Bay 12 Games Forum

I always thought Resident Evil 4 was a good example of deescalation due to guns. You start out the game with just a pistol in the woods, and every enemy you fight (the first time you play the game) is challenging. When you get to the village and are suddenly surrounded by several dozen ganados, it's terrifying. The game throws more ganados (and a chainsaw guy!) at you if you manage to find the shotgun, so that's not much better.

The further you get, the more the game shifts narratively from horror to action. By the end of the game, you're mowing down about as many ganados in a minute as there were in that whole village scene. You have a rifle, a magnum, better ammo capacity, a goddamn rocket launcher and mine thrower are available, and the enemies get more ridiculous.

The game manages to remain tense by making the enemies more frightening as you go, but they're scary in a way that isn't as relatable because everything gets so outlandish.

It's a lot harder to get good-looking results when you're working with a relatively small chunky hex map instead of a huge grid like in those images.

On the other hand, it should be much easier to use that moisture propagation. Did you just flood fill from every contiguous water source, reducing the moisture based on terrain type as you went?

I know this is not exactly what you are suggesting, but there's something you might enjoy here. It's still early access and needs a lot more features (too basic for now for my tastes as a DF player, but it's certainly playable) but I like the idea and hope it gets developed.

Yeah, I've seen Keeper RL. Haven't checked it out in a while though, maybe I should download it again.

Now, @Gatleos, sounds like the hilariously evil version of CKII. I'd also really like to see that. I know you said large-scale/grand strategy, but what about some more intimate interactions with people? at least in the form of messengers, etc.?

Yeah, I realized after a while that it was CK II: Evil Overlord Expansion. Holding meetings (or " granting an audience" once you're more full of yourself) with diplomats, trade caravans, or summoned demons would be essential. Even a reclusive evil archmage (or at least his high-ranking cult members) needs to do a little diplomacy now and then.

Are you sure about making multiple fortresses?  It seems to me that the necromancer/archmage archetype (as opposed to, say, an emperor or warlord) prefers to build upward rather than spread out, creating a single ominous palace whose influence spreads out like a dark cloud of notoriety (or a literal dark cloud) that covers and corrupts the land around them.

I think some sort of cross between Civ and Crusader Kings II could work for the strategic layer. Have provinces with multiple towns/villages/castles/ancient_ruins in them. They can be razed, micromanaged, or just taken and then mostly ignored.

Yeah, a single tower would fit the genre/archetype the best. The main reason I mentioned multiple fortresses was that it makes more sense realistically. A place to fall back to if your main base is compromised, where you can rebuild your forces and prepare to strike back. As for Crusader Kings II management of fiefdoms and whatnot, that's actually a good way to abstract it out.

Quote from: IndigoFenix on April 01, 2015, 01:08:13 pm

Also, maybe you don't like this idea, but what about a 'benevolent archmage' option?

I would prefer that.
Instead of "Pillage everything. Kill resistors and enslave the rest," I would like an option to leave towns un-razed. Mechanics-wise, I expect I would need to spend more resources on laborers than on slaves, and probably need to keep the towns happy despite being guarded by rotting corpses, but there would be less of a diplomatic penalty.

I think it would need a limiter, something to keep us from playing necromancer-king world conquest. We should be able to hire some living mercenaries, but levying armies that can stand and win against our rivals seems like it would distract from the necromancy simulation.

It could be a good idea to extend the concept from "necromancer" to "evil wizard overlord". Though necromancy was the original impetus, the main idea here is that you're the kind of evil wizard BBEG that would field armies of goblins or kidnap princesses to steal their lifeforce and power some magical doomsday weapon. You wouldn't necessarily have to be the grimdarkwicked mustache-twirling baby murdering psychopath, you're just a megalomaniacal magical overlord. That said, it could be interesting to hide your more sinister activities from the masses. Semi-benevolently ruling over a few towns doesn't preclude you from having a few undead-spawning necropolises powered by the pain of innocents tucked away somewhere.

That said, the danger in this is overextending. Trying to include too many different roles could lead to significant feature creep.

Perhaps distant battles could be abstracted (You send X zombies/monsters/slaves to make an attack on a village with Y defenses, roll for success, gain some fresh corpses and prisoners, lose some zombies, build summoning circles to build magic power, use magic to turn corpses into zombies or summon demons, and so on), while armies who attack your stronghold directly could play out in real-time like cross between a tower defense game and an action RPG (you could have zombies, monsters, archers, etc defend your tower automatically, while you stand at the top of the tower and cast long-range spells to fend off stronger enemies).

This brings up the biggest concern I have, which is determining the level of abstraction. This is one area where I feel DF has struggled in the past; it's hard to care about the big picture of what's going on in your fort when you have to worry about the logistics of transporting stone and making wooden bins. It's ultimately a tradeoff between customizability and efficiency: it's hard to make a satisfying combat system when you have to worry about pathfinding around arbitrary collision maps, and the more the player can customize their tower the more likely it is that they can circumvent the invader AI and make the game into a joke.

The specifics of the combat and how it relates to base customization is very important, and could easily soak up a ton of time if made too intricate.

I'd say the ultimate driving force of the game, once you have built up a strong zombie army and have achieved high enough notoriety among the surrounding villages, should be attaining more and more power from more and more powerful demons.  Perhaps you can choose to either cut deals with demons, or when you get strong enough, actually capture them and force them to do your bidding (which would be a very dangerous endeavor that could potentially backfire severely).  Maybe an endgame goal could be building a tower to heaven and waging war on the gods of the setting.

It might be interesting to add in pantheons of gods. Light gods would really like for their worshipers to stop us, while the dark gods will give us quests. It could also add in more of an end game - The light gods are getting desperate as their power wanes, and are more willing to risk the world's destruction as the dark gods are in danger of winning. Live people could then provide worship.
Slaves could be sifted through to look for potential apprentices, sent into battle to hurt enemy morale, magically sacrificed, or kept as a breeding population for more undead.

A lot of potential with these. Making deals with supernatural beings is something more games need to include.

To be fair, they do comment on it. Some people just don't age noticeably during that time of their lives. How many years was it since Black Mesa? Wasn't it only about 10-14 years or so? Barney was probably about 25 during that time, so at most he's 40, which seems about right. You're not wrong about the retcons, but I don't really see how these amount to really big plot holes?

Yeah, they do mention it. According to the wiki, Alyx is supposed to be in her mid-twenties and was only a few years old at the time of the first game. You also never see anyone younger than about her age due to the suppression field thingy, so we can assume it's been at least 2 decades.

So not really plot holes, just strange behavior from characters. It also serves to highlight the fact that Gordon never talks, since you'd expect his first reaction to be "Guys I was in a time warp for like 20 years that's why I look the same". Though it could be Link-style muteness, where he's just implied to be talking to people.

The thing from HL2 that stands out the most to me was when Barney made a joke about praising you for doing something easy, which was funny because the rest of the series continued to do exactly that, getting more and more ridiculous as it went on.  Walk forward, shoot a dude, Alyx tells you good job, walk forward, shoot more dudes, Alyx flips her fucking lid at your skills, do a puzzle, Alyx approves, shoot dudes, great job Gordon.

Nobody is with you for the majority of HL2, while the episodes revolve around traveling with companions. It would have seemed strange for nobody to react to anything Gordon did, but then they painted themselves into a corner by going the opposite direction. It just highlights the absurdity of Gordon's hypercompetence when everyone starts commenting on it.

The problem with Half-Life's story isn't the little things, it's how clearly unplanned the overall story was. Laidlaw pulled most of the retcons and filled-in details in HL2 straight out of his ass, because he had to. Why doesn't anyone express surprise that Gordon looks exactly the same as he did decades ago? Or Barney, for that matter. Guy must be at least in his late 40s, but he looks nothing like it.

The series tries so hard to be realistic, but it makes the gamey elements of the story all the more glaring.

Awesome avatar btw.

I don't think it was ever actually considered bad by numbers so much as by volume, but I did play Morrowind, then play and prefer Oblivion. Most of the legitimate criticisms (less interesting via more familiar world, hampered spell/enchant/alchemy shenanigans) struck me as understandable choices or necessary sacrifices, and a lot of the more subjective things (dungeon layouts) I either preferred or didn't really mind. And, of course, the game was just technically and mechanically better, having benefited from technological improvements and the possibilities that came with it.

Yeah, Morrowind is by no means a bad game, but only because 1.) the story and setting are interesting, and 2.) you can mod the hell out of it to fix most gameplay issues. It had awful, boring combat if you weren't playing as a mage, a completely broken magic and potion system (look up "Morrowind speedrun" and watch the system get abused to hell and back), and a million bugs.

I completely understand people preferring later games in the series; some people complain about the loss of complexity, but Bethesda really tightened a lot of things up (except the amount of bugs on release ). For people like me who prefer Morrowind, it's all about the world and atmosphere.

Quote from: Graknorke on March 25, 2015, 07:29:57 pm

I liked the 3D sonic game where the characters are split into teams of 3. I forget the name but I honestly liked playing it at the time.

Sonic Heroes?

This also helped me think of a bad game that I like: Sonic Adventure. Yeah it's an early 3D platformer in the Sonic series, but the plot was actually really good. Not the acting or writing, mind you, but the idea was cool: each character gets a piece of the backstory, and then you see the whole thing at the end for the grand finale. I feel like a remake could be pretty nifty.

More on topic... I still like Sonic Adventure 2. Yes, I know the story is awful. Eggman blowing up half the moon with a space station that looks like his face, a bunch of anthro furries hijacking the United States President's limousine to figure out that Eggman is in space (orly), the hilarious edgelord that is Shadow, weird awkward furry romance subplots, awful dialog, and plot holes everywhere. I know.

The game itself isn't much better. The engine is truly terrible, with frequent physics issues. For some goddamn reason the designers decided the Dreamcast controller didn't have enough buttons and added a button to cycle through possible actions, which is just bizarre for an action game. This also means every command that isn't jump is mapped to the same button. The treasure hunting levels were just painful, the camera tries its best to sabotage you constantly, and it took Sonic Team about a decade after this game to figure out how a Sanic game should even work in 3D.

But I had never played anything like it when I was 13, and the different story paths were intriguing. The Sanic/Shadow action stages were actually pretty fun, and it doesn't play nearly as bad as later games in the series. Oh, and the soundtrack is great. I'm serious. I was actually surprised by how many good songs are on it when I listened to it by itself. Just... skip over the Knuckles tracks.