At0mic

<nevermind - ranting> Let's just say that I feel FTL is not as much fun anymore after all the new stuff the advanced edition put it. It's too much to master, and if I'm going to have to master so many details I'd rather use the brain power to do better with actually important things in life.

Well, if you follow modern mainstream gaming trends it would seem that for the majority of cases (Dark Souls excluded) it's more about the "experience" rather than the challenge. People want to be immersed in some sort of world and feel like a badass, and you can't be a badass if you die too easily. That, and making games more accessible for a larger crowd. The difficulty level of FTL is also not particularly linear. Most games will gradually ramp up the difficulty level because you'll learn the mechanics and have better strategies and tools for dealing with obstacles. FTL and most other rogue-likes just goes all over the place because rarely is anything actually planned in terms of enemy progression. Sometimes you just get a shit roll of the dice, and no-one enjoys losing due to randomness. With something like The Dark Mod, it's challenging but things follow well-understood mechanics that can be learnt and adapted too. Rarely is anything totally random that you end up hating the game for it. Simply put - losing because you made a bad decision is fine. Losing because the game's random decision making basically forced you into an impossible situation is not fine. I know it's the style of rogue-likes but I'm having a hard time getting used to it.

Dying, yes. It's what I play games for. To feel pain. Despite that I still keep playing though. There's something about FTL that keep me coming back. Perhaps I'm a masochist?

Type C layouts are unlocked by completing the game on the Type B of a particular ship. Which means you need to have unlocked Type B first before you have the opportunity to get Type C. Fortunately the game now indicates in the ships list which ships have completed the game on their specific layouts. I will also never, EVER play on the Hard skill level. FTL is hard enough on Easy and masochistic on Normal. Why would I pay money for a game that just stresses me out by playing on Hard? Feeling like you're a shit gamer after playing FTL is not a nice experience, and Hard will just make it worse. Also, a lesson in trying for achievements. I tried FTL again yesterday with a wiped profile because I wanted the joy of starting from scratch Was going really well in the Kestrel and I wanted to get that ship achievement where you repair fully after hitting 1 HP on your hull. I got into a combat situation near a shop so I dropped my shields so the enemy lasers could whittle down my hull, and had a defense drone to deal with missles. Got to 2 HP... and then an enemy missle managed to bypass my defense drone. Boom. This was one of those cases where I felt like I deserved that death for doing something so risky, but at the same time, in most other games I'd have quickloaded after the incident. Risk-taking isn't rewarded in FTL.

Not just Steam owners - everyone gets the FTL: Advanced edition regardless of where they bought it (Steam, GOG, Humble Store). FTL is such a love/hate game for me. It's the type of game which is really aggravating when you die, because it's difficult to know whether it was an "unfair" death due to the random number generator that determines everything deciding to ruin your game, or whether it's because you yourself made the wrong decisions and hadn't prepared to be flexible enough to handle whatever could be thrown at you. I don't mind a death if it was simply because I made a shit decision that got my ship and crew horribly murdered, but if I get boarded with 4 mantis, my medibay is knocked out and half the ship is on fire due to a single encounter, it's enough to make you go AAGGGGG!! and rage quit. But if you win, it's ohhh soooo satisfying. FTL is weird like that.

Woah, that's impressive, particularly the perfect (at least to my untrained eyes) matching of a 3D object into footage. Of course what one would have to have learnt to even get that far kinda scares me...

Zenimax are indeed scum, however gamers as a whole aren't one to punish companies by boycotting their games. If they did, EA would be long, long out of business. As for the game itself, I shall withhold judgement until someone like TotalBiscuit and/or NerdCubed can give it a go.

Interesting responses. Confession time - despite being a fan of TDM, unlike a lot of folks here I'm not a Thief veteran. I've played the demo of the second Thief game, played a bit of the full version of Thief 3 and nothing else. When it comes to stealthy games my favs have been things like the Deus Ex series and more recently Dishonored. In those games stealth is important, but you're normally well armed and capable enough to deal with the AI if they do encounter you, whereas in TDM a single AI encounter might be utterly lethal if you can't dispatch them quickly enough. Also, most other games involving stealth are a lot more forgiving in terms of the AI detecting you than TDM is. Given these experiences, most such games just encourage you to deal with an enemy and move on. I appreciate the fact that the idea of Thief and TDM is that if you're suppose to be such a great thief, a great thief should be completely invisible and no-one should have even known they were around, which means (among other things) zero knockouts. I haven't really played any games which push this idea apart from TDM so I'm not used to it, hence don't particularly like forced avoidance of AI unless I can physically take them out, even unconsciously. So there - I have to harden up apparently.

I generally play most fan missions on the difficult/hard skill level. On this level the missions are normally challenging but not insurmountable; they generally have high loot requirements which force the player to explore and have a keen eye (which is something I enjoy) and don't allow killing but generally allow knockouts (which is a decent challenge). What I don't like however is when some missions (Lockdown for example) have it so that you can't even blackjack on the medium skill level - you have to play on easy which feels too noobish I suppose (or to my ego anyway), but worse than that, the easy skill level might be missing a lot of objectives you only get on the harder skill levels, which I'd enjoy doing if I didn't have to deal with bloody no-knockout requirements! I don't know about other people, but I prefer to knock people out, dump them in a corner and examine under every rock if I can for interesting things to find/loot. Clearing out an area is the only way I know of how to safely spend time examining a room for lootable paintings (which are impossible to tell from non-lootable paintings from a distance as far as I can tell), or more importantly the occasional hidden readable which I know FM authors love to stick in interesting places. And let's not forget trap doors and hidden buttons. But you only get the the opportunity to search for such cool hidden stuff if people aren't observing you or prone to doing so, hence you conk them out and dump them in a pile 10 bodies high. Not being able to do that really reduces the enjoyment factor for me considerably and I don't like the idea of playing on easy just because I don't like this "pure ghosting" aspect. So, why do people who like non-knockout objectives enjoy them? Do I just need to develop more patience or am I missing something?

I've only played the main Bioshock Infinite campaign. Definitely very pretty (color, what a concept!) but the gunplay was awful. They weapons just didn't feel particularly special and the enemies were simply bullet sponges without any particularly interesting AI. For a game that's strong on narrative but still at its core an FPS, this is not a good thing. I hear EP1 is more of the same but EP2 is less direct combat focused and more stealth focused, which sounds like an improvement. I honestly would have been happier if BI was more of an adventure game and didn't have any shooter elements are all. The FPS element feels like it's there just as an obstacle to get to the next part of the story, as opposed to being a satisfying component in its own right.

I'm definitely on the latest version (2.01) according to the updater. As far as I know I've always had this behaviour, but it's not really that serious or common enough to cause that much grief. This is a fairly clean install too, so I don't think I've corrupted anything, but again it could be related to a download immediately timing out due to my fickle modem and the game not having a provision for dealing with that. I don't have a firewall enabled so it's not that.

I apologise if this has been brought up before but a search failed to show anything, so here I am. I have noticed that occasionally I'll have one of two issues that will, at times, manifest separately with the in-game mission downloader (TDM 2.01, but I recall this happening earlier too): When starting the download, the game will lock up at 0.0% done and needs to be killed at this point (and as it turns out the download never actually starts, so no partial files exist). When finished a download, the game will lock up at 100% done and again needs to be killed, but at this point the mission has been unpacked successfully and so the next time I run the game, it appears in the mission list. These are mostly just an annoyance, but they happen a bit more than rarely so I'm just curious if there's anything I can do. I will say my modem/router is a piece of shit at times and occasionally when just doing regular net browsing, you might click a link to a page and the browser will immediately bomb out with a "page not found" error, but when you reload the page, it will load fine. This might be related to the first issue, but I don't understand how it could affect the second. Anyways, just something I've noticed.

Playing "Home Again", I very sneakily went up and blackjacked Mr. Bier while he was sitting down. For some reason he flipped and landed in a perfect handstand (well, back of the hands anyway):

I have now!

What's the basic hit detection logic for the blackjack? I ask because when it comes to blackjacking someone, it seems like it gets more random the more armor the AI wears. If I run up and hit a dude with the blackjack who's wearing normal clothes (no armor), he drops like a sack of potatoes regardless of whether it was a direct head shot or at the torso. If they're wearing full plate armor and one of those helmets with a slitted faceplate then they're impossible to blackjack, which makes sense and seem to be made specifically to force ghosting in certain missions. It's the guys who have either partial armor (chainmail around the shoulders, or just a metal hat but no extra metal armor) which seem to be a case where I'm not confident of a 100% successful hit. I've done save scumming to test and sometimes it seems like only a frontal or side hit will take someone down, but even then the same repeated hit won't always work from one save to another. Note that I'm making accurate (to me) hits on their head, not torso shots. Is there an element of randomization added to the game logic that determines the success of a hit against an armored AI... or do I just suck and need some pointers?

Can you rocket jump?

This is one of my issues with Steam - you can't sell or transfer games from your Steam library if you have no interest in them anymore (maybe you've played them to death, maybe they're boring or ended up being total crap, whatever). Hence you find yourself tempted to have them all installed at the same time "just in case", bloating out drive space. But I suppose even ignoring the fact Valve would prefer people bought new copies of games rather than "used" from other accounts, there's also some security issue about being able to mess with one's library in such a way, particularly if an account is compromised. Such is life in digital distribution. Also remember of course, as has been mentioned - RAID, no matter which way you have it configured, is NOT a backup. It's redundancy. Should you happen to fuck up the actual files on the array on the system level (accidentally overwrite for example), said fuck-up will be dutifully replicated onto all drives. Always remember to make the occasional backup to something away from your RAID. Heck it was apparently World Backup Day a few days ago - figured it was a good reminder.

Virtual memory is balls-achingly slow. Depending on what they want to do in the engine it might chug like a mofo if it expects to read/write memory pages at a certain speed (physical RAM speed) and instead gets hard drive speed. An SSD would mitigate it somewhat but then you'd just end up thrashing your SSD very hard, very fast, which wouldn't be good. Sure the original games were pretty simple in term of system requirements when we look at them now. They probably weren't too simple compared to the typical PC at the time and I bet in 15 years time, the specs for Reincarnation will look pitiful compared to whatever's around by then. Who knows... we might even get Half-Life 3 by then and people will be willingly upgrading to whatever is necessary to play that.

I'm pretty sure the reason Bloodlines came out on the same day as Half-Life 2 is that Valve didn't want anyone releasing a Source-powered game before Valve did with their own flagship game, so as part of the agreement to license the engine, Troika/Activision had to hold off release until at least when Half-Life 2 was released (which obviously was the same day, even though Bloodlines was finished a while beforehand). Bit of a shame it had to be like that; but that was the licensing agreement (if you believe the story).

Heck, if I knew something about Doom 3 modding, I'd probably want to find a way to integrate specific Doom 3 resources in the mod. Imagine playing The Dark Mod armed with a shotgun, chainsaw, rocket launcher or even the BFG! Probably wouldn't go with the theme of the game and the setting, but it'd be good for a laugh. It'd also make combat horribly one-sided ("Did I see... something? *BOOM*), but again, for short-term amusement I'd be worth it.

Anyway, back on topic:

Valve are alright. They certainly have helped with improving the profile of Linux among game developers so that's good to see, even if you don't use it (competition is always good). I only have two real issues with Steam: 1. I don't like buying software that's vendor-locked, even with Steam's reasonably balanced DRM. I don't expect Valve to disappear anytime soon, but it's very unsettling to me the concept of buying games that require authentication against a third party every time you want to play. It means you're more invested in Valve's ecosystem than you might want to be, and if Valve change their terms in a way that you don't approve, it's even harder to leave since you still need to use Steam (cracks notwithstanding). With GOG on the other hand, you buy the games, download them and can do what you like with them, GOG be damned. It's much more freeing an experience and instills greater confidence that YOU are in control over the software you purchased, not someone else. 2. Moreso to do with Valve, but there's a shitload of Valve/Steam fanboys out there. It makes it very difficult to have a discussion about any deficiencies or issues one might have with Steam or Valve, because no matter how reasonable or sensible or innocent you present your concerns, the fanboys take it very personally and defend Valve to the hilt, and often not in a particularly polite way. It makes me not want to talk about it in the first place and so I don't bother anymore, except for this thread because people here seem a lot nicer than in other places. I still think Valve are overall a positive for the gaming world - I just wish they pushed more publicly for DRM-free games. At least we have options like GOG and the Humble Bundles I suppose; keeps everyone happy.

To be honest, if I screw up such that an enemy spots and comes running to me, I quickload almost immediately. My aim is to complete missions with a reasonable stealth score - direct combat kinda ruins that. For this reason I don't normally get put in a situation where I have to use my sword. Maybe it's not quite as immersive if I'm save scumming, but the game is unforgiving and it makes things less frustrating if you make a single slip-up.

If you're caught, you run the shit outta there! I'd imagine most thieving bastards in real life would do a runner if caught, rather than try to fight and suffer worse consequences.

You have to remember that you're playing a character who's main purpose in life is to not get noticed. This means few opportunities to practice and experience sword fighting. One could imagine a thief learning sword fighting skills on a practice dummy I suppose, but I'd expect a master thief would eschew learning sword fighting skills and instead use the time to work on improving their lock-picking and steal capabilities. So when going into a sword fight against guards who I would imagine are far better trained at using a sword than the player character would be, there's got to be some way to artificially hamper the player's fighting skills, such that it matches what a thief would be expected to know. At the very least it ensures the player is not just cutting down everyone and instead pushes them towards stealth and being sneaking, which is what you want people to do by default in a game like TDM. If you have to resort to sword fighting then you've fucked up and have to deal with the consequences (with the exception of forced combat in missions like The Transaction). A master thief would be disadvantaged against well-trained opponents anyway, hence it fits the player character perfectly. TDM isn't like Dishonored where both combat and stealth are legitimate options. The sword fighting in TDM is deliberately handicapped against the player - it seems like the only way to show this in gameplay is to make combat clunky and tricky.