Alternate Light Gem

[sxotty]

Yes, I see it very differently.

There's no point using words like 'dictating' and 'forcing' the player to do such and such.

You are 'forced' to move your bishops diagonally in chess, its 'dictated' by the 'rules', but that doesn't mean chess was invented by fascists and mind-controlling bigots..

The real world as plenty of hard rules as well, and I don't see why you want to single computer games out as areas devoid of rules.

If by rules you mean laws of nature such as gravity, well those type of rules in games are good and provide a believable universe for 3d games to unfold in. If by rules you mean speed limits, well people play racing games so they do not have to obey such things. People play thief and are breaking rules of real life. There is nothing wrong at all with a punishment for breaking a rule, but the punishment needs to make sense given the rule in question. So having the player suddenly burn to death for jumping onto a ledge that you did not intend breaks immersion unless there is some explanation such as it is magically protected. And if that is the case the player should have a way to remove that protection.

 

Chess and other board games are not representations of reality in the same way that a 3d game is. There must be rules so that the players can have a game together. If not you have a board and some pieces to juggle I suppose. Those two players could define their own rules however as long as they agree. It will no longer be chess, but it will still be a game. It is between them to agree upon it. That is why it is a game. I do not see that there is some sort of obligation for a player to agree to play a singleplayer game any given way upon purchasing it. However most of the time it is simply more enjoyable to play a game the way it was intended because "cheating" removes the challenge and makes it pointless.

 

We are a long way away from being able to make total immersion computer games where you can just let a player lose in a virtual world and expect them to have fun for any length of time, and even then you're going to need more or less abstracted systems to portray things such as health and death.

 

I want to see health and death of avatars become a major thing in games, becasue currently it's nothing but the most minor of inconveniences.

The closest we've been to that is perma-death on some MMO game servers - i.e. if your character dies, even if it's taken you a year to build him up, he's dead for good, no resurrection.

In MMO death is IMO even more of a big issue. People waste a ridiculous amount of time investing in the game and then lose their character. It is not surprising they leave the game for another. That doesn't mean it is right, or wrong. I am not suggesting death should not be a big deal, but when people pay to pretend to be a big shot they probably get upset to see themselves lose just like in real life. People already commit suicide over this rubbish.

 

Sure it ruins the balance to have in the example too many Jedi running about, ruins the atmosphere, but that is also a sign the developers were not creative enough. Let me give you an idea I have and think they should utilize.

 

Allow people to play your MMO for free and download it as well. In a fantasy setting these people will be serf's. In a sci fi they are the lower class. They have some ridiculously small chance of being promoted, but for almost all of them they will live their avatar as a low born, and die the same way. This would provide the lower fodder for those that pay to make the world seem balanced and realistic while still rewarding those who are willing to pay. Sure there is the issue of bandwidth and such, but I think that the worlds created in this fashion would be far more realistic and avoid the being skewed toward an over abundance of hyper beings who make the whole thing ridiculous.

 

I could be wrong I don't play MMO and won't b/c the time and money involved seem a waste to me. I am just saying there are alternatives to provide some balance and still cater to the customers. If you don't want to cater to a customer fine, but then you are an artist I suppose. Although even most artists cater to customers. When they ask for a horse you don't give them an Indy Car because you felt like it.

[Nyarlathotep]

Half-right, and utterly wrong.

 

It is true that what most people define as "beauty" tends to be fairly consistent -- facial symmetry, proportions approaching the "golden ratio", etc. However the word "beauty" can apply to more things than just the proportions of the face and body, and may include other things such as attitude, personality or intelligence which are most certainly NOT objective with regards to other people's preferences. I won't even look at some overpainted flouncing tart who walks down the street like some kind of princess, even though that same person's face might rate highly on the "beauty" scale.

 

Objective fun on the other hand is absolute nonsense. I know many people whose idea of "fun" is to go to noisy clubs and get drunk with loads of other people, but to others like me that is more akin to torture.

It's getting to the point where I can't even be a smartass anymore. What the hell happened to irony?

 

Most people seem to forget what beauty actually means. Subjectiveness only enters into beauty when it is applied to things that are outside of the quantifiable measures of beauty (it sickens me that I even have to state this tautology). Humans have always had a bad habit of applying concepts to things outside of their actual meaning, and beauty is no different. Bleach blonde and high heels are not a measure of beauty, nor is mathematical beauty related to actual beauty.

 

Sure it ruins the balance to have in the example too many Jedi running about, ruins the atmosphere, but that is also a sign the developers were not creative enough. Let me give you an idea I have and think they should utilize.

No, it's just that the developers compromised themselves. Some of the changes they made to make being and becoming a Jedi easier were necessary, such as making it actually possible to learn how to unlock a Jedi (rather than have it happening by sheer luck) or making it a little easier to hide (rather than literally having a target painted on you in the minimap). Doing this actually helped to balance the game, but they later compromised their vision by pandering to people who couldn't stand to take the effort and risk involved in being a Jedi. People who refuse to take a risk to garner their rewards should never be pandered to, particularly when their given the safer alternative.

 

Allow people to play your MMO for free and download it as well. In a fantasy setting these people will be serf's. In a sci fi they are the lower class. They have some ridiculously small chance of being promoted, but for almost all of them they will live their avatar as a low born, and die the same way. This would provide the lower fodder for those that pay to make the world seem balanced and realistic while still rewarding those who are willing to pay. Sure there is the issue of bandwidth and such, but I think that the worlds created in this fashion would be far more realistic and avoid the being skewed toward an over abundance of hyper beings who make the whole thing ridiculous.

No. Money should never be the measure of one's worth--not even in a game.

[sxotty]

No. Money should never be the measure of one's worth--not even in a game.

 

 

Why not? If you don't have money you don't even exist in the games. Playing for free seems fine to me I think people would do it. Think of the serfs revolting and destroying a few high level players etc... it would certainly be interesting to have cannon fodder that had real thought instead of pathetic AI.

[OrbWeaver]

Most people seem to forget what beauty actually means. Subjectiveness only enters into beauty when it is applied to things that are outside of the quantifiable measures of beauty (it sickens me that I even have to state this tautology).

 

What "quantifiable measures"? Nothing in that Wiktionary link indicates the existence of such, unless you mean that the measure of beauty is purely statistical (i.e. something is more beautiful if a greater number of people find it pleasing).

[Gildoran]

Rapist have to have someone to rape. Another individual is being harmed. Who is harmed when someone cheats in a singleplayer game? Is hopping onto a ledge cheating? How do you know the map maker intended you have access? What if the AI cannot deal with it? Ever watched Q2DQ? Was that cheating? That is still only your opinion unfortunately. There is no possible way to play a game as you suggest unless you email the developer and ask them what they intended. Worthless scum is not usually a title applied to persons that did nothing wrong, yet what wrong is there in cheating in a singleplayer game to begin with? Is it wrong or right?

There is nothing wrong with cheating in a single-player game. But that doesn't change the fact that unlimited saves are cheating. Players should be able to access unlimited saves, but only through using a cheat cvar.

 

Allow people to play your MMO for free and download it as well. In a fantasy setting these people will be serf's. In a sci fi they are the lower class. They have some ridiculously small chance of being promoted, but for almost all of them they will live their avatar as a low born, and die the same way. This would provide the lower fodder for those that pay to make the world seem balanced and realistic while still rewarding those who are willing to pay. Sure there is the issue of bandwidth and such, but I think that the worlds created in this fashion would be far more realistic and avoid the being skewed toward an over abundance of hyper beings who make the whole thing ridiculous.

I can't remember where, but I've already seen entire articles suggesting this approach in MMO design forums. Except, they went even further, suggesting a whole pyramid of different levels: For free, players get a basic MMO hack'n'slash game with collecting items, slaying dragons, going on quests, maybe basic crafting, etc. If they purchase a subscription, they also get to buy and sell tracts of land, construct buildings, craft and sell advanced items, etc. If they purchase a premium subscription, they get to be royalty, and tax the land-owners in their kingdom, or recruit armies, etc.

 

The general idea, was that since a player who wants to be king depends on a large range of other players to be their subjects, they should effectively subsidize the other players' subscriptions as RL payment for them pretending to be mere adventurers/peons. Even an inn-keeper or a blacksmith needs other players to pretend to be clients, so even they should subsidize adventurers' subscriptions to some extent.

[OrbWeaver]

But that doesn't change the fact that unlimited saves are cheating. Players should be able to access unlimited saves, but only through using a cheat cvar.

 

That's not a "fact", it's a matter of opinion. It is not one I personally agree with, although I can see why people might want such behaviour and would have no problem with such a feature being available as an option.

[oDDity]

That's fucking ridiculous. A game where the player decides arbitrarily which rules he is or isn't going to follow?

So your big idea to get rid of cheating is to have no rules to break?

[OrbWeaver]

Was that a response to me, or somebody else? I am not sure which point you are referring to.

[Gildoran]

That's not a "fact", it's a matter of opinion. It is not one I personally agree with, although I can see why people might want such behaviour and would have no problem with such a feature being available as an option.

I'll admit that for some games (such as inventory-puzzle ones), unlimited saves are not cheating. But I strongly hold that saving is not a "meta-gameplay" mechanic, and I refuse to even listen to arguments otherwise until somebody shows me a game of Tetris (with highscores) that allows quicksaving. (it doesn't count if you code it yourself )

 

I think the game creator (or in the case of TDM, map author) should decide what is or isn't officially considered "cheating". The player should be able to play in any way they want, but if they want rules outside of the range of what the game creator specified as acceptable, they should have to turn on some cheat cvars or modify the assets/code.

[ZylonBane]

There is nothing wrong with cheating in a single-player game. But that doesn't change the fact that unlimited saves are cheating.

Christ, not this fanatic douchebaggery again...

[Nyarlathotep]

Why the fuck can't people just accept that saving without any particular restriction is a meta-gameplay mechanic?

 

What "quantifiable measures"? Nothing in that Wiktionary link indicates the existence of such, unless you mean that the measure of beauty is purely statistical (i.e. something is more beautiful if a greater number of people find it pleasing).

Wow. Thank you. Please do miss my entire fucking point. I wasn't linking in a dictionary reference to support a fucking tautology--that would be stupid and a waste of time. This time, try reading it without the tautological crap:

 

It's getting to the point where I can't even be a smartass anymore. What the hell happened to irony?

 

Most people seem to forget what beauty actually means. [...] Humans have always had a bad habit of applying concepts to things outside of their actual meaning, and beauty is no different. Bleach blonde and high heels are not a measure of beauty, nor is mathematical beauty related to actual beauty.

Gee, I couldn't possibly be pointing out a massive, rampant fallacy of equivocation here, could I? Thus far I have not actually stated anything about what any of these measures of beauty actually are. It's useless to do so without getting people's heads out of crap notions of beauty and actually focusing on the original meaning. It's impossible to pin down objective quantifications of something that could mean anything at all.

[Gildoran]

Why the fuck can't people just accept that saving without any particular restriction is a meta-gameplay mechanic?

To use the example above, the reason you never see a version of Tetris with quicksaving (despite the myriad of variations of it), is because quicksaving would ruin Tetris's core gameplay; that save-methods would have such a huge impact on Tetris's gameplay shows that saving is not a meta-gameplay mechanic.

[Springheel]

Can't something be a meta-game mechanic without being applicable to every conceivable type of game?

[Gildoran]

I'm saying that much like how unrestricted quicksaving ruins Tetris, it ruins TDM, since Thief-like games depend on risk-analysis and backup plans, but unrestricted saving bypasses those.

[Nyarlathotep]

How does it do that, exactly, without concerted effort by the player to break the gameplay of the map--something, I might add, is just as easily done (and just as consciously) by enabling cheats?

 

Risk-aversion and planning are only useful gameplay mechanics when the world is guaranteed to behave intuitively. Most of the time, I only save (including quick-saving) in three situations: one, when the mapper has forced me into an obscenely hard and often immersion-breaking situation (such as several of Into the Bonehoard's jumping puzzles); two, when I can't tell whether or not something is wise move to do because the mapper has given me no sort of contextual clue (e.g., I couldn't tell if the buttons scattered about Dram's mansion map were light switches or alarms without first pushing the button); or three, I am unsure whether or not I will be able to achieve something that the mapper has required of me (and I cannot determine that a fall-back plan is actually even possible). Risk-aversion is not a viable strategy when mistakes are harshly punished. I for one, would never play a map twice if a single, slight mistake just before the end meant I had to replay the entire map--especially the 2+ hour, hard-as-nails map that seems solely beatable by knowing the ins and outs of every exploit and the entire map by heart, down to the precise timing of every AI.

 

You seem to think that we, as developers, cannot trust players not to cheat. The problem is that, as both developers and players, we simply can't trust the mapper to play fair. Believe me, the lesser of evils is to let the player cheat if they want to--it's not like it's actually feasible to stop them (they can always find exploits).

 

Can't something be a meta-game mechanic without being applicable to every conceivable type of game?

Apparently not.

[ZylonBane]

To use the example above, the reason you never see a version of Tetris with quicksaving (despite the myriad of variations of it), is because quicksaving would ruin Tetris's core gameplay

No, moonbat, the reason you don't see quicksaving in Tetris is because it's a trivial little arcade game where each game rarely lasts for more than a few minutes. There's no quicksave because nobody wants or needs it.

 

Save-anywhere is a TOOL, which is up to individual players to use responsibly, or not. Banning save-anywhere would make exactly as much sense as banning, say, knives. Sure you can hurt people with them, but they have far too many legitimate uses to do without.

[sparhawk]

To use the example above, the reason you never see a version of Tetris with quicksaving (despite the myriad of variations of it), is because quicksaving would ruin Tetris's core gameplay; that save-methods would have such a huge impact on Tetris's gameplay shows that saving is not a meta-gameplay mechanic.

 

Which is not really a good argument, because obviously it depends on the game itself, wether this might be true or not. You can't expect to play a 40+ hour game to played in a single session, so a saving option is a must. Especially when you consider that this time might only be the optimum play time, which a first time player certainly will not reach. Tetris on the other hand, is simple enough that you only loose a single game, but even there are often enough saving of the highscores. Which means that the saving is limited to that part of the game which need reasonable to be persistent. In case of Tetris this is only true for the highscore. In case of Thief, or most other games, it's different. Tetris is a casual game, that you can play quickly in the midday break. That's certainly not the case for more complex games. So you are comapring apple and oranges here.

[oDDity]

He's not. An average Thief mission is only 2 hours anyway, and if you have 4 saves in it then that breaks it into 30 minute chunks.

Anyone who can't devote at least half an hour to a game like Thief, the whole point of which is the immersive atmosphere and tension, shouldn't even bother playing it.

[sparhawk]

Seems we had this argument already several times, so I just refere you back to the answers that were given back then.

[oDDity]

And they're still wrong. I think you tried to say that some people play Thief in 10 minute chunks or something, and it's patently obvious, that while you can play a game like tetris for 10 minutes and enjoy it just the same as playing it for an hour, you cannot do that with a game like Thief. Thief is not a snack game.

[Saith]

Too many FMs with marble flooring, not enough moss arrows, not enough flashbombs.

I think that authors should make the effort to design an FM as though it doesn't need to be saved.

 

Thief is a snack game. I think it's patently pretentious to say otherwise. Off the top of my head, the only true non-snack game I can think up is Eve Online (which you might enjoy, oDDity. Maybe not totally up to spec, but dying can set you back a couple of real months). I love the idea of a map where saving was actually not allowed, though. How many ghosters QS/QL on average, anyway? But to ban quick-saves/quick-loads? That'd just piss people off. It's a feature that doesn't, y'know, have to be used, but usually is anyway.

Edited April 26, 2007 by Saith

[oDDity]

Depends how you define snack I suppose. I rarely have a snack that lasts 2 hours.

[Crispy]

Most people seem to forget what beauty actually means.

Go on, enlighten us then.

 

Go on.

 

No, really. I mean it. Any century now will do just fine.

 

If you're going to make a point, make it already, don't pussyfoot around it and insult the intelligence of everyone who can't read your mind by pretending that your meaning is obvious.

[SneaksieDave]

I was playing Thieves' Highway (what's turning out to be a hell of a fun map by Uncadonego) last night for a bit, and more time was spent reloading than playing. There's one spot where, crossing from one roof to another, I needed to lob a rope arrow into an overhang and then make a far leap onto a narrow edge. I reloaded there probably 15 times. Twice the arrow needed to be further out. A few times I needed to be higher on the rope. A handful of times, the player just slid right off the narrow ledge, even though I made the jump well. And a time or two, it didn't seem to jump at all and instead I fell, far short. If I wasn't allowed to save at that spot (only about 20 mins in), and had to replay from the beginning 15 times, just to pass this unimportant hurdle, because of poor game mechanics, some questionable design (the ledge should definitely be more forgiving), and player error, you can forget it - the game wouldn't even be on my drive.

 

Another room, I had to get into the rafters to get into a secret area. I was trying to mantle into the rafters for probably 10 minutes (this really reminded me how simply awful Thief's mantling is... nice that we've actually outdone them on that, by a long shot ). It simply wasn't catching. I had to KO the AI (just civilians) just to get them to shutup and stop crying out, because it was a bother. Then I could resume trying to mantle. Eventually, probably after 50 tries, it just caught, and up I went. Ridiculous.

 

Perhaps limited saves would be more appropriate in a 'perfectly designed computer game', but they don't exist, and never will. Even ignoring that technical hurdle, the majority probably wouldn't play it anyway, simply out of preference to be able to save when they choose (or a number of other reasons).

[oDDity]

That's a problem of a badly designed map. I don't remember any such problems of having to do something 50 times in any of the OMs, or even the FMs I've played.

You can't hold up an example of a very badly designed map combined with bad game mechanics in an old game engine as an argument for having unlimited saves.

It'd be up to you to design a map better than that if you actually expect people to play and finish it.

Plenty of games have had limited saves already ,and none of them were perfectly designed.