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Author Topic: Gaming Pet Peeves  (Read 493863 times)

Robsoie

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Re: Gaming Pet Peeves
« Reply #4785 on: May 31, 2020, 12:48:57 pm »

From what i remember there was a camping button to heal to the max without spells in EoB3 so you didn't have to rely on cast healing spells all the time.

It's usually a shortcoming of nearly every rpg on computer, i mean you rest all the time to make sure your character have full health and full memorized spells (or full mana for games with a mana system) so you're not going to run into a difficult situation without your pants.


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Iduno

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Re: Gaming Pet Peeves
« Reply #4786 on: May 31, 2020, 01:20:27 pm »

From what i remember there was a camping button to heal to the max without spells in EoB3 so you didn't have to rely on cast healing spells all the time.

It's usually a shortcoming of nearly every rpg on computer, i mean you rest all the time to make sure your character have full health and full memorized spells (or full mana for games with a mana system) so you're not going to run into a difficult situation without your pants.

Yeah. It's tough to thread the needle between full reset between each fight and limiting resources, especially in a computer game where it's harder to fudge things up or down depending on how things are going. Some games try to limit things with a timer, but that only punishes people who are doing poorly.
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Reelya

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Re: Gaming Pet Peeves
« Reply #4787 on: May 31, 2020, 01:34:30 pm »

They did speed up the camping process in Eye3. That's one of the few things they actually got right compared to Eye 1 and Eye 2. But it's more that the first two games has something that was clearly broken and they did a no-brainer fix for it.

In Eye 1 and Eye 2 there's a bit of a bug. When you rest, your clerics immediately let loose every healing spell they have on the injured person with the lowest HP, no how much damage they've actually taken. So in other words even if you have enough healing spells to heal an army, they cast literally everything on whichever character has damage. And by that, I mean if someone has 1 HP damage and it's their turn next to be healed, every cleric in the party will cast all their healing spells for the day on that one dude. Then they sleep for 8 hours, spend several more hours re-memorizing spells and rinse and repeat. For each character. Worst-case scenario is that everyone in the party has a little damage, and they spend half a week just casting spells and sleeping. This also takes a substantial amount of your actual time and is annoying as hell to watch.

So you have an annoying trade-off decision to make there. You could micro-manage the healing process and maybe shave off some actual real-world time, but then there's the cool-down time between spells to consider so it's 50/50 whether this is worth it, and there's cognitive load to consider. It's easier to relax and let the machine do it, even if it takes an unnecessary amount of your time for it to be completed.

Eye 3 at least fixed that one thing, and the clerics do in fact stop casting on someone once they're healed up and switch to the next person. Meaning no more resting for half a week (and a minute or two of your time) because they're too dumb to know when to stop casting.
« Last Edit: May 31, 2020, 01:48:50 pm by Reelya »
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Rolan7

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Re: Gaming Pet Peeves
« Reply #4788 on: May 31, 2020, 03:51:58 pm »

Gods, and I thought *I* was an overeager healer...
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MrRoboto75

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Re: Gaming Pet Peeves
« Reply #4789 on: May 31, 2020, 04:43:13 pm »

^me, playing fire emblem
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Reelya

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Re: Gaming Pet Peeves
« Reply #4790 on: June 01, 2020, 03:03:23 am »

I also found a very broken thing in Eye 3. There's a level with wights that drain your levels, and near the end you get a Rod of Restoration that returns your lost levels and HP.

Now, that'd be great, and it is great. Too great, in fact. It doesn't check what level and HP you were originally, it just adds any lost levels and HP on top of whatever you currently have.
 
I had a new NPC in the party, a Dwarf 8/8 Fighter/Thief with 71 HP. When I worked out that it was level draining, I decided to drain all his levels then re-level him up, but with the optimal amount of HP (already done this for my other characters in the previous 2 games).

Now, when I finally got the Rod of Restoration, that was after I'd releveled him up manually from level 1 to level 7 (managed to get him an extra 10 HP - would be 81 HP by level 8 ).

But then, I hit him with the Rod of Restoration, and it boosted him to level 14/14 with 131 HP. So yeah, he'd "regained" his levels but suddenly they're higher levels and all the lost HP has now been added on top. Also note the XP cost to get lower levels is much cheaper.

I'm kinda guessing you could just exploit this over and over to get characters with really ridiculous HP amounts and/or possibly to exceed the racial level limits. If it's just adding the old levels on top of what you are now without regard for the original level then I'm guessing they didn't have the brains to also check for racial limits on that thing. I'm actually going to somewhat test this out. If I can get my demi-human characters up to the level limit of 20 I'll be happy.

EDIT: confirmed, this stupid Wights / Rod of Restoration thing is the ultimate cheat in the Eye of the Beholder universe. Allows characters to ignore racial level restrictions, allows ultra-fast leveling up to max level and allows HP farming to get arbitrary amounts of HP.
« Last Edit: June 01, 2020, 09:37:46 pm by Reelya »
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Reelya

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Re: Gaming Pet Peeves
« Reply #4791 on: June 18, 2020, 09:59:36 pm »

Ok so I stopped with Eye of the Beholder 3 for now, that game's too broken to be fun, and it's just a slog. Really the only fun element I found was manually mapping it out, and that's saying something since there are in fact auto-mapper plug-in apps for the Eye series.

After that I've started going through old Amstrad games from when I was a little kid, finishing ones that screwed me over and I never completed. And this has lead me to some very poorly designed text adventures (the better designed ones were difficult but could be finished).

Completed a text adventure called The Secret of Bastow Manor that me and my sisters pulled our hair out trying to solve. We didn't get very far, and looking back at this has brought up a raft of design issues, as well as outright *broken* things that would have prevented us completing the game even if we did navigate its stupid parser. There are a lot of objects in this game that you can see on the screen, and have to guess their name, or even *guess they even exist*. And the LOOK command isn't helpful enough. The game has pictures, and you get stuff for example a square on the screen and you're meant to work out that this is a "CASE" and do "OPEN CASE", then you can LOOK CASE and see what's in it. However if you LOOK CASE before opening it, you just get a generic message "You see nothing special", but this message also appears if you type LOOK and random gibberish. There are well-designed text adventures and this is not one of them. If there are random nouns you're meant to work out, there need to be clues. This game doesn't even give you LOOK ROOM or the equivalent to tell you what things are called or what you can interact with.

The real problem here is that you don't know what the nouns are until you type them with the correct verb: LOOK, MOVE, GET, PRESS, READ, OPEN, UNLOCK etc. if you do the correct noun, but the wrong verb, it just says a generic message about how you can't do that. A better design here would have been that if you "LOOK XYZ" then it checks if there's a combo of VERB NOUN for XYZ at your location and then gives you a different message "you can see XYZ". Then you'd know you're on the right track. But you get nothing, so often you did the right noun but the wrong verb and then you try something else, never hitting the exact right combo. A better designed text adventure mitigates this parser-guessing by making failure give you a little information. If you say PRESS XYZ but there's no XYZ it could say "you can't see XYZ" but if XYZ is recognized but not pressable it says "You can't press that" instead. I ended up following a walkthrough to beat this game however, since doing the guessing thing is only fun for so long (hence why we gave up).

All that would be hard enough, but do-able. However, going through the walkthrough I got to a blood-boiling moment. The game is ported and it looks like they re-did the artwork. And whoever ported it decided that some plot-critical objects weren't worth drawing on the screen. There's ARMOR as an object, and you can't get past a certain screen without the armor. But there are no clues that you need the armor, and the room with the armor seems to contain neither visual nor textual clues that the armor exists, or that it's in this room. I can only assume that it was drawn in the original version of the game. You can in fact look at the source code of the game and see GET and ARM as tokens, but then you gotta still brute-force it by typing GET ARM in every room of the game, and that's presuming you knew that's the combo you were missing. So the game was in fact not just punishingly cryptic in terms of guessing the games for things, it was just broken and unfair.
« Last Edit: June 18, 2020, 10:12:07 pm by Reelya »
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Niveras

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Re: Gaming Pet Peeves
« Reply #4792 on: October 18, 2020, 10:19:38 am »

Genshin Impact has so many middling little annoyances to its UI, I can't tell whether they're deliberate or incidental or just lazy.

Why can't I right click to exit a menu/window/whatever, only Escape or a little button in the top right?

Why do I have to exit a menu to enter a different menu? (E.g. inventory to character)

Why can't I cycle between dialogue options with mousewheel like I can when selecting objects to pick up or interact with?

Why is my only control for selecting a dialogue option through the mouse cursor, without a default key like F/interact?

Why do I need a completely different menu to swap parties, and not just a subset of the character menu? It even seems to need its own load time ("reading party info").

Fucking why are the buttons for cooking slightly off from each other such that I have to mouse the cursor to use each one, especially when I need to mindlessly, manually repeat the same craft a dozen times before I can just auto-craft them.

Why are lore-only books considered quest items that I can't delete? Thanks for bloating the quest tab of my inventory, I guess.

Why do I get a bar to select item counts when buying, but not when selecting the amount of an item used to enhance a weapon or level up a character?

I guess the answer to all of these is "lul get a controller Mr. Masterrace, mouse/keyboard is old, man, get with the times."

The game is so polished in other ways, its hard to understand how they can manage to have such irritating failures to the user interface experience.
« Last Edit: October 18, 2020, 10:27:04 am by Niveras »
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Frumple

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Re: Gaming Pet Peeves
« Reply #4793 on: October 18, 2020, 01:39:42 pm »

Eh... it's also on mobile, so I'd guess wanting to mostly do one pass on the UI explains a lot of it. Lot of what you're mentioning sounds like ported mobile interface issues.
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Egan_BW

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Re: Gaming Pet Peeves
« Reply #4794 on: October 18, 2020, 01:53:37 pm »

More evidence that touchscreens were a mistake.
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Arbinire

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Re: Gaming Pet Peeves
« Reply #4795 on: October 19, 2020, 09:21:52 am »

More evidence that touchscreens were a mistake.

Putting the Internet on literally everything definitely has proven to be, for sure.
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Rolan7

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Re: Gaming Pet Peeves
« Reply #4796 on: October 19, 2020, 03:19:28 pm »

What if GPU technology had stagnated at some point in my youth - at or before Half Life 1, preferably earlier.  What would video games be like, now?

How would that have effected the waves of moral panic?  Photo-realistic violence would only be possible in the FMVs, and thus inherently tied to movie violence.

But more importantly, I'd love to see the depths of gameplay innovation we could have had with that toolset.  We get a lot of unique ideas despite it, and I have to wonder if we'd have even more with that lower barrier to entry.

(Apologies, just rewatched Prodigy - One Love)
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Urist McScoopbeard

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Re: Gaming Pet Peeves
« Reply #4797 on: October 19, 2020, 05:13:48 pm »

@Rolan,

It's interesting. I for sure think all the focus on graphics and photorealism is kind of bland and disappointing, there are fewer and fewer games each year that have new or interesting mechanics.
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Egan_BW

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Re: Gaming Pet Peeves
« Reply #4798 on: October 19, 2020, 09:08:53 pm »

there are fewer and fewer games each year that have new or interesting mechanics.
To my eye, it's the opposite. The minimum barrier to create and distribute a game is lower than ever, so there are simply more and more games coming out each year. And more games means more opportunity for innovation, as well.

AAA games are certainly stagnant, but haven't they been for a long, long time? If you look only at the huge, huge games created by hundreds of thousands of dollars and months of crunch, you'll get a skewed view of things.
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MrRoboto75

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Re: Gaming Pet Peeves
« Reply #4799 on: October 20, 2020, 11:36:11 am »

What if GPU technology had stagnated at some point in my youth - at or before Half Life 1, preferably earlier.  What would video games be like, now?

How would that have effected the waves of moral panic?  Photo-realistic violence would only be possible in the FMVs, and thus inherently tied to movie violence.

The moral panic started mainly with stuff like Doom and Mortal Kombat, FMVs were more vague porno stuff like Night Trap.
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