hiver
Guest
Yes, but there is no need to have completely or largely useless skills presented as equal to all others in char gen.
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Development Info Josh Sawyer on Utility and Balance in Game Design
- Thread starter VentilatorOfDoom
- Start date
Captain Shrek
Guest
Completely separate issue.
hiver
Guest
hhah..Yeah, right.
St. Toxic
Arcane
Having skills which sound useful but actually do nothing is not the mirror image of making every possible build as viable as any other. I can understand how misrepresentation might piss people off (though I disagree about the complaints regarding Fallout, those skills do exactly what they promise) but if any random choice you make in char-creation actually makes your character more viable, then the entire process of choosing is essentially futile. Then again, I like my lists of skills and abilities miles long and cluttered with junk and even traps, provided of course that the description of what the skill does is accurate, so no split pools or lists for me pls. The only compromise I might consider is a faster cap on skills that have fewer uses in the game-world, though I think it's a missed opportunity of potentially turning previously useless skills into surprising gems come lategame.
EG
Nullified
- Joined
- Oct 12, 2011
- Messages
- 4,264
I did. My friends even encouraged me to take empathy, night vision.etc.
I'll get them for it, one day.
hiver
Guest
But isnt choosing skills that are much more useful - making your character more viable - and quite unfairly too, since descriptions dont really tell you how useful something is?
Weve been over this before, but i basically see a separate list as a clear explanation of what is supported by a lot of gameplay, the core gameplay. Or most of the gameplay. And what is a complimentary/support skill.
This wouldnt be necessary if there was enough content for all skills that are there, but if it isnt then char gen should not make it seem as if there is.
Although i agree that Fallout or Fallout2 especially was difficult to fuck up completely, there were several skills that had very little use at all.
Repair had like three four uses in the whole game. Outdorsman was a sink, first aid and doctor are basically one skill that was intentionally split in two - just so there are more skills.
Gambling? Fucking traps? Barter? Who ever wasted points on fucking barter? Sneak?
Not only was there almost no gameplay for them but other gameplay made them even more redundant.
And even worse, after you invested some small amount of points into them - there was absolutely no need to invest more.
Well, the only thing is that high doctor skill was required for implants - very late game, and accessing that one computer in Vault city. Giving you info about jet you could get another way, anyway - from Myron, if i recall correctly.
Wouldnt be my personal choice, to say the least.
hiver
Guest
Why? There was tonnes of weapons, equipment, items and money around so you never needed high barter.
lol, no it doesn't. "How?" is implicit in both character systems. You're not changing shit, you're just removing the strategic challenge leaving only "how?". There is no effort involved in "how?", no thought-process. I have nothing to win or lose, nothing to conquer - no game to play. I simply pick the red fork or the blue knife, and there is no difference, I am rewarded in the exact same way and on the same level.
Barring the fact that Sawyer will not succeed in creating such a system - because there will eventually be a consensus on what is best and what is useless and so on in his system too, no matter what Roguey thinks - such a system would be terrible. There is no reason whatsoever to let me customize my character when it makes no difference how I do it.
You're just butthurt that you'll never be as good of a designer as Sawyer. 
Moribund
A droglike
A quick lobotomy would fix that.
In all seriousness Grunker seems to have some idea what he's talking about, if I ever make super awesome RPG maybe I will have him be alpha tester.
In all seriousness Grunker seems to have some idea what he's talking about, if I ever make super awesome RPG maybe I will have him be alpha tester.
Severian Silk
Guest
I don't usually replay a game until years have passed and I've totally forgotten how it works. 
DraQ
Arcane
First, there is a tradeoff here, more "what" means less opportunities to ask "how".Why eliminate one for the sake of the other?
Second, there is a waste of build space.
Third, while having a bad options during game's proper is a good sort of challenge, it isn't so during chargen, because every bad choice made at this point is either obvious and therefore pointless to even have in your build space (see #2) - like making a retarded mage in setting where magic is of wizardy "over a century of intense studies" type rather than innate gift - or inherently uninformed and stupid only in hindsight which is neither legitimate challenge, nor good design - same as:
Not unlikely if I picked first aid instead of melee.Oops what? Can't finish the game?
Besides, being able to beat the game in a way that disregards your build is also bad design, so yeah.
So I have a choice to either level up my character in a way that doesn't make me stronger, or in a way that leaves me gimped in regards to my primary offensive skill when I can finally use it.
Fucking brilliant design, Fallout devs, Todd bless you.
Not balances for maximum efficiency doesn't automatically mean shit beyond imagination.
Besides,balancing for optimum efficiency should be the matter of informed decisions you make during gameplay, not uninformed ones made during chargen.
May I ask how?
You don't need any sort of training to be "barely able to hit" someone with a sword or stick. If you put points in it you can expect having some proficiency in it.
If you have several skills that do exact same thing, except with different animations, and different top of the line stuff *IF* you even get it, then there are three different routes opening up before you:
- give them different enough situational utility/performance/advantage to make them being mechanically separate justified (it may be subtle but should still be there).
- man up, admit to being not up to the task and merge them into a single skill without crying about toxic feedback and stuff.
- continue to suck as designer and developer, maybe switch to making beer or something after you can no longer stand your deranged loser fans.
No, obvious solution is having both broad-but-shallow and deep-but-narrow characters able to progress and find suitable challenges. Broad characters should find it easier to get into stuff as well as use solutions combining many different skills (like distract a ragged group of bandits with illusion cantrip or setting fire to a bush, sneak in and poison their food with self made laxative, while making a break for it with their prisoner later on, while they have more, um, pressing issues on their minds), having more tools at their disposal, but unable to get into specific high level challenges (elite swordsman approaching you with weapon drawn? fucking run - cantrips won't distract him in this situation, laxatives are poor choice for poisoning your weapon and he will probably cut you into pieces before you'll get to think "mommy, I should've been a farmer").
Not true. You typically approach game with some preconception of how you will play it.
Random build choice followed by random tactics, even if the latter is chosen from group of tactics seemingly fitting your build should still end up with buttrape, the difference being that buttrape would be caused by faulty short-term decision that can be changed easily in next situation or after (preferably not-free) reload, rather than an uninfromed strategic decision you're stuck with.
Funny thing - the longer the list, the more viable builds if typical build consists of approximately the same proportion of the list.
St. Toxic
Arcane
Nah, you can get along on non-combat skills with relative ease. Just don't pick fights, you dummy, and make use of that outdoorsman.
Considering that your criteria for good design is having any random nonsense build perfectly viable, it's surprising that you think beating the game despite your build is bad design.
So I have a choice to either level up my character in a way that doesn't make me stronger, or in a way that leaves me gimped in regards to my primary offensive skill when I can finally use it.
Fucking brilliant design, Fallout devs, Todd bless you.
It is brilliant design. Big guns and Energy Weps are the heavy-hitter/specialty weapon classes in Fallout, so they're reserved for the mid to lategame phase. By tagging Energy Weps, you're essentially telling the game "I care about late-game power." and in the end you get your compensation for being rubbish at the start. Not that putting points in untagged skills really makes your character that much worse, or that there's any lack of Guns & Bullets mags scattered all over the place.
Now, I understand that the ADD crowd wants the lvl 50 Kill-o-zap Spell from Hell on their level 1 mages, because they have a disease that interferes with their understanding of how the world works, but pretty please don't spoil the fun for normal people who aren't interested in instant gratification.
I didn't say anything about beyond imagination; I reserve that expression for the junk you're trying to sell. Don't deny that you're riding games for reacting accordingly to the uninformed decisions you make in character creation. It's like beating up a coffee machine because you gave it gravel instead of money and it wouldn't pour you a cup.
Right, because it's harder to read and evaluate a skill or a stat, then predict what a perquisite is for killing a monster, passing a skill-check, surviving an ambush, setting off/disarming a trap etc. I mean, I understand what you're saying. Gameplay without meta-knowledge is guesstimation, with chargen acting as a buffer. You know what your characters excel at and which actions are more likely to result in success, or at the least make failure less absolute, meaning that the decision-making rests on character development informed by gameplay, but not the gameplay itself.
Balancing the gameplay to accommodate for a random start essentially means being lenient towards new characters and utilizing gameplay in a way as to provide a clear representation of what the rest of the game has in store. Balancing the gameplay to accommodate for random builds, however, is to eliminate the reliance on character development in favor of player skill or, well, just make the game piss easy. Most non-rpg rpg's of our time tend to go for the latter. The Codex' favorite non-rpg rpg, Dark Souls, went for the former, though it's arguable whether it's actually balanced for any such thing or if it's just a side-effect of the gameplay itself.
May I ask how?
This game is unfair! I didn't know he was standing behind me with a machine gun! I didn't know he was preemptively launching a rocket just as I passed the corner! I didn't know he was in the bushes sniping my ass!
The whole idea of challenge is overcoming the unknown factor, getting yourself informed through the magic of failure and pain. Some people, when faced with the unexpected, just start bitching and whining. They want the tedium of perfect knowledge of the circumstances and a set of specific actions to carry out to ensure their victory. Imagine knowing all the builds and counters in an rts and playing without fog of war to keep a close watch on your opponent; at what point does the strategy aspect enter into it? Because it's not in the micromanagement, which is a matter of sorting efficiency. It's in trying to make an accurate estimation, and re-evaluating your possibilities when this estimation fails to to be accurate.
Maybe if you're fighting a brick-wall or trying to bash a piñata. The weapons skill is an abstraction for numerous aspects of combat that you have no control over. It's not an absolute value of how fast you can swing your weapon, it's a value strung up by random variables and countered by your opponents ability to deflect or avoid your swings. If you think the bare minimum of combat affinity is enough to tackle creatures who go out of their way to look for a fight, I wish you the best of luck.
You can't justify a general lack of character proficiency by empowering every weapon to the point where using all three is as good as using one with 300% higher success rate. I don't care if you're taking out stone elementals with pick-axes, skeletons with maces and saving the sword for fleshy tentacle monsters -- with 300% in either of these I'll get at least the same success-rate as a matched pair, with three times the success rate once I face my own weapon's match.
I already talked about overpowered magic weapons and having a bigger pool to choose from, but it still boils down to the same thing as above, so the economy advantage falls off quickly. I'd like an example of utility-based separation though, it sounds interesting.
Anyway, I don't know why I'm engaging you in a debate over this. I have a quote of you in the very same post complaining about having to "level up my character in a way... that leaves me gimped in regards to my primary offensive skill". Bu-hu, right, because Energy Weapons aren't mechanically different from Melee, Throwing or Small Guns in any way.
What about rewards? Rewards tend to scale with the difficulty of the task at hand, which is natural seeing how the character's experience and gear economy ramps up as the game progresses, and while a specialist continues to rapidly improve in his field a broad character inevitably stagnates under the costs of maintaining more skills which need increasing. With multiple solutions to quests, a specialist would likely have near-equal access to the same quest pool as the broad character (albeit being well overqualified for sections of the task) and little use for the rewards given, creating multitudes of junk-quests scattered about.
Balancing the quest process makes deep characters seem superfluous -- why over-invest in one skill when a handful of points in three or four skills gives you access to more overall game content with a reward-total equal to or greater than a specialist? Sure, you might not get the be-all-end-all master quest for your chosen tier, but if it's really (and I mean really) worth getting then the broad character is getting shafted.
Yeah, based on your character build. If you've built some random nonsense with no conception of what you're trying to accomplish, adapting to it once in the game should be like trying to drive a submarine on the highway.
So, your idea of making a faulty build playable is to save-scum until you find the right combination of actions that will let you proceed, whether or not these actions have anything to do with your character's abilities? Brilliant.
So... yeah.
Not sure what you're trying to say here. My point is that if there's Rocket Scientist next to Street Sweeper in the list, I'm a happy camper.
No, misrepresentation would be saying that a skill does one thing while in reality it does another, or nothing whatsoever. Having a skill for both Maces and Swords and then providing a greater selection of enchanted swords than maces in the game is fair play. Having fewer speech-reliant dialog options than locked doors and containers too. If you make shit like that uniform it only serves to put unnatural constraints on the world, nobody but autists will be happy with that crap.
hiver
Guest
St. Toxic
original sentence:
I was responding to:
so - things being like that : you are still randomly choosing a set of skills that make your character more viable. - if you happen to randomly choose the correct ones.
And it is misrepresentation because all skills are represented as equal, you can tag all of them and invest equal amounts of skill points into them, which presents the situation as if all skills are more or less equally useful - and you have no idea or any way to find out how much content there is for any of them - before you play through the game. Descriptions for each skill do not tell you anything about that at all.
While you can deduce that combat is very important on account of combat commonly being a big part of gameplay in most RPGs, you have no way to deduce before hand how important other skills are.
You can also try to deduce things based on the setting of the game. Or you should be able to - but thats one of the bigger problems Fallouts have with this issue.
And something we learned doesnt work - by fucking experience.
The misrepresentation isnt absolute - but it is still there.
The gameplay quality should not rely on bad design or development problems that caused lack of content for some skills.
Especially when several skills should be logically very valuable in a particular setting, such as repair, outdorsman, first aid - doctor and traps.
I can go along with skills being not completely equally useful - of course, but those that are there - should have greater value, especially if they logically correspond with the setting.
First, if its some kind of retarded high fantasy where enchanted weapons fall out of every bush - then fucking all kinds of weapons enchantments should be around in similar numbers. Over the whole game, of course.
Because under such conditions there is no sane way to expect one type of weapon to be much more numerous and the other almost non existent - especially if we are talking about two weapons that are very common and well known.
Better, in a more sane type of setting the enchanted weapons should be very, very rare and choosing one skill over another should lead you to different path in the game - depending on your very martial prowess with chosen weapon - where you would be able to find an enchanted form of it.
Say, for quick example - your swordsmanship skill gets around and other famous swordsmen challenge you to duels or there is a tournament for swordsmen or a king who loves swordsmanship draws you into some quest - which all may end with you winning or finding an enchanted sword.
While a mace wielder would never even see that path through the gameplay. Or even if he did he would have no use for that sword so he would sell it or do something other with it.
A spear wielder would go in another direction. A bowman would do his own thing. And so on.
This is - providing items and equipment through the gameplay and content - instead of just randomly dropping them around and then limiting one kind for no goddamn sane reason at all.
The problem gets much bigger when we talk about many very different skills that require their own kind of content.
original sentence:
I was responding to:
so - things being like that : you are still randomly choosing a set of skills that make your character more viable. - if you happen to randomly choose the correct ones.
And it is misrepresentation because all skills are represented as equal, you can tag all of them and invest equal amounts of skill points into them, which presents the situation as if all skills are more or less equally useful - and you have no idea or any way to find out how much content there is for any of them - before you play through the game. Descriptions for each skill do not tell you anything about that at all.
While you can deduce that combat is very important on account of combat commonly being a big part of gameplay in most RPGs, you have no way to deduce before hand how important other skills are.
You can also try to deduce things based on the setting of the game. Or you should be able to - but thats one of the bigger problems Fallouts have with this issue.
And something we learned doesnt work - by fucking experience.
The misrepresentation isnt absolute - but it is still there.
The gameplay quality should not rely on bad design or development problems that caused lack of content for some skills.
Especially when several skills should be logically very valuable in a particular setting, such as repair, outdorsman, first aid - doctor and traps.
I can go along with skills being not completely equally useful - of course, but those that are there - should have greater value, especially if they logically correspond with the setting.
It does not need to be uniform - posing things like that is a fake binary extreme choice between two options that are equally bad.
No it isnt fair play. its shit.
First, if its some kind of retarded high fantasy where enchanted weapons fall out of every bush - then fucking all kinds of weapons enchantments should be around in similar numbers. Over the whole game, of course.
Because under such conditions there is no sane way to expect one type of weapon to be much more numerous and the other almost non existent - especially if we are talking about two weapons that are very common and well known.
Better, in a more sane type of setting the enchanted weapons should be very, very rare and choosing one skill over another should lead you to different path in the game - depending on your very martial prowess with chosen weapon - where you would be able to find an enchanted form of it.
Say, for quick example - your swordsmanship skill gets around and other famous swordsmen challenge you to duels or there is a tournament for swordsmen or a king who loves swordsmanship draws you into some quest - which all may end with you winning or finding an enchanted sword.
While a mace wielder would never even see that path through the gameplay. Or even if he did he would have no use for that sword so he would sell it or do something other with it.
A spear wielder would go in another direction. A bowman would do his own thing. And so on.
This is - providing items and equipment through the gameplay and content - instead of just randomly dropping them around and then limiting one kind for no goddamn sane reason at all.
The problem gets much bigger when we talk about many very different skills that require their own kind of content.
DraQ
Arcane
And how do you make use of that outdoorsman?
Wrong.
One of my criteria for good design is that there are no nonsense builds possible in the system.
Again, wrong.
I think that beating the game by disregarding your build is bad design.
Except I can't know that. At best I can expect heavy and energy weapons to be rarer and/or either getting less ammo or being more ammo hungry.
I can also expect heavy weapons to be more demanding on physical stats.
Way to pile up strawmen on top of each other.
More like beating it for only accepting certain nominals and not returning change (or your money if you unknowingly gave it wrong nominals), without the notice being displayed on the machine or in its vicinity.
Player skill is necessary for game to be a game. Liking games for not relying on player skill doesn't make you a more monocled player. It makes you more of a fan of interactive screensavers.
Finally, why eliminate reliance on character development? Character build is still there and determines what the character can and can't do. It's just that if you take the freeform approach to challenges, good compartmentalization of individual abilities into skills, and well designed synergies between as many of them as possible (not meaning explicit synergies, but possible uses of skills together where they augment each other) means that pretty much every build you can make makes sense if it's used in right way.
Except we're talking of playcycle of even under a minute VS a playcycle of tens of hours.
There is a difference between playing an RTS with fog of war, but with units functioning more or less like expected, and playing one where half of the units make your base blow up when you try to make them, at which point the game calls you a faggot and CTDs.
No, I think that bare minimum of allocable combat ability should be about enough to make difference in low level combat encounter.
Weren't you complaining that I don't know how combat works a while ago?
So how will your combat against stone elementals with a sword go?
Or will you just swing pickaxe at them without even being barely able to hit them?
Task that requires charisma/stealth/lockpick/toaster repair specialist rolled into one person seems pretty difficult, or at least complex.
Problem #1 - shitty character development system not accounting for variable breadth and depth of specialization.
Problem #2 - shitty quest design providing discrete, pre-designed path for every skill (so for example each quest has, in parallel, a vent, locked door and guard that can be persuaded or killed barring access to objective).
So, let's break it down:
ironman, highly lethal from the beginning - both systems kill you off outright, no real contest between them.
free reloads, highly lethal from the beginning - both systems net you some savescumming near the beginning, then you finally hit a wall some h in with yours - congratulations for wasting your time, sucker.
any, softer at the beginning - both system give you some rough time at the beginning to allow you adjusting your playstyle, but you can't fix broken build sucker.
Yeah,
St. Toxic
Arcane
I did say "any", as in, "it doesn't matter which random skills you select, you're still making the right choice." There should be a thought process involved here. What does my character need? What are my character's strengths? What's going to make him better and what can I do without?
But skills have no reason to be representative of game content. All they need to represent are actions which the character is able to perform, and what these actions do. You're not going to over-invest into a skill at level 1 anyhow, unless it has a total of 0 uses in the game, and with stats you generally have a base to work with outside of skills rather than starting as a completely blank slate, so it's unlikely you'll break the character at chargen.
I'm hopeful that the future may bring diplomacy-centered rpgs, but I'll be pissed off if there aren't any combat skills simply because they're deemed less viable than the skills around which the game is centered. Supposing that the entire storyline presumes you've invested heavily in diplomacy, and the optional and entirely avoidable combat is realistic in the sense that it carries with it ridiculous social and physical penalties, I'd still expect it to be among the core skills and not just some flavor additive. And, naturally, it would go against the entire premise of the game to attempt to balance the usefulness of combat with the usefulness of diplomacy -- it devalues what you're able to achieve in a system when using the optimal approach -- but that it's there as an option, though a more strenuous and unreliable one, is invaluable for non-linearity.
But it does work. The games aren't broken, you're able to finish them no matter what you start out as. Some options kick more ass than others, but that's a natural consequence of simulating any scenario.
Now that's a tough nut to crack. How do you suppose we make gameplay quality a separate issue from bad design or development problems, hm?
I hear what you're saying, but I'm of the opinion that balance leads to more streamlined and minimalistic games and game-worlds that feel mechanical rather than natural. It's generally one of the staples of mmo's to provide players with basically equal experiences no matter what builds they invest in, and we've had plenty of rpg's that feel just like single-player mmo's primarily, in my opinion, because of their adherence to this ideal.
Though I'm forced to agree that a number of the Fallout skills, such as traps or repair, are perfectly in tune with the setting but probably less so with the style of gameplay. There's a whole list of features in regards to sustainability that would have made them tons more useful as primaries, like for instance the need for food and water in the desert and constant equipment malfunctions. It would make for quite a different type of game though, considering Fallout was pretty heavy on the scripting and relatively underdeveloped on the sandbox.
As it is, they are at best situational. First aid and Outdoorsman works if you're going for a grindless/barterless early-game, like low-level traveling, and tagging them is what makes it work. I usually tag Doctor if I'm Jinxed because I tend to cripple myself quite often. But I digress. The main reason they work, is because they're in tune with the setting. I'd much rather have a skill that's less useful but still a logical skill to have available, than the absence of a skill which would seem invaluable given the context.
On top of that, I tend to view game mechanics as separate from the game content. If someone makes an expansion on the same platform, or makes a pnp campaign based on the system, there's no rule saying that first aid, repair and outdoorsman won't be the dominant trio for that particular scenario. They aren't flawed structurally, they're just hampered by one iteration of content economy. So, for me at least, when a designer says "Cut! Merge!" it's an indication that he's just not very good at working with what he's got.
I didn't specify. Suppose there's only one enchanted weapon in the game, linked into the main storyline, and it's a mace. So what, you're going to add in a sword, a spear, a bow etc, a version for every possible weapon type and player preference in the interest of placating some retards? Who cares? You're not going to see any pvp in this game, the computer already cheats, the designers are trying to kill you (at least hopefully), it's not an mmo -- why balance? As long as the game is beatable with every weapon-type, why would it matter?
I don't think gear should play such a central role anyway. I mean, I can understand UO providing a Vanq variety of every single weapon, because if you give players too definite an edge in fucking each other up then that's what they'll go for, but even then you could still cut people to ribbons with regular junk-gear, provided you had the skills and knew what you were doing, and it made sense to use junk because of the potential that you'd fail horribly and lose it all. Would you really like to see a weapon-related quest-line implemented in rpg's as a general rule of thumb?
Nice example, but I'm not swayed. If the setting calls for the most epic weapon to be a magical sling-shot, and the sling skill is the most underpowered and unattractive one of all, I see no problem with that. We're talking about a fictional world here, not some car dealership where you get to customize your Kia -- there's no sane reason to provide every fighter with a magical or even particularly powerful weapon, other than to placate loot fetishists of all weapon inclinations.
If you want an easy solution, don't make combat skills weapon specific, make them action specific. Melee weapons all rely on thrusts/stabs, slashes and overhead strikes and have varying damage and utility depending on the performed action, so that any character (provided his stats are in order) is theoretically able to use any weapon. A character primarily proficient in thrusts will do better with spears and daggers and worse with maces and axes, for instance, though a Mace of Death Magic +10 would still hurt when thrust into anyone's eye-socket. A fourth skill, one that influences aim/chance of success, may be in order -- something like Steady Hand -- that would cover ranged weapons as well as melee, though it probably wouldn't be a main skill for hand to hand combat unless you were trading damage potential for accuracy.
Probably needs more fleshing out, but at least you'd have no reason to mess with the game content.
Nah, it's pretty much the same shit.
St. Toxic
Arcane
What, you don't know? Every point you put in it makes it less likely that you'll get hit with a random combat encounter. At particularly low levels of the skill it's quite likely that you'll spawn at a disadvantage, and for a non-combat character that can be a serious problem. Random items and easter-eggs on the map are pretty much just a quirky bonus though.
That implies either a fairly simplistic character-system or a particularly rigid one. I can see how skill-trees could be balanced to prevent players from making any decision that could act as an obstacle to their progress. Classes can be made pretty rigid, I guess, if the only specialization available was at chargen. It works for Diablo-clones and that new X-Com I guess, but hardly rpg material. So, if I've got 20 skills to choose from, in a free-form system, what's to stop me from distributing my next 20 points evenly across the board?
Unless we're talking about kiting some boss in an action-rpg and actually using game-glitches to your advantage, there's no "disregarding your build" available. Maybe you think chargen is supposed to put you on an exclusive linear path throughout the game, though I don't see why you'd actually advocate linear design.
A diplomacy character is not prevented from entering combat by anything that he has selected, and a combat character can still talk his way out of a bind. If you put heavy armor on your bard, with enormous penalty to every ability he's got, just so he can survive one particularly bad encounter, nothing is broken or lost. Your stats, and by extension their mod on your skills, whether or not you have chosen to invest in them, generally grant you the every-man's permission to attempt any feat. So, builds are not disregarded; at the worst they are evolved situationally.
Irrelevant. There's a lot of things you can't know about the game both before and after you've played it, and that isn't going to change. Unless you intend to say that it's bad design not to introduce you to the meta right away at the character screen?
A lot of effort expended in that rebuttal, I see. There was no fabrication in what I said. If you want to demonstrate how my statement fails to apply to your design ideals, you may do so, but ADD kiddies want instant gratification or they start crying and, at least so far, that's what I'm getting from you.
No, giving it money would imply giving the system something of value, such as an informed decision. I suppose you could be giving it foreign currency, but you would hardly be robbed of it -- you just wouldn't get your cup of coffee.
Well, sorry, but I'll always favor decision making over twitch gaming. If I ever want a monocle, guess I'll go buy one.
I don't see it. Maybe you're talking about, like, a graph where all the skills mesh together, and your character's affinity is represented by a line crossing all of them to some degree? So that when, say, you've got a lock that needs to be picked, part of the lockpicking skill is represented by repair and another part by, err, hat-making? How are these builds used in the wrong way, as opposed to the right way? Look, maybe you could describe the character system for me?
Right, I forgot. Multiplayer games don't get played for tens of hours, and generally people learn all there is to know about the game in under a minute. Notice that I'm being sarcastic.
Well, the enemy units might come out of nowhere and "make your base blow up" at which point you call your opponent a faggot and ragequit. I'm not sure what you're trying to say though. I'm saying perfect predictability and adaptability makes for a boring existence. If your point is that making mistakes in chargen is like living in a universe where the laws of physics occasionally and unpredictably flip, I can only shake my head in disagreement and worry about you.
"Make difference" in, what, winning you the fight or make you lose the fight less thoroughly?
Weren't you complaining that I don't know how combat works a while ago?
To take a page from you,
Wrong!
I was complaining that you fail to grasp what a combat skill is meant to represent. Anyways, what are you so smug about? If you split a number of points between 3 skills that could have been used to strengthen 1 skill, that's a functional relative estimate of what you're trading away, without going into specifics on how the skill-system works.
That's up to the designer. If you opt for immunities as a common theme, you're making specialization impossible (provided, of course, that we aren't talking about making the combat optional). If you opt for damage bonuses based on weapon types, it'll do fine. I pretty much implied all that in the previous post already though.
Complex is right, but if it's difficult skill-wise you better hope the game ships with an editor.
You mean that a quest targeted at a specialist is a sign of a shitty character development system? We don't know how this hypothetical scenario is designed, perhaps the current average requirement is 60 with 20/20 to spare with most specialist players pushing 50/25/25. You're still going to be way under par on 33/33/33 to be useful, and if they run quests on 30 or 40, which is attainable to a jack, then there's actually more specialist quests available to a jack than there are to a specialist. I mean, sure, you can hang around and farm these things until you're miles ahead of a specialist in levels and loot, but I'm not sure that's a more balanced alternative.
Isn't that what you're arguing for anyway? I mean, sure I've always been a fan of the idea that paths could arise naturally out of a more dynamic and sparsely scripted game, but so far there's none of that -- so you'll have to come to terms that they're pre-designed. I'm a bit confused though, because you call alternate solutions shitty quest design, but advocate variable breadth and depth of specialization. If quests, and in particular the main quest, limit themselves to a single solution p. problem, then it'd be easier to build a good character with random selection than to find and complete a quest for which you've allocated just the right number of appropriate skills.
You sure broke that down, maybe even apart. So, let me see if my broken-English skills are up to snuff for this quest. First, a recap.
We press buttons at random in chargen, go into the game and try to adapt to our character's skills. We fail. The failure, according to DraQ, lies in a faulty short-term decision that we can easily alter after reloading, this time, presumably, not trying to adapt to our character's skills. We succeed. Hooray, we're not stuck.
Maximum difficulty: We press buttons at random in chargen, one of the buttons happens to be ironman. Oh crap.
Maximum difficulty: We play on normal, using the DraQ approved save-strategy. A few hours later we, inexplicably, hit a wall?
Man, shouldn't have wasted all of my time and instead done something more productive like, eh, playing some other game?Increasing difficulty: We play, I guess, either on ironman or normal, but the game seems to allow adjusting our playstyle (though I'm not sure why it's giving us a rough time?). Also, for some reason our build is broken beyond repair. Ok?
I don't know man, I'm really not following. There's a few points I'd be interested for you to clear up, but other than that I think we're just talking past each other on this issue. Not a big fan of selective quoting either, it gives off the impression that you're dodging.
DraQ
Arcane
It's still a passive skill, and very situational one. So what will my good natured medic (first aid, doctor) with a knack for survival (outdoorsman) do with his situational advantage? Beat people over the head with his doctor's bag?
It may just as well imply incredibly complex and flexible character system.
If your list of skills is long enough, then the character will likely have points in many of them even while staying focused, which means they will be unlikely to gimp themselves with unsalvageable skill selection.
If skills are flexible and problem solving free-form, then there will be a way of utilizing nearly any combination of skills to your advantage in any situation, even though it may be very non-obvious and difficult for player to come up with.
As for the breadth of character, if you can't balance for different breadths, then you can always try to constrain characters to fixed number of skills at given level of specialization (the way the older TES games have done it).
As a rule of thumb, depending on gameplay synergies, you'll want a character being small slice of your skill list if there are virtually no synergies, but if there are many, you'll want considerbly greater breadth - extreme case: assuming all skills synergize with each other, will give you the most variety of builds that play very differently for characters with as much as 0.5 coverage of your skill spectrum.
Not linear path, but if you can disregard chargen, then why have chargen?
We were talking in a context. In Fallout neither first aid, doctor nor outdoorsman can be used to progress through main quest. If I tag those three skills I am expected to use them as axis of my character, so either the game fails by providing unsupported builds, or it fails by allowing you to progress ignoring your build.
If I am not supposed to treat my tagged skills as axis of my character then why the fuck tag random skills in the first place? Either make it so that you can only tag the skills that get high starting values based on your SPECIAL, make you tag more skills than you have shitty/purely auxiliary skills in your skill list, or some combination of both.
Also, make adjustment to the number and breadth of individual skills - why the fuck are doctor and first aid separate? how exactly is firing laser pistol different from firing a regular one, but similar to firing laser rifle?
Relevant. I intend to say that it's bad design to introduce me to the meta until I've beaten the game at least once.
Having seemingly valid build derp up for metagame reasons is very bad.
If the game gives me not one but two medical skills, I can't reasonably expect truckloads of stimpaks rendering one and half of them irrelevant.
If the game gives me energy weapons and heavy weapons as alternatives to regular ones, I can reasonably expect to find a raygun or machinegun early, but have to hang onto it instead of selling it for considerable cash, and having ammo troubles offset by the amount of awesome I can unleash in combat.
So you want to trade strawman in for ad personam?
How about you demonstrate how your statement does apply to my design ideals in the first place or STFU and GTFO?
Or my currency back.
Again, informed decision is not something you can make based on manual alone, and there is no value in randomly blundering through arbitrary contrivancies of a system only to run through the same content repeatedly.
If you want your decisions to not involve any skill, you might as well replace yourself with RNG - nothing of value will be lost.
Tactics, my friend, tactics. You have a variety of tools at your disposal, you have rich environment providing many natively mechanical (as in not specifically scripted) opportunities to use those skills, you try to devise combinations of actions using available tools that solve your problem.
I have already given you an example in the form of hostage rescue through use of unusually low level illusion, sneak and alchemy.
Not sarcastic, stupid.
Multiplayer games rarely make your mistakes trail after you for multiple hours. Multiplayer games also don't force you to experience the same fucking content again and again as part of the necessary learning on those mistakes.
That's pretty evident.
Adaptability doesn't imply you know how to adapt, only that the possibility exists.
How is dying slightly later a difference?
Yet you fail to grasp the exact same thing, except to a much greater degree. Combat skill shouldn't represent some flat to-hit bonus. Combat skill should be relative. Even fairly low level of proficiency should be sufficient to thoroughly fuck an unproficient combatant up. Even relatively high level of proficiency shouldn't give you much chance against master.
Having three different melee skills at moderately low level shouldn't make you a failman, especially in universe, where having your spear or sword/axe (or entire quiver of arrows) stuck in an undead will make you curse (briefly) the day when you decided you won't be taking a mace or katana with you, while facing off some huge and nasty beast with a sword will make you want nothing but spear or good bow and proficiency in its use.
Of course having your sword at moderately low level (along with your spear and mace or whatever) shouldn't do fuck to help you when you got yourself into a duel with master swordsman.
Well, specialist has much less options available. "Hit obstacle with a sword, repeat" or "find a vent, sneak through it, find next vent, repeat" don't exactly strike me as interestingly designed quests.
Fail.
You still have to try to adapt, only this time you know something about how game works.
Again, that's pretty evident.
Maybe try re-reading?
tuluse
Arcane
- Joined
- Jul 20, 2008
- Messages
- 11,400
This actually makes sense. Lasers have no recoil, reach their target at light speed, and are not effected by gravity (fuck off Einstein, I know it light is effected by gravity, but not enough to matter in this context).
Also, caring for an maintaining energy based weapons is going to be p different from weapons that use explosions to push air into projectiles.
hiver
Guest
Well, imagine that you thought about it, picked a right skill for that purpose - and the game fucks you up because there is no fucking content in which you can apply that skill - in the way you would reasonably expect to be.
But if it turns out there is no content - ergo no gameplay for that skill - you cannot perform any action at all with it.
Or very little - so much that it isnt sufficient to play through the game using those skills.
I can deal with having a tougher time in the game - just fine. If it makes sense.
Say, like going unarmed in Fallout. Its a challenge, especially at the start - and it makes sense in the setting.
Later on you get some nifty perks, new, better moves and status effects and there are quests you can do in different way - if you have the skill for it.
Thats balance. (although it would be better if there was more quests where that skill would provide different solutions - regardless of how tough and hard it may be)
You take another underpowered skill - like throwing (about which everyone complained to no end) and combine the two with pretty good results.
Thats also balance.
Only, not a balance that just makes unarmed or throwing completely overpowered so those skills are artificially made the same as any else.
But that means there would be enough gameplay-content for combat skills. Harder - yes - but you could still play the game, you have your own gameplay content - which makes sense in the setting.
I have nothing against that. Thats a reasonable - sane proposition.
Im against circumstances where such a game would give you combat skills - but it turns out you can do fuck all with them .
But it does work. The games aren't broken, you're able to finish them no matter what you start out as. Some options kick more ass than others, but that's a natural consequence of simulating any scenario.[/QUOTE]
I can finish it - but i cannot play it. Because there is no or very little content for that set of skills.
So i either have to use other skills or skip to the end - and game over.
And what is that to me?
I can also deinstal the game and finish it that way.
I can also do a speed run to Navaro and make myself overpowered in first few levels - whats the point?
Its not about finishing the game - its about playing it. Enjoying the content, figuring out how to overcome adversity and so on. And you cannot do that if the balance is fucked up to such an extent.
Now that's a tough nut to crack. How do you suppose we make gameplay quality a separate issue from bad design or development problems, hm?[/QUOTE]
You cannot make it separate - im not suggesting that.
Im saying that mistakes and development problems should not be presented as some sort of ... difficulty curve that only the master race can overcome.
Im talking about balance of content - not mathematical balance of skill mechanics.
Which mean providing appropriate content for the skills. Not making any skill capable of getting that singular content that is there - which MMOs do.
And it was barely finished and had all kinds of development problems.
Its not what the devs wanted - they simply didnt have enough time, resources and money to implement all the necessary gameplay.
I dont want to placate retards in that way.
I would rather have really difficult quests, gameplay requiring tactics and knowledge of the tools you have at your disposal and conditions of the gameworld.
Rather then retardedly making things difficult by simply not providing weapons for combat skills that are in the game.
And with it all content and gameplay you could have with them.
Imagine if in AoD you choose spears and there isnt any other then bronze?
Or you struggle through half of the game increasing lore (or any other diplomatic skill) only to find out you cannot do anything with it?
Wouldnt that make you go
?Lets take a look at combat in AOD. Its difficult as fuck, right? No end to simplistic complaints by retards. Yet the game is giving you every tool you need to overcome that difficulty.
First fight with the Assassin is a problem. But you can still opt out of it without loosing anything.
And if you study the rules and dont rush in into things you can figure it out.
Thats the balance i want to see.
It depends on the setting, story and the type of game youre trying to do.
But that makes sense. For being underpowered and having a hard time over most of the game - you get the only magical weapon in the game.
Thats balance - in my book.
Only not a balance that makes everything equally easy.
Sure, good idea.
There isnt only one solution to this quandary.
No it isnt - see above.[/quote]
St. Toxic
Arcane
I think you're ready to pay the Master a visit.
Sounds different from your "No bad builds allowed." decree. Likely or unlikely, suppose, like you did for Fallout, that we're primarily investing into the non-combat non-diplomacy non-stealth side of the spectrum. Either we'll be able to beat the game by Climbing, Swimming and Ancient Literature or the long list gets shorter with the lack of any situational skills.
This wouldn't be skill-system reliant, though, this would be game content reliant. In essence, you're saying that any shitty skill-system can be good with the unlimited high-quality content patch. Problem solving isn't free-form in a scripted game, every solution and combination requires implementation.
And if your limited specs only get you part of the way and you need to respec? It's hardly surprising that you'd suggest a design formula that actually demonstratively breaks characters because of lack of content.
Are we talking about producing new skills? Like, if I invest in Daggers and Lassoing I'll unlock Tailoring? You did say gameplay synergies, so I'm guessing no. Are we talking about tasks that require a certain skill reacting to all skills across the board? Like, he's lock-picking a chest with half the required skill, but he also knows Tinkering so the lock opens. It's just a crutch for an obviously lacking skill-system. Or are we talking about the combination of skills to complete a certain quest-line, like stealth-lockpick/pickpocket-piemaking? Sort of like how RPG's generally work?
Unless the game really doesn't rely on your character's stats or skills, you can't actually disregard chargen. It literally cannot be done. If you want to roleplay a specific character that's just not in the game, go ahead and larp, but whatever character you generate he'll have no choice other than to adapt to the situation or perish and there's no disregarding that.
I'm afraid you're just plain wrong. The main quest begins with you leaving the vault, and consists of triggering events that aren't necessarily linked to any particular skill. If you want specific skill-checks, it raises the question whether or not combat skills can be used in order to progress.
Wrong. You tag the skills you want to cap or get a boost in as early as possible, and that's it. All characters know all skills to different degrees, and there is no rule stating which skills are out of bounds for your build.
You want to start with high values in particular fields?
But why? Limiting skill choice to stat affinity does nothing other than ensure you'll get the most out of your skill-points, at the cost of freedom. Three tags is almost too much as it is, two would probably be a better option.
They do different things?
No recoil.
So, you have your reasonable, generic ideas and the game doesn't follow suite huh? Well, go ahead and cry. The game is under no obligation to meet your expectations, whether or not you yourself consider them reasonable.
I think it makes perfect sense that you, and probably your character, find medical skills overall a surprising disappointment. Heck, everyone in the vault probably thought they'd be a big success, but the outside world has had quite a number of years to compensate for a dangerous, hostile environment. In a campaign where you don't have anyone to barter with, however, they could prove invaluable.
And, hang on a second here, you can reasonably expect to find high-end, military grade overkill weapons early? In the fucking wasteland? Oh, right, I'm sure the desert is just littered with these things, because ammo is so scarce (why would it be?) and nobody wants to lug the weight around. Vendors on every corner selling tactical nukes the way it's supposed to be. I mean, thank God they fixed this for FO3 right?
Ok, here:
No you can't. You can't expect your first ever lvl 1 character to beat the game, and you can't expect that your random skill selection will be the most useful. You can't expect that the game will accommodate for your particular lvl 1 build. These expectations belong to people who don't have what it takes to make observations while playing and react accordingly, but simply want everything delivered to their front door as soon as they hit play. If any lvl 1 character is expertly built no matter what skills he has, the game is practically adapted to ADD kids. There's nothing wrong with random pitfalls and unexpected mechanics, as it's part of the game challenge to predict these. Predict as opposed to expect; you're not entitled to expect anything.
Reading comprehension fail.
DraQ saying there's no value in research and that practice doesn't make perfect, how quaint. There's the total range of other similar games that you've played to draw inferences from as well, i.e experience. So far, I've never been stumped by an RPG, nor complained about unsupported skills. I've certainly gimped characters on occasion, but tracing back to my mistake I generally found it to be an obvious one. ADD gonna ADD I guess.
I'm afraid skill doesn't influence your decisions, other than perhaps giving you (false?) confidence. Intelligence does.
But this is content, not skill-system.
Wrong, that's pretty much what mp games are all about.
Then you have no reason to complain.
Enables you to gage what's missing from the fight.
And I've implied no such thing. With 300% success I obviously meant general success relative to the skilling up of three combat skills, not that the skill would have 300% to hit.
In perfect agreement there. Now, suppose you're going against an "unproficient" combatant with a total of X invested into combat skill Y. Now, suppose you've invested 3X, how will the difference manifest? The value that X is meant to represent is difficult to pin-point, but would you consider it fair to say that, in a rough estimate, your character's prowess in this skill triples?
Are you implying that 3 combat skills at 30% should be the norm for any average encounter, while optional encounters mean 100% in 1 skill? Naturally there won't be any real problem for a master swordsman to handle any average encounter (or the game would be pretty much broken), and on top of that he gets to stomp through the optional combat. The tri-force, on the other hand, gets to switch between weapons all game, comes out underpowered and forces the designers to scale down the combat challenges throughout the entire experience. I mean, what if big bad is a master swordsman? He can't be, right, because 'failman' can't go up against that.
Me neither. Don't quit your job to become a quest designer.
You mean that we died before we could figure out how the game works? Doesn't chargen teach us 60% of what we need to know anyway? No, I think you're talking about "knowing what to do" and not "how it works".
I already tried that a couple of times, it doesn't help. I think maybe your English breaks up in places.
St. Toxic for president! 
EG
Nullified
- Joined
- Oct 12, 2011
- Messages
- 4,264
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