True Gaming Stamina Systems for In-Game Actions (e.g. Sprinting/Attacking): How can they best be used? |
- Stamina Systems for In-Game Actions (e.g. Sprinting/Attacking): How can they best be used?
- Darkwood has by far the best day/night cycle I've ever seen in a game.
- Foldit, and the gamification of research and crowd sourcing
- Onrush Deserves More Attention
- Reloading / Ammo Count
- Is mouse acceleration really that bad? Not using mouse accel seems to have crippled my FPS skills.
- Does Nintendo get away with cutting corners?
- Is there really a point to reviews for games with demo's like Octopath?
- I don't get the new trend in the Fortnite community where the discussion revolves around who has which skins and who has been playing since which Season
| Stamina Systems for In-Game Actions (e.g. Sprinting/Attacking): How can they best be used? Posted: 12 Jul 2018 09:29 AM PDT Many games have mechanics such as a "sprint" function with which the player can sprint for a limited time; doing so depletes their stamina bar, so they can only sprint for a certain distance before they run out of stamina and have to wait a short while for it to regenerate before they can sprint again. Another action like this is a special attack that also requires stamina (e.g. Unturned where doing a more powerful melee attack costs stamina as well). There are also games that require stamina to do many core game actions - Dark Souls is one example, in which attacking, blocking, dashing and most actions require stamina and you cannot do those actions without having enough stamina. It could be said that this adds challenge to the game by not allowing the player to "spam" abilities, and forcing them to think carefully about which abilities to use given how much stamina they currently have. Some games (like certain platformers) may also use energy/stamina for special moves like jumping further and teleporting, for the same reasons as above, as well as to potentially reward the player by trading energy for a special power. Which games have the best use of stamina systems for in-game actions like sprinting, attacking and jumping? How can stamina systems be best used to enhance the gameplay experience and not feel restrictive to the player? [link] [comments]  |
| Darkwood has by far the best day/night cycle I've ever seen in a game. Posted: 12 Jul 2018 02:42 PM PDT Some of the very first games that I've played had this feature, The Sims 1, Vice City and Pokemon Silver all had systems in place that allowed an in-game clock to tick and make day turn into night and vice versa, something that is taken for granted in modern open-world games. Always the atmosphere of the game has a drastic change, Vice City's neon lights turning on during the night made the game world feel vastly different than during day-time. The Sims' nighttime was usually very quiet, with all of your Sims sleeping, time passed by rapidly, until a criminal, ghost or raccoon appeared which never failed to scare the absolute shit out of me because of the music that played. Sometimes nighttime can make the game itself change in various ways, a simple example would be when different Pokemon are available on a certain route at night. Minecraft was pretty significant in how much things changed as darkness made monsters spawn and you had to put torches on the walls so it can light up the surroundings. Darkwood on the other hand, is all about the day/night cycle. Day is spent exploring the haunted woods around your hideout and collecting as much resources as you can find and then frantically sprint back towards your hideout the moment the sun starts to set, because when night falls you have to barricade yourself inside your own home, huddle in the corner and ready your weapon for when the unknown footsteps down the hall eventually breaks down your barricade or the furniture starts moving by itself again. The funny thing is that it isn't day OR night in themselves that are the most hard-hitting parts of Darkwood, it's the short moments between them, sunset and sunrise. Looking out of your barricaded windows, watching the light slowly drain away and the music intensifying, you sit there in anticipation, wondering just what you're going to deal with tonight. But Morning? Morning is where Darkwood distinguishes itself from all other horror games, because morning, in contrast to the other parts of this game, decides to soothe the player. Time is paused, meaning you have all the time in the world to manage your resources, rearrange your furniture and fix your barricades all while a very soothing yet-melancholic melody very reminiscent of the calmer Silent Hill themes palys in the backround, all of this ends of course when you leave your hideout, then the clock start ticking and the frantic search for resources to last another day starts again. Darkwood isn't purely a horror game, but also a survival game that does away with the annoying need to constantly eat and drink (because you're in a Blair-Witch project inspired forest anyways), Darkwood is entirely about overcoming whatever is thrown at you, regardless of how terrifying things get, everything is manageable. It doesn't throw scary things at you just for the sake of being scary, but to prove that you CAN survive the night. Darkwood was definitely the most underrated game of 2017, and it may look kind of underwhelming when you see a static screenshot of it but the visuals are great, it reminds me a lot of the way Diablo 2 looked (but this may just be me), the visuals are only a small part of the experience, IMO the sound and gameplay are the best part of this game. It's also really cheap and I got 45 hours out of it, so there's that. Best survival game I've ever played, because it realizes survival is about surviving, not just collecting a bunch of stuff, building a giant castle and calling it a day. [link] [comments]  |
| Foldit, and the gamification of research and crowd sourcing Posted: 12 Jul 2018 11:46 AM PDT As a disclaimer, I make no claims to having the answers to any of these sorts of questions, but will provide some thoughts in the hopes of encouraging some discussion. I am also NOT here to talk about gamification being used to encourage people to do jobs/learn things/exercise, as I feel that's been discussed plenty before and wanted to try something different. My interest is more in using gamification to solve or create a collective work(such as research, data collection, or any other task requiring many people) rather than motivating individuals to do their tasks. If you want to talk about that maybe start your own thread? So I came across mentions of this game years ago and just remembered it recently, and since it was an interesting topic I haven't seen around here I figured I'd bring it up From foldit's wikipedia entry on the gameplay:
Now when reading this, I started coming up with a lot of questions into the ethics and possibilites of gamifying research and crowd sourced works. For instance, if I was playing a game where I design engines in order to improve them or whatever(the specifics of the example doesn't matter), and let's say I design an engine that is 10% more efficient than the best engine on the market. Something like that would be incredible and save boatloads of money, as well as make tons of money. But, by playing the game has my rights to the IP of this design simply been forfeited? Can the company behind the game now just sell my design for millions and tell me tough luck? That seems highly unethical in my eyes. To try and answer this I attempted to do some research on the matter, but was quickly drown in a sea of either useless articles unrelated to the topic, incomprehensible legal jargon, or "well, we don't know really". I didn't find anything satisfactory on the subject, but maybe someone else will have better luck. I know a lot of researchers pay people to take part in studies to gather data, and as I write this mechanical turk comes to mind for both research and commercial purposes. However, with those you come in expecting to be compensated. With games I can see many people just playing a game for fun and unknowningly being exploited for virtual labor without compensation. It also becomes tricky if you pay for a game, and your data/effort is being collected en masse to perform tasks, likely for commercial purposes. Even the topic of actually going through with compensation becomes tricky, as you now have to quantify the value of the work being done and determine payouts. What if you pay them in virtual currency? What if I'm a power user who should be getting paid hundreds if it was a real job, and all I get are fake coins? International law comes into play with real money, which is partially why companies use digital currency to begin with, so now you have to contend with that. What if AAA games start introducing these crowd source tasks into their games? Try hacking a door and now you're playing a minigame where you build molecules for cancer research. Loading screens? Gamers as a whole can spend hundreds of thousands of collective hours in a single game staring at loading screens. That could be used as a source for good while simply giving gamers something to do with that time that would normally be spent mashing buttons or watching a bar fill up. I'm not entirely sure where I'm going with this, but I think gamification being used in this manner creates a lot of interesting moral, legal, and design implications. I think it represents a significant grey area that should be explored and discussed. What are your thoughts on the matter? [link] [comments]  |
| Onrush Deserves More Attention Posted: 12 Jul 2018 10:45 AM PDT Welcome Back Evolution Studios In most racing games your goal is to complete the laps before your opponents and hopefully end within 1st place. Onrush is a bit different as it focuses on objectives within a race rather than being first. Onrush is composed of 4 different race types: Countdown, Lockdown, Switch and Overdrive. - Countdown focuses on having you essentially race in a time trial against the opposing team. You'll need to go through green gates to earn more time. Your goal is to keep your remaining time higher than the opposing team. You'll want to focus on taking out other drivers as well since a crashed driver cannot hit the gates to add more time to their team. - Lockdown is a king of the hill type mode where both teams fight to control this moving area. Capture enough areas and your team wins. This can be really fun to battle with other players as you try to control it. - Switch has the player hunting down the enemy team and trying to take them out. Each time you are taken out you'll need to spawn as a different vehicle. As you continually die, the vehicles you spawn as will get stronger and stronger. - Overdrive is all about boosting. Boosting contributes to your score. You'll want to take out enemies, and make jumps to gain more boost. Gain enough and you can launch a rush move that will send you charging forward and can give your team major points for boosting along with taking out many enemies. The four modes do bring some fun variety. I found myself falling in love with overdrive as it is the most accessible and the focus is on the speed. Countdown can be rather intense, especially when playing the game online. Another thing that separates Onrush from other racing games is its focus on playing on a team. Each of the modes I mentioned are all team based. In most games, they focus on your own success and here you are continually contributing to the success of the team. Since most of the modes are point based and not based on being in first place, you'll feel like you're still contributing and winning even if you're not the best driver. Though being within the top three for a race does show where you need to improve you skill and better yourself over your opponents. With Onrush you'll work with your team to maximize points as each of the different cars have different passive buffs that provide you with more speed. Some allow you to get more speed from jumps or driving close to another vehicle. Some cars are better for taking down enemies. I do like the visuals and mostly great performance to the game. The visuals are colorful while not being super detailed and I think this plays into the game having a good performance overall. There were a few small instances of the game having a minor half sec stutter but that was about it. Noticeable and annoying but it wasn't detrimental to the fun of the game. While I did like that Onrush allowed you to play coop online I feel like this game would have been perfect for local split screen play. Even if the engine could not handle the preferred 4 player local split screen I would have loved to see this just have 2 player split screen. And this would work well with the game since it is all about being on a team and teamwork. As you play the game you'll gain experience for various activities and challenges. These factor into you unlocking different loot boxes for different cosmetic items. Though the game does have loot boxes, there are no microtransactions within the game. Though that could change with a patch, I hope it does not. The new skins are fun to unlock along with having that exp system but when you play the game with no internet connection you can play the campaign but you won't be able to earn anything. I wish they hadn't done this. I would think that they essentially made the game always online for balancing and with unlocking items but since the unlocks are cosmetic I do not understand why you can't unlock stuff offline. Overall, I like what the evolution team has done here with Onrush. Onrush takes a unique approach to its arcade racing roots and attempts to change things up by having the players focus on objectives. By focusing on objectives the game inherently encourages teamwork as each player must work with their team to win the match. While the matches can be chaotic there is a great rush that comes over the player while racing and upon obtaining that victory! The four modes, countdown, lockdown, Switch and Overdrive bring enough variation to keep matches feeling different enough from each other while also making you wonder about additional objective based modes the developers may cook up for additional content or a sequel. It's great to see evolution get a second chance to make a new racer for the current generation and Onrush is a fun racer that helps fill that void left by the summer months as we wait for many of the major releases this fall. If you have some friends and you're looking for a new game to play then I'd recommend you check this one out Link: https://youtu.be/74eqZrL6yG4 What are your thoughts on the game? [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 12 Jul 2018 03:00 PM PDT I don't know too much about guns, but one thing I've always gotten a kick out of is that your ammo count is not penalized when reloading a non-empty clip in a game. For example, if you have 30 bullets total and a full clip has 10 bullets, then when you reload a clip that has 5 bullets left, your total bullet count is still 25 when in reality it should be 20. I think an added element of strategy would be forcing the player to choose between reloading an entirely empty clip (and therefore losing some bullets but ensuring a full clip for next encounter) vs. reloading an entirely empty clip (and therefore retaining the ammo count but risking the reload time during your next enemy encounter). [link] [comments]  |
| Is mouse acceleration really that bad? Not using mouse accel seems to have crippled my FPS skills. Posted: 11 Jul 2018 08:59 PM PDT My first FPS game was Halo 1 on PC, which I played as a kid without knowing anything about optimizing game settings or mouse DPI or anything. I just played with the default Windows mouse settings and a crappy offic mouse and actually got pretty good at the game. Later on I started playing TF2 and started reading all this stuff about optimizing your setup to be better at the game. Now one of the first things I saw was people unanimously claiming that mouse acceleration is bad and ruins the game for you. So I followed the instructions, and proceeded to suck at TF2 forever. However, I still carried the mentality of "no accel = good" into other FPS games I played and I proceeded to suck at every single one of them. It has been literally years since playing without mouse accel and I have never come remotely close to being as good as I was at Halo. In fact, I basically suck at FPS now. While I obviously play games less often than I did as kid, I have definitely spent more total hours playing shooters without mouse accel. However, if I reset my Windows mouse settings and hop into Halo again, I can find some of the same feeling I had years ago, although I am definitely not as comfortable as I used to be since I've gone so long without using mouse accel. You might say it's just because I'm bad at the non-shooting aspects of all the other games but I've tried playing Battlefield with a controller, on PC, and actually did better than with my usual mouse setup. Now that I think of it, basically the physical action of aiming in every single FPS I've played since Halo has been uncomfortable for me. The best way I could describe it is like trying to write with your non dominant hand. What the mind wants to do and what the body actually does don't match up. And the irony is I've actually gotten used to writing with my left hand just from random doodling but I've never gotten used to what I thought was the "optimal" style of mouse-based aiming even after all these hours of playing shooters. Does anyone have a similar experience or am I potentially schizophrenic? [link] [comments]  |
| Does Nintendo get away with cutting corners? Posted: 12 Jul 2018 12:33 PM PDT I've been extremely frustrated with Nintendo. I love their games and their products. But it's the fact that there are so much more areas of improvement for Nintendo that really bugs me. We all have our issues with xbox one, ps4, pc, etc. But I feel as though the issues with Nintendo and their consoles are enough to make it fall out of competition to be a "main console. Firstly their online infrastructure (or lack thereof) is an abomination. We absolutely 100% need a messaging system on a console released in 2017. Its unacceptable. The complete lack of some integral, basic features is jarring. Secondly their actual hardware seems.....very cheap. Switches are warping now. And things such as the kickstand being a flimsy joke and the USB port on bottom......I understand that the switch is ambitious but these things make it seem like the quality control department of Nintendo is lacking when it comes to hardware. Can we swap a little bit of the plastic for some metal? Overall I feel like Nintendo gets away with things that Microsoft and Sony would be crucified for. [link] [comments]  |
| Is there really a point to reviews for games with demo's like Octopath? Posted: 12 Jul 2018 08:56 AM PDT Octopath offers 3 hours of playtime and lets you transfer your save into the main game. I might be being presumptuous here, but wouldn't any customer know if they would want to pay full price for it after playing it for that amount of time? Yet I do see plenty of customers waiting on reviews regardless. I mean even if it got negative reviews, if you enjoyed the demo a lot would it really matter at that point? And even if it got positive reviews, if you didn't enjoy the demo would it really matter? Just not really understanding the train of thought here. I can understand like a short 15-20 minute demo, but anything over 2 hours should be much more convincing than any review. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 12 Jul 2018 05:14 AM PDT Those two topics of discussion are prevalent in the Fortnite community - both in-game and on reddit. People talk about who has which skins, and act like you're a noob if you don't have a certain skin. Also people with some certain skins are considered better at the game than others. They're purely cosmetic though...? So why is this even a point of discussion? Secondly, people constantly talk about how they are "OG" and have been playing since Season 2 or whatever. Season 2 was only a few months ago. How is this any indication? People have been playing games like LoL or WoW since 5+ years. Why are people proud of playing a game for 5 months? I apologize if this is stupid, its just confusing to me. Feels like I'm missing something. In most games I played, people were discussing the game, stats, character builds, etc. You know, stuff that's IN the game, part of the gameplay. It seems like now the discussion revolves around who owns which $10 skin? [link] [comments]  |
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