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Dead Space 3, or How To Fuck Up A Popamole Game

potatojohn

Arcane
Joined
Jan 2, 2012
Messages
2,646
"If you go into a baker's to buy a bun and they give you the wrong change and you walk away knowing you have been given more change than you handed over in the first place, that's theft," Sara Ludlam, an intellectual property expert at Lupton, Fawcett, Lee & Priestley told the BBC.
What? That's not true. It's the merchant's responsibility to not fuck up. You have no legal obligation to correct them.

You'd think a fucking lawyer, even a joke (IP) lawyer, would know that.
 

mikaelis

Prophet
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Joined
Nov 28, 2008
Messages
1,436
Location
Land of Danes
Codex 2013 Codex 2014
Know what would make a cool concept for a co-op horror game? Actually split up the group often. Completely, not some lame 5-foot impassable barrier. Basically have 2 separate storylines. Watching a friend getting ambushed back and forth while you slowly creep through another section of the game would be pretty tense. Like listening to a real world SS2 audio log.

Yes, that would probably be the only redeeming thing going for this fucking overused co-op mode. I am really surprised that nobody did something like this as opposed to just throwing double the amount of mobs at you (+ some simple puzzles).
 

Gord

Arcane
Joined
Feb 16, 2011
Messages
7,049
"If you go into a baker's to buy a bun and they give you the wrong change and you walk away knowing you have been given more change than you handed over in the first place, that's theft," Sara Ludlam, an intellectual property expert at Lupton, Fawcett, Lee & Priestley told the BBC.
What? That's not true. It's the merchant's responsibility to not fuck up. You have no legal obligation to correct them.

You'd think a fucking lawyer, even a joke (IP) lawyer, would know that.

Maybe UKanistan laws are different? They like survailance a lot, so maybe the brits are thieves after all. :M
 

sea

inXile Entertainment
Developer
Joined
May 3, 2011
Messages
5,698
:retarded:

I have no words for the amount of stupid contained within that BBC story.
 
Joined
May 22, 2010
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2,608
Location
Airstrip One
"If you go into a baker's to buy a bun and they give you the wrong change and you walk away knowing you have been given more change than you handed over in the first place, that's theft," Sara Ludlam, an intellectual property expert at Lupton, Fawcett, Lee & Priestley told the BBC.
Let's be honest - does anyone expect anything else from a female intellectual property "expert"?


A better comparison would be going into a bakers and buying a sausage roll only to find, when biting into it, there is in fact no meat at all inside, just pastry - and then when you go back and demand a replacement, they refuse and state that they only sell meat in their in their jumbo sausage rolls. Would you like to buy one? Only 60p extra, we won't charge you the full £1.80
 

anus_pounder

Arcane
Joined
Mar 20, 2010
Messages
5,972
Location
Yiffing in Hell
Ok, question for others with the yarr'd edition. Do you guys have infinite ammo ?

This isn't some joke about how plentiful ammo is in the game. I seem to be literally not using up any ammo at all. Pressing 1 or 2 brings up the weapon selection screen with shows that I have say...500 shots for my SMG. I fire 10 rounds, the number goes down to 490. Then I reload and its back up to 500 and it seems like I didn't use up a single bit of my Ammo Stacks in the inventory.

I'm assuming this has something to do with, ya know, pirate edition. Infinite ammo seems like it would be a p. big deal for the real paid product.
 

mikaelis

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Codex 2013 Codex 2014
Ok, question for others with the yarr'd edition. Do you guys have infinite ammo ?

This isn't some joke about how plentiful ammo is in the game. I seem to be literally not using up any ammo at all. Pressing 1 or 2 brings up the weapon selection screen with shows that I have say...500 shots for my SMG. I fire 10 rounds, the number goes down to 490. Then I reload and its back up to 500 and it seems like I didn't use up a single bit of my Ammo Stacks in the inventory.

I'm assuming this has something to do with, ya know, pirate edition. Infinite ammo seems like it would be a p. big deal for the real paid product.

LOL, hahaha, if that is true it is so hilarious on EA part (especially taking into account how shitty the story and ending is reported to be). It is almost like some EA mastermind says: "ok, so what do we have here? Ahh... that piece of crap with juvenile story... Ok, I know how to troll pirates - Let's give them godmode so they can absorb our feces easier - that will convince them to buy legal version"
 
Joined
May 6, 2009
Messages
1,875,975
Location
Glass Fields, Ruins of Old Iran
Making the game super easymode isn't such a bad idea for an anti-piracy measure, actually.

...of course, not when you're planning on nickel-and-diming your players for items that lower difficulty, such as more ammo. Sometimes I almost feel pity for the suits, they try their hardest but even when they come up with a good idea, they fuck up royally in the execution. Then I remember they are massive arseholes and go back to enjoying the trainwrecks.
 

HanoverF

Arcane
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Joined
Nov 23, 2002
Messages
6,083
MCA Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Codex USB, 2014 Divinity: Original Sin 2
Nah there's not infinite ammo, but it's pretty plentiful on easy difficulties.
 
Joined
Nov 8, 2007
Messages
6,207
Location
The island of misfit mascots
Enter room, get ambushed by monsters: The Game III

Is it Dead Space a Doom 3 clone then?
Although Doom 3 had a little more complex mechanics:
Enter room, lights turn off, get ambushed by monsters: The Game

:M

In fairness, DS1 (I didn't play the second) would mix things up a bit, most memorably by having one particularly nasty guy (would 2-hit kill you) who couldn't be directly killed - you could lop off his limbs to slow him down (or his head, but that was pointless as he'd just keep coming at you) but he'd regenerate them in a few seconds. Nothing special, but it's still nice when a popamole shooter actually makes you turn tail and run for your life. Sometimes it would just be the cheesy thing of being stuck in a room with the Regenerator and a bunch of other necromorphs while having to survive for a certain time until someone unlocks the door for you, but there were other parts where it was done a lot better, like having him chase you down a series of corridors populated with necromorphs - so you have to judge whether to try and thin the herd before running through them (risking the Regenerator raping you from behind), or to shoot off the Regenerator's legs and buy some time to distance between you (risking getting pwned by the other necromorphs).

I also quite liked how it gave you an incentive to desecrate any corpses you find, due to there being a creature that goes around causing any corpses in the room to reanimate as one of the nastiest necromorphs in the game.

The monster design might have been gimmicky, but it was a decent gimmick nonetheless - not only was it a nice change from headshots, but the dismemberment focus meant that the game put effort into locational damage, so that if you took off a creature's legs it could pull itself along by its arms, etc. The weapons were also some of the best I'd seen in a shooter for some time - especially that buzz-saw weapon. It had some nice balance to the weapons as well - e.g. the pulse rifle starting off as utterly useless (the game's plot actually points to the ineffectiveness of the military pulse rifles as the reason for everyone getting slaughtered) but is the strongest weapon once fully upgraded (if you factor in the cannon's limited ammo, that is).

Actually Doom 3 isn't a bad comparison, in that the first DS wasn't anything special, but didn't condescend to you like most post-Doom3 shooters. E.g. the necromorph that chases you in the tutorial section before you get a weapon does normal damage and will kill you if you don't run; the game trusts you to work out that you'd better run from the regenerator without needing to explicitly tell you; it trusts you to work out that you need to lure the regenerator to the freezer and lop his legs off so you can run to the lab controls and send him down the waste chute as an iceblock - none of that is exactly difficult, but most games wouldn't trust the player to do something half as complicated without a fucking quest compass, detailed on-screen instructions and an NPC telling you exactly what to do next.
 
Joined
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Messages
6,207
Location
The island of misfit mascots
"If you go into a baker's to buy a bun and they give you the wrong change and you walk away knowing you have been given more change than you handed over in the first place, that's theft," Sara Ludlam, an intellectual property expert at Lupton, Fawcett, Lee & Priestley told the BBC.
What? That's not true. It's the merchant's responsibility to not fuck up. You have no legal obligation to correct them.

You'd think a fucking lawyer, even a joke (IP) lawyer, would know that.

Well, it's been many years since I practiced law, but I DID practice in criminal law, and sorry but she's right. The key is whether you know you've been given too much change, and whether you knew it at the time that you left the store. Fraud would be an easier fit (it includes deception by omission, so long as you're (a) aware that the person is deceived, and (b) someone is getting a financial benefit), but theft would still apply.

Common assumption of blameworthiness =/= the law.

As a general rule (not universal, but a good rule of thumb) criminal law works on intent, not action - so it usually doesn't matter if you received the money via an act or simply an omission, so long as you formed the intent to leave the store with the money.

In a practical sense, however, you wouldn't get charged because there's simply no way of proving that you knew you were given too much change, and hence no way of proving intent. Even if it was a large amount of money, you could always say that if it was possible for the shopkeeper to accidentally miscount, then it's equally possible for you to have done the same.

Also, I certainly wouldn't call IP lawyers joke lawyers. Sure, IP law itself is grossly unfair, but it's also one of the more complex areas you can practice in - hell, it's a fuckload more complex than criminal law is. Given that IP lawyers (except patent lawyers, who aren't actually lawyers but scientists - lawyers aren't actually permitted to advise on patents) usually also need to know trade practices law (anti-monopoly, misleading and deceptive conduct, etc) I'd actually rate it as the second most complex area of law to practice in after tax law (and by tax law I'm talking large corporate clients - small business tax law is a piece of cake compared to IP law).
 

Zewp

Arcane
Joined
Sep 30, 2012
Messages
3,566
Codex 2013
In fairness, DS1 (I didn't play the second) would mix things up a bit, most memorably by having one particularly nasty guy (would 2-hit kill you) who couldn't be directly killed - you could lop off his limbs to slow him down (or his head, but that was pointless as he'd just keep coming at you) but he'd regenerate them in a few seconds. Nothing special, but it's still nice when a popamole shooter actually makes you turn tail and run for your life. Sometimes it would just be the cheesy thing of being stuck in a room with the Regenerator and a bunch of other necromorphs while having to survive for a certain time until someone unlocks the door for you, but there were other parts where it was done a lot better, like having him chase you down a series of corridors populated with necromorphs - so you have to judge whether to try and thin the herd before running through them (risking the Regenerator raping you from behind), or to shoot off the Regenerator's legs and buy some time to distance between you (risking getting pwned by the other necromorphs).

That necromorph(s) make an appearance in Dead Space 3 again and they are way over-used to the point where they just become tedious. In Dead Space 1 it was really good and very suspenseful because OMG THIS THING WON'T DIE. In DS3 it's just 'oh, these things again. Just stasis them and run away.'
 

potatojohn

Arcane
Joined
Jan 2, 2012
Messages
2,646
Well, it's been many years since I practiced law, but I DID practice in criminal law, and sorry but she's right. The key is whether you know you've been given too much change, and whether you knew it at the time that you left the store. Fraud would be an easier fit (it includes deception by omission, so long as you're (a) aware that the person is deceived, and (b) someone is getting a financial benefit), but theft would still apply.
I'm not going to argue over definitions, because laws and legal ideas are purposefully vague and elastic. If you think it's a crime then cite a case of someone being persecuted.

Granted you say that the man can't prove that you knew of the mistake. However, as a criminal lawyer you must be aware that people are way too eager to blabber about their criminal mischief. I'm sure it's happened thousands of times that someone derived some advantage from a merchant's mistake and then bragged about it to half the town, so if it's a prosecutable crime as you say there should be at least one case.
 

Borelli

Arcane
Joined
Dec 5, 2012
Messages
1,261
"If you go into a baker's to buy a bun and they give you the wrong change and you walk away knowing you have been given more change than you handed over in the first place, that's theft," Sara Ludlam, an intellectual property expert at Lupton, Fawcett, Lee & Priestley told the BBC.
Let's be honest - does anyone expect anything else from a female intellectual property "expert"?


A better comparison would be going into a bakers and buying a sausage roll only to find, when biting into it, there is in fact no meat at all inside, just pastry - and then when you go back and demand a replacement, they refuse and state that they only sell meat in their in their jumbo sausage rolls. Would you like to buy one? Only 60p extra, we won't charge you the full £1.80
This reminds me of that movie where a black man walks into a pizzeria, orders a cut, sees it has no cheese, says put some cheese on it man and the italian owner says "extra cheese is 2$".
 

Borelli

Arcane
Joined
Dec 5, 2012
Messages
1,261
I just realized something, if you are putting pay2win in your game then it makes sense to make the game arcadeishly difficult.
Tell me is it difficult? It being next gen AAA tells me no. I would love to see the look on EA CEO face when he realized that gamers are breezing through the levels without needing their precious microtransactions.
 

Gozma

Arcane
Joined
Aug 1, 2012
Messages
2,951
I think their ideal game theory for microtransaction stuff is to make the game fun in bursts between tedium, tedium that can be disposed of via money. That is how you can leverage the fun of a game into a monetized addictive cycle. I would think some retarded shit where you can mindlessly grind for two hours to get something that costs 3 bucks would be fine by them. I am pretty against it because my reaction to tedium is to cheat
 

Zewp

Arcane
Joined
Sep 30, 2012
Messages
3,566
Codex 2013
To be honest here, about halfway through the game I had so much resources that I didn't really know what to do with it. I had all the upgrades I wanted, I could make any weapon part I wanted and I still had resources left over. That said, I basically stuck to two weapons that I just kept upgrading, but seeing as you can only carry two weapons at a time it didn't matter. Maybe you'd have to buy resources if you wanted to make a weapon of every sort, but I had a Plasma rifle with grenade launcher underbarrel and a shotgun that could shoot sawblades as well, and that was more than powerful enough to carry me through the game.
 

Cyberarmy

Love fool
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Feb 7, 2013
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Smyrna - Scalanouva
Divinity: Original Sin 2
To be honest here, about halfway through the game I had so much resources that I didn't really know what to do with it. I had all the upgrades I wanted, I could make any weapon part I wanted and I still had resources left over. That said, I basically stuck to two weapons that I just kept upgrading, but seeing as you can only carry two weapons at a time it didn't matter. Maybe you'd have to buy resources if you wanted to make a weapon of every sort, but I had a Plasma rifle with grenade launcher underbarrel and a shotgun that could shoot sawblades as well, and that was more than powerful enough to carry me through the game.


Yeah, normal game modes have plentiful resources even if you dont use scavangers. Really kills survival mood.
New game + modes are the real deal (monsters drop nothing) but i dont think im replaying game again. Maybe if i find someone for hardcore co-op but dont have enough time nowadays.
Experimenting with weapons is fun but i always end up "Heavy Metal Storm" modified it for extra fire damage and everything just melted. My side arm was one handed Line gun with melee blade (which need ammo strangely...)
 

DalekFlay

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Oct 5, 2010
Messages
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New Vegas
Honestly everything I have read and watched of the game since release has shown the microtransactions to be not a problem. Which is good.

Still plenty to bitch about in the game though, from right after launch DLC to human enemies and Gears of War style cover to whatever else. Certainly a step down from Dead Space 2 regardless of how heinous the microtransactions are.
 

Psquit

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Sep 18, 2012
Messages
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Location
Ushuaia
Honestly everything I have read and watched of the game since release has shown the microtransactions to be not a problem. Which is good.

Still plenty to bitch about in the game though, from right after launch DLC to human enemies and Gears of War style cover to whatever else. Certainly a step down from Dead Space 2 regardless of how heinous the microtransactions are.

actually its the same cover system with all the games that have a crouch button...

i think its a step up from dead space 2 at least now we have secundary objetives, better weapon craft/upgrade stuff, better enviorements.

the only shitty thing i found its the universal ammo an that the Hard difficulty its the normal one an the brutal its the hard one.

an they replaced the babies with dogs cuz its a ship with soldiers an shit, make more sence having dogs than babies...
 

Regdar

Arcane
Joined
Apr 24, 2011
Messages
665
QbGxZns.jpg


Not even the end of the game. By the end of the game, resource consumption was notably higher, but I still found more than I could use. The 900+ ammo is stored in stacks of 20, and the way the game works is that different weapons use different amounts of ammo. For example, I beat the game with nothing but an upgraded plasma cutter (the iconic weapon for Isaac Clarke and one of the first weapons you get in the game) because it's the most versatile and efficient, and it gets around 45 shots out of 20 ammo. So on that screenshot, I actually had around two thousand plasma cutter shots. Which is arguably more than you need to beat the entire game. I started out on "normal" difficulty, kicked it up to "hard" about 2/3 way through.

All in all, if you play it like a) a shooter and b) a conclusion to a story spanning three titles you've played, then it's definitely playable. Neither survival nor horror to be had here, unfortunately.

Oh wait, I just remembered that it was capped at 30 fps. FUCK THIS GAME DON'T TORTURE YOURSELF.
 

Gurkog

Erudite
Joined
Oct 7, 2012
Messages
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The Great Northwest
Project: Eternity
Dead Space was a surprisingly good game, with great pacing and atmosphere. Dead Space 2 as a colossal pile or shit raping the franchise with its linear corridor maps that are only seen once and then forgotten and the horribly designed screeching bitch that was just annoying as hell. Dead Space 2 wasn't worth the $20 I paid for it when the price dropped and i doubt I would have paid even 5 for it due to the lack of substantial gameplay or entertaining narrative. Dead Space 3's presence will never plague my hard drive as EA once again demonstrates that they would rather systematically rape and destroy an IP than try to figure out why it is was popular and expand upon it.
 

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