I got L4D2 in the steam sale, and did my first online game just now, in which I encountered a broad range of incompetence, got some competent people showing up after the others dropped, and started the rock concert to signal the chopper, then got fucked over by the AI director with a surprise tank.
We had annoying dude who wasn't actually very good and LEERROOYYY JENKINS in the initial set, but they got replaced by someone with actual map experience and a succession of guys who could shoot straight and stick together, respectively.
Last edited by name_here on Fri Dec 17, 2010 3:33 am, edited 1 time in total.
It's really painful in left4dead because 4 of the special infected can incapacitate you until a teammate smacks them off of you, one can blank out your screen, one of them can punch you so hard you need to spend a second getting up, and one will straight-up kill you. The last one exists only to force survivors to scatter and not be able to deal with the others.
DSMatticus wrote:It's not just that everything you say is stupid, but that they are Gordian knots of stupid that leave me completely bewildered as to where to even begin. After hearing you speak Alexander the Great would stab you and triumphantly declare the puzzle solved.
DA was shit and I'll never buy another Bioware game sight unseen again. I even liked ME1.
Tactics my ass, plonking a plate guy with a shield in a doorway and having all the mobs bump past pissed me off so much that I uninstalled and never touched it again.
I liked ME1 a lot, ME2 not so much. It decided to go full shooter instead of the rather fun (when not using a sniper rifle) hybrid it had going, but more importantly it stupided up the plot.
DSMatticus wrote:It's not just that everything you say is stupid, but that they are Gordian knots of stupid that leave me completely bewildered as to where to even begin. After hearing you speak Alexander the Great would stab you and triumphantly declare the puzzle solved.
I actually thought that the monster's ability to "bump past" tanks was a pretty good innovation for DA and made it a more tactically challenging game. A tank actually has to work at being a tank - and the monsters weren't stupid enough to simply ignore casters who are about to fireball them.
I can only hate on one thing: The system of leveling up is terrible to the point where I don't want to play it. The only way to have decent stats is either research and make bizarre custom classes and grind skills, or not level at all.
In this moment, I am Ur-phoric. Not because of any phony god’s blessing. But because, I am enlightened by my int score.
Count Arioch the 28th wrote:If I could hate on Morrowind for a minute...
I can only hate on one thing: The system of leveling up is terrible to the point where I don't want to play it. The only way to have decent stats is either research and make bizarre custom classes and grind skills, or not level at all.
Indeed, this is the real problem with Morrowind/Oblivion.
I literally cannot play those games without custom leveling mods that make stats dependent on skill ups total, instead of some random alchemy system that results in raising them in a different order being either a terrible character or a perfect character.
PoliteNewb wrote:
Easiest way I found to beat Velius (though a trifle tedious) was to run around from him during the battle while he's still a dude, using your Squire abilities to boost the crap out of your speed and attack power. Then one-shot him, and when he turns into the 4-armed demon, you still have your boosted stats, and should have 3-4 turns before he gets to go. Smack the shit out of him, you win.
If you don't have the patience for that, I find the Lich summon tends to have a good hit chance and awesome damage on Zodiac demons.
I have considered that. Free powers = no mana = spam = win.
I can only hate on one thing: The system of leveling up is terrible to the point where I don't want to play it. The only way to have decent stats is either research and make bizarre custom classes and grind skills, or not level at all.
This times infinity. Apparently, my brother picked up Oblivion some months ago, and I've been tempted sorely to play it. The leveling system, however, is such a chore that I can't bring myself to try and play.
Count Arioch wrote:I'm not sure how discussions on whether PR is a terrible person or not is on-topic.
Ant wrote:
Chamomile wrote:Ant, what do we do about Psychic Robot?
Dragon Age is really just one of those fantasy heartbreaker 2e clones that they made while figuring out BG 2 and all that. It makes tons of mistakes, puts in tons of useless crap that nobody cares about, and makes sure that fighters do not get to have nice things.
They also forgot to stop mages from being God, and even instituted a mana system without really thinking about what that system does to casters. They also used a dumb wowlike cooldown system.
Tons of balance problems besides, like the fact that Blood Mages and Arcane Warriors take giant shits on the other specialisations.
Psychic Robot wrote:This times infinity. Apparently, my brother picked up Oblivion some months ago, and I've been tempted sorely to play it. The leveling system, however, is such a chore that I can't bring myself to try and play.
Psychic Robot wrote:This times infinity. Apparently, my brother picked up Oblivion some months ago, and I've been tempted sorely to play it. The leveling system, however, is such a chore that I can't bring myself to try and play.
PC or Xbox.
if PC Realistic Leveling Mod solves that problem.
This.
I actually got back to Oblivion recently, my first 2 attempts ended because I could forsee a monitor embedding itself in plasterboard.
Careful selection of mods has made the game quite good. It'll never be Morrowind though.
If I could get the tessellation from fpsoptimizer working on my newer cards, I'd still be playing it (again, post mods).
Yeah, the bad leveling mars Oblivion no end...you have to make your character class level dependent upon skills you hope to never use, else you level ridiculously fast.
I did play one time through using 'efficient leveling', which was sort of fun, until, like any other method, you get just too dang powerful for the game world, long before you have made it even halfway through the (dull) main quest line.
Kaelik, to Tzor wrote:
And you aren't shot in the face?
Frank Trollman wrote:A government is also immortal ...On the plus side, once the United Kingdom is no longer united, the United States of America will be the oldest country in the world. USA!
I think one of the main problems with Morrowind/Oblivion is that levels don't actually mean anything. And not because in Morrowind you could use Alchemy to bypass the levelling of attributes or use a Drain Skill spell just before talking to a Skill Trainer to get all your skills up to 100 to bypass having to actually train your skills.
But because saying that your character is level 1 doesn't say how capable you are of beating challenges. A level where you increase Armorer 10 points and luck, agility and willpower, getting an extra 3 hitpoints, is supposed to be equal to one where you increase Long Blades, Heavy Armour, Sneak, Acrobatics, etc, etc all 60-70 points, increase Endurance, Strength and Willpower 5 points and increase your hitpoints by 10.
Its the same thing with Fallout- less so with New Vegas than Fallout 3 since you get companions and its much better at giving you non-combat options. But a character that focuses on getting their weapon skill to max and their Lockpick/Science/Speech to max is a lot better than one that evenly spreads their skillpoints over all skills.
Maybe Bethesda just doesn't like the idea of levels actually meaning anything.
Last edited by Parthenon on Mon Dec 20, 2010 11:44 am, edited 1 time in total.
I've actually explicitly written emails to friends who work for Bethesda telling them to not use level at all in Skyrim (at the time letters where sent, called "The next Elder Scrolls game").
They really just need to bite the bullet and have all your stats be dependent on the average of your skills associated with that stats +/- a racial bonus, and add in some different way of progressing HP.
No levels, just characters who get better at things by doing them.
Fallout's levelling system was okay. You at least got to assign stats where you wanted to. Elder Scrolls is pretty junky.
But the other problem really is that everything in the world scales to your level (for Fallout and Oblivion). So you never really get much weaker or more powerful than any of your enemies. To fix that also requires the use of mods - Wanderer's Edition for Fallout 3, and OOO (and few others) for Oblivion.
Zinegata wrote:Fallout's levelling system was okay. You at least got to assign stats where you wanted to. Elder Scrolls is pretty junky.
I really think there are already a billion games that allow you to level and put points where you want. Elder Scrolls is different at least in part because what you do determines what you are good at.
It needs work, such that leveling optimally doesn't involve keeping track of what you leveled, and avoiding leveling some things, but meh.
Zinegata wrote:But the other problem really is that everything in the world scales to your level (for Fallout and Oblivion). So you never really get much weaker or more powerful than any of your enemies. To fix that also requires the use of mods - Wanderer's Edition for Fallout 3, and OOO (and few others) for Oblivion.
I take it for granted that anyone who has ever played both Morrowind and Oblivion, even the developers, knows they need to make the game not level scaling.
The whole 'level skills as you use them' thing sounds fuckawful.
Granted, the only game I played where they used that mechanic was Daggerfall but even back then I could see how retarded that was. I don't really want to jump around the fucking map like a Quake deathmatcher to raise my jump skill. I don't want to waste an hour of my life picking 'safe' locks for no good goddamned reason except to raise the skill for a dungeon I need later.
There's no reason for this shit to be in the game except for the fact that people A) want something different, even if it's worse and B) feel the need to stick their 'realism' dicks in everything.
Josh Kablack wrote:Your freedom to make rulings up on the fly is in direct conflict with my freedom to interact with an internally consistent narrative. Your freedom to run/play a game without needing to understand a complex rule system is in direct conflict with my freedom to play a character whose abilities and flaws function as I intended within that ruleset. Your freedom to add and change rules in the middle of the game is in direct conflict with my ability to understand that rules system before I decided whether or not to join your game.
In short, your entire post is dismissive of not merely my intelligence, but my agency. And I don't mean agency as a player within one of your games, I mean my agency as a person. You do not want me to be informed when I make the fundamental decisions of deciding whether to join your game or buying your rules system.
The two games I've played that do that are Hero Quest (Quest for Glory) and GTA San Andreas.
HQ lets you start with a point-buy, and from that point on, what you do increases your stats. This encourages you to sneak or run everywhere you go, pick up rocks and throw them at things, and climb trees over and over for no reason.
GTA lets you increase your stats, skill with vehicles, and weapon skill with practice. This encourages you to finish the first mission, save, go to the gym, stock up on guns, and shoot tires and heads until you can use the best guns two at a time, before starting the second mission.
It sounds cool in practice, but it encourages grinding in some fashion. It's mildly rewarding when you play the game as intended and slowly get better at various things.
Maybe its having both an open world where you can choose what to do and levelling based on skill use. If you had levelling based on skill use in one of those pretty much corridor 3rd person fighters/RPG then...
Wait, what the hell am I saying? It would just encourage the most efficient levelling up possible and be even worse since shit characters can't go find the easy way to do something.
You might be able to mitigate that grind by tying skill improvements to failed attempts rather than every attempt. If there's a melee / swording / whatever skill then it only improves when you fight guys that you can't stomp all over. Similarly the block / defense / your mom skill would only improve when you took a beating. Lockpicking and pick-pocketing could be done the same way, and as long as there are penalties for extreme failure (jammed lock you can't ever pick, dude notices and attacks) it prevents finding the hardest thing you could try it on for spam purposes in a very similar way to how combat attempts to dissuade you from that sort of training. This is a lot harder to fit for movement skills like climbing or running or swimming though. It could maybe be done by adding increasingly crazy things for you to use those skills on, but that just spreads the grind out to a few places where you "train" up your skill before moving on.
This puts a soft cap on the skill boosts you can get out of grinding lower level opposition (though you might be able to get around that somewhat by using crappy gear, depending on what gear does for you) and is also largely incompatible with the "whole world is your level" model. It's not incompatible with the "this section is set to whatever level you are when you enter it, and does not level after that" world model that I thought Fallout 3 used, but it would probably still work a lot better if the world just had shit in it and wasn't trying to rubberband you.
