Posts by Rick_D

qte's are also painful to develop - you need believable states to be in when it occurs, and you need good fail/success scenes, it splits up everything and cutscenes would be better without them - or maybe we could make video games that aren't movies and have the action not so frenetically cut between dozens of cameras that you can have the player take part in the action.

there's a few games that do this well - i think uncharted has got some great ideas hidden behind some less great ones. the chase sequences actively involve the player. remember the scene from uncharted 2 when you were being chased down that street by the truck, and you had to shoot at it - and then it crashed and exploded? that would have been a cutscene in a hundred other games. the fact that it's a polished mechanic is what raises that game above games where it's just a cutscene.

call of duty 4, the post-nuclear bomb section, beautiful piece of the game, completely the moment that made it my GOTY - could have been a cutscene, artfully directed by some amateur wannabe director in the cg department, the fact that it was made into gameplay using existing mechanics of the game is a perfect example of how to do it.

then the closing of that same game, where you are thrown a weapon and have to make the shot. that was utterly beautiful, a perfect note to end on, and could so easily have been a cutscene.

the fact that these games are high scorers and games like heavy rain aren't (HR got pity scores, it was a turd and you know it) is precisely because the player is involved in the highpoints of the story. they are given, in their eyes, the opportunity to make their own destiny. the fact that they care enough about the characters and the events that they will do precisely what the designer asks of them at a specific moment is another area of skill altogether.

tl;dr if you're going to have some section of a game that can't be played with the regular mechanics the make it into a new mechanic and make it work.

games liek metal gear are an exception to this, they have such completely movie-like cutscenes that QTEs simply aren't feasible, and the action is portrayed in such a way as to be enjoyable to watch, so you don't feel too frustrated that you aren't taking part. although MGS4 really pushed it and it was one of the biggest complaints.

haha that's pretty accurate. although i remember some really great games where you make some stealth pushes behind the lines to take back points. can't do that in rush

and yes, karkand was good because it was small, infantry and infantry vehicles only, set in the middle east (which was pretty much still a novelty back then). so i think it has some special memories for people.

anything looks good approaching thumbnail size.

and yes, some places are tied together very nicely, but then you go wandering around on the mountains and it's just shit.

i really wish they would have added something to their snow/moss blend textures, just give them normal maps, or some actual surface detail so it's not just pure white.

anyway, here's 2006:

[Blocked Image: http://chorrol.com/files/57/obliv19B.jpg]

they have made some huge improvements, they tie their meshes into their terrain much better now, they have put in a lot more interesting ground detail, the distant landscapes have some great cloud atmospherics, the lighting is better, they polished a lot of things. i like the game, i like the visual style and i am not saying it's the worst looking game ever made; i just really was hoping for something that really blew my mind instead of just making me go "hmph, looks ok"

it's more a case of death by a thousand cuts. the characters really are pretty bad but i guess that has a lot to do with how little the artists can really control things - the characters all seem to be made from the same creator that the pllayer uses so i guess it's hard to really push things one way or the other. the custom creatures (the giants for instance) actually seem pretty cool, but i haven't actually gotten very close to them yet

just did the horn of blahblah quest, oh my gods the dungeon is fantastic. i fall more in love with the game the more i play it.

imagine if the actual inagme stuff looked as nice as the loading screen objects.

i wonder if there's some broken code somewhere that is forcing console-sized textures for the pc, ala rage.

i played baldurs gate recently. the further away from that we get the better. choice for the sake of choice, confusing, ill-explained, minor variations in stats and yet 50 million pages of menus to read through when you start the game. dunno about you but i have shit to do, i don't need to spend half my game time trying to understand what some fat neckbeard (irony) has hidden away in riddles that only make sense to him and his mom.

can someone explain to me (as somebody who never played morrowind) why everybody is losing their shit over a lack of spears, and not being able to dual-wield shields?

ooookay so i explored a bunch more, found some really nice looking areas, individual assets are still pretty poor but the overall ambience is sweet. also getting further into some skill trees and getting a feel for the kind of class i want to play. the favourites system is actually very well thought out; i personally wield an enchanted-as-fuck 1 handed weapon, and use my left hand for fire/frost damage spells - healing when i am low - and a magical shield. it's really quick and easy to just jump between things - and you could even put other things in there, maybe a real shield when low on magic, or another 1 handed weapon. it feels pretty badass to leap around with a pocket full of butterflies and putting up forcefields between myself and bosses all the while raining fire upon them like some deranged angel of mercy.

i just punched a crab to death, then jumped about picking flowers and catching some butterflys.

everything is turned up to 11, don't kid yourself, this is not a pretty game

i think there is sometimes too much freedom, it makes it feel like they are having trouble conveying a solid focused story. doesn't feel very dramatic when a guy insists i go kill a dragon and instead i go around picking flowers and stealing apples like some kind of 18th century london orphan.

i'm enjoying it but i keep looking at some of the scenery and thinking they could have appeased a PC crowd by just throwing in some DX11 shit, some nice rendering, tesselation or POM, or just anything to make it less fucking ugly. it's pretty much on the same level of quality as oblivion, and that game is old as shit i like the technical idea of some of their stuff - like auto generating either moss or snow on rocks depending on the objects height in the world, but then they have this terrible 1bit alpha as a mask.

the voice acting is, once again, diabolical. there's main storyline characters who sound like 18 year old norwegians, and then there's some sidequest dude hidden underground who has the coolest most badass voice in the game. it's just really weird.

i wonder if beth were working on this since falllout3 or if this is a second team who were given a year.

been tweaking the shit out of the game and the ini files but it still looks like shit

http://i.imgur.com/H4lRX.jpg

i'm pirating the game right now. and it'll work. and in 1/10th of the time. good work developers. good work.

Quote from Puddy

Are you sure it's installing from the disc? Also, if you haven't done so already, try selecting Netherlands/some other country instead of Sweden in Steam.

I'm probably going to buy the game tomorrow, but I doubt I'll play it this weekend... my BF3-appetite is not satisified

nice, 95kbps!

fucking steam can suck donkeys cock this is ridiculous.

i genuinely don't care about the treasures because they seem like an artificial way to lengthen the game by making you play through more than once. i'd love challenges like older games had then: beat the level without taking any damage, run through in X amount of time, etc. i don't really enjoy hunting things down knowing they have been placed in as obscure a place as possible.

bought it from webhallen after a fucking hour long journey to find the store - unrelated note stockholm city is nice this time of year - installing it now, got myself some fuel and i intend to stay up till 1am playing it! hardcorrrre!

Quote from Thrik

I don't think anyone's exactly advocating that shit either. God damn gaming.

This is a very interesting point. I mean people keep buying those games because lineups change and they want the newest stuff, but I don't think anyone really wants to buy it, I think people would be pretty happy with a DLC that just updated player rosters or added a new stadium. But there's not exactly the same amount of money in that.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/ ... /4824-Rage

i love this line:

"it's funny how innovation seems to mean catching up to valve"

comprehensive. i'd agree with all of that.