I kind of disagree with this! I felt like they were just entirely unwilling to take risks.
There was no reason they couldn’t have subverted the game mechanics or created ‘unfair’ things, they just chose not to.
In maybe half an hour, Rocket League took everything I thought I knew about my skill with games and threw it out the window. How do you even play this game?
positioning is key! once you get past the initial hump of “shit this is a car how the shit do I drive this car”, rocket league is actually a great translation of soccer to video games because that sense of helplessness and chaos when you’re not allowed to use your hands but you have to get a ball past someone else is replicated with having to control cars instead of people (in actual soccer games the game does a lot of the player “handling” for you)
so in rocket league’s case you’ll want to think a lot about how to maximize your effectiveness with that very short amount of time you’re spending in close proximity with the ball, meaning you’ll want to spend all the time you’re NOT close to the ball trying to make it so that when you are close to it, your contact is as effective as possible
I’m not going to elaborate too much further because this is not the rocket league thread, but when you get over that initial driving hump holy wow does rocket league get FANTASTIC
It didn’t.
I could probably have been less blunt, so we’re even. I didn’t get the sense you were offering a devil’s advocate like counterpoint as much as you were elaborating on what cuba said. I was trying to be like “okay, yep!” to what you were saying.
Well i could have not used the modifier “bleeding” and that might have helped your reading. What you were saying is kind of obvious, though. I say that intending no value judgment. And i’m obnoxiously english major so maybe it’s just obvious to me. Pardon me.
I don’t feel like Rum’n’Coke meant really real realism in reference to the balance or lack thereof of weapons in a fantasy game, though. Just that stringent balance is a more transparent artifice, less believable in the sense you described. Weaker verisimilitude. But i don’t wanna put words in dude’s mouth.
@spacetown hmm okay that’s actually very helpful, thank you! I was getting really frustrated, but I’ll keep at it if the payoff opens up to a lot of possibilities. And because I just paid over Ten Whole Dollars for it so I better get my money’s worth.
I wasn’t aware we had a rocket league thread (though I didn’t look very hard), so I’ll look into that.
I don’t think we have a rocket league thread! I just didn’t want to write a ton about it in here - I can make a thread when I get home!
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Yes. Hence, “to put it crudely:”
There’s nothing inherent in Dark Souls’ fiction that makes it likely that dudes who want to use halberds will be just as effective as dudes who want to use curved greatswords, or whatever. Putting it that way makes it obvious. Rather, it’s a brutal zero-sum universe, much like our own, where those who want power seize it. Not only does it make sense that there may be powerful artifacts lying in wait for those with the tenacity or luck to grab them early, it makes sense that you would abuse those artifacts’ power to trivialize challenges in the world. In exchange for oozing this narrative substrate, you might not get to have such a great fight on a mechanical level with Taurus Demon, or whatever. This tradeoff is more than worth it.
EDIT: Here’s a smart guy making a similar point. Note: “balance vs. variety”
I’m glad to see that my favorite game, Not Getting Into The Overwatch Beta, has returned and hasn’t changed a bit since it went offline two months ago
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Me too ;_;
Overwatch is really good ;_;
“Balance vs Variety” is an argument that happens a lot with fighting games. You can make a game that’s all Ryu clones and it’ll be balanced, but it’s not what people want to play nor even what people want to watch. The good games focus on making characters unique and individual and ideally play well, and then try to make them integrate well with each other rather than making them all homogenized. (Admittedly, an overdose of system mechanics these days has led towards the same problem of uniformity even with widely varied characters; looking at you Arc System Works)
I just strongly disagree that the balance in DS2’s weapons is what led to it being boring. They each had their own upsides and downsides and worked differently enough that playstyles could vary from them. What led to it being boring PvE was that they decided to make sure every enemy could be dealt with equally well by all of them. So everything in the game became a variation on “dodge the attack, hit buttons during the incredibly wide open animation they have afterwards.” This was not a necessary design choice, but they did it anyway, so gone were the days of infinite mosquitoes and Lord-of-being-parried Gwyn and so forth. As a result most enemies became a forgettable blob, rather than ones specifically meant to counter certain strategies.
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I played through Firewatch last night. I liked it!
- It fixes the radio support character you never reply to by giving the player character the ability to reply and initiate conversation about things you see.
- The dialogue is fun and the actors give relaxed performances.
- The PC has great physical presence, like if Joel from The Last of Us got a sedentary job then went camping (but also the Respawn/DICE first person body feel).
- It’s very pretty.
Overall, as a Gone Home successor it’s tremendously successful. It’s also successful as a hiking simulator for someone who likes to look at Skyrim.
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I mean, that last sentence you wrote IS “balanced”. What we’re running into here is a semiotic discussion on what balance means. My point is that DS2 is “balanced” to be perfectly playable and smoothly challenging as long as you build your character along a reasonable trajectory. To say that the game included no enemies that countered certain builds is to say that all builds are balanced equally. Right?
Instead you could say, to make more varied enemies that counter certain builds is its own kind of balance, balance on a higher and richer level, that makes sure no one build is superior not on a fight-by-fight basis, but on a global “# of enemies build x is good against” basis. This is a good thing, or at least better than DkS2’s approach.
But Broco’s original complaint was that certain weapons eschew even this kind of balance in DkS1. If you have a gravelord sword it’s just better than basically anything else you can get at the time and completely rolls ALL enemies. That’s truly broken balance. And again, I like it, because it reinforces the setting as I described above.
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