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[1.65/X.CE V0.35.0] X-Division 1.00 Beta (1.00.11c)


Charon

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Only the main UFO ever is in the map, the escort is not present then.

Yeah, it is known that there are consistency problems with going on multiple missions in a row. That should be a vanilla thing though, not X-Division specific, and near impossible to fix for the mod team. And also it occurs pretty rarely anyway, so it sounds like more work than it's worth.

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Extremely annoying bug when the Dreadnought UFO is encountered in phase 4: Once an aircraft has fled from the area, missiles continue to follow it (including turning), but the countermeasures are disengaged, so you need a very precise timing to be able to leave the area just as one missile has been shut down, but before the next one has been fired. The missiles are single hit kill ones as well, as far as I've experienced. I assume this can happen with other craft as well, but this bugger fires them so rapidly you need luck to get the exit timing right, and it doesn't have any range restrictions, at least not in practice.

Another air combat bug is that if you try to leave the area when very close to the border, the aircraft can leave, and then turns back in towards the enemy, which is fatal if the aircraft left due to fuel shortage, as it will disintegrate the moment you take control over it (on other cases you may or may not be able to get away by disconnecting the disengage setting and take control of the aircraft and order it to leave again). This bug conspires with the previous one to make whittling away at dreadnoughts a rather time consuming and annoying game of "roll the dice and see if I got away this time".

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@PALU Personally im always amazed when the development of X-Division changes the rules again, even with the limited possibilties available. You think you can safely leave the battlefield BAM ! think again.

I also noticed that with drones, where you sometimes have to time your exit just right, so the disengaged anti-missile system are not your downfall. But the dreadnaught is ofcourse a completely different story, with its high effective range nothing is safe anymore, and adds a new skill to your arsenal:"Time your exit right." I am not up to date, but the missiles have a poor turn rate. Wouldnt you be able to basically evade with this manouver ?

Unbenannt.thumb.png.f9d88c6a041c4f9c0c132840e2b22996.png

Afterburners on for maxgeschwindigkeit.

 

Apart from that it is a fitting fight for the lore description which comes along with it. Dont you think it fits extraordinarily well ?

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I've tried many variants, but the missiles are extremely fast (I initially thought they were cannon shots, not missiles), and unless the UFO is very close to the edge, the second missile is fired before the countermeasures have engaged the previous one. I assume a roll would be able to evade a missile (but if you could perform a roll, the next missile is already on the way anyway, and I don't have any bombers with roll capacity anyway). In a couple of cases I've seen missiles miss the UFO because they get out into the dead reckoning movement zone, where they won't adjust the course, but I haven't figured out what causes that to happen and when it does not. In most of the cases where I've succeeded the second missile somehow wasn't fired.

My least bad results have come from moving towards the edge at an angle, and then change the target to a position with a similar opposite angle towards a target along the edge, resulting in a turn that goes out outside of the area. Once there, it's possible to immediately switch to retreat by moving towards a position outside of the area, and thus immediately block further missiles from being fired. However, I'd need luck to succeed one time out of 5, and since the game crashes when trying to reload, I have to restart the game every time, so each failure takes about 2 minutes, I've got 3 bombers, and each bomber requires at 7 lots of stealth mines to take down (the first one will need 8, because the first 2 engagements didn't hit with/deploy all mines, and so I ended up with 50% damage rather than 60% after 4 Drakes' worth of mines).

There's a reason I play turn based games and not FPS or platformer ones...

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Slowing the rate of fire of the missile slightly might provide a somewhat larger escape window (far from ideal, of course, but a lot better than the current situation). I tried to hack it, but it had no effect: it's quite possible the XML files are used only when the craft are created, but once created the info is in the crafts themselves.

A couple of battlefield oddities, with insufficient data to provide real bug reports:

- The single Robodog Ghost spawning Andron I've encountered went stealthy when the shield was brought down, i.e. its enemy indicator disappeared, and it could only be targeted by selecting the tile (but the "body" was marked when that tile was targeted, just as for a robo-sadist "corpse". Likewise, no damage indications were shown when it was fired at, but it nevertheless was brought down (and it did move and attack, so it wasn't a passive "statue")).

- A small number of times (4?), all in phase 4, I've had the odd experience of movement ceasing to work. It was possible to select a path for units, but confirming that path did nothing. It was possible to select other units, but all I've tried refused to actually move. I haven't tried a vehicle, and I don't think I've tried firing at anything. This issue cleared itself after saving (in a different save than the previous one) and reloading. The last two times were in turn 1 of an Andron base building mission: Two Medium Killer Drones waited outside the drop zone (plus an andron and a small drone). I exited the area, moved the Mech two or three steps, and then fired twice at one of the medium drones, destroying it. After that I couldn't move any units (the mech was out of TUs). Save/reload, and a couple of soldiers moved into position and destroyed the other medium drone. Again, the odd movement refusal occurred. Save/reload, and things worked correctly again. I haven't encountered any medium drones since that, although there should be some waiting on at least one mission when I've finally downed the pesky dreadnought bombers (although they might not show up if that particular bomber has to be downed into the drink: I don't remember which craft they were on: such info is usually not of interest until it's time to equip a party to deal with them).

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7 hours ago, PALU said:

I've tried many variants, but the missiles are extremely fast (I initially thought they were cannon shots, not missiles), and unless the UFO is very close to the edge, the second missile is fired before the countermeasures have engaged the previous one. I assume a roll would be able to evade a missile (but if you could perform a roll, the next missile is already on the way anyway, and I don't have any bombers with roll capacity anyway). In a couple of cases I've seen missiles miss the UFO because they get out into the dead reckoning movement zone, where they won't adjust the course, but I haven't figured out what causes that to happen and when it does not. In most of the cases where I've succeeded the second missile somehow wasn't fired.

My least bad results have come from moving towards the edge at an angle, and then change the target to a position with a similar opposite angle towards a target along the edge, resulting in a turn that goes out outside of the area. Once there, it's possible to immediately switch to retreat by moving towards a position outside of the area, and thus immediately block further missiles from being fired. However, I'd need luck to succeed one time out of 5, and since the game crashes when trying to reload, I have to restart the game every time, so each failure takes about 2 minutes, I've got 3 bombers, and each bomber requires at 7 lots of stealth mines to take down (the first one will need 8, because the first 2 engagements didn't hit with/deploy all mines, and so I ended up with 50% damage rather than 60% after 4 Drakes' worth of mines).

There's a reason I play turn based games and not FPS or platformer ones...

Maybe the problem lies in the fact that you use only drakes ( a Phase 3 aircraft on top of that ) ? What if you aggro with 1 adopted alien interceptor, while the 2 drakes escape unscathed. The adopted alien interceptor should be agile enough without having to have a narrow time window to escape ? Aircombat skill can net you better results, but in reality you just need to make a good plan for your encounter.  The file says the dreadnaught missile is single targeting, so it should work.

If you are now saying that you need to stay in range of dreadnaught for 20 seconds than thats because you are using mines. Mines are good, but there are definite counters to it. Like the dreadnaught.

Time to deliver max payload:
AV.STEALTHMINES: 19 seconds
AV.SINGULARMISSILE: 10 seconds
AV.WARPMISSILE: 6 seconds ( 12 ?)
AV.SINGULARITYTORP: 4 seconds

You can see the higher the tech goes, the faster you can deliver your payload, usually, and thuse spend less time in the danger zone. Mines are just mines, they need time to deliver their payload.

As the dreadnaught is basically the last piece of tech you need to bring down ( since you technically dont need the mothership, thats just an extra ) and the fact that you are mostly using Phase 3 tech there are 2 points:

(1) 2 lost drakes for for 1 dreadnaught doesnt sound like a bad deal. You are in Phase 4, your production is supposed to be able to substitute anything.

(2)You dont have much Phase 4 tech. No heavy interceptor, no interceptor, no nightowl, no archelon. Fighting Phase 4 enemies with Phase 3 equipment is supposed to be difficult. What should players look forward to if better aircraft, you know, wouldnt be better. The nightowl can evade, the heavy interceptor has 1 normal and 1 heavy slot, and the archelon is just armageddon ( still propably needs a buff. ) And the dreadnaught is supposed to be one of the last things you need to get.

 

EDIT:
Fazit: Im not unhappy about the technical limitations of the fight, although if i would be able to change it, i would. The lore department is there to make the player feel good about what happens, so if the head chief of said department wants to write some lore about how terrifying beyond *shrug* range the dreadnaught is, it would be welcome.

 

I have buffed the archelon acceleration from 500 to 1000 for the next version, still with a very low turn rate of 25. This is supposed to make the player decelerate when he wants to turn. @PALUmaybe you can make a lore point about the high tech rotateable (a lot of mini thrusters as described in Researches.DirectionalThrusterArray ) super fueled "turbines" of the archelon ?

 

This is for you guys:

 

Edited by Charon
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I'm using Drakes because they reach the target slightly faster than my Lotus craft (I'm using those as well, and some have delivered their payload). I'm just over a month into phase 4 when the dreadnoughts show up (this is the first time I see them), and while I've researched the tech for Lotus craft a long time ago (in phase 2), I have to raid a lot of sites and disassemble a lot of cores to get the critical resource for phase 4 craft (and I'm producing craft as quickly as I get cores: there's no core backlog). So far Drakes have worked just fine, so I've spent the resources building some Interceptors (no heavy ones have shown up yet), and have been working or replacing the completely inadequate Corsairs with Contrails (and the single use of them seems to indicate they might just be acceptable, although I'm still not sure it wouldn't have been better to produce half as many repurposed Interceptors instead).
There's a slightly better bomber than the Lotus, but it uses 8 rather than 6 of the Extreme critical resource, which is what you might be able to scrape together from a complete wave, and so far I've seen nothing indicating 3 of those crafts would provide me with any benefit that's actually worth anything, let alone a fourth Lotus. Thus, my plan so far is to produce that one only when I'm full up on Interceptors (and I'm not convinced I should switch from Interceptors to Lotus yet anyway, as the problems I have aren't the ability to deliver damage, but the ability to participate in the next wave, and unless a bomber craft had enough HP to withstand both a pea shooter AND a missile hit, I don't see anything indicating there's any worth in sacrificing damage delivered [i.e. number of craft provided by the available resources] for fancy craft stats).

Phase 4 is a bit of a shock when it comes to production time: weapons take a bloody long time to produce (one fully staffed workshop takes more than one wave to produce a single Sonic Rifle Mk-3 from scratch), resources for aircraft are scarce, and production resources in workshops are scarce. I've upgraded the production yet another notch, but the staff for the first new workshop hasn't arrived yet, while the two other workshops are still in production.

I've got a single Archelon, and it's on the way to one of the bombers. If it's faster than other bombers it should be given a chance to wear away almost all the remaining HPs of that craft, but not the last 5% (it's the first wave I've got it, as the Mothership was gained in the previous wave).

It doesn't matter how long you stay in the danger zone, as there is no way to exit it before the dreadnought has fired its first missile, and after that it doesn't matter how long you stay (apart from the damage the pea shooter causes, or if you're using the very first countermeasures so you might run out of ammo for it): the danger is in leaving the area. Unfortunately, I've found you have to stick to mines as the only thing that works on everything: missiles might work on dreadnoughts, but they don't work on craft sporting powerful cannons (i.e. most everything else), and it takes forever to change the loadout, so all other weapons are nice decorations of little practical value. It's not possible to have enough aircraft to have loadouts adapted to different sets of targets, as it takes too long to actually get to the appropriate targets, and you're bound to get waves where large parts of your special purpose aircraft are useless because their types of targets didn't show up.

Evasion ability is useless to counter this situation, as the game will not activate it automatically while you've no longer got any control of the aircraft (and I've tried a mixed squad of Hunters and Interceptors, and while they did cause a decent damage, marginally better than a Drake, one of them was downed after exiting). I've considered sending bombers in full squads to reduce the losses to 1:3, but it's too late for this wave, as all the remaining bombers come from bases far away and have been in the air for quite some time.

If I was trying to play "honestman", I would leave the dreadnoughts alone, as I'd have to be lucky to recover a single bomber if sent them one at a time. For full squads I'd expect to lose 3 per dreadnoughts (and 2 Lotus crafts per dreadnoughts, or one Archelon, assuming I had a pair, but I've only seen two Motherships so far, and the core of the first one was lost to research, as usual). Actually getting away without the missile killing the craft has a rather low probability, and so would be a lucky exception. Those losses would mean I'd be down 9 Drakes for the next wave (assuming I was using full squads), which means I'd be unable to take down all craft in that wave instead. Now, losses suffered up to gain specific captives might be worth it, but it's not useful as a general strategy: the losses are simply too large.

If the Archelon has a lousy turn rate but good (?) acceleration, it sounds like the turbines  are actually fixed, but capable of providing a high thrust... (The question mark indicates I have no idea if that value is good or not. I have no idea what numbers other craft have in comparison),

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20 minutes ago, PALU said:

If the Archelon has a lousy turn rate but good (?) acceleration, it sounds like the turbines  are actually fixed, but capable of providing a high thrust... (The question mark indicates I have no idea if that value is good or not. I have no idea what numbers other craft have in comparison),

That sounds like a better explanation, go with it.

Foxtrot has an acceleration of 200, merlin, the Phase 4 2 heavy slot bomber, has 250. They have better turn rates, and faster speed than the archelon, in case of the merlin. The Firebird has 1000 acceleration. This means the archelon can accelerate and decelerate with the same agility as a Firebird, ontop of that the max speed of the archelon is lower, which means it can go reach highest/lowest speed faster than a firebird.

The main problem with bombers making a bombing run is partly the turn rate means you need to have a good plan, but the main disadvantages of bombers is their low adjustment to speed. This is such a big problem that better players even snake their planes in order to cover less ground ( and thus are slower at a certain range ). The archelon is a heavy craft, and the heaviness makes it hard to turn, but its turbines make it possible to speed to a certain point, decelerate to turn in 3 seconds, and acelerate to max speed in 3 seconds again.

Unbenannt.thumb.png.bc1ecd8bf8937b926db1f4b47c562ba9.png

At least thats the intended design.

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What about this:

"Sir, I have an idea that I think you're going to like... You know how we've been having such a hard time taking down those alien capital ships, what with the incredibly dense armour and shielding and whatnot? Well, I've come up with a simple-yet-effective solution...more firepower. If we could just hit those alien ships with twice as many torpedoes I'm pretty sure we could start taking them down without the current high fatality rate, but the only planes we've got that could carry that much weight are our troop transports. As I'm sure you've noticed, they aren't exactly great at running down an alien ship... they are far too slow. There's only one plane that I'm aware of that could lift the kind of ordnance I'm thinking about while still having the speed to catch the alien capital ships... the NASA Archelon. That's right, Commander...I want to steal NASA's best bird and load it with torpedo bays. It's normally used to lift an entire space shuttle up to the edge of space, and with the same weight allowances I believe I can get a full set with a mixture of torpedos and missiles onboard, along with all the control hardware. I also intend to cover the exteriour of the plane with hardened alien alloy to give it some durability...now that I think about it, perhaps the entire skeleton of the plane should be molded from hardened alien alloys. Actually Commander, I think I'd rather steal NASA's Archelon blueprints than the plane itself... I bet we could build a better one from scratch if I can include alien tech into the design. I'll give our engineers the completed technical specifications once I've had a few hours with those blueprints. Be a pal and make the call, Commander, NASA's not going to give those blueprints up without some... encouragement.

Thanks for explaining to NASA that providing us with their blueprints might allow them to actually be able to continue their operation once the war is over, provided we're able to end it, with their help.

In the process, we've done some significant calculations and even performed some wind tunnel experiments, and it turns out we'll have significant issues with turbulence whatever we do to turn this beast quickly. However, what we CAN do is to change the speed rapidly thanks to our extremely powerful (and heavy) engines, and the fact that alien materials have allowed us to actually reverse the engines to slow the craft, which means we should be able to almost stop, turn, and then accelerate back up to top speed in with both the deceleration and acceleration phases taking a mere 3 seconds (so the pilots will actually have to wear G suits to handle the G forces, which no other bomber pilots need to bother with)."

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56 minutes ago, PALU said:

What about this:

"Sir, I have an idea that I think you're going to like... You know how we've been having such a hard time taking down those alien capital ships, what with the incredibly dense armour and shielding and whatnot? Well, I've come up with a simple-yet-effective solution...more firepower. If we could just hit those alien ships with twice as many torpedoes I'm pretty sure we could start taking them down without the current high fatality rate, but the only planes we've got that could carry that much weight are our troop transports. As I'm sure you've noticed, they aren't exactly great at running down an alien ship... they are far too slow. There's only one plane that I'm aware of that could lift the kind of ordnance I'm thinking about while still having the speed to catch the alien capital ships... the NASA Archelon. That's right, Commander...I want to steal NASA's best bird and load it with torpedo bays. It's normally used to lift an entire space shuttle up to the edge of space, and with the same weight allowances I believe I can get a full set with a mixture of torpedos and missiles onboard, along with all the control hardware. I also intend to cover the exteriour of the plane with hardened alien alloy to give it some durability...now that I think about it, perhaps the entire skeleton of the plane should be molded from hardened alien alloys. Actually Commander, I think I'd rather steal NASA's Archelon blueprints than the plane itself... I bet we could build a better one from scratch if I can include alien tech into the design. I'll give our engineers the completed technical specifications once I've had a few hours with those blueprints. Be a pal and make the call, Commander, NASA's not going to give those blueprints up without some... encouragement.

Thanks for explaining to NASA that providing us with their blueprints might allow them to actually be able to continue their operation once the war is over, provided we're able to end it, with their help.

In the process, we've done some significant calculations and even performed some wind tunnel experiments, and it turns out we'll have significant issues with turbulence whatever we do to turn this beast quickly. However, what we CAN do is to change the speed rapidly thanks to our extremely powerful (and heavy) engines, and the fact that alien materials have allowed us to actually reverse the engines to slow the craft, which means we should be able to almost stop, turn, and then accelerate back up to top speed in with both the deceleration and acceleration phases taking a mere 3 seconds (so the pilots will actually have to wear G suits to handle the G forces, which no other bomber pilots need to bother with)."

Very good entry. I like it.

If you want the technical details, the archelon flies with 3000 kmh, making its max speed 4500 kmh. To accelerate from 0 to 4500 you need 4.5 seconds. Since aircraft usually dont fly on 0 kmh you can say that the average time it needs to reach the speed you can practically work with is indeed 3 seconds, give or take.

 

I have also redesigned the ancient weapons, but am struggling with the latest 2 weapons to give them a unique design. Do you want to get the preliminary results and write some entries for them ?

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5 minutes ago, PALU said:

Yes, it would be useful to get the designs, as well as any themes they might have that might explain similarities and differences.

Ill pass them along to you this evening. So you will propably be able to work on them tomorrow.

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7 hours ago, PALU said:

In your own time. It's not urgent, so post them when you're done, and I'll try to come up with something in my own time ;)

Ill take that than.

 

A postboned game will eventually become good, but a rushed game will forever be bad.

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Fought another Andron landing mission, and the two medium killer drones behaved normally, i.e. no weird refusal to move happened after taking them down (the first one was destroyed with an AP Singularity Rocket, and presumably resulted in no "corpse", while the second one was killed "normally"). The Andron that should transform into a Robodog Ghost went stealthy as the shield went down, however, but the mission ended as it was "killed" and morphed into a box (as it was the last unit, so that's not unexpected: the shield was taken down while there were still two other units around).

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From discord.

 

 

 

"Removing elements can be as impactful as adding them" - Does adding a guiding system add to the experience, or does it take away from the accomplishment of the player to make their own system ? "The books he ( Hidetaka Miyazaki, creator of dark souls ) read at the time, many in English, were sometimes beyond his reading capabilities, with parts of text he could not understand fully. Using his imagination to fill in the blanks by using the accompanying illustrations, Miyazaki used this as inspiration for some of his later ideas on game design.

All games have 2 extremes. The Gameplay side, and the Cinematic side. The Gameplay side, roughly speaking, is about what kind of pysical and mental skill a player has to either posess, or aquire during the gameplay to successfully progress in the game. The Cinematik side, also called Presentation of the game, is what kind of content the player is experiencing without having to be restrained by any skill requirement. It is what i call the "Movie" side. You dont need to have any skill to sit down and watch a movie. And ofcourse there are infinite variations inbetween.

Lets talk about what that means.
Having a gameplay heavy game means turning away players who do not possess the skills to play the game. This limits how far you can budget the game and how big your audience can even be ( restricted by skill level ). Let me reiterate that those 2 points are quite important, as both have to do with money. So you can say that the gameplay element adds an environment to learn deep skills, but on the expense of a smaller audience, since not everybody is at the level of which some people can even start to aquire the skills necessary to progress in the game. It is more akin to teaching material than a mobvie.

Having a cinemtic, or "Movie", heavy game side means that you have to lower the game-play required skill level in order that more people can enjoy the cinematic. A game like "Firewatch" would be poorly designed if it would require too much skill in order for the player to progress. It is a playable visual movie for you to experience, with some button clicks involved. No skill necessary. The advantages of this is very good content brought across to the player, at the expense of giving the player less environment to aquire skills and to improve on themself. Watching the "Titanic" is nice, and you can extract a lot of information from it, but it hardly changes how you approach games and the world.

For the last 20 years and with the fall of the mighty movie industry, due to being easily able to spread cinematic content over the internet and the and blue-ray fail, games have moved heavily towards the cinematic side of gameing. Mainly because focusing on the cinematic side lets you expand your audience almost indefinitely, you just have to lower the skill requirement. A bigger audience means more money. More money is good when you loose a lot of money somewhere else. Games have become the new Hollywood. And so this notion towards "streamlined features" and more cinematic content has become the agreed norm in the game industry which we move towards to. Even more, customers are getting accustomed to the low skill requirements and are getting angry when a game actually demands skills from them. After all, a movie doesnt demand skills from you either, no ?

But what are we getting here at exactly ?
"Quest markers are the laziest game mechanic i can think of. The usual solution that developers concots in response is "Well, just turn them off". ... Well now im just completely lost, because the game isnt designed with this in mind. Basically, no amount of turning off quest markers or mini maps will bring back the sublime in-world maps of the original Thief games."
Simply put: You cant develope a game in 2 opposite directions. Cinematic games gets its enjoyment from making cinematic content as easily available as possible on the expense of skill requirements. Gameplay rich games gets its satisfactions from aquiring and mastering skills at the expense of players who are not capable enough to get into the journey.

A quick but important side note i try to outline here: Skill requirement games won´t ever see such a popularity for the same reason any kind of teaching material in the world won´t see any storm of people anytime soon. First of all, the people are limited to those who actually want to learn the skill. Than its further limited by who even has the requirements to profit from the learning material. And the death sentence for teaching material is ... once people learned what they wanted to learn they move on. This keeps the kind of people in need for the same kind of teaching materials always limited.

Cinematic material on the other hand reaches infinitely more people than skill based games. More people means more money. Did i mention that money is important ? Anyway, this brings us to X2 and guiding systems. Does making a guiding system help the player, or does it take away the opportunity of making their own system, and the satisfaction which comes along with it. Only one things for sure, you cant have both, because one lives on the expense of the other.

And the other big thing apart from not being able to develope a game in 2 directions is that ... you cant make 2 games. You can only give 1 goal your full support. Do you give him a visual help and call it a day ? Or do you expect the player to be able to count numbers + turns + shooting options, and give him support based on the required skill ? The point im trying to point out is that one of the decision curbs the other. You cant have a visual system AND give the player support in case they make their own system. There is only so much money available to make a game. On the other hand it doesnt make sense to implement a visual system if you spend money on supporting the playercalculating numbers + turns + shooting.

Aaaaaaaaaanyway, im outta here.

 

Cheers.

Edited by Charon
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16 hours ago, Charon said:

Necrophilia means loving corpses. Im not sure what that would mean in the context provided.

It was a pun on your spelling mistake. "postponing" is correct.

As for cinematic vs. mechanical gaming: I agree to the overall sentiment, but I would not use these terms to describe two opposites. In my opinion games can be both, or none of these, so these to me are two different aspects that just coincidentally happen to appear linked in the games we consume.

Why am I saying that? Well, first of all, a game with poor presentation and poor gameplay likely will never be played by you, so the amount of games with both that exist is not reflected in our perception. We know games that are "ugly" but good, and we know games that are eye candy but nothing more, and we see causality where there is only correlation.

Dark Souls is such an example. The first one had pretty good graphics for the time, and it was gameplay heavy, so it is a game with both being "high". The first Thief (or Dark Project in Germany) was a good example for its time, Deus Ex comes to mind, StarCraft was not ugly when it came out either.

I agree though that the trend in AAA gaming goes toward eye candy games with shallow gameplay. That is partly because with good graphics you attract a bigger audience, but also because of economy. If you put many resources in the game's appearance, you don't have them for the gameplay any more, and a game has to pay for itself without fail; the industry is a high risk one, with one misstep having the potential for financial ruin. And the gameplay is so shallow both because the ressources lack to make it deeper (with making that decision costing more ressources in terms of testing and so on) and because it is risky to try something new.

Also, with the trend towards games as a service, you actually want the player to play for a long time, so the difficulty has to be at a level low enough not to shy away most players. That has nothing to do with the presentation of the game though; it is also true for most of the hundreds of random JMMORPGs.

Edited by Dagar
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@Dagar As far as i read your response you missed the whole point of the things i wrote. Eg. the topic mentioned is not mechanics vs graphics. Its gameplay vs cinematik. The difference between them is as big as a tactical in comparison to strategic. Most people use them in an interchangeable manner, but they have 2 completely different meanings.

Edited by Charon
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No, I did not miss it. I also saw the linked video a while back, so I know what is in there, at least roughly. I used the terms mechanisms (not mechanics) and graphics as synonyms to the terms gameplay and cinematics just for the flow of text. Substitute them in your mind if you want and care for their respective distinctions. The point stays the same. These are not diametral features of a game.

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12 minutes ago, Dagar said:

No, I did not miss it. I also saw the linked video a while back, so I know what is in there, at least roughly. I used the terms mechanisms (not mechanics) and graphics as synonyms to the terms gameplay and cinematics just for the flow of text. Substitute them in your mind if you want and care for their respective distinctions. The point stays the same. These are not diametral features of a game.

Okay.

I kindly disagree.

Edited by Charon
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