you like while the game is paused. Health thankfully doesn't come back until the game resumes but with the speed and duration of the over-time healing it doesn't matter unless you wait until you're almost dead to heal or an enemy can take all your health in one blow. Stimpaks have a short animation but can otherwise be spammed indefinitely (spamming them from the menu circumvents this too, you get 1 animation for all of them). In power armor they don't have the animation and become even more spammable, which compounds on power armor already providing extreme damage resistance to bring the player even closer to unkillable status.If healing items were scarce then the negative impact of all these problems may be largely alleviated, but unfortunately they're absolutely everywhere. They have the potential to drop from nearly every enemy in the game, they're found as loot, they're buyable in large chunks. At best you might - might - feel strained to maintain healing supplies very early on in the game.
The Survival difficulty mode tries to address the issue in two main ways: healing is extremely slow, and stimpaks apply debuffs. This still doesn't work in my opinion. The slow healing grinds combat to a halt and forces the player to become inactive. At best there may be some skill involved in avoiding further attacks while your health ticks up, but usually easy cover or space to sprint away from melee enemies is available. If not, unavoidable attacks may end up proving more frustrating than fun but I'll get to that later. Either way, in my opinion faster healing is preferable so as not to ruin the flow of combat - limits should be created in other ways, not by forcing the player into lengthy periods of almost total inactivity. The stimpak debuffs aren't severe enough to outright prevent healing spam - it's not "take 3 in a row and you die" or "take 3 in a row and you suffer a massive debuff to speed or a huge health hit", it's "they increase your thirst, so you'll have to drink more, but water is easy to find".
Solutions
The healing system forces the player to limit themselves because actually doing everything you can to stay alive makes the combat a joke. This is only avoided either early on before you have a massive healing stockpile, or otherwise when damage is so high as to kill in only one or two hits - but that (usually) isn't desirable either for reasons I'll get to below. But can self-imposed limitations fix all the problems? You can create your own restrictions - can't use anything but stimpaks for healing; only carry X stimpaks on your person; have to wait Y seconds between each injection. Maybe a balanced healing system can be contrived like that. But such limitations should still have been built into the game's mechanics. This might just be me but it never feels as good when you have to deliberately hold yourself back either. It's like never doing circlestrafe backstabs in Dark Souls - "removes" the problem, sure, but it'd be better if backstabs were an engaging balanced mechanic.So in my opinion a decent fix would be just that - make healing limited to stimpaks only (maybe with the exception of a few rare items, like Divine Blessings in Dark Souls) and slap an unavoidable cooldown on them. 1 stimpak every 40 seconds or something. Not so long the player risks being forced into boring inactivity, but long enough to make them carefully consider when to heal. The exact balancing would have to be worked out through testing. Another option would be to extend the healing animation but considering it's usually so easy to be out of harm's way for a pause I'm not sure this would accomplish much. Maybe make it a bit longer so that if you get hit it gets interrupted, forcing slightly more thoughtful usage. I'm not sure about limiting the # of stimpaks carried but that's more on the resource management side and becomes less important with other limitations in place. Finally, stimpaks could still carry debuffs but I'm not sure how these should be implemented or if it's a good idea.
2) Repetition and simplicity in enemy designs.
The Problem
Too many melee enemies, even when they look drastically different, boil down to rushing at the player and striking or leaping when they get close enough. Sometimes they might have poison damage. This adds little of value since it's really just more damage (with the potential for frustration due to how imbalanced it can be sometimes) that the game doesn't let you either dodge nor strategically prepare for really. Poison could have been handled differently to be a more engaging mechanic instead of just piling on more damage. Like making healing less effective; imposing a temporary penalty to max health; or draining or penalizing action points used for sprints, power attacks etc. I'm not sure any of these are good, mind, but the point is that just more damage is really boring.For weapon-using enemies, the different weapons and gear they come equipped with don't provide anywhere near as much variety as they could. They're nearly all just minor variations on the same hitscan attack or the same melee strike. Damage naturally varies but this barely changes anything mechanically. You duck behind cover and shoot, most likely taking some damage as you pop out although enemy accuracy is very inconsistent. Or you run and gun, probably having more fun but inevitably taking damage, which the game allows you to shrug off with the cheesy healing system. In either scenario the damage you take is unpredictable, due to the randomness of enemy accuracy, if they were assigned strong or weak weapons, and if they get any headshots on you (2x damage). This again can result in frustration if they randomly land many good shots with strong weapons. There's no reason to not tweak enemy accuracy and damage to be more consistent, and random hitscan headshots with the potential for instant death just shouldn't be a thing in my opinion.
A positive example
Some enemies do fare a lot better than others, like the Mirelurk family which is probably the best enemy type in the game. I thought I'd go over why just to showcase what I mean. From strongest to weakest:- Queen has a giant health pool, shoots a spray of high damage poison, does a huge amount of melee damage if you get close, spawns weak minions and moves at a moderate pace.
- King has moderate health, shoots a straightforward sonic attack at range, has poison damage with its melee strikes, can turn invisible (more like translucent), closes distances aggressively and quickly, is small enough to get into cramped spaces and can leap obstacles better than other enemies.
- Hunters have moderate health, shoot a smaller poison spray than the Queen, tend to stay at mid range if you don't approach and move at a moderate pace.
- Plainly named Mirelurks have low to moderate health, a hard carapace forcing you to carefully aim at legs, arms or the small, occasionally exposed head, and employ rushdown tactics into melee strikes.
- Hatchlings die in one hit and do very low damage, but can swarm and nag the player, they spawn from eggs if the player gets too close and the Queen sends them out.
I'll be moving on to the issue of damage avoidance next as it's closely interlinked with the lack of enemy variety. Fix suggestions and ideas on how to do these things better will be touching on both at the same time, so that stuff will come at the end of the third section.
3) Lack of damage avoidance mechanics.
This may be the biggest of the big flaws that holds back Fallout 4's combat system. At times it almost feels like you're -meant- to take hits and then use the cheesy healing system or any of the other overpowered tactics the game allows to brute force through challenges instead of overcoming them with skill. Or on high difficulties when damage can be so high that you die in one or two hitscan hits, constantly stealth and do sneak attacks... in a game where the stealth mechanics are far from stellar.The Problem
Let's go through the different types of damage. You can't dodge hitscan bullets on reaction. There's no ramp-up or tell to enemy attacks that can be reacted to - they fire instantly when you're in LOS whether it's a weak pistol shot for minor damage or a potentially deadly headshot from a sniper rifle.AOE attacks such as explosives, which zone players with the threat of extreme damage, are often weakly telegraphed and the ability to shoot grenades in enemies' hands in VATS before they're tossed at you has been removed for some reason. This is a main culprit for cheap early game deaths. Even well-telegraphed AOE attacks, like the nuke launcher with its shrill whistle, are often dubiously avoidable because it's not easy to tell where the projectile will actually touch down, meaning it's equally unclear where you need to move to be out of the considerable, typically instant kill blast radius. Imagine that an easily identifiable mark on the ground highlighted the to-be ground zero when you hear the whistle. This would be totally unrealistic but mechanically more sound, as the player could make a snap judgment as to the direction and distance required to move to survive.
For melee enemies, the lack of any sort of dodge mechanic means that, without switching to melee yourself, you're all but impotent when melee enemies get close. You stand there and take it or you avoid attacks in the only way possible, by turning around and sprinting (very few enemies can keep up with your speed). This reduces combat to a totally unengaging "shoot, sprint away, turn around and shoot, sprint away" loop. Alternatively, in classic Skyrim fashion you may opt to put bits of terrain between you and the enemy as the AI is usually incapable of moving over it. You then circle around the bit of terrain repeatedly, shooting the hapless enemy until it is dead. It should go without saying that this is as unengaging mechanically as it feels cheap and stupid to execute.
Other issues are that some melee attacks from enemies are poorly telegraphed, striking too quickly to reasonably react to. They would likely be unavoidable either way due to the lack of a dodge but such attacks can still feel especially cheap. Certain projectile attacks are sent out in erratic patterns that may hit or not hit you. Hugging cover and peeking out out for potshots is the optimal way to avoid them, but this is another boring way to fight and a good example of missed potential. Instead, the projectiles could have been made more consistently avoidable based on observation and player skill. There could have been variations that required moving in different ways to avoid. That sort of approach would then have allowed for a fun fight by staying out in the open and dodging each variation as appropriate while striking back. Especially if other enemies are also involved as is often the case.
Solutions
Melee enemies
For melee enemies in general, the necessary steps are at least three. Firstly, they need more attacks and sometimes maybe new mechanics - some enemies just move straight at you (provided their pathfinding works) with absolutely nothing else going on. This holds back some of the more cool and creative visual designs in the game. I'm not saying they have to be Dark Souls enemies but at least a few basic variations - gap closer, 180 sweep, a "get away from me" thrashing, a "don't stand behind me" attack, a straight poke with good forward momentum etc. I'm not saying they should all be identical either but you get the point.Secondly, their attacks need to be predictable enough to be avoidable. I think this should be the norm, with very few - weak - attacks straying from it. Currently too many enemies just barrel into you at frantic speeds, strike erratically and very quickly, and I'm pretty sure the hitboxes are sometimes horrendously inaccurate. The absolute worst offender is enemies that automatically pull you into a cutscene where they hit you just for being near them. This is random and unavoidable. It's incredibly annoying and I'm convinced it only exists because it looked cool in the trailer and nobody thought about whether it was actually a good game mechanic. These "cinematic" attacks would be fine if they were tied to a tell and failure to respond properly resulted in the grab attack.
Obviously it would take diligence to design all or nearly attacks in this way but yeah, making good combat does take a lot of work and it would pay off since Fallout 4 spends the vast majority of its time having you fight enemies.
Thirdly, the primary way to avoid these attacks should probably be a new dodge move. Fast lateral movement is usually enough to avoid damage in Fallout 4 because most enemies don't have a lot of tracking (some do, and it should probably be cut since most melee attacks happen so quickly anyway) - the problem is there simply isn't a way to achieve a fast burst of lateral speed in the current game. I'm not sure if any i-frames would be necessary, it's a testing thing I guess. Maybe i-frames could be baked into leveling up melee skills since melee fighters would need them the most. The dodge should use up some action points just like sprinting does to prevent mindless spam. AP need more utility anyway so it's the ideal choice. Having two different versions of the dodge like Witcher 3 - a fast, cheap side-hop and a much longer, costlier roll/dash - might be cool too.
There are already some cool enemies in Fallout 4 but polish is needed. A dodge feature would go a long way toward letting you have fun and engaging bouts with them. But sometimes the game just goes off the rails, like Radscorpions, which are otherwise cool enemies held back by currently unavoidable attacks, starting to spasm out and teleport around. Fairness clearly goes straight out the window when this happens and hopefully Bethesda's next game will have less of this stuff, it's thankfully not overly common.
Ranged/mixed enemies
It's not as obvious how to make dudes with regular, kind-of-have-to-be-hitscan guns interesting but let's try anyway. These are extremely common (whether they're humans, robots or bulletspongey mutants) so making them more interesting is pretty damn important, especially with the game's FPS focus.Imagine first that humans were split up into a more clearly defined mook/elite, then melee/pistol/auto/shotgun/sniper etc. system like many other games do. I think this makes more sense than the system currently in place because it should make it easier to design and define each enemy and create interesting synergies.
- Mooks could retain their no tell, hitscan properties when they use projectile weapons like pistols and shoddy rifles. They do low damage and don't ever stagger you, so getting hit isn't that big of a deal. The challenge is not getting swarmed or having them force you into a compromising position so the stronger guys can get you. Weakening them like this could also allow for many more to be active at once which could make for some fun moments of quickly shooting down lots of enemies and keeping the fight more active.
- Elites with sniper type weapons could have a visual and/or audio tell so you could avoid an incoming dangerous hit by reacting quickly, with some 100% reliable ways to avoid it like sprinting perpendicularly, ducking behind cover or timing a sidestrafe with a specific timing in relation to the tell appearing. Since gun-toting enemies very rarely come alone there's still a challenge in doing this while other enemies are active on the field.
- Some weapons like miniguns and gatling lasers already have a ramp-up period - this is good stuff, it forces you to aim very quickly and then duck away which is different. They work well at shutting down areas, forcing more movement and activity from the player, and the enemies that carry them are made near immobile when they fire.
- Missile launchers, grenades, molotovs and the likes are close to okay as they are but more noticeable tells would be ideal since these things are often instant kills. I mentioned earlier that the nuke launcher could give the player a small indication of incoming ground zero. One ridiculous problem is that enemies will often fire nukes and missiles at point blank range. They sometimes pull out other weapons but it's inconsistent. This just needs to go.
- Some projectile weapons in the game - like plasma guns and gamma guns - aren't hitscan but are still too fast to really reliably avoid, especially with several active at once. If they were slowed down a bit they'd be a good addition to the enemy arsenals, especially with a new dodge move in play.
- Some weapons fire a single strong shot, then there's a lengthy reload time. These usually work as follows: you poke your head out and quickly duck away, because there's a small pause before the enemy actually fires. So he'll fire where you were and miss. Now you quickly come out and take aim during his reload period to deal damage safely. This already works pretty much fine although it's punishing for run'n'gunners. Just gotta make sure that little pause always happens and isn't up to chance, since, as said before, massive damage from unavoidable hitscan attacks with no ramp-up time isn't my idea of a good game mechanic.
- Shotgunners are already okay - as you'd expect the challenge is to prevent them from getting close to you since the damage is trivial at range. But sometimes enemies will hilariously sit and camp at a distance and snipe you with shotguns. An AI tweak to make enemies focus almost exclusively on closing in when they are assigned a shotgun might be a solution there, hopefully the pathfinding holds up.
- Finally, high-powered automatic rifles and fast-firing semi auto weapons are the worst balanced weapons in Fallout 4. These have no real drawbacks or weaknesses to exploit. They can do very high damage, fire quickly, are accurate and usually carried by the spongiest enemies. For autos, I believe the solution is to decrease their accuracy, That'd make them similar to shotguns but still a little different since it's a continuous stream of fire, and if several enemies wielding them are active at once it could be dangerous even at range. The high powered semiautos just need to be hit with the nerf gun. Either lower their fire rate or damage greatly, maybe both. These weapons are poorly balanced both for the player and when found in the hands of enemies, resulting in them pushing usage of other weapons away and causing erratic damage spikes.
Problems and solutions for melee combat
Lastly I want to speak about melee combat. Despite the game's transition toward FPShood I think there's a huge amount of value in a robust melee alternative for variety's sake, and I hope Bethesda think so as well.The good parts about F4's melee compared to previous Bethesda games are:
- Attacks usually cause staggers on enemies and
- Blocking requires you to time it properly (the block is active for about a second, then there's a "cooldown" for another second or two) but actually blocks out all damage.
Staggers are great because otherwise a melee character has no way of preventing enemies with guns from continuously shooting, instantly making the combat degenerate into mindless spam and cheesy healing. But it's also balanced so you can't chainstun cheese foes, they recover faster than you can strike again. Against other melee enemies this is equally important to prevent Skyrim-esque "two dudes stand and swing in each others' faces until one dies because the other healed from the pause menu" excuses for duels. It should go without saying why timed 100% protection blocks are better than non-timed blocks where considerable damage still seeps through. Maybe a Soulsesque blocking system could work, but AP recovers far slower than stamina.
The main problems with melee combat are:
- No good way of closing gaps reliably,
- Enemy blocking is broken and
- There's not enough attack variety.
For closing gaps I can see at least two options, both of which would probably be good to implement. The first is a very fast, long-range gap closer that costs some action points. It should be able to clear small to moderate sized obstacles in the way too. Bit like the Vanguard's Charge in Mass Effect 2/3. Upon reaching your destination there's no recovery, you can attack immediately, and if you slam into an enemy directly they'll be staggered and take damage. The second is some kind of sci-fi shield for melee players to equip. It completely blocks projectile attacks but gets continuously weakened as it does. Once a certain threshold is hit it no longer works and there's a lengthy cooldown. Lowering and raising it in-between hits lets it recover quicker like your stamina in Dark Souls, so there's a mechanic with some depth to work with. I think these changes would be necessary to make it feel satisfying to fight gun-toting enemies with melee weapons. As it is, you run headfirst into enemy fire because you have no other option, you get stuck on dumb little obstacles, it's really stupid and not mechanically engaging.
Enemy blocking is broken in two ways. First in that it blocks all damage. Always. No matter what. They hold up their bare fists and your overhead power attack from a rocket-powered sledgehammer literally bounces off. This just needs to be tied into some sort of weight and gear system, like: if you wear proper armor you can block light attacks, medium weight ones seep through with light damage, heavy attacks can only be blocked with power armor. This should be the same for the player, easily blocking Behemoths is a bit stupid.
The second way that enemy blocking is broken is that it's random. Sometimes they block and totally shut you down. Sometimes not. There's nothing you can do to coax out a block and then punish, or target below their block, or anything like that. Even if you wait for them to strike, block so they bounce off, their recovery period before they can block is shorter than the time it takes for you to be able to strike. A naked human might die on the first hit because he did nothing or he might stand there and block 10 in a row. This is really annoying but turns into a trainwreck when there are other enemies around and the one you rushed down wastes your time in this ridiculous way. So if you block first that should definitely leave them open. Targeting their vulnerable legs could be a good idea as well even though "aiming" your melee attacks feels a little wonky sometimes.
Attack variety finally needs to increase. The previous game New Vegas already had several moves with unique effects like knockdown, knockback, increased forward momentum, stagger, setting enemies on fire, a combined block+counter etc. so it's dumb that Fallout 4 mostly doesn't. Stuff like this would be good to bring back, it would allow for better block counters and gap closing alongside what was already said. A disarm move would be perfect for letting melee guys go up against firearm users. I also think differences between weapons need to increase. In F4 every light, medium and heavy weapon swing the exact same way (in -every- way) when there could easily have been much more variety with stuff like the speed, momentum, trajectory and so forth.
F4 does have its "legendary" special effects that are randomly assigned to special loot but this matters less than it should in practice, and the most sought after effects are just overpowered (like permastagger) than particularly well balanced and mechanically engaging.
Combine all the above with the same changes to healing, enemies and dodging discussed above and I think a decent melee system should emerge. I don't think it needs to aim for being amazing since I imagine that's very difficult to do within a largely shooter framework.
4) Damage, both taken and dealt.
This ties in with all the issues mentioned above to create some potentially frustrating or tedious situations. You can't avoid hitscan bullets, so if an enemy, by chance or poor balancing, comes with an unusually strong gun (which you have no way of telling is unusually strong) you can find yourself, due to no real fault of your own, suddenly taking massive damage or even dying outright depending on your chosen difficulty level.Poison damage is poorly balanced, it's excessively high on some enemies and you can't use mods or buy certain armor types to resist it. Radiation damage, which is rare, is similar but better thought out since you can use some of the game's many anti-rad tools to resist it, and it's a good tweak on normal damage how it doesn't just take away health but reduces your maximum health with every hit.
Melee attacks balancing is usually okay since these attacks are more avoidable, even if I wish avoiding them was more interesting than it currently is. Finally, "legendary" enemies gain a damage boost when they go into their buff state. This can sometimes cause what would be reasonably balanced situations to deteriorate. The concept of legendary should really just mean something else than buffed stats, but buffing damage is probably worse than buffing health and there's really no need for it.
On the flip side to all this, with sufficient armor and health the player can become far too resistant to incoming damage, to the point that combat loses any sense of danger when combined with the broken healing system - or sometimes, even without any healing at all. Even when Bethesda raises the damage taken multiplier to a very extreme x4, making the balancing atrocious for weaker and early game characters in the process, it still isn't enough to offset the borderline invincibility the player can achieve. To be fair this may be considered a minor issue because it only really happens after many hours of play and at a higher level, but you could simply put an appropriate, much lower cap on health and armor. Presumably that would help balance all numbers easier.
Many enemies, like super mutants, are highly durable (read: bullet sponges) and rely heavily, sometimes near exclusively on this durability to put up any sort of resistance or differentiate themselves from other gun-toters. This sometimes drags combat down to the old level of spamming attacks until their massive health pools finally hit zero. You can't dodge their hitscan attacks so you poke your head out, shoot and hope you don't get hit, but if you do healing is easy so there are neither stakes nor any real skill-based challenge. It's tedious. This can really drag on too if the enemy is a legendary (1.5x effective health) on a high difficulty.
Durability is also why the above-mentioned "shoot, sprint, shoot, sprint" loop exists - it's often the only way to deal with tough melee-only enemies that soak up tons of bullets, like Fog Crawlers, or a particularly bullet-spongey legendary or high level enemy you might end up running into. Since you can't avoid attacks head-on the combat degenerates into mindless juke cheese instead of these miniboss-esque enemies being fun and engaging encounters. There's no value to a bullet spongey ghoul (fast zombie) having 4-5 different melee strikes if they're all equally unavoidable and you either kill it before it comes close or with one of the many flavors of cheese. It's a shame that some really visually cool enemy designs are held back by this issue.
Again on the flip side, it's certainly possible to circumvent all this sponginess by using some of the game's hilariously overpowered weapons and abilities. Some of these can only be found randomly which is sort of okay I guess. It's a very rare, very strong reward which is exciting. But others, like a fast-firing submachine gun that causes an explosion with every hit, can be bought for a moderate sum an hour into the game. This really shouldn't work the way it does. You can avoid the op stuff but that's still a worse option than it being balanced.
Either way the real issue is that if you're using overpowered stuff to counter bloated health bars then you're just back where you started and nothing of value has been added (from a mechanical, action-focused standpoint; there's certainly value in the feeling of progression, even if that progression is kind of a lie). The player has to eventually hunt down this overpowered stuff or get left behind the curve, but they're still doing the same exact thing before and after. Instead, like with armor, Bethesda should have kept numbers lower to make it all more manageable. I don't think this is a huge issue though and I imagine balancing for such an open, massive game is not an easy task, so I won't delve any further into it.
Closing
If you actually read all this then I'm both surprised and thankful. I hope the content in the text is enough to spur some discussion in case the topic feels interesting enough to someone else. I'm sure I've got plenty of things wrong and there are important points I've missed. Am I right about damage needing to be much more avoidable for the combat to become mechanically engaging? Is the broken healing the real culprit?I know I've ignored some things in order to focus on these four core points. Drugs can be horribly broken but I feel like they're separate enough from the core mechanics to not be necessary to discuss here. They're not an integral part of it like the healing system, which is why the latter being broken is a massive problem. Maybe you could argue that I'm missing the point with all this talk of dodging and you're meant to kill enemies before they reach you. But I'd argue that doesn't really make sense. What should be the punishment for them getting close, then? Death? That would certainly put a razor sharp focus on the shooting but it's way too excessive. If not death but not staying in and dodging either, then the options seem to be the ones I've discussed - healing cheese or just running away. And I hope I've made clear why I don't think either option is mechanically engaging, nowhere near as much as staying in close and dodging based on skill and quick decision making anyway.
In any case, thanks again if you made it down here, and feel absolutely free to explain why I might be utterly off the mark - I really just felt like getting my thoughts out there and seeing if I'm nuts or if these problems I'm experiencing while playing the game are pretty legit and my instinctive solutions make some sense.
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On XP, levels and how it could be improved
Posted: 23 Dec 2016 02:09 AM PST
I've been thinking about the whole "gaining and spending XP" in RPGs. I love the feeling that the more you advance in a game, the more powerful you become but some things always bugged me with that concept and I'd like to address them.
What makes sense:
-The more you fight, the better at fighting you become
What makes no sense:
-The more you fight, the better a lockpicking you become
-When you're level 12 a gunshot hurts less than when you're level 3
-Because you finished that quest about talking to a merchant you suddenly gain the ability to throw fireballs
-Because I'm level 9 I can now wear this piece of armor except if I'm a wizard because reasons
I understand why this system exists for a tabletop RPG, things should stay simple and straightforward for players, but for a computer game I feel we should expect something better. I was trying to find ways to do just that. I guess it's a post about story and system segregation. Here are some solutions I came up with :
-The more you do something, the better you become at doing that specific thing. I think some RPGs have tried this system (I'm thinking about an early Final Fantasy, I could be wrong). I don't think it's a good system because it pushes players to do something in a strange way for the sake of becoming more powerful. An extreme example would be to let an enemy hit you again and again so you can have more HP.
-You can't change your stats but you can win some objects granting you extra abilities. Think Link in Zelda. At the end of the game he becomes more powerful because he found a better sword, a better shield and a boomerang.
-Every ability or new power is gained through quests and story. "Thank you for helping me. To thank you I can teach you how to be more efficient when you try to lockpick a door." or "Because you managed to lift this Boulder you have become a little bit stronger."
Do you have any thoughts about it?
submitted by /u/inckorrect What makes sense:
-The more you fight, the better at fighting you become
What makes no sense:
-The more you fight, the better a lockpicking you become
-When you're level 12 a gunshot hurts less than when you're level 3
-Because you finished that quest about talking to a merchant you suddenly gain the ability to throw fireballs
-Because I'm level 9 I can now wear this piece of armor except if I'm a wizard because reasons
I understand why this system exists for a tabletop RPG, things should stay simple and straightforward for players, but for a computer game I feel we should expect something better. I was trying to find ways to do just that. I guess it's a post about story and system segregation. Here are some solutions I came up with :
-The more you do something, the better you become at doing that specific thing. I think some RPGs have tried this system (I'm thinking about an early Final Fantasy, I could be wrong). I don't think it's a good system because it pushes players to do something in a strange way for the sake of becoming more powerful. An extreme example would be to let an enemy hit you again and again so you can have more HP.
-You can't change your stats but you can win some objects granting you extra abilities. Think Link in Zelda. At the end of the game he becomes more powerful because he found a better sword, a better shield and a boomerang.
-Every ability or new power is gained through quests and story. "Thank you for helping me. To thank you I can teach you how to be more efficient when you try to lockpick a door." or "Because you managed to lift this Boulder you have become a little bit stronger."
Do you have any thoughts about it?
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Questions about emulation, entitlement, and the Pokemon community (not necessarily in that order).
Posted: 23 Dec 2016 08:04 AM PST
Already posted this on /r/retrogaming, but thought I'd also post here. Want some relatively impartial feedback on this. Much as I want to discuss this issue on /r/Emulation, I'm curious about outside perspectives first, and I don't expect the response there to be at all unbiased.
So... this is an emulation related post for the most part, but I thought I'd post here in order to (hopefully) get less biased feedback on this, and maybe a different perspective.
To be clear and provide a bit of background: I'm not against emulation. At all. I've been part of the emulation community (at least as a lurker) since the late 90's. Pretty much ever since I learned I could actually get access to Japanese games via importing Fire Pro Wrestling G and playing it with the PS1 swap trick. A bit after Dragon Ball GT: Final Bout came out I found out there were DBZ games on the SNES and Sega, and I wasn't a fan of the PS1 game. So I looked into ways to play those SNES and Sega games, discovered emulators, and the rest is history. Today I play all my retro games via emulation, minus a few on Steam. These days I also moderate a few emulation communities, on top of being into retro games in general.
I just wanted to provide a little background and be clear that this isn't an anti-emulation post. But I want to discuss something negative I've noticed about the emulation community, and it's something that is either been getting worse recently, or I'm simply noticing more often.
There seems to be a sense of entitlement within the emulation community, at least here on Reddit. And I'll disclaim it's far from everyone, but it is a fairly vocal (and revolving) minority. I've personally been annoyed with the "gimme free shit and free tech support" crowd in the past, but took them as a vocal minority. My thoughts are if you're emulating (and likely pirating), you do the leg work, test ROMs, do your own troubleshoot to at least a bare minimum, and you give back to the community where you can since you're already essentially getting free shit. But in recent past, this sub-group seems to have gotten louder and it seems worse (though maybe it's the behind the curtain view, since I moderate three emulation related subs). Recently, a Pokemon ROMHack called Pokemon Prism got a C&D from Nintendo. And people are rather predicatbly pissed about it.
I've noticed the Pokemon community seems to be a particularly vocal subsection of the emulation community, and in a rather negative light. I mean, besides this, most of the begging and anger and flipping out on /r/Emulation seems to be folks looking to emulate Pokemon specifically. And now it's to the point people are regularly asking how to emulate current gen stuff like Pokemon Sun & Moon, or Pokemon X & Y. While I know progress marches on, I think this is kind of fucked up. I love emulating games, and yeah, there's a lot of ROM piracy and the like, I get it. It's part of the scene. But I feel you gotta draw the line at current systems. If people are gonna emulate a system that's out on the market right now and now support said system, where's the incentive for developers to continue making games for the platform and manufacturer?
I can't understand how people can't wrap their heads around this. And when a C&D goes out, or the hammer comes down on a ROM site or something, things get all "Fuck Nintendo!" "This is bullshit!" "Blah blah [incoherent rage and spite]" and I just can't get behind it. I mean, Nintendo (and any other company) has the right to protect their IP. Everyone knows emulation is a gray area with a good bit of black mixed in depending on how you wanna go about it. So why rage out at a company for protecting their product, when they're not otherwise ripping people off? It's not like Nintendo is the scum of the universe and deserves to be pushed out of business.
And then there's the anger at developers. I mean, right up to death threats and the like against closed source developers, e-stalking and harassment. Just lots of hostility toward the people making the software to play this stuff they enjoy. And tied in with the Pokemon community, we have one NDS emulator dev who sabotage(d/s) his own work to make Pokemon and other related features not work intentionally, presumably because of people flipping about why Pokemon doesn't emulate properly. Some of this anger is often also reserved for moderators as well, much to my sometime chagrin. :P
And there are the people shitting on Android emulators for pay, like ePSXe or Robert Broglia, and Drastic. I'm like "you've been using this damned emulator since 2005. After over a decade, you don't think it's worth a decidedly optional $3.50 to play it on portable?" Or with Drastic, an Android NDS emulator so good that it runs better on Windows via an Android emulator than other native options. But some people will say it's not worth basically the price of a Big Mac meal at McDonalds. You're basically playing free games on these for hundreds or thousands of hours (and with a developer time commitment in the thousands and tens to possibly hundreds of thousands of hours). And you're indignant about tossing them a few bucks for lunch or a coffee??? Dafuq?
/rant I guess. I just wanted to vent some of this out and get some input from the community. I may cross post this to /r/Emulation as well, but I thought I'd try to get some less biased feedback on this first (and I doubt this would be well received there). I'm just wondering, was the emulation community always like this? I mean, as I said, I've lurked since the 90's, but didn't really get to caught up in anything beyond following development and playing games. I don't get this entitlement and sense of indignant rage within a subset of the community. And as a moderator, I find myself wondering what further steps could be taken to actually improve said community and promote more civil discourse. I do what I can, but it's like tossing a bucket of water into the ocean sometimes, not much of an impact.
Since emulation in and of itself is about the games and consoles first, I thought it might be a good fit for discussion here, but if not I understand, and will remove this if asked.
submitted by /u/tomkatt So... this is an emulation related post for the most part, but I thought I'd post here in order to (hopefully) get less biased feedback on this, and maybe a different perspective.
To be clear and provide a bit of background: I'm not against emulation. At all. I've been part of the emulation community (at least as a lurker) since the late 90's. Pretty much ever since I learned I could actually get access to Japanese games via importing Fire Pro Wrestling G and playing it with the PS1 swap trick. A bit after Dragon Ball GT: Final Bout came out I found out there were DBZ games on the SNES and Sega, and I wasn't a fan of the PS1 game. So I looked into ways to play those SNES and Sega games, discovered emulators, and the rest is history. Today I play all my retro games via emulation, minus a few on Steam. These days I also moderate a few emulation communities, on top of being into retro games in general.
I just wanted to provide a little background and be clear that this isn't an anti-emulation post. But I want to discuss something negative I've noticed about the emulation community, and it's something that is either been getting worse recently, or I'm simply noticing more often.
There seems to be a sense of entitlement within the emulation community, at least here on Reddit. And I'll disclaim it's far from everyone, but it is a fairly vocal (and revolving) minority. I've personally been annoyed with the "gimme free shit and free tech support" crowd in the past, but took them as a vocal minority. My thoughts are if you're emulating (and likely pirating), you do the leg work, test ROMs, do your own troubleshoot to at least a bare minimum, and you give back to the community where you can since you're already essentially getting free shit. But in recent past, this sub-group seems to have gotten louder and it seems worse (though maybe it's the behind the curtain view, since I moderate three emulation related subs). Recently, a Pokemon ROMHack called Pokemon Prism got a C&D from Nintendo. And people are rather predicatbly pissed about it.
I've noticed the Pokemon community seems to be a particularly vocal subsection of the emulation community, and in a rather negative light. I mean, besides this, most of the begging and anger and flipping out on /r/Emulation seems to be folks looking to emulate Pokemon specifically. And now it's to the point people are regularly asking how to emulate current gen stuff like Pokemon Sun & Moon, or Pokemon X & Y. While I know progress marches on, I think this is kind of fucked up. I love emulating games, and yeah, there's a lot of ROM piracy and the like, I get it. It's part of the scene. But I feel you gotta draw the line at current systems. If people are gonna emulate a system that's out on the market right now and now support said system, where's the incentive for developers to continue making games for the platform and manufacturer?
I can't understand how people can't wrap their heads around this. And when a C&D goes out, or the hammer comes down on a ROM site or something, things get all "Fuck Nintendo!" "This is bullshit!" "Blah blah [incoherent rage and spite]" and I just can't get behind it. I mean, Nintendo (and any other company) has the right to protect their IP. Everyone knows emulation is a gray area with a good bit of black mixed in depending on how you wanna go about it. So why rage out at a company for protecting their product, when they're not otherwise ripping people off? It's not like Nintendo is the scum of the universe and deserves to be pushed out of business.
And then there's the anger at developers. I mean, right up to death threats and the like against closed source developers, e-stalking and harassment. Just lots of hostility toward the people making the software to play this stuff they enjoy. And tied in with the Pokemon community, we have one NDS emulator dev who sabotage(d/s) his own work to make Pokemon and other related features not work intentionally, presumably because of people flipping about why Pokemon doesn't emulate properly. Some of this anger is often also reserved for moderators as well, much to my sometime chagrin. :P
And there are the people shitting on Android emulators for pay, like ePSXe or Robert Broglia, and Drastic. I'm like "you've been using this damned emulator since 2005. After over a decade, you don't think it's worth a decidedly optional $3.50 to play it on portable?" Or with Drastic, an Android NDS emulator so good that it runs better on Windows via an Android emulator than other native options. But some people will say it's not worth basically the price of a Big Mac meal at McDonalds. You're basically playing free games on these for hundreds or thousands of hours (and with a developer time commitment in the thousands and tens to possibly hundreds of thousands of hours). And you're indignant about tossing them a few bucks for lunch or a coffee??? Dafuq?
/rant I guess. I just wanted to vent some of this out and get some input from the community. I may cross post this to /r/Emulation as well, but I thought I'd try to get some less biased feedback on this first (and I doubt this would be well received there). I'm just wondering, was the emulation community always like this? I mean, as I said, I've lurked since the 90's, but didn't really get to caught up in anything beyond following development and playing games. I don't get this entitlement and sense of indignant rage within a subset of the community. And as a moderator, I find myself wondering what further steps could be taken to actually improve said community and promote more civil discourse. I do what I can, but it's like tossing a bucket of water into the ocean sometimes, not much of an impact.
Since emulation in and of itself is about the games and consoles first, I thought it might be a good fit for discussion here, but if not I understand, and will remove this if asked.
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Posted: 22 Dec 2016 09:30 AM PST
At first you might think: "Of course. These companies primary motive is not to make you happy or entertained. They want to and have to make money."
But what happens when the cost of "optional content" becomes more expensive than the game itself? Recently, Zenimax Online Studios released a new bit of content for Elder Scrolls Online for what equals out to $36. The game itself is currently selling for full price ($30) on Steam. What is this new item?
A single mount.
This has ignited a vigorous discussion with one side claiming ZOS is testing the waters for future pricing and might bleed over into other, more gameplay affecting items. The other side argues that since it is entirely cosmetic and affects no gameplay whatsoever, they can charge what they want and if you don't like it, don't buy it.
If people are willing to pay as much as the companies charge, should companies continue to price items based off that? What if the trend continues and they charge more next time? What about people who may want the item, but can't afford it due to the trend of rising prices? Does price really matter if the item doesn't affect gameplay at all? Will all games with premium content look like Train Simulator in the future?
submitted by /u/hammerjam But what happens when the cost of "optional content" becomes more expensive than the game itself? Recently, Zenimax Online Studios released a new bit of content for Elder Scrolls Online for what equals out to $36. The game itself is currently selling for full price ($30) on Steam. What is this new item?
A single mount.
This has ignited a vigorous discussion with one side claiming ZOS is testing the waters for future pricing and might bleed over into other, more gameplay affecting items. The other side argues that since it is entirely cosmetic and affects no gameplay whatsoever, they can charge what they want and if you don't like it, don't buy it.
If people are willing to pay as much as the companies charge, should companies continue to price items based off that? What if the trend continues and they charge more next time? What about people who may want the item, but can't afford it due to the trend of rising prices? Does price really matter if the item doesn't affect gameplay at all? Will all games with premium content look like Train Simulator in the future?
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Money From Mario
Posted: 23 Dec 2016 04:42 AM PST
I noticed that Mario Run is down to 5th in the Top Grossing list on the AppStore. Anyone have a rough idea what the top of the store is making per day? I'm curious when it's ride is done if Nintendo will consider it a success.
submitted by /u/RGNinja64 [link] [comments]
Walkthroughs, Guides, Roleplaying, and (not) Having Fun
Posted: 22 Dec 2016 05:18 PM PST
Disclaimer: I've polished my topic, and it seems to be more in tone with this subreddit's rules. I would like to see how it fares here once again.
Hello there.
I've been juggling the concepts mentioned in the title in my head for a while now, and would like to hear your take on it.
While there surely are benefits to walkthroughs and guides, they seem to indirectly affect roleplaying negatively, especially in MMOs. Is it not an immersion killer to already know what monsters you will face and what their abilities are? If you see a video showing how to defeat your opponent, is it still satisfactory to win without having figured it out yourself?
Clearly this doesn't affect everyone, but I find it difficult to return to a multiplayer game if I am to focus on the raw experience and sense of adventure, since players are pretty much expected to read up on end-game content before engaging it. It makes sense to be prepared, but is it right to do so at the cost of exploration? What happened to wanting to discover content?
If anyone would like to read more, I've written a larger piece on this topic here.
And now I ask you what your experiences are in terms of walkthroughs getting in the way (or not) of your adventures. It depends on what you expect from a game, but am I in the minority here? You can, of course, argue that I can just not read those guides, but then chances of joining other people for end-game content decrease, and it ends up being a handicap when compared to those other players.
submitted by /u/Keeper-of-Balance Hello there.
I've been juggling the concepts mentioned in the title in my head for a while now, and would like to hear your take on it.
While there surely are benefits to walkthroughs and guides, they seem to indirectly affect roleplaying negatively, especially in MMOs. Is it not an immersion killer to already know what monsters you will face and what their abilities are? If you see a video showing how to defeat your opponent, is it still satisfactory to win without having figured it out yourself?
Clearly this doesn't affect everyone, but I find it difficult to return to a multiplayer game if I am to focus on the raw experience and sense of adventure, since players are pretty much expected to read up on end-game content before engaging it. It makes sense to be prepared, but is it right to do so at the cost of exploration? What happened to wanting to discover content?
If anyone would like to read more, I've written a larger piece on this topic here.
And now I ask you what your experiences are in terms of walkthroughs getting in the way (or not) of your adventures. It depends on what you expect from a game, but am I in the minority here? You can, of course, argue that I can just not read those guides, but then chances of joining other people for end-game content decrease, and it ends up being a handicap when compared to those other players.
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How will future generations experience and study games of the past?
Posted: 22 Dec 2016 06:20 PM PST
I can listen to music and watch movies/television that was recorded in the 1950's because it's been digitized and uploaded onto the internet or a modern physical medium.
That said, I know that, as someone who was a teen in mainly the 2000's, I can't listen to The Who's "My Generation" in its original context of 1965. Roger Daltrey's generation, The Baby Boomers, will always be the generation of my parents, and so I'll always associate "My Generation" with 'oldies' music, with a rebelling youth generation who have gotten old and are now "the Man" of today. Though I listened to a lot of The Who in high school, they'll never be that fresh thing that appealed to my teenage mind (which I guess would be something like Muse's "Knights of Cydonia").
But videogames are different.
I can find emulators for, say, Pac-Man. And so I can technically play Pac-Man in 2016/2017.
I can also acknowledge that I'll never experience Pac-Man in an arcade, before gaming was mainstream on home consoles and smart phones.
But, if I were a Videogames professor in 2040 and I wanted to assign SW:KOTOR (a game that I loved as a child) to my students, I think I'd face a few unique issues:
submitted by /u/yo_soy_soja That said, I know that, as someone who was a teen in mainly the 2000's, I can't listen to The Who's "My Generation" in its original context of 1965. Roger Daltrey's generation, The Baby Boomers, will always be the generation of my parents, and so I'll always associate "My Generation" with 'oldies' music, with a rebelling youth generation who have gotten old and are now "the Man" of today. Though I listened to a lot of The Who in high school, they'll never be that fresh thing that appealed to my teenage mind (which I guess would be something like Muse's "Knights of Cydonia").
But videogames are different.
I can find emulators for, say, Pac-Man. And so I can technically play Pac-Man in 2016/2017.
I can also acknowledge that I'll never experience Pac-Man in an arcade, before gaming was mainstream on home consoles and smart phones.
But, if I were a Videogames professor in 2040 and I wanted to assign SW:KOTOR (a game that I loved as a child) to my students, I think I'd face a few unique issues:
- Hardware. This is the biggest problem I anticipate for future generations looking back. While I don't think there's necessarily a fundamental difference between hearing music on a record vs. an MP3 player (correct me if I'm wrong), there's a big difference between playing a game on a controller vs. a keyboard (or whatever they'll have in 2040). Playing Pac-Man on a PC emulator is very different from playing it with a joystick. Growing up, I played Mechwarrior 4 on a joystick, which was different from just a mouse and keyboard. My hypothetical students won't have Xbox(s/es?) and their controllers and so will play them differently than I did.
- Graphics. I think I tried replaying KOTOR on Steam a couple years ago, and... I couldn't. It just seemed so... empty. I don't know if this was because of the graphics or because of its general design, but as the years go on, it becomes more and more distracting when an old game has dated graphics. And that breaks immersion, which is crucial. While old movies might be in black-and-white or technicolor, they still portray defined images of their characters and environments. They aren't blurry or have jagged edges or wonky animations. Maybe a music analogy would be something like listening to "Big Rock Candy Mountain", which, while clearly recorded on outdated technology, is still perfectly enjoyable.
- Design. This one I'm a bit more iffy on, but I think one could say that there's a sort of 'progress' going on in each genre. FPS's are more engaging than they were 20 years ago. If you want to run around shooting bad guys, I'd expect the average person to almost always prefer a modern CoD to a Duke Nukem. I think this is where "design" differs from "art", as it seems more like a technological progression than something static like a person's artistic expression. Over the years, we've experimented with and enhanced game features, and we've learned how to make objectively better games as time goes on. I understand that film has evolved greatly over time, but, with maybe the exception of silent films, I'm not distracted by the primitive technology or design of older films.
- Time commitment. If I want to teach a class featuring KOTOR, it better be the only thing I teach that whole semester. Very few music compositions and films require tens of hours to experience. Not many famous books are absolutely massive (though The Count of Monte Cristo is 1276 pages). I guess only television would be a time commitment similar to videogames.
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Would like some feedback on our gaming blog (no ads)
Posted: 22 Dec 2016 07:56 PM PST
Hi all, a small group of us decided to start a gaming publication called Reboot Reload. There are currently NO ADS running on the page (the only "ad" links back to our facebook page) so this post is not a link-click revenue grab. :) We are just looking for feedback and criticism.
Our target audience is gamers who identify themselves as beginners/noobs. With that in mind, we push out reviews that score games on a difficulty-scale and beginner guides. There are some general opinion pieces about gaming as well.
submitted by /u/Sasaki- Our target audience is gamers who identify themselves as beginners/noobs. With that in mind, we push out reviews that score games on a difficulty-scale and beginner guides. There are some general opinion pieces about gaming as well.
- Is out content interesting/relevant/unique?
- What kind of gaming-related content would keep you reading?
- How else would you improve the site?
- Any kind of feedback and criticism is appreciated!
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M+KB vs Gamepad
Posted: 22 Dec 2016 10:38 PM PST
I consider myself both a PC gamer and a console gamer and I don't understand when I see PC gamers saying stuff like "Using a mouse is so much more accurate!" and I've even seen people saying stuff like PCs are meant for gaming (???). I'm just curious as to where this myth arises? I like PC gaming but at times I do find the elitist attitude of a lot of the PC gamers to be very annoying. In my personal experience, I play FPS games on both PC and Console and I find myself more in control of my weapon when using a game pad. Personally I believe that you can be just as accurate with either, but it's a lot easier to be accurate with a gamepad than it is a mouse. That said, I do believe mouse gives much better control of the character at times. You never see people doing crazy strafing with gamepads (although that's a good thing if you ask me) or other crazy mouse things. Just my two cents, not trying to start a flame war this has just been on my mind for a while and I'd love for someone to shed some light on the idea that nearly all PC gamers have that a mouse is so much more accurate than a device meant for gaming.
Cheers.
submitted by /u/OverlordGhs Cheers.
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Why I Find The Term "Nostalgia" To Be Unhelpful
Posted: 22 Dec 2016 02:44 PM PST
So I've been to try to discuss and critique older games. But I find one term in particular to be getting in the way of the discussion, Namely nostalgia.
IMO nostalgia is a cop-out term. From my perspective Whenever I've seen people use the term nostalgia they seem to be defending an old game they like without providing solid evidence as to why the game they like is good. All the games I played during my childhood that I feel are good I can site evidence to support my claim.
But there's also a ton of games I played during my childhood that were just shit that I kept playing because I didn't know any better. Now that I'm an adult I don't see any need to defend terrible old games from my childhood because they were absolute shit.
As an adult I've also been looking for more depth in the games I play as I find the current AAA games industry fore the most part to be lacking in such. While some of these have been Indie games and Dark Souls quite a few of them have been older games that simply aged well IMO. This includes RPGs like Planescape Torment, Icewind Dale, Arcanum, Deus Ex GOTY and FPSs like Quake I. All of the games I just mentioned are older titles that up until now I have never touched before in my life. They're new to me as experiences even though they're very old. You could technically call me a time traveler in terms of the games I've been playing recently and you'd be right.
I don't mean to point a finger but at the same time I can't help but be bothered by this. People I've seen whom have sited nostalgia as the reason an old game is good seem like they don't want the question "Is it good?" asked or simply don't know what makes it good.
I just don't see how claiming a game is good simply because you played it at an early point in your life as solid evidence for it being good. Simply saying Nostalgia isn't good enough to prove your case IMO.
submitted by /u/kenaochreous IMO nostalgia is a cop-out term. From my perspective Whenever I've seen people use the term nostalgia they seem to be defending an old game they like without providing solid evidence as to why the game they like is good. All the games I played during my childhood that I feel are good I can site evidence to support my claim.
But there's also a ton of games I played during my childhood that were just shit that I kept playing because I didn't know any better. Now that I'm an adult I don't see any need to defend terrible old games from my childhood because they were absolute shit.
As an adult I've also been looking for more depth in the games I play as I find the current AAA games industry fore the most part to be lacking in such. While some of these have been Indie games and Dark Souls quite a few of them have been older games that simply aged well IMO. This includes RPGs like Planescape Torment, Icewind Dale, Arcanum, Deus Ex GOTY and FPSs like Quake I. All of the games I just mentioned are older titles that up until now I have never touched before in my life. They're new to me as experiences even though they're very old. You could technically call me a time traveler in terms of the games I've been playing recently and you'd be right.
I don't mean to point a finger but at the same time I can't help but be bothered by this. People I've seen whom have sited nostalgia as the reason an old game is good seem like they don't want the question "Is it good?" asked or simply don't know what makes it good.
I just don't see how claiming a game is good simply because you played it at an early point in your life as solid evidence for it being good. Simply saying Nostalgia isn't good enough to prove your case IMO.
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