Posts by Algor

Finished Bulletstorm tonight. Pretty fun game! Steam says it took 8 hours for the campaign, well worth the $5 or whatever I paid for it. Satisfying weapons and gameplay, everything had a nice weighty feel to it. The gameplay was pretty butt-simple and highlighted the exits with glowing interact prompts. Luckily the kick and lash mechanics felt really satisfying too. The story didn't bother me too much until the end when the antagonist really became annoying with dialogue that might as well have been straight out of a CoD match. The environments looked nice and colorful and the enemies were easy to pick out. It might have been nice if they chose a more natural method to tell you about new ways to kill enemies rather than fishing them out of a menu. Damn to think the giant grindy-wheel train level is just one huge kismet sequence.

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Jesus guys, let's not get bogged down in fiction.

I'll make it easy for you: The hostages have been tortured and are very weak. So they need to be carried. Or they had too much candy to eat.

Rather let's dismiss the problem just because it's one of our favorite developers? I just saw a weak official fiction wrapper and someone praising it for being bulletproof. They could have tried harder as evident by your examples. In other news, the new Militia is pretty fun! If anything I think the new hostage mechanic plays more like a CT with a big orange flag on their head than the old frustrating method of T's chasing a hostage as it follows CT's around corners.

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And now it finally makes sense, because before the hostages were able to walk. So why did they remain in captivity instead of trying to escape somehow (after the CT had broken into the T zone/ whatever)? IMHO now it's more believable. They are blindfolded and they can't walk, so it makes sense to carry them one by one instead of rescuing all of them at once and winning the round.

Are the blindfolds glued to their faces? Only their hands are tied up. Why not hold E to remove the blindfold and then the hostage follows like before? While its cool to see they are playing with the formula, this is not a cure-all fiction wrapper. I also only played a few rounds with bots so I couldn't tell my hostage carrying speed relative to normal but it didn't seem drastically slower. I thought it might have more of a burden like only being able to use your pistol while carrying a hostage but hey that probably would suck. The few times I looked at online servers they were all defusal or custom fy_iceworld servers . It does seem like they are making some smart changes to condense the maps!

I finished Far Cry 3 last night after some 27 hours. I completed the story, got all the pouches and took out all the camps but couldn't be arsed with much else. Overall I think it was a good experience except they stick their foot in their mouth a number of times with the open world thing.

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Tried to boat down to the farthest southern island early on only to get the lovely "leaving the Battlefield" message. Then my boat is reset outside the battlefield where I am constantly being reset and unable to get back to the playable area. Later, I couldn't get access to The Compound so I found a nearby hill and tried to wing suit my way in only to find The Compound is filled with industrial strength fans to push me out of. To add insult to injury that seemed to create a bug where my wing suit was broken in the same manner until I quit and reloaded the game.

I'm still not sold on first person driving and I got sick of the physical interactions with everything pretty early on. Might have been a good skill to unlock where you don't have to pat down every body for loot. There were also a number of checkpoints placed right before a long first person cinematic which got pretty annoying. There were also a lot of missions that ended standing next to an NPC, the player turns away and resumes control of their character, only to turn back and the NPC is gone. This wouldn't be so bad if my next story objective wasn't to talk to that guy who was standing right next to me and is now halfway across the god damn world. Early on I felt like they took the cheap route and hid all the skills and equipment upgrades behind their side missions just so you'd be forced to play them. As I found many of those happened naturally I didn't mind it so much. I also had a strange thing happen where the first half of the game my wallet was always capped out, and towards the second half I never had more than $500. While I didn't use the pistols very much past the first couple minutes, most of the weapons felt pretty satisfying and diverse to use... maybe with the exception of the sniper rifles. lol @ this game has a cover system? Never even knew about it. Lastly,

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that helicopter mission was a disaster. "Hang on while I do donuts around the airbase while every soldier fires rockets at us." I had to drop the difficulty to easy after failing the mission five times, and even then I barely scraped by.

Tonight I started up Bulletstorm and I am finding it surprisingly awesome. While the story is very convoluted for the type of game (how many times did the story shift time periods in the first hour?), the gameplay feels very tight and satisfying. We'll see how it holds up after a while.

Almost instant join that time. Played about 30 minutes on Docking, good looking stuff! One hell of a complicated game.The tutorials during respawn seem to be moving in the right direction, but it seems like they could be more directed at my previous round rather than just running through all the features of the game. The phase gates got damn confusing when there are multiple points to move between. When the lurk is spraying his shit all over a room do the other aliens become hidden inside of it?

My game took five minutes to update the shader cache and then was going for another five minutes of precaching before I gave up. Is this just the result of my graphics settings being cranked up?

Hey Scott,

Welcome to Mapcore! I only have Gears for 360 so the best I could do was watch your video. Looks like a nice piece of work, especially hearing so many horror stories about the Gears editor being one of the most unstable! I thought it was a bit contrived to start in the pool only to read one of your documents saying we end up there after a helicopter crash. An important bit of context . Your encounters seemed to have good variety both spatially and pacing wise. Had your validated some of your design decisions with other playtesters? Specifically the melee intro, charging perpendicular across a combat zone to get ammo, or general navigation? It may have also been hard to follow with some of the video editing after connecting back to the main lobby but I don't know why it was necessary to get back there. That may have been one of the encounters you cut. I also thought the final encounter could have been a bit more climactic and be spent fighting enemies that are between the player and the exit, rather than 180 degrees from the exit. That would make the objective very obvious and integrate the fictionally weak objective "kill everyone before leaving". It always brings a tear to my eye to see more SP content.

What a calculated PR stunt, Kojima owns

Quote from PogoP

Looks cool! Seems a bit easy though?

I'm sure this is just to make a good demonstration. The first game was super hard! The success rates of the campaigns are broadcast when you make a server. On normal most are <40%, on hard most are <25%. I sure hope the teammate AI is improved for the sequel.

Pretty good example I found some months ago;

Started Singularity today after getting it some time late last year. The first hour has been pretty painful and its a real shame how much Call of Duty influence is in this game. I don't know if that came from Activision or what. So far it has been move through linear levels as Nolan North opens every door for you and tells you exactly what to do the entire time.

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I actually cheered when he was killed in a cutscene.

It doesn't seem like he said anything original and just ran through the military stereotype textbook; "Keep your head on a swivel", "stay frosty", "we are oscar mike" blah blah. It's a strange choice to have note collectables and audiobooks that play on the spot. They both slow the pacing way down, especially when they are used as frequently as they are here (I recall now Dishonored uses this same system, even with the more text heavy books, but maybe they just have better writing, or the placement of the items is better). I also find it unnecessary there is so much interactable shit like typewriters and faucets, or why when I use a microphone it plays a prerecorded message? The weapons weren't very fun to use and didn't have good feedback so I just melee'd all the enemies until the soldiers showed up. I quit after running down a series of hallways where some chick kept screaming "left!", "faster!", and "right!" when it there were no other choices.

Then I started Far Cry 3 and I was really enjoying it. Characters were saying interesting and original dialogue that gave them... character. Mega points for not using Nolan North or any famous actors/actresses from what I could gather. The player is put in a simple scenario (escape from pirate camp) and is fun, tense, and provides a lot of moments to teach game mechanics or sell the fiction in a natural setting. The sandbox seems pretty cool and is expanded in a really slick way. Good move adding a simple incentive to climbing the radio towers on top of the Assassin's Creed model. I'm excited to play more!

Edit: What happens when you die in this game? I feel like I have crafted some items and bought the same skill points several times. Do some of these things reset on death or am I just getting a weird bug?

Word, it has been a dream of mine to have a massive catalogue of reference to go through that can be tagged and filtered

Awesome to see some campaign content. This is a nice chunk of work, took me an hour to play through! Looks like you really got your hands dirty to learn a lot of systems and make different kinds of gameplay. My recorded playthrough demo here;

http://thealgor.com/public/sn1.zip

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My main impression was this was like a Groundhog Day story, but I only experienced it once so really its nothing like Groundhog Day. If I am to believe my player character just keeps doing this over and over, why wouldn't he try drastically different things each time? The scripted moments didn't really sell the experience for me, and most of them were silent and awkward. In the end I never understood who the guy was I was chasing after, myself? Having dialogue would really help sell the mood you are going for. Honestly, even though at first I thought it was a Lost reference, I was more interested in the sphere / vanishing island visual storytelling but it never amounted to anything.

I think the main issue for me was the encounters.

• The encounters all felt the same. The player starts at one end of an arena, a whole shitload of guys spawn at the other end and flood the space. Most of the AI seemed to assault the player, so I really just had to sit in one spot and not die (which at times was very difficult). This can be a useful mechanic to create pressure, but it does not encourage the player to move around and use the space you have spent so much time building. It also makes the AI look really dumb, how they all just go to the exact same spot to get killed. I don't think HL2 ever has anywhere near this many active enemies at once. You should definitely work on making the encounters different, where the AI are falling back or looking like they are really trying to defend something, and use less enemies but spawn reinforcements as the player pushes well into the space.
• Never enough cover for the player. I almost never seemed to have cover at the entry to an encounter and when there was, it was usually crouch cover. At this point I almost disregard crouch cover entirely and I have found players don't even consider it as an option. Try to consider cover as player height and upwards, and change the size for variety.
• I died nearly 10 times on the Hunter fight and if this wasn't the only time I was playing this I would have rage quit. The encounter was a clusterfuck and there was no clear best way to tackle it. One attempt I gave up and tried to run for what appeared to be the exit door and it was locked? After the combat was over it magically unlocks?
• The hall with dozens of headcrabs was painful as well. It is really annoying to fight fast moving small enemies, let alone this many of them at once.
• I would recommend reading this article and even many of the comments;
• http://www.fullbrightdesign.com/2009/02/basics…-encounter.html

The puzzles were another pretty weak area. In almost every case I found the solution first before I even knew there was a puzzle. Oh, here's a battery, and another, well I might as well bring these to the center of the level for when I find where they go. In the beginning, all of the doors have a blue keypad next to them and are locked, and the one the player goes through is the same except it's sparking? Using common terminology like doors with a red light are locked and doors with a green light interactable is a good place to start.

Other notes;

• Many of the interactable buttons should read as interactable buttons and have a clear state change when the player interacts with it. Press a button on an elevator and get an audio response is one thing, but to have it glow or depress is another. If a device needs electricity to work, make sure everything in the area is powered down or lit by alternate sources (natural or alien)
• After I did the puzzle where the player got the pistol, couldn't I have just shot the device with the shotgun I already had? It also made no sense an important piece of equipment was behind a grate wall.
• There were some silly things like a lock placed on the handle of a door? Makes no sense.
• In the first elevator I moved forward to hit the button and was pulled onto the ladder volume before I even knew it was there.
• Way too many vents and similar ways the player has to get into them by jumping onto stuff and then moving along the top of stuff in the room to reach it.

http://www.joystiq.com/2013/02/02/rum…eal-on-march-1/

http://www.aliennoire.com/

It's back?

GG y'all

Thank you, good sir!

I'm pretty sure I saw a video on here just a day or two ago that was a developer walkthrough of some recent cryengine stuff but now I can't find the link. Does anyone know what I'm talking about and have the link?

Never played much more than an hour or two of this but it was fun. Pretty cool to hear more content and music on the way. The music owns for this game!