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BLOBERT

FUCKING SLAYINGN IT BROS
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Codex 2012
BROS STILL ON CODE VEIN BUT IM LOSING PATIENTS WITH IT

ALSO PLAYING DEAD CELLS WHICH TO ME IS LIKE ROGUE LEGACY BUT MUCH BETTER IN EVERY WAY POSSIBLE
 

Azalin

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Finished Heavy Rain,my second and probably last David Cage game.The game has some interesting ideas and could have been good but it mostly fails,the graphics are good for an old game,the 4 main characters are ok,the gameplay is mostly quicktime events and the controls are shit.The story had some potential but like the whole game it doesn't reach it.It could have been a good game if it had more of an actual gameplay like an action/adventure and the idea of having 4 playble characters than can die/get captured during the game was good,but in the end its mostly bad.Btw,the pc version doesn't include the dlc that was released on ps3.Rating David Cage/10.Not recommended
 

Fluent

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The Real Fanboy
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Apr 8, 2021
Messages
830
Playing 3 games at the moment.

Grimoire
Stranger Of Sword City Revisited
Dark Sun: Shattered Lands

Grimoire. Still very early but LOVING it. :) It's my kind of CRPG, that's for sure!

Stranger Of Sword City. About ten hours in or so. Really enjoying it. Love hunting Lineage Types and "hiding" to ambush chest transporters. Very cool. :)

Dark Sun: Shattered Lands. Almost 20 hours in. What a joyride this has been! Simply a super underrated gem, I love the roleplaying opportunities and the killer 2nd ed. d&d implementation. :)

3 great games imo, having a blast with all 3! Probably won't start any new games for awhile though. Hope u guys are enjoying your games as well. <3
 

ChaDargo

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Feb 19, 2018
Messages
425
Location
Texas
Started Ori and the Blind Forest, Definitive Edition last night. Holy shit the animation and music...

Been playing Monster Train a good amount, but I'm thinking of trying Griftlands. Card games are fun <3

Also, the above post makes me want to try out SoSC!
 

Durandal

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My team has the sexiest and deadliest waifus you can recruit.
I promised Ash a year ago that I'd give him my thoughts on his Unreal Evolution mod for Unreal Gold. Since that time a lot of things have gotten in the way (70% being my own laziness), so I figure any time is good as any to make due on my promises. Before I delve into the mod, I wanted to give vanilla Unreal another shake so I can come at Evolution with a fresh perspective on all the things it modifies. Without further ado:

Unreal Gold poses an interesting question: "what if enemies in a singleplayer FPS behaved like multiplayer bots?". Instead of large groups of predictable and squishier enemies like in Doom or Duke Nukem, here you get to deal with smaller groups of unpredictable yet tankier foes. They dodge your attacks, move while shooting, lead their shots, and can even use the same weapons that you do. A fight against a single Skaarj Warrior is more dynamic and unpredictable than, say, a Hell Knight from Doom. Yet despite Unreal’s more complex enemy behavior and 10-weapon arsenal with alt. fire modes on everything, it fails to deliver combat with the same level of depth compared to games with more simplistic enemies and weapons such as Doom or Quake 1. Nonetheless, there are still lessons we can learn from this experiment of trying to give FPS enemies “good AI”. Whatever “good AI” means.

Perhaps the most important one is that having complex enemy behavior is not a substitute for good encounter design. Unreal’s levels are on the whole decent when it comes to non-combat elements like exploration and pacing, but the actual combat scenarios themselves tend to be very repetitive. The key reason for that is because for the game keeps throwing encounters with only minor enemies at you (i.e. the enemies that don’t exhibit much complex behavior, like the Tentacles, Slith, Krall, Gasbags, insects and Brutes) while refusing to throw more than one Skaarj (the “good AI” enemies) at you at once up until the last third of the game. This is part of the reason why the ISV-Kran levels being a constant string of 1v1s/1v2s against the Skaarj starts to feel exhausting after a while.

While there’s certainly more ways an encounter with a single Skaarj Warrior can play out compared to, say, a single Hell Knight in Doom, there is still a limit to that. The Skaarj are not *that* unpredictable; their primary behavior still boils down to “get in your face”, “dodge your attacks if possible” and “keep my distance when I’m on low health”. They’re not going to do any high-IQ flanking or strategic camping. Nor should they, as making individual enemies more unpredictable tends to involve making them more RNG-dependent or making it impossible to keep up with them (such as by having enemies move obscenely fast or giving them too many behaviors to keep track of)--making them frustratingly inconsistent to deal with no matter how good you get at the game. Instead, this inherent predictability of the Skaarj should have been compensated for by making you regularly fight groups of Skaarj or Skaarj paired with minor enemies, thus increasing uncertainty without resorting *too* hard to the inherent inconsistency of RNG. A little RNG is necessary to create uncertainty at higher levels of play when you have every facet of the game already down to a T, but too much RNG makes the game incredibly inconsistent to play on low/mid-levels of play, and reduces the relative depth of the game on all levels of play in favor of a few consistent and safe strategies that largely mitigate RNG, as we will see later.

Now, while the last third of the game does regularly throw groups of Skaarj at you, the spaces in which these fights take place fail to make good use of the Skaarj. It’s either because Unreal reuses the same “some Skaarj in a tight corridor” or “a group of Skaarj in a wide flat open field” setup for the umpteenth time, or it’s because of our old friend, The Door Problem. A lot of fights are going to turn into the same “backpedal behind a doorway and bottleneck a group of enemies to more safely pick them off” if the space allows for it, which becomes an especially enticing option if the enemies have explosive weapons. In these situations the complex behavior of the Skaarj ceases to be relevant: in tight spaces they (and you) do not have any space to dodge and it becomes more of a battle of who can out-damage the other first, in large open spaces there’s so much space to let you safely keep your distance from enemies and pick them off with your hitscan weapons that they don’t have an answer against, and neither do the Skaarj have a good answer against you camping a doorway. Once again we can see that “good AI” is not a silver bullet that will magically improve your game--levels must provide enemies with the opportunities to let their unique behaviors shine.

Such an ideal combat space with the Skaarj involves a relatively constricted area that prevents hitscan weapons from becoming too dominant, it involves plenty of cover to give both player and enemy room to outmaneuver each other and avoid explosive splash damage, and most importantly, these spaces should essentially lock you in so as to prevent you from backpedaling away from any threat. That’s right, I am talking about the **a-word**.

There are a handful of such **arenas** in Unreal which, while badly executed, show a glimpse of potential of what could have been. The first arena in Demon Crater highlights this neatly where you have a space with tons of cover and varying height levels for you and the Skaarj to juke it out. While held back by being able to run past everything into the corridor leading to the basement, it is still conceptually interesting because (ignoring the basement) there is no perfect position in this arena. As you and the Skaarj move about, some positions become more (dis)advantageous and susceptible to explosive splash damage or providing one no space to dodge projectiles. So the northern rim of the arena is raised and allows you to get a good vantage point on the center, but at the same time that rim is narrow and has your back close to the wall, which means that while you can easily dodge incoming projectiles, you can’t easily dodge the splash damage from incoming rockets. The warehouse areas in Dasa Mountain Pass and ISV-Kran Deck 4 also feature similar constricted cover-dense arenas against multiple Skaarj where macro-level positioning matters more, but the former is hamstrung by having too much free space for backtracking, and the latter doesn’t have enough enemies to apply proper pressure on you from multiple directions.

Now contrast all this with the final arena of Demon Crater, which is this big flat donut space with some cover here and there and Skaarj Officers sparsely placed around. Because there is so much free space, you don’t need to be worried about splash damage or being boxed in, and the element of map control is non-existent in favor of circlestrafing being the definite solution for avoiding damage. Were the enemies in Unreal designed in a way where they could prevent you from circlestrafing from long-range or in an open flat space, then this might have worked, but as it stands the enemy roster is best suited for close-quarters arena combat, while the arena design itself is incredibly lacklustre.

Having enemies dodge your attacks like a human opponent in a multiplayer match does make them come off as more intelligent, but in terms of gameplay, it also comes off as *bullshit*. Namely, the way enemies in Unreal dodge your shots is by RNG. The exact moment that you press the fire button, nearby enemies check if shots from your weapon is something they’re allowed to dodge, and then they roll a dice to see if they can do an instant dodgeroll away. In practice, this means that there’s a N% chance (all dodge chances listed here onwards are not accurate and just my best guess) that one shot is basically a waste of ammo. For rapid-fire weapons such as the Stinger or Minigun this isn’t a big deal, but considering most of your workhorse weapons are projectile-based with a low rate of fire, the RNG dodging makes the effectiveness of certain weapons inconsistent, or just makes them plain not worth using at all. For the Eightball this means that your primary fire will get instantly dodged half the time and is usually only any good for its splash damage when charged, whereas for the Flak Cannon primary fire it’s just plain wasted ammo 40% of the time. And when you consider that the time-to-kill on Skaarj is already fairly high (it takes like 3-4 rockets or two Flak shells to kill the lowest ranks), it makes this annoying inconsistency even more pronounced.

Instead of bothering with this game of roulette, what you’ll more likely do is use weapons that enemies aren’t hardcoded to dodge to begin with. So the Eightball alt. fire, on its own useless due to its low projectile speed, now becomes surprisingly useful for one-shotting Skaarj Warriors (after charging 3+ grenades) because they are hardcoded to never dodge grenades. The Flak Cannon alt. fire becomes one of your best options since it kills most Skaarj in 2-3 quick shots from mid-range that will never get dodged, and without needing to be charged like the Eightball alt. fire either. The Razorjack can also decapitate most Skaarj in 2 shots and almost never gets dodged. And instead of bothering with projectile-based weapons, you can simply use your hitscan weapons such as the Pistol, ASMD primary, and the Rifle. The Minigun, despite being hitscan like the Pistol and Rifle, *will* get dodged, but since it’s hitscan you can easily correct your aim when an enemy dodges. Dodgerolls are just a very ineffective method of dodging hitscan attacks because of how the recovery after a roll leaves enemies stationary--having enemies dodge hitscan through erratic strafing would have been more effective. Given how all weapons have their own ammo pools (except for the Pistol/Minigun) and how each ammo type is equally scarce (Flak Cannon ammo is a bit rarer, and bullets are more common), you will always have enough ammo to use a weapon that renders enemy dodging behaviour redundant, which begs the question what the point of using RNG for triggering enemy dodging is.

Before we continue, it’s worth considering whether dodgerolling is the only means an enemy could theoretically react to your shots being fired (not to be confused with enemy reactions *after getting hit*). I mainly talked about dodging here because that’s what most Skaarj in Unreal do, but that’s not the only possible enemy reaction to your shots in Unreal. Skaarj Officers can react to your shots by putting up a shield instead of dodging out of the way, which I’ll touch upon later. To avoid making it come off like dodgerolling is the only possible on-fire reaction an FPS enemy can have, I’ll henceforth refer to enemy dodging/blocking/etc. as simply “reacting” unless I’m specifically talking about dodging or blocking.

Another thing to consider is what the point of having enemies react to your attacks in any action game like this actually is. The immersion-level goal of enemy reactions seems to be to create the illusion of unpredictable opponents that fight like actual human opponents would. I suppose the intended gameplay-level goal of enemy reactions then is to keep combat fresh and exciting, which, more specifically, is achieved by making certain weapons more situational to use. Because enemy reactions usually involve nullifying/countering your attacks somehow, then naturally your weapons won’t be as effective depending on their nature and that of the enemy’s reaction. So projectile-based weapons are more likely to get reacted to from medium range, while hitscan weapons work at most ranges. In this regard, enemy reactions serve a similar purpose to damage resistances/weaknesses and locational weak points (think headshots or weak points on the back). The difference is that while resistance/weaknesses apply on hit and locational weak points apply depending on the angle you’re facing an enemy (you can’t really shoot their head if you’re right below them), having enemies react to your shots depends more on your relative distance, position, and their state. This gives designers another tool to balance out weapons when other tools wouldn’t be as adequate.

For example: the Shock Rifle alt. fire fires a ball which can be detonated with the primary fire to create a shockwave for massive damage. This Shock Combo is incredibly strong, which is why it’s balanced out with enemies having a ~90% dodge chance against it. This doesn’t make it useless--what you have to do is create a situation where the enemy cannot dodgeroll away from the ball. So if they’re next to a wall, then shooting an orb to their other side means that no matter where they dodge towards, they’re always going to be within range of the Shock Combo. This way a Shock Combo can be strong in certain situations instead of almost *every* situation. Giving enemies a damage resistance against the Shock Combo (so it can gib some enemies in a group, but not all) to prevent it from becoming a dominant strategy would work if enemy groups were more diverse, but considering most enemy encounters in Unreal are fairly homogeneous, this wouldn’t really work. Having enemies only be vulnerable to Shock Combos from a certain angle (such as from behind an enemy) is most certainly a valid way of balancing it, but because not every humanoid enemy in Unreal has a means to block frontal damage, the Shock Combo’s usefulness is better mitigated through dodging, which every humanoid enemy is already capable of. Technically you could give every humanoid enemy a means to block frontal damage and it would work just as fine, but I suppose that having enemies mitigate your shots through movement makes them appear more intelligent than the alternative.

Taking all this into account, it would have been preferable if enemy reactions were made semi-random at the very least. So the conditions for a reaction to happen are deterministic, whereas how the reaction executed is partly random. A dodge could be triggered deterministically, but the exact direction of the dodge is influenced by chance. This way the designer has tighter control over weapon balance, while there’s still a degree of uncertainty that prevents the game from becoming too predictable. So the player could also devise more strategies using more weapons instead of relying on chance or a smaller handful of weapons that avoid chance completely. Taking projectile-based weapons for example, having enemies only be able to react to your projectiles after they travel a certain distance would mean that you could consistently use those weapons up close, but whether you would *want* to depends on if said weapon can inflict self-blast damage, or if the enemy is very dangerous to stay close to. Alternatively you could create a situation using a combination of weapons so the enemy cannot dodge projectiles even at long-range (such as having other weapons bait a dodge or cripple enemy movement).

Unfortunately, the weapon switch speed in Unreal is too slow to allow for any weapon combinations that aren’t two fire modes on the same weapon. If you wanted to use the ASMD alt’s ~90% dodge chance to bait Skaarj into dodging to land a guaranteed Flak Cannon shot, or if you managed to launch a Skaarj into the air by shooting a rocket at its feet and want to finish it off with the Flak Cannon mid-air, then by the time you are done switching to the Flak Cannon, the Skaarj will already have recovered and is ready to dodge anything. On top of the slow weapon switch speed you also have long refire times (the delay between shots) on several weapons in Unreal. So if you’re trying to switch weapons right after firing your current weapon--a use case that comes up fairly often--you’re forced to wait for the firing animation of your current weapon to finish before the weapons actually start to switch. With high-RoF weapons such as the Pistol and Stinger this isn’t as noticeable, but with workhorse weapons such as the Eightball, ASMD and Flak Cannon, it certainly is.

The slow weapon switch speed is a problem for Unreal in particular, but first it’s worth explaining what kind of a weapon switch speed fits a given FPS, and why not every FPS needs instant weapon switching. Basically, it’s about whether a game emphasizes split-second decision making (ULTRAKILL, Doom Eternal), or thinking ahead into the future (Final Doom, Serious Sam). In the former a small mistake is highly damaging, but you have more means to mitigate and recover from such mistakes. In the latter it’s the exact opposite; mistakes aren’t as damaging, but they’re harder to recover from in the long-term as they slowly build up to a point where recovery is impossible. This is also reflected in the enemy design of these games: in the former they tend to be agile and harder to predict, whereas in the latter they tend to be slow and predictable. After all, predictable enemies are less likely to push you into making constant split-second decisions when you can see what they’re about to do from a mile away, whereas unpredictable enemies are more likely to do the opposite. Thus, the weapon switch speed (and whether you can cancel the firing animation of a weapon by switching weapons) serves to reinforce the player into either thinking ahead or thinking fast. With a slow weapon switch speed, the player needs to always keep in mind that switching to another weapon leaves them temporarily vulnerable because of the weapon switch delay, and that switching to the wrong weapon can potentially screw them over. With a fast weapon switch speed, it’s simply a matter of whether the player can react fast enough to switch to a more suitable weapon as the situation constantly changes.

Taking this into consideration, one can see why the weapon switch speed in Unreal is a bad fit: the enemies are designed to be agile and unpredictable, but you cannot switch weapons fast enough to keep up with them as the situation changes--which it does constantly. This is not to say that you won’t ever switch weapons during combat--ammo for your current weapon isn’t infinite after all, but the slow switch speed biases your selection away from more situational weapons towards all-rounder weapons that work in most situations, which especially stings in a 10-weapon arsenal as some weapons end up feeling underutilized. Really, the only reason that the weapon switch speed isn’t a more noticeable issue is because of how limited in scope most Skaarj encounters are. Had the encounter design been more daring and engaging w/r/t enemy composition and the amount of enemies, you’d have many more reasons to keep switching weapons--where the slow weapon switch speed would have most certainly been felt.

It’s not only the weapon switch speed that makes it hard to keep up with the Skaarj, but the movement as well. Skaarj are overall faster than you, and when they’re within melee range of you it’s very hard to shake them off. Your best chance of pushing them away is by forcing them to dodge away using a high-dodge chance weapon, which, again, would have been a more viable option had the weapon switch speed not been so low. Otherwise you just have to hope that the Skaarj don’t try to chase you, or that you can cheese them out using level geometry. Jumping as an evasive maneuver also doesn’t really work because of the lack of air control and the pitiful height it covers (which also puts a damper on how vertical combat spaces are allowed to be; there’s no point in verticality if you do not have the mobility options to reliably move vertically). Lastly you have a dodge move as well (basically a short dash), which is pretty much useless because it covers only an incredibly short distance. Dodging is also done with a double-tap input that you’re more likely to do on accident than on purpose, especially in a game like this where you’re constantly changing strafing directions. While there’s unfortunately no one-tap dodge option, you can disable dodging altogether to prevent such misinputs.

Unreal’s direction w/r/t escalation of encounter design isn’t feasible for the long term. Its encounters had to be limited in scope, otherwise the player would be overwhelmed because of the player character’s limited ability to keep up with the Skaarj (like a Souls player character being pitted against Bayonetta enemies). Yet this limited encounter scope also means that the encounters become too repetitive across Unreal’s 8-10hr runtime. Here there are two options for expanding the encounter scope without over/underwhelming the player: either the player character can be given more means to keep up with the Skaarj (greater mobility, faster weapon switching, etc.), or the Skaarj themselves can become scaled down in terms of HP/aggression/reactivity/mobility so that they can appear in greater numbers without proving too much for the vanilla player character’s abilities. Although either option could work, I’d still lean towards the former considering it preserves Unreal’s unique edge compared to other FPS games on the market, what with its deathmatch bot-like enemies.

To sum things up, having enemies behave like deathmatch bots does make for good marketing and an interesting surface-level experience, but it doesn’t necessarily make for engaging gameplay. Enemies, be they complex or simple in behavior, need to be designed around the player’s abilities, and the encounter design should use these enemies in varied and engaging ways. Complex behavior isn’t a substitute for level design, because no matter how complex that behavior is, there will always be a finite range of actions an enemy can potentially perform. While Unreal most certainly stands out with its complex enemy behaviors, they end up feeling inevitably repetitive when the same enemy set-ups keep getting repeated throughout the game.

There are a bunch of other of Unreal’s failings I haven’t talked about yet (the redundancies and imbalances in its weapon arsenal and the design/usage of the minor enemies), but quite frankly I find that is more going into specific implementation details that aren’t as interesting in the grander scope of things. There is also a lot of praise to be written about Unreal’s immersive worldbuilding and implicit storytelling, and the way it does so by respecting the player’s time and intelligence (especially without locking them in a room waiting for NPCs to finish talking), but this is a part of Unreal that has been already extensively covered by others.
 

Keshik

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Joined
Mar 22, 2012
Messages
2,115
Played Patron, at least the demo, this seems to have ripped off Banished a whole alot. Only $20 though.
 

Daemongar

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Nov 21, 2010
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Codex Year of the Donut
Ok, so I loaded up Fallout 3. Just trying to remember if it really sucks, or maybe the assholes at RPGCodex poisoned my mind (again.) Downloading mod after mod. Others have said it here, but I ignored them at my peril. You just can't mod this fucking game into a good game. No matter what mod - it just sucks. I owe everyone an here apology. Fuck.
 

Achiman

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Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 BattleTech
I've had a similar morbid curiosity with 4. Todd must have planted subliminal messages in my head at some point.

I was going to get it the other day when it was like $13 on a steamy sale.
But then a small voice whispered.. 'it will be $5 one day, just wait'
I can't be fucked pirating it either, not that curious.
 

Ash

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Oct 16, 2015
Messages
6,235
Durandal said:
Perhaps the most important one is that having complex enemy behavior is not a substitute for good encounter design. Unreal’s levels are on the whole decent when it comes to non-combat elements like exploration and pacing, but the actual combat scenarios themselves tend to be very repetitive. The key reason for that is because for the game keeps throwing encounters with only minor enemies at you (i.e. the enemies that don’t exhibit much complex behavior, like the Tentacles, Slith, Krall, Gasbags, insects and Brutes) while refusing to throw more than one Skaarj (the “good AI” enemies) at you at once up until the last third of the game. This is part of the reason why the ISV-Kran levels being a constant string of 1v1s/1v2s against the Skaarj starts to feel exhausting after a while.

Agreed. Encounter design is vastly overhauled in Unreal Evolution. On hardcore mode it is optimal and I recommend you start there, assuming you're not shit at games. Lower diffs definitely have quite a bit but the intent is to be relatively faithful. Additionally, the simpler enemies in the game are made more complex in behavior, even tentacles.
Regarding encounter design: There is new crafty enemy placements, as well as more diverse mobs (fighting multiple different enemy types at once rather than always the same class like vanilla, which was quite dumb), where lore allows. To highlight the difference to you here: I had to add random infighting chance on friendly fire as opposed to guaranteed on the first hit as in vanilla. Diverse mobs demanded it.

I look forward to what you have to say Durandal. About damn time!

Taking this into consideration, one can see why the weapon switch speed in Unreal is a bad fit: the enemies are designed to be agile and unpredictable, but you cannot switch weapons fast enough to keep up with them as the situation changes--which it does constantly.

There is a bug involved when switching between automag/dispersion I can't remmeber what exactly but it resulted in a massive delay and was very lame. That got fixed. Automag also has slightly faster swap speed to give it advantage over the mini-gun (shares ammo) and make it good to pull out real fast. There is also an upgrade for the Razorjack for faster swap speed (slowest swap in the game).

It’s not only the weapon switch speed that makes it hard to keep up with the Skaarj, but the movement as well. Skaarj are overall faster than you, and when they’re within melee range of you it’s very hard to shake them off. Your best chance of pushing them away is by forcing them to dodge away using a high-dodge chance weapon, which, again, would have been a more viable option had the weapon switch speed not been so low. Otherwise you just have to hope that the Skaarj don’t try to chase you, or that you can cheese them out using level geometry. Jumping as an evasive maneuver also doesn’t really work because of the lack of air control and the pitiful height it covers (which also puts a damper on how vertical combat spaces are allowed to be; there’s no point in verticality if you do not have the mobility options to reliably move vertically). Lastly you have a dodge move as well (basically a short dash), which is pretty much useless because it covers only an incredibly short distance. Dodging is also done with a double-tap input that you’re more likely to do on accident than on purpose, especially in a game like this where you’re constantly changing strafing directions. While there’s unfortunately no one-tap dodge option, you can disable dodging altogether to prevent such misinputs.

Dodging is vastly overhauled in UE: be sure to bind the dedicated dodge input and disable double crap dodging.
-You get three dodges in a row, then a short cooldown.
-Dodging is faster and covers more distance.
-You can dodge underwater, which also doubles as a way to swim faster.
-You can now dodge up inclines rather than the slightest slope stopping the dodge.
-You can dodge through breakable objects and over small obstacles on the floor.
-Dedicated dodge key prevents accidental dodging and doesn't conflict with intended movement.

Having enemies dodge your attacks like a human opponent in a multiplayer match does make them come off as more intelligent, but in terms of gameplay, it also comes off as *bullshit*. Namely, the way enemies in Unreal dodge your shots is by RNG. The exact moment that you press the fire button, nearby enemies check if shots from your weapon is something they’re allowed to dodge, and then they roll a dice to see if they can do an instant dodgeroll away. In practice, this means that there’s a N% chance (all dodge chances listed here onwards are not accurate and just my best guess) that one shot is basically a waste of ammo. For rapid-fire weapons such as the Stinger or Minigun this isn’t a big deal, but considering most of your workhorse weapons are projectile-based with a low rate of fire, the RNG dodging makes the effectiveness of certain weapons inconsistent, or just makes them plain not worth using at all. For the Eightball this means that your primary fire will get instantly dodged half the time and is usually only any good for its splash damage when charged, whereas for the Flak Cannon primary fire it’s just plain wasted ammo 40% of the time. And when you consider that the time-to-kill on Skaarj is already fairly high (it takes like 3-4 rockets or two Flak shells to kill the lowest ranks), it makes this annoying inconsistency even more pronounced.

Enemy dodging has some differences (still RNG-based), but it is notably less frustrating now, at least with certain weapons. You'll see. Keep in mind some weapons even vanilla have lower dodge chances than others though. These are obviously anything hitscan where RNG dodge is fine, but also Biorifle, Razorjack, Flak Cannon alt fire, Eightball Alt fire. Armed with this knowledge + UE's dodging changes the dodging is a lot more reasonable, as opposed to annoying bullshit. UE does however add low chance of dodge in the case of Flak alt, because originally it was never dodged and just made it steamroll anything and everything. In most cases however dodge chance is actually reduced. Some enemies also have special case BASE dodge chance reduction themselves, to make them dodge everything less, namely the gasbag, but it has slightly faster movement speed to compensate. Vanilla these things were dodging ninjas, forced you to pull out a hitscan weapon, and just no fun.

There are a bunch of other of Unreal’s failings I haven’t talked about yet (the redundancies and imbalances in its weapon arsenal

Should also be mostly addressed. e.g Stinger alt is no longer useless - more accurate, fires an extra shard, and has knockback. Minigun primary is no longer completely outclassed by the alt fire. Automag alt fire base accuracy and rate of fire increased. And more. there's still some arguable redundancies but for the most part the weapons all have their place.

I'll stop there as it is getting late.
 
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Curratum

Guest
Fun fact - center home / round button + right trigger on an xbox 360 controller takes screenshots in Steam games.
 

Daemongar

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Codex Year of the Donut
I've had a similar morbid curiosity with 4. Todd must have planted subliminal messages in my head at some point.
That's just it: I got to Rivet City and it dawned on me that they based Fallout 4 off of a minor side quest in 3 - while totally ignoring FO:NV. Once I realized that, FO3 became unplayable. Also, there still isnt' a mod that doesn't make the it looked like washed out grey/green crap.
 

Joggerino

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Ok, so I loaded up Fallout 3. Just trying to remember if it really sucks, or maybe the assholes at RPGCodex poisoned my mind (again.) Downloading mod after mod. Others have said it here, but I ignored them at my peril. You just can't mod this fucking game into a good game. No matter what mod - it just sucks. I owe everyone an here apology. Fuck.
Yeah, it's just garbage. Even FO4 is better
 

newtmonkey

Arcane
Joined
Aug 22, 2013
Messages
1,725
Location
Goblin Lair
Spirit of Adventure (PC)

I got a bit burnt out on the game I'm currently playing (Lords of Xulima) due to getting addicted and playing it for 5-6 hours straight over the weekend, and decided I wanted to play something on my dedicated DOS machine. I considered starting up Blade of Destiny, but why not start with what is for all intents and purposes Realms of Arkania 0, Spirit of Adventure?

The most interesting thing about this game, I think, is that each character gets a random magic ability that's free to use. The manual describes these as magic powers granted by dust raised during a volcanic explosion, but that sure sounds like mutations from nuclear fallout to me. It will be interesting if the game ends up going with that, but I doubt it. Some of these abilities are really useful early on, such as one that gradually heals everyone outside of combat. Others are seemingly useless, like the one that tells you from which direction an encounter might come. It's worth rerolling characters during character generation to get decent abilities, perhaps even more important than stats.

So far, I like it. It's got a tough beginning akin to The Bard's Tale, where the game just throws you into a massive town without any direction whatsoever and you are not even safe from random encounters. Unlike The Bard's Tale, combat is relatively infrequent in the town, so you can get a lot of exploration done in between battles. I ended up completely mapping the town during my first session, and was not really surprised to find that only a handful of the dozens upon dozens of houses have anything in them. I do get some satisfaction out of drawing maps, but in this case I almost wish I had just downloaded a map. Having said that, I gained some EXP and enough gold to outfit my party with basic equipment, so it wasn't all a waste of time.
 

Gregz

Arcane
Joined
Jul 31, 2011
Messages
8,511
Location
The Desert Wasteland
I've had a similar morbid curiosity with 4. Todd must have planted subliminal messages in my head at some point.

If you enjoy building a complicated base to repel invaders, Fallout 4 is pretty fun. It's a great setting inside of which to build your ITZ bunker.

Are there any mods that make it worth playing?

I only played it once, and that was a long time ago, no idea.
 

Puukko

Arcane
Joined
Jul 23, 2015
Messages
3,862
Location
The Khanate
I've had a similar morbid curiosity with 4. Todd must have planted subliminal messages in my head at some point.

If you enjoy building a complicated base to repel invaders, Fallout 4 is pretty fun. It's a great setting inside of which to build your ITZ bunker.

Are there any mods that make it worth playing?
There's a Wabbajack modlist called enhanced edition that I was interested in but ran into hurdles getting a cracked copy to work.
 

Machocruz

Arcane
Joined
Jul 7, 2011
Messages
4,318
Location
Hyperborea
The Frost mod for F4 looks interesting to me, but I'm into survival craft games to begin with. Best thing is not having to suffer Bethesda writing
 
Joined
Dec 24, 2018
Messages
1,783
I played Halo 4 last week. Actually, last week and then finished it today. I had to pause because my headphones broke (while I was playing it, suspiciously...) and I needed new ones.

I know a lot of people are going to read this and go "Halo? Pfft, it was always shit", but personally I quite liked Bungie's Halo games. I was never huge into shooters, more RTS and RPGs, and didn't play arena shooters, so I personally don't carry the grudge that many arena shooter fans - justifiably - have towards Halo for changing the overall FPS genre to have lower weapon counts, health regen, and slow movement. So, as someone who is a fan of the Halo games - Halo 4 was kind of shit.

But I wouldn't call it a travesty. Supreme Commander 2 was a travesty: a game that had next to nothing in common with its predecessor mechanically and took a giant and perhaps deliberate shit on the world it's set in. Halo 4 was more like Thief: Deadly Shadows. No grand and clear-cut thing that you can point to to explain why it's bad, but lots of little cumulative shortfalls that come together to provide an overall disappointing experience. More, I was already expecting it to be bad based on other people's reviews and based on gameplay footage that I had watched before. So, these are the areas where I think it fell particularly short.

Music is number one, and while music is not what video games are about, the difference was very noticeable. O'Donnell and Salvatori are great composers, and their work really has, in part, carried the Halo series. It's iconic, it's memorable, it's distinct. Neil Davidge is an incompetent retard - Halo 4's soundtrack sounded generic, or occasionally sounded like it had been lifted from other franchises like Star Wars. None of it accentuated the experience. It wasn't good or even just "okay" (and merely good would have been a big step down), it was flat out bad. The music was also badly implemented from a technical standpoint. In Bungie's Halo games, the music tended to play at appropriate times; in Halo 4, it did not, and it could just be because the music was bad, but it often felt like there were times when music should be playing, but wasn't, or times where it felt like the music that was playing should have undergone some changes. It was particularly notorious in cutscenes, at times when the music would start building up for what was clearly meant to be an "epic moment" and then just fade out.

The gameplay was probably the least bad part of the game. Not much of it changed from prior Halo games. It didn't feel as fun, but I can't quite put my finger on why, so I can't really criticize the game for it. Maybe it was just because the story wasn't engaging me, and the visuals felt like a distinct downgrade from Reach, but it felt like a chore rather than something enjoyable for its own sake. I did find myself very frustrated at mostly being stuck with Forerunner weapons, and with fighting Forerunners most of the time. The best part about Reach (ODST too) was that it did away with the tedious Flood and just focused on the Covenant. Halo 4 felt like a step back in that regard.

Dialogue and story were pretty bad. The main villain in particular had the sort of crappy dialogue that I'd expect in a redditcore novel like Malazan, and the plot felt like contrived crap meant to shuffle the player around mediocre setpieces. Of course, the Halo series has always essentially just been about shuffling the player between setpieces, but at least the setpieces were generally good, and the plot itself had the overarching thread of humanity's war against the covenant. Halo 4's plot is that the protagonist is conveniently dumped at a Forerunner installation right as both humanity and "some covenant" also both happen to be trying to get in, they wake up a sleeping bad guy, he goes running for a superweapon, so the protagonist chases and kills him. There's no greater context, it's just a self-contained one-off incident that could just as easily have not happened at all.

And speaking of setpieces - this is subjective, but it's been bugging me for a while since playing 343's "remastered" versions of Halo 1 and 2: they don't have soul. Halo 4 doesn't either. This is something that's hard to explain, but also hard to dispute for anyone who's played the games. There are things I can point out individually, like the replacement of sparse skyboxes in 1 with lots of LoD terrain in the remaster, or the change in weather and lighting in a couple levels in 2, but overall the 343 versions just didn't feel as good, and Halo 4 feels like those remasters, not like the earlier games in the series.

I mentioned it already with the music but the whole game felt technically incompetent, like a group of hacks had inherited a property from actual skilled developers and had just enough leftover resources from their betters, plus just enough funding, to put together a working video game, but didn't have the talent to do it well. There are lots of little technical things that are poorly done. Like the shield regen sound using what I'm pretty sure is the Heavy's minigun windup sound from Team Fortress 2, or the crappy new visuals for the plasma grenades, or the way that activating a button now plays a first person animation for no reason but to show us that some intern was able to make that happen, or the inclusion of fucking retarded Call of Duty style "press W to climb" garbage. The visuals in general looked shitty. Lots of crappy low resolution textures.

Back to story, because I am a bit of a storyfag, there's so much that bothers me. The expansion of the Forerunners in the novels was an atrocious mistake. You leave the "distant and unexplained" history distant and unexplained. That's how your world feels big and vibrant and legitimate. You don't go over every fucking nook and cranny. It never improves a setting. Now they've made a game that focuses mostly on the Forerunners and even has a living one present. This is how you shit on whatever mystery your setting might have once had. Although it's not their setting, really. Why is humanity fielding a gigantic super-advanced starship? The Human-Covenant War was disastrous to humanity. Humanity virtually lost everything except Earth, and even that got somewhat fucked up. In fact humanity basically DID lose that war, catastrophically, and only survived because by sheer dumb luck the Covenant underwent a religious schism and the winning faction wasn't interested in wiping out humanity. Halo 4 is set four years after Halo 3. There is no way humanity should have that kind of industrial capacity yet. They should be fielding small frigates and focusing mainly on rebuilding. If you want a setting where humanity has advanced drastically you should set it much further after the apocalyptic war.

And on that point there are lots of stories they could have told that would have tied in better with the setting and wouldn't feel like something that had zero connection to Bungie's universe. The Brutes still exist and are still very belligerent. Species like the Jackals still exist and their pirates would grow to be a much greater problem with the Covenant gone. There would have been plenty of opportunity for Reach style war stories that don't involve some epic cosmic evil and are just about one military vs another. Maybe a fight over a planet optimal for colonization, or reclaiming a former human world - the war is over, now humanity needs to expand while on very tenuous footing. But I guess the franchise belongs to incompetent hacks now so it has to be an epic cosmic evil.

I'm not mad, or even disappointed, since I knew from many people that Halo 4 is shit. In fact, it wasn't actually as bad as I was expecting. But now, having played it personally, I can at least see how it was bad.
 

DeepOcean

Arcane
Joined
Nov 8, 2012
Messages
7,394
Halo 4 is shit but Halo 1, 3 and Reach that are the only ones really playable for the single player arent that great to begin with, even something like Half Life 2 looks like a masterpiece in comparison with them, they are very mediocre games and their only redeemable features is that playing Halo 1, 3 and Reach are decently challenging on Legendary and enemies arent dumb like sacks of bricks that is the usual on most modern FPSs, the rest are as fun as a colonoscopy. About the story the fanboys like so much, yeah, Halo 4 is a pile of shit but you have retarded/cliche stuff since Halo 2, you literally have to save the galaxy on every single fucking main game, that is Todd Howard award of peak creative bankrupcy.

To make the whole thing even more comedic, while you are saving the galaxy, the characters are on a constant competition over who can say the most cool sounding random Hollywood one liner what makes even harder to buy the whole "humanity is doomed" bullshit. Usually I dont give a shit about stories on FPS but the fanboys defending garbage like Halo 2 as the greatest thing ever because of its story is really baffling for me.
 

Denim Destroyer

Learned
Joined
Mar 20, 2021
Messages
425
Location
Moonglow, Britannia
Halo is the prime example of decline within the FPS genre. Two weapon limits, poor weapon variety, unsatisfying to use weapons, hide behind cover to heal, slow movement, extremely linear level design, poor level design in multiplayer, lack of proper modding tools, lack of player hosted servers, and worst of all extremely popular despite how dumbed down it is. The only way I have ever had fun playing Halo was making custom game modes to play with friends which even that has issues due to how limiting the game mode editing tools are.
 

NerevarineKing

Learned
Joined
Jan 6, 2021
Messages
315
Speaking of FPSs, I beat Ultimate Doom (+Sigil) and Doom 2 (+No Rest of the Living) for the first time recently and had a lot of fun. I'm not much of an FPS guy and have little experience with 90s shooters, so I played through them all on Hurt Me Plenty using GZDoom. Doom 1 had very tight level design and I could see myself replaying it again on Utraviolence. Doom 2 was a lot less consistent with its level design, but added a new weapon and basically doubled the enemy count of the first game. Next I'm gonna give Wolf3D a try with ECWolf and I plan on playing Final Doom and Doom 64 in the future.
 

curds

Magister
Joined
Nov 24, 2019
Messages
1,098
Halo is the prime example of decline within the FPS genre. Two weapon limits, poor weapon variety, unsatisfying to use weapons, hide behind cover to heal, slow movement, extremely linear level design, poor level design in multiplayer, lack of proper modding tools, lack of player hosted servers, and worst of all extremely popular despite how dumbed down it is. The only way I have ever had fun playing Halo was making custom game modes to play with friends which even that has issues due to how limiting the game mode editing tools are.
Might be nostalgia talking but Halo CE splitscreen death match with friends rules.
 

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