Community Question: Genres of Choice

(Runeforce) #21

Currently playing: Enemy Terrirtory: Quake Wars…because it’s just too damn good! (Ps. Join Taw :smiley: ).
Xonotic is also fun.

Previously I was into World of Warcraft.

(Rex) #22

Voted for shooter, because I still play a little ETQW.

You will never catch me alive! :stroggtapir:

(Runeforce) #23

WANTED: Rex!

Dead or Alive

Alive: $5. Dead: $10

:armadillochase:

(light_sh4v0r) #24

Tribes Ascend and League of Legends. The odd Portal 2 coop here and there.
And when in a weird mood my friends and I play a game of Worms Reloaded, C&C Generals, Empire Earth, or, lo and behold, Liero Xtreme :slight_smile:

(edxot) #25

kicked $15. banned $20

(SockDog) #26

There was an underlying point to my praise of L4D2 that went beyond merely stating SD should do the same. Specifically that the game encourages teamplay and reliance to the point that if people do play selfishly it stands out, jeopardises the team and ultimately gets them abandoned. It’s clear with Brink that they want something similar in their games but it didn’t quite work. Closer study of L4D2, and I’m not trying to patronise, may help them achieve that.

For example you could offer passive buffs if you are within (and stay within) a certain radius of a player class. This would hopefully encourage players to stick together rather than rambo off to their deaths. Seems a much better idea to me than actively clicking players at random to buff them before they run off to their death or bribing people with you know what.

Yes, I saw this yesterday and it looks very interesting. For them specifically I just wonder if they’re going to be able to add any gaming meat to those nutritious bones. :slight_smile:

(tangoliber) #27

I like FPS and Strategy. So, Natural Selection 2 is pretty much the ultimate game for me.

Favorite RTS is R.U.S.E.
Favorite non-strategy multiplayer FPS is Killzone 2.

(BioSnark) #28

I’ve been playing that a fair amount since the last build optimized it to the point that I can decently run it on my fairly low spec rig.

(tokamak) #29

Oh I completely agree that players should be able to boost each other and thus let a team become greater than the sum of its part. I just think that Brink did this in a too explicit fashion. Staying together and pressing F on each other regardless of what´s going on is great teamwork but it doesn’t require much insight or skill.

And in a way L4D is similar to that extend. L4D is more about not being a dumbass than it is about being clever.

(Humate) #30

Real teamwork is to outfrag the enemy so that your team-mates can press F.
Both actions are two sides of the same coin - they are one thing.

The only time a “selfish” player actually jeopardises a team, is if they are incompetent at fragging…
However this works boths ways with an unselfish team-player.

Brink failed, because the two sides of the same coin, were treated as separate entities.

/cough

(montheponies) #31

FPS mainly, currently playing CS:GO which is a sad reflection of how bad the FPS multiplayer genre is at the moment…still occassionally play Brink and RTCW. Got back into Company of Heroes a few weeks back and played till i got to a level that I was consistently humped… :), very occassionally play Dirt3 and Fifa (with the lad).

as an aside, on the L4D comment - I’m fairly sure there was a reasonably developed competitive scene, though to be honest I lost patience with the game fairly early on and only logged about 30hrs on L4D2.

(SockDog) #32

The boost isn’t my point, just an example of implementation. It’s that there can be passive drivers that promote better teamplay rather than bribing or filling the screen with clutter. Again, it’s about changing the path rather than constantly repaving it and expecting to get somewhere else.

And in a way L4D is similar to that extend. L4D is more about not being a dumbass than it is about being clever.

This raises the question, ‘why are you playing this game?’ Many games are simplistic (to use your definition) but are great fun to play and have excellent longevity. You seem to feel this need for depth often at the cost of accessibility and fun, while not directly related this video kind of covers that approach.

//youtu.be/FRTsl1jCqq8

BTW - I believe you’re meaning to write ‘extent’ although L4D does extend me quite a bit. :slight_smile:

(BioSnark) #33

Remember that all but 3 of the special infected classes will stun and kill an individual player over time should an attack connect and not be interrupted. That is the most significant element keeping the survivor team together and it is extremely heavy handed in implementation. It’s hard to translate into the comparatively vanilla format of two teams of players shooting at each other.

(tokamak) #34

Well I’m not arguing for realism though, I just want games that reward ingenuity and creativity. That’s why I play games and ET really pioneers the way these two skillsets are rewarded. L4D only partially does that by letting players play the zombies.

(.FROST.) #35

Even though he has some valid points there, I must say I really, really hate nay-saying from the bottom of my heart, especially because he’s all wrong and he even shows us the evidence but says something different. The one moment he shows us the giant leap between Doom and Half Life 2, the next moment he shows us a(in his opinion) not so giant leap between two Halo games. That’s bias.

Then he states how expensive games are getting; well, if they’d have tried to make Crysis(with the same fidelity level) 10 years before they actually made it, it would have cost them probably 5-8 times more, or even more than that. So actually technologies are getting cheaper and cheaper.

But the most important thing he forgot: People like to have good and affordable hardware
. That’s only possible if there is a mass market for that stuff. But the mass market will only be there if people feel the need to buy the newest hardware. But people wouldn’t buy that stuff if there wouldn’t be the proper software(or video medium) for that. And if people don’t do that we’d still pay a fortune for a 1GB harddrive. But it’s not only the PCs and consoles that profit from that, but all the other technical “toys” as well. My first TFT for example was 600 Euro and it is only 19" the next one cost me 360 Euro, a 24" monitor and the last one was 320 Euro, a 24" monitor with integrated 3D Vision, together with one pair of glasses.

And Half Life 2 is still very pretty; I installed it a couple weeks ago. But it only looks so good because they’ve put so much effort in that game back then. I don’t know what kind of problem he has, but if a developer/publisher earns more money than he had invested, then everybody wins. The more Jobs are available in the computer-game industry the better. Thousands and thousands of talented people want to work there, but they also need their bills to be paid. Millions and millions buy photorealistic AAA games and enjoy them. That doesn’t mean, that it is entirely forbidden to play games like “Retro City Rampage”, “Hotline Miami”, or “Pixel Boy”. It’s the variety that is so unique to video games. No other medium has so incredibly much variety than computer games, not nearly. Maybe he should found something like “Dogma Games”, or something.

And the question is not if “we” will ever be able to completely copy his world in every facet, it’s only a question of WHEN. 10years, 20years, 100years, 1000years, 10000years??? Doesn’t matter, technical advancement doesn’t stop only because you are dead.

Remember those nay sayers, saying, no way digital photographing will ever be as good as analogue photographing? Well, I guess we all know what happend. Frickin advancement happend. Some guys said, men will never ever be faster than the speed of sound, others have said, that our earth isn’t a sphere. My advice to all those guy, BE OPEN FOR EVERYTHING AND NEVER SAY NEVER, BECAUSE IN HUMAN HISTORY EVERYTHING THAT MEN COULD REALISTICLY IMAGINE TO ACCOMPLISH MEN HAD ACCOMPLISHED SOONER OR LATER AND YOU DON’T WANNA BE THAT POOR LITTLE GUY SITTING OUTSIDE IN THE RAIN WITH A DONKEY MASK ON HIS HEAD WHEN EVERYBODY ELSE IS SITTING INSIDE, CELEBRATING HUMANITIES NEWEST ACHIVEMENT.

God do I hate those nay sayers.

(SockDog) #36

I wouldn’t say it was heavy handed, it’s just blood obvious. I think the distinction is that you’re not stopped from doing it or bribed in some way for not doing it. It’s a natural way to solve poor behaviour or make certain behaviours more risky. When you screw up you might learn and blame yourself, correcting your behaviour, or you may blame your team for not backing you up. End result however is you know that when you’re not with your team the chances of something bad happening is greater.

I gave the example of a distance based passive buff. Maybe you could likewise give penalties (or a nicer name as not to scare players) for being away from the team. Perhaps a Covert Op would have a cloak that’s 100% effective around one enemy player but as the number grows the more observable they become. This would allow them to stalk stragglers on the enemy team but also be compromised if the enemy works in units.

Of course I’m getting stuck here on location/team based things but there are other subtleties that valve employees through design that could benefit a team vs team type game.

Well this is going to lead into a tired argument so lets leave it there. Again, I mentioned L4D2 because of it’s design choices and how they drive player experiences.

(tokamak) #37

Yes, so realism is completely irrelevant, we both were already on the same page.

@Frost, that’s a great video but I think it’s worth mentioning that COD MW1 and MW3 are nearly identical looking while being 5 years apart. Five years further back, COD3 is from a completely different era. So although we can blame the recession and we can blame the xbox360 determining the pace of the market, we can also just say that MW3 has hit the sweet spot when it comes to graphics versus performance.

I’m still blown away by MW3’s graphics that run really smoothly on high settings on my 5 year old PC.

And isn’t that refreshing? I don’t really need games to look better than that. They’ve already tricked my brains in accepting it, they no longer need to work at bridging what’s being displayed and what it needs to actually represent like five years ago.

If game developers no longer need to invest in looking more realistic than MW3 then they can start being more fun, more interact able and mroe fantastical than MW3. Gamers simply no longer want games to look better. They’re happy with their Gears of War, Borderlands and Halo. It’s fine as it is. What they will care about is being able to do more cool stuff, like Portal 2, or Planetside2 or well, I guess a lot of folks looked forward to Brink’s parkour…

Anyway, I look at this:

or

http://newbreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/gears3_beast_thrashball-jpg.jpg

And think ‘jup, that’s cool, now let me shoot at things’. A totally different feeling then the enormous thrill of seeing UT2k3 run for the first time on my friend’s pc. Going from UT99 straight into UT2K3 was such a milestone, it wasn’t just about having more pretty things to look at, it was also wondering about what would be next and how cool games in the near future were going to look.

fui4u.jpg800x640

(.FROST.) #38

Absolutely my opinion. My problem with the video above was only his “photorealistic no good, real photorealism will never happen, or animations won’t ever match the realism of the graphics(wich is ridiculous)” bla bla. But actually I don’t buy games because they are just photorealistic. No matter what, but Mass Effect for example(imho one of the absolute very best games I’ve played so far) is not photorealistic, yet it looks just gorgeous and “real”(wich is not necessarily photorealistic real). Same with Brink(although utterly different art-style), there are things that look realistic, even photorealistic sometimes(though low resolution blows that illusion if you are less than 2-3 meters away from the respective object*), but overall it’s highly stylized and much, much more apealing to me than anything else with a desperately realistic look to it.

But like with traditional arts you have to first understand reality before you can make your own, convincing version of it. Look at the Source engine for example. At first it was mostly about realism, but now you got games running on that engine wich are everything but realistic. Like TF2 and Dota 2 wich looks just fantastic btw.(and I’m not even remotely a Fantasy guy, but that game looks so absolutely amazing. I even thought about buying it just because of the graphics…so beautiful).

*The Hope(ship on CC) looks especially realistic(when you look at it from where the gate is/was)

(BioSnark) #39

Well, frost, you’re also missing the major point about the art assets necessary in attempting to achieve that style. These photo-realistic environment goals are necessarily either dependent on repetition of the same props or following a limited corridor. This is about the artists making the assets. It is tangential to technology and some day may be able to be circumvented more successfully than it can at present by the same (one reason the rage engine texture system is exciting). The style currently holds back the scope of ambition for other aspects of the game, such as scale or player agency to accommodate better fidelity.

Mid-far future or mid-far past are likely the best settings to attempted photo-realism at the moment because they allow for a more believable gap between game environment and real environment because the setting already establishes that the player has little comparisons to draw with real experience. Thus, they can partly excuse art asset limitations.

As an aside, photo-realism is an idiotic goal, even ignoring all technological and development constraints. Imitated photographic limitations like lens flare and low depth of field make sense when the player is supposed to be looking through a glass camera lens in the game or in screenshots advertising that the game looks just like a photograph. That’s a fairly limited range of sensible usage.

(SK7109) #40

Coop Shooter PayDay The Heist. This small dev team OverKill got this right. Fun game…fav map Green Bridge…they make this look easy http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8A8TYGbkMAU