The Gaming Den

Because going to gaming sites nowadays means inundation with Dark Souls 2 info and wank, I'm going to say Dark Souls. Because I thought it could easily have been fixed and made for a much, much more rewarding play experience. For instance:

Remove stat requirements for all items and spells. This is perphaps the biggest thing. From what I gather, the various weapon categories have different movesets that present meaningful tactical choices. I wouldn't know, however, because I played as a dedicated mage, and so I couldn't even fucking use different weapons without diverting stat points away from my primary shtick.

Stat requirements for equipment were dumb in Diablo 1+2, and they're exacerbated by the stat-scaling in Dark Souls.


I also wish the controls in Witcher 2 were better. It's sad that because they didn't include the ability to cancel out of stuff in the sequel, the combat in the first game actually feels better and more fluid.

I wish there were more breadth to the tech trees in Civilization V. Every civ I ever play feels the same and takes all but identical advancement paths.

I wish Legend of Grimrock had let you hotkey actions per character rather than force you to click on each character's individual action button.

I wish Far Cry 3 hadn't gone full-on stupid halfway through. The writing was so bad I had to quit before my brain melted.

I wish Guild Wars 2 had gone whole hog on letting the world's future be player driven, sorta like Shadowbane.

NineInchNall wrote:Because going to gaming sites nowadays means inundation with Dark Souls 2 info and wank, I'm going to say Dark Souls. Because I thought it could easily have been fixed and made for a much, much more rewarding play experience. For instance:

Remove stat requirements for all items and spells. This is perphaps the biggest thing. From what I gather, the various weapon categories have different movesets that present meaningful tactical choices. I wouldn't know, however, because I played as a dedicated mage, and so I couldn't even fucking use different weapons without diverting stat points away from my primary shtick.

Stat requirements for equipment were dumb in Diablo 1+2, and they're exacerbated by the stat-scaling in Dark Souls.

In practice, Dark Souls' stat system is nothing like Diablo's. They are both ass, but they are ass for different reasons.

In Diablo, allocating attribute points is basically a non-choice - your class (and possibly specific skill build) decides what your target equiment is (with some variance here and there for certain builds, but not really), and you take the stats necessary to use that equipment. Vitality is always the best choice for your remainder, and energy is always useless. This is a bad system because it does absolutely nothing except offer an opportunity to fuck up your build for no reason. It is complexity without function.

In Dark Souls, your selection of class is basically meaningless, but each stat is tied to a different set of actions/capabilities (STR weapons, DEX weapons, sorceries, miracles, ninja-flipping in heavy armor, whatever). If you want your character to do those things, you invest in the stats that let you do those things. Your decision of which stats to increase and which ones not to isn't a trivial requirement of what your character is, it's the subsystem of the game that defines what your character is. And it's quite obviously way more fucking fiddly than it needs to be. It's function bloated with unnecessary complexity.

Dark Souls also has the problem that it is a Japanese game, and Japanese game devs believe firmly that explaining the rules of the game to the player is a cardinal sin. Not only are you expected to learn how to play well through trial and error (sure, sounds reasonable), you are expected to learn how to play at all through trial and error (fuck yourself with a rake, Japan). So the system is both ridiculously fiddly and completely obfuscated. But nevertheless, once you know what you're doing (thank god for wikis), stat allocation is a system with very real, very meaningful trade-offs in different areas of expertise.

In this specific case, I felt like the lack of tutorials made for a more immersive experience. It felt like an accomplishment to beat enemies, find the few allies, and open up new locations, and also made me feel like the character--who had no reason to be super-aware of how a lot things worked.

There is nothing immersive about spending skill points blind. There is also nothing immersive about spending skill points informed, but at least then you actually know what the fuck your decisions do. But immersion is absolutely 100% not a justification for hiding mechanics from the player, especially when characters are going to be interacting with those mechanics regardless.

I meant more the "Figure out the finer points of combat on your own".

The stats are irritating, given how high they have to be to use something nice.

DSMatticus wrote:There is nothing immersive about spending skill points blind. There is also nothing immersive about spending skill points informed, but at least then you actually know what the fuck your decisions do. But immersion is absolutely 100% not a justification for hiding mechanics from the player, especially when characters are going to be interacting with those mechanics regardless.

I agree with this, but I actually saw a video that was about the awesomeness of hiding mechanics from the player.

While there could be a case made for the customization aspect of the DS stat allocation system, I don't think there's any justification for tying item use to stats. All that does is make it so I get bored by using the same weapon and tactics from hour two for hour 52, because diversifying my experience and reducing staleness would require punching my character progression in the dick. I should not have to sacrifice efficiency for fun, is what I'm saying.

I think my last build swapped around two katanas, the balder side sword, and the silver knight spear - all solid dex weapons, fairly different movesets, pretty satisfying to use. But the claymore and the zwei are also pretty fun.

More to your point, Dark Souls is a game in dire need of a respec button. And I'll admit it now; I just fucking opened up cheat engine and reset all my skills and soul level whenever I wanted to, then gave myself enough souls to level back up. I did a lot of PVPing, and I wanted to experiment with different builds without grinding away at the same bullshit a dozen fucking times. And I encourage everyone who plays the PC version to do the same, provided you keep the character legit if you're going to PVP. Otherwise you're a dick.

My last PVP build centered around Priscilla's Scythe, and the Bloodbite ring.

I got actual hatemail over that; folks calling it cheap and such when I murdered them.

I'm not even that great at PVP, but apparently very few people use Priscilla's Scythe, so they weren't as practiced on the timing for the counters.

Maxus wrote:My last PVP build centered around Priscilla's Scythe, and the Bloodbite ring.

I got actual hatemail over that; folks calling it cheap and such when I murdered them.

I'm not even that great at PVP, but apparently very few people use Priscilla's Scythe, so they weren't as practiced on the timing for the counters.

I got similar reactions to playing an outside fighter in Fight Night Champion. People absolutely hated it when I would backpedal an entire fight. Despite the fact that the game mechanics don't really support outfighting.

And that's another game I wish had been better. There was too much randomness involved with stun/KO effects. RNG-based stuff is fine for RPGs, but it cheapens the feeling of victory and makes losses feel like BS in something like a boxing game.

Dragonfall Addon Berlin Campaign for Shadowrun Returns dropped 2 days ago.
Still wish this was better ._.
The story is good, but it's a bit railroady and sometimes nintendo hard <.<

I also shelled out for sim city and the cities of tomorrow addon . . .
I so wish this was better. especially larger city plots god damn it -.-
And true numbers and an actually able to manage the data engine x.x

NineInchNall wrote:I wish there were more breadth to the tech trees in Civilization V. Every civ I ever play feels the same and takes all but identical advancement paths.

I always think 4X games are better when they aren't historical. We have a hard time imagining a different past, so tech trees are always linear. Something like Alpha Centauri worked much better. Late game, I could be faced with a meaningful choice between a tier 10 tech and the tier 3 tech that I never researched that has blocked off a quarter of the techs.

Yeah, the Tech-Trees are mediocre, that's true.
Civ1 had different Civs start with differen techs.
That was a bit different, but also horribly unbalanced.

Stat points worked great in the original Diablo. The Magic and Dexterity stats were very important, and Strength was, too, up to the point that 98% of the players (and the dev team) would want to experience. The game is smaller in scope, and displays the tendency of many roguelikes to pretty much let you have whatever stats or spell levels you want, up to the cap, if you're lucky enough to find elixers and books on the dungeon floor. The game is fast and loose, but also a lot tidier than its successor, in a lot of ways. Stats are a welcome reward for advancement.

During Diablo II's development, they had an inkling that they were authoring a work that lots of people would sink hundreds and hundreds of hours into just to make the same few characters better, which really wasn't the conceit with its predecessor. They aspired to raise the level cap, pay a little more attention to the post-game difficulties, and nail down the significance of leveling up so that you couldn't turn level 1 characters into endgame motherfuckers by just kicking out a bunch of dup'd Godly Plates of the Whale and Obsidian Rings of the Zodiac (which were so fucking prevalent that I understand they're a specific, unique item in D3, which I haven't played). The comparative rigidity of the game makes stat points a boring, obligate affair, and the scope of the game completely eclipses stat points as a meaningful reward for advancement. They are a vestigial system.

What makes baffles me is that they added the Stamina secondary stat, which is both unprecedented and also 100% useless from the very first second of your character's life to the last time you ever log in. Nobody ever doesn't run in Diablo II, and that should have been during development that institutional blindspots couldn't have concealed.

The idea was that there would be times when people don't run because while running, attacks auto-hit you and your block rate plummets.

NineInchNall wrote:I agree with this, but I actually saw a video that was about the awesomeness of hiding mechanics from the player.

That's not what the video game is arguing for, exactly. They're saying that sometimes a game should simply not tell you every single thing to do. Some games should let you learn the game by just playing through it without a tutorial every step of the way. There's another video that I would suggest is a better presentation of the same sort of idea. Setting up the game so that the player can learn what's going on and how to play the game without getting bored from doing too much easy tutorial stuff is non-trivial. And doing it so that the veteran player can at the same time have fun each time they replay the game is even more difficult.

Now, in the case of Dark Souls I think they probably went too far in the "don't tell them what's going on" direction. I've tried to play the game twice now and each time I don't even get up to the boss fight of the tutorial dungeon because I just don't care about anything the game appears to be offering, and the game is telling me nothing about what I might even have to look forward to later, so I dropped it. Then later, the exact same thing happened about as soon as I got one room farther than before.

TiaC wrote:The idea was that there would be times when people don't run because while running, attacks auto-hit you and your block rate plummets.

But you agree, pretty much never because you actually ran out of stamina somehow.

my observation was, it's only so good upon starting the game... but eventually loses its charm as you get to the end of it.

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Dragonfall has this annoying mission with surprise mandatory decking the ONE TIME I didn't bring a dedicated decker, and ALSO the one time in the entire game when "drive a truck filled with explosive into the lobby" would be a completely appropriate course of action.

Eikre wrote:

TiaC wrote:The idea was that there would be times when people don't run because while running, attacks auto-hit you and your block rate plummets.

But you agree, pretty much never because you actually ran out of stamina somehow.

It's more that those downsides don't actually matter. Either you want to be in melee and should get there as fast as you can, or you want to stay away from melee, and should get out as fast as you can. Not being there is a far better defense. When you aren't moving, it doesn't matter whether you have run toggled.

But yes, stamina is useless.

name_here wrote:Dragonfall has this annoying mission with surprise mandatory decking the ONE TIME I didn't bring a dedicated decker, and ALSO the one time in the entire game when "drive a truck filled with explosive into the lobby" would be a completely appropriate course of action.

The AI Basement. SUCKS.

I was actually talking about Project Bloodline.

So, Aztechnology is doing some extra-horrifying blood magic thingy, and one of the researchers hires you to take it out. You are specifically ordered to destroy the entire building and kill everyone inside. I figured this was the perfect time for Pink Mohawk because it was going to end in a building-leveling explosion anyway. Unfortunately, there are locked doors that must be hacked open. Several of them. My PC had put three points into decking, so I just barely managed to pull it off.

It was extra-infuriating because the fixer kept warning me that there was a KE High Threat Response Team on call and they would absolutely kick my ass, but not a word about the doors. Then the High Threat Response Team showed up and I took them apart but nearly got killed because the door out was locked.

The AI basement did warn me that I would positively need a decker, but I can see overlooking that because you're going after something which was introduced by murdering an expert decker the moment they jacked in. Plus, I was under the impression our plan was to smash shit until we reached the "Break Glass In Case Of Murderous Rogue AI" button that presumably would not require decking because that would be stupid. Does our team just not know anyone who can manufacture explosives? Is there no one in Berlin who can do that?

Diplomacy in D&D 3.5/PF.

My beef was playing PF, it seemed like every time I opened my mouth to ask someone to do something, I got "roll a diplomacy check," despite my character having a -2 mod. So I actually hurt the party by participating.

So basically:
1. The DM hates you if you're good at it (mechanically, by refusing to let you do what the skill says you can).
2. The game hates you if you're bad at it (as in, you can't talk things out with people ever).

And there's no consensus on how to fix it, so it just gets swept under the rug.

The Theif remake. It's fun, but the old games are just genuinely better, also the sound design in the remake is just absolutely fucked. A bunch of niggling problems pile on top of each other and really drag down what could have been a great game and a good re-imagining of a classic.

I wish we could have a genuinely decent Puzzle Quest sequel which involved them ironing out the flaws of the original game rather than having them (badly) reinvent the wheel repeatedly with PQ2, PQC, and Puzzle Kingdoms.

By ironing out the flaws, I mean:
1.) Make overland travel less of a pain in the ass. Until you get crazy gamebreaker skills like Deathbringer battles take from 3-7 minutes to complete.
2.) Do something with the Morale and Gold puzzle pieces. Either get rid of them or make them more consequential beating a match. I can understand the importance of board filler, but PQ isn't a game that needs it because the skill system inherently renders some of the gems filler. For example, if gold pieces were required to unlock certain skills or morale refilled your life bar, that would be much better.
3.) The minigames for forging runes either need to be easier, deterministic, fail forward, or less ass. It is retarded beyond belief to spend 20 minutes on a forge only to lose all of that effort due to a single bad move or even bad luck.
4.) Most importantly, the game needs better balancing. Puzzle Quest works pretty well balance-wise until you get to the third continent with the minotaurs. But then the difficulty utterly collapses due to how powerful skills are. It becomes less about matching gems and outmaneuvering your opponent and more shooting off your skill and OTKing your way to victory. Flaming Skulls + Deathbringer is the most infamous combo, but it's far from the only one.