Riddick and Far Cry VS Half Life and Doom

[sser]

Im not saying they shouldve added stealth to Doom, cause theyre demons anyway so you just shoot them and maybe the tech wasnt there yet. But to me it seems really natural, like adding color to TV that eventually, you have to add some stealth to a FPS... Otherwise it lacks something.

 

[Jick Magger]

Okay, who's alt is this?

 

[sullynathan]

I won't lie, I still haven't beat far cry, I just reached the monkey business part and the decline is too much to handle.

 

[Jackalope]

Not all FPS need to be the same. Just go play Dishonored or something, if you like stealth so much. Half-Life 2 was a fine game, even if it dragged on a few levels to show their brand new engine. And Doom needs stealth just as much as a fish needs a bicycle!

 

[tormund]

the tech wasnt there yet

OK.

 

[Lyric Suite]

Sorreh, "almost as bad". I got carried away. Not the place to redo the Eternal "Why Quake 2 is bad" routine. Kickass soundtrack, though.

Quake 2 is the last "traditional" FPS id soft has ever made, with traditional gameplay and traditional level design. It was a step down from both Doom and Quake but it was essentially in the same category. Doom 3 was the real first modern shooter made by id, so it was completely new type of shit.

 

[tormund]

It might as well be "traditional", but it was every bit as slow and boring to play, and as drab to look at as Doom 3 was.

 

[ultimanecat]

Without comment on the other random shit, I'll say this: the Riddick games are decent fun but they absolutely fall apart when it comes to being FPS games. It'd probably be acceptable except there are portions of each game where stealth and punching guys gets thrown out the window, and those parts suck. We're talking like the entire last third of Dark Athena being a janky shooting gallery of loose mechanics and unsatisfying gameplay.

 

[Severian Silk]

I tried playing Crysis, but my poor old man brain and reflexes couldn't juggle all the different roles the suit was meant to fill.

 

[Azrael the cat]

Surprised to see so many Far Cry AI dislikes... Sorry to say this but maybe you guys just werent good enough... FC has the best AI out of all FPS games. They use trees as cover, they crawl walk, they lie down when you shot them with a sniper, they shoot at your last known position. Theyre unpredictable... Sometimes when you hole up in a room they try to enter it while lying down. Other times they enter and start shooting before they enter haha!

Basically they act the same as you would in their place(in a videogame). They also use vents, a traditional safe spot in games, but not so in FC. They crawl inside and shot you in the ass. I suggest you all play it again on the highest difficulty and see how far you can go... Remember FC mercs are highly trained so stay low and avoid contact if possible.

As for the mutants they were like haunts/zombies from Thief. They added some variety to the mix and they were S C A R Y... Not because of looks(they looked kinda goofy) or sound like in Thief but becasue of the AI behavior. You couldnt deal with them the same as with the mercs. They never went at you in a straight line, they always strafed left and right. Some, like the basic "ape" Trigent had some "traits" i havent seen before or since, like the ability to jump 20 meters in the air. In your standard shooter, when youre on some balcony and the enemy is down then they are down and they dont go up, unless there are stairs... Not so in FC. First time i saw one(in the treetops) he nearly killed me even though i was in an elevator going up... He jumped and slapped me like a bitch. I still remember the pounding on the elevator floor, below... It was horrifying.

Nobody hated the trigens due to their mobility or unpredictability - those were the good aspects that weren't quite good enough to make up for the goddawful negatives. We hated them because they were bullet-sponges, in a game that was very much anti-bullet-sponge mechanics up til that point.

 

[Riskbreaker]

Without comment on the other random shit, I'll say this: the Riddick games are decent fun but they absolutely fall apart when it comes to being FPS games. It'd probably be acceptable except there are portions of each game where stealth and punching guys gets thrown out the window, and those parts suck. We're talking like the entire last third of Dark Athena being a janky shooting gallery of loose mechanics and unsatisfying gameplay.

Dark Athena campaign shows just how much Starbreeze misunderstood why is it that original game was so loved by the players. They also changed some sections from the base campaign in their re-release, and those changes show the same thing. Remember that part in the original game, when you first encounter one of those mecha riot guards? Originally, you were able to sneak around him, while in the "HD" version you are forced to fight him.

 

[Carrion]

Without comment on the other random shit, I'll say this: the Riddick games are decent fun but they absolutely fall apart when it comes to being FPS games. It'd probably be acceptable except there are portions of each game where stealth and punching guys gets thrown out the window, and those parts suck. We're talking like the entire last third of Dark Athena being a janky shooting gallery of loose mechanics and unsatisfying gameplay.

Dark Athena kind of sucks as a whole anyway.

I never really understood why Riddick got the FPS tag in the first place. You do occasionally shoot stuff in first person, but it's just a small part of Escape From Butcher Bay (and a slightly bigger part of the vastly inferior Dark Athena), and as a whole the games very much fall into the extremely broad action-adventure category rather than being outright shooters or stealth games. Escape From Butcher Bay kind of has that HL/HL2 thing going on where each part of the game has some new element that sets it apart from the others, getting your hands on an actual gun for a while being just one of those things, but it manages to do it well enough that it never feels gimmicky or forced. The sequel fucked up the pacing and seemed to be a rather misguided attempt at replicating what was good about the first game, and it's a bit of a chore to play.

 

[Kontra]

Not all FPS need to be the same. Just go play Dishonored or something, if you like stealth so much. Half-Life 2 was a fine game, even if it dragged on a few levels to show their brand new engine. And Doom needs stealth just as much as a fish needs a bicycle!

Dishonored sucked... I couldnt finish it.

And yeah Doom doesnt need stealth... But in a way thats why i cant play it for more than 15 minutes. It lacks... STEALTH
You know forget about it. The previous post was as far as i could go to justify my taste as being natural. But i dont know maybe theres something to it.

Without comment on the other random shit, I'll say this: the Riddick games are decent fun but they absolutely fall apart when it comes to being FPS games. It'd probably be acceptable except there are portions of each game where stealth and punching guys gets thrown out the window, and those parts suck. We're talking like the entire last third of Dark Athena being a janky shooting gallery of loose mechanics and unsatisfying gameplay

Well i dont count Dark Athena... Its just an expansion and yeah it kinda sucks. Which parts of EFBB sucked? Sure sometimes you have to shoot like the in riot guard sequence or in the end. But how does that make it fail as a FPS... In the end it is a shooter.

Nobody hated the trigens due to their mobility or unpredictability - those were the good aspects that weren't quite good enough to make up for the goddawful negatives. We hated them because they were bullet-sponges, in a game that was very much anti-bullet-sponge mechanics up til that point.

Maybe the big ones were a bit spongey but it wasnt that bad... Nothing that the shotgun couldnt deal with. Maybe you were shooting at their armored parts instead of exposed ones?? Cause it took me awhile to realize it actually protects them.

 

[sullynathan]

Crysis just sucks ass, Crytek has yet to make a good game

 

[A user named cat]

Crysis was great for a benchmarking tool and looked amazing too. It actually still is if you install a couple of the extreme realism mods. First 3-4 levels were good until like Far Cry and many other games, it falls apart with the alien nonsense. It also suffered from the same kind of bullshit AI in Far Cry. Enemies behave and react like total morons yet they're all navy seal sharpshooters who will nail you miles away from a Korean tugboat boat with peashooters.

 

[ultimanecat]

I probably sounded harsher on EfBB than I should have - it's genuinely one of my favorite games from around that time.

That being said, it's still not a very good FPS. It's good at many things, but shooting monkeys in the sewers and the later forced shootouts are low points for me.

 

[Kontra]

Well you can say its kinda rushed near the end but thats really the only problem, cause its so damn short... Far Cry OTOH is the opposite, is just a bit too long... You kinda get sick of it by the end.

suffered from the same kind of bullshit AI in Far Cry. Enemies behave and react like total morons

Man maybe you just didnt play it in a while? Total morons? I suggest you play it again Phantasmal... One thing that can happen for example is when you take out a squad and just one guy remains. What he does is he hides, like literally crawls inside a bush and just waits to make a jump on you. Or if hes in a building he crouches behind some boxes. How cool is that... In Far Cry the AI stealth kills YOU.

I havent seen anything similar before or since.

Thats why Crysis sucked, mostly because of the AI. Theyre too easy to kill and they didnt do half as much shit as they did in FC. I dont remember ever seeing them lying on the ground for example... I dont think they even can?

And on top of that the story sucked, the aliens sucked. I remember the music being way too dramatic for that kind of stuff. But sure the gfx were good and still are. Its just too bad they never made a new FC in that engine. That wouldve been something...

 

[lemon-lime]

Doom was a very arcade-like action game, a very good one at that. But my personal taste always went more into the direction of a simulation. I always wished, it would have been System Shock instead of Doom, that made a huge impact on gaming.

For that reason Dark Forces was more to my taste. A "Doom clone" that made progress in exactly the right direction as far as my taste was concerned. And yes, even Dark Forces had rudimentary stealth mechanics in fucking 1995. Enemies which weren't activated yet, noticed you (and therefor activated) earlier, when you were sprinting through brightly lit areas instead of slowly crawling through the darkness. AFAIR the sequel Jedi Knight didn't offer that feature, which disappointed me a little bit. It's one point, where JK is worse than DF.

My big love, of course, became Deus Ex. It exemplifies everything I like about first person gaming, despite its storyfaggotry. But DX even did storyfaggotry right. The story of DX feels like it's part of the gameplay, not some shit that is tagged on. There are several reasons, but the main one is the simulationist approach, in which the story parts give you information to analyze in order to find your approach to the target. (Instead of following a quest marker to name the direct anti-thesis.)

In Far Cry I recognized a lot of what I liked in DX. Of course it's a more toned down simulation; a more pure shooter. But the level design had the right qualities. The third (and also free demo) level "Fort" is a master piece of level design and storming the satellite dish reminded me of DX's storming of Lady Liberty.

I never played any of the Half-Lifes. Their concept always seemed like shit to me. And I remember posting "Half-Life 2 looks like a poor man's Deus Ex" during HL2's pre-release marketing. If I played the HLs, so that I actually knew what I was talking about, I'd say: "Valve fanboys have been dumbfucks from the very beginning."

 

[Kontra]

Yeah, the Fort , from the main menu loop... Or what about Rebellion, another killer map. The threeway between mutants, mercs and you; and a multitude of paths through it... Really throughout the whole game i could clearly see, in the placement of enemies, bushes, trees and whatnot; how they made it just so you could sneak too. It was in no way a bunch of slapped together maps... The germans knew what they were doing.


edit

Also i forgot, the game had a nice sound mechanic where every weapon had a different level of loudness that you could see on the radar, with the sniper being the most loud. So if you were sniping, the mercs could pinpoint your exact position and start moving towards it... This forced you to move around after the shots (like a real sniper), but it also allowed you to flank them and make an ambush.

Also it had a very light RPG mechanic where you could only carry 4 weapons and every weapon had its weight (with the rocket launcher being the heaviest and the machete the lightest) that impacted Jacks speed... So you actually had a good reason to carry the machete around, for when you made those dashes between the bushes or for a quick escape. However you had to forego another weapon. Very very light RPG mechanics...

 

[Lyric Suite]

Never played Riddick. Which version should look for? Is GoG safe?

 

[Lyric Suite]

"Half-Life 2 looks like a poor man's Deus Ex"

If only. Half Life 2 has absolutely zero in common with Deus Ex.

 

[sullynathan]

gog has the newer Riddick that remade parts of the old one but people say this new version is bad. The original/old one if not on gog or steam so you can find it on torrents.

 

[Riskbreaker]

Go for the original PC release, and avoid Assault on Dark Athena. Graphical improvements from the re-release are awful (original game still looks pretty damn good anyway), small changes they introduced to the game actually made it worse (I mentioned one example earlier), and additional campaign is just a waste of everyone's time.

 

[A user named cat]

I'd like to retract my earlier opinion. Reinstalled Crysis last night just to check out a new graphics whore mod and it was terrible from the go. Not sure why I remembered the first few levels being fun but I was bored within ten minutes and uninstalled again.

 

[Kontra]

Never played Riddick. Which version should look for? Is GoG safe?

Do what Riskbreaker told you and go with the 2004 original. It has the neat quicksave option and a cool developer commentary that you can check out after finishing the game... It also has the zoom option which allows you to step into Riddicks shoes even more by "zooming in" on your future victims, from above. And yeah it also somehow looks better, cleaner... or should i say, it looks clear. Definitely go with the original.