Oktokolo
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Posts posted by Oktokolo
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On 6/29/2022 at 3:06 PM, AluminumHaste said:
One of the things that was easily exploited in the thief games was alerting a bunch of guards, and have them chase you into a shadow. You could then KO them by blackjacking them in the back of the head.
Maybe that's realistic, but it trivializes the threat of the guards.
I sortof do that pretty much all the time in TDM missions: I jump to make a sound to get a guard to investigate without drawing a weapon and then carefully maneuver around and blackjack the guard at a conveniently dark location.
I never do it with more than one guard at a time though. And i never did it in the original three Thief titles, so can't compare.
But it definitely doesn't feel like trivializing the game. The sound cues need to be dosed right to avoid guards switching into "may i suggest a quickload" mode. And sneaking around still makes some noise, so getting into position isn't that easy either.I like that you can do this in TDM. So i guess, thanks for beefing the AI up a little.
Still not a fan of the "may i suggest a quickload" alert level though (i am in the blackjacking and headshots should work at all alertness levels camp - you still have to be able to get into position and headshots on helmeted guards are quite hard anyways)... -
4 hours ago, snatcher said:
Here is the suggestion: what if zombies keep re-spawning and re-spawning in the quarry? Players realize killing zombies is cool and it gives them some time but ultimately, it is a lost cause that keeps depleting their gear. Wouldn't that make the quarry more challenging for all players?
(Zombies can stop re-spawning as soon as the player reaches an objective).
You mean like it is done in some missions in Call of Duty?
3 hours ago, chakkman said:I simply hate invincible enemies in any game. Well, gas arrows do the trick, but, how many missions actually feature gas arrows?
Most missions containing elite guards also contain one or more gas arrows. But you often have to get the guards to clump up and score a tripple knockout to preserve ammo. Or just lure em into a room and block the door with a box which is blocked by another box. The physics engine only handles direct impulse propagation, so a door can move another object, but that object can't move anything else... It is a cheaty but fun way to deal with leet guards and other (semi-)invincible AI, authors add to enforce ghosting.
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13 hours ago, datiswous said:
In my experience it was. But maybe I have to ckeck in other missions
I definitely onhitted unhelmeted thugs in the past but my bow aim never got really good while my blackjacking did. So i started blackjacking everyone but lone guards lurking on inaccessible parapets featured in some missions.
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1 hour ago, Frank Cotton said:
take that back and apologize to sam
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15 hours ago, Obsttorte said:
Ah, ok then. I don't consider immersion and player choice the same, but I am no native speaker, so maybe that's why I found that label odd. I would probably choose adaptive, as the game adapts to the player choices instead of following a fixed script. But well, it's not that important.
As a Metalhead you don't have to tell me. We love our categories and sub-sub-genres.
The label is pretty odd. The majority gets immersed in railroad telltale games and ultra-accurate racing simulations way more than in mechanics-heavy environment simulations like The Dark Project.
But when it comes to metal, there obviously always is a distinct and well-defined border between the categories. So metal heads like us definitely never have to explain the differences between folk metal and pagan metal...
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10 hours ago, snatcher said:
There are plenty of moments like this in his play-through and I wonder whether the player is (consciously or unconsciously) having an engaging, frustrating or simply an uninteresting experience. Because rules allow for it, the player is applying the best strategy there is, and he is exploiting the mechanic to have it all: an insta-kill, a cool head shoot, and his arrow back. You can notice he is not trying to go through the challenge fast, he's got all the time in the world.
How can this be any fun? No sense of risk or loss, no chance of failure, but a constant trial and error. The problem has nothing to do with the player or his play style but with the mechanic itself: the lack of limits or restrictions to be precise.
Headshots (insta-kills / fatalities / you name it) are extremely satisfying features in any commercial game. But here is the thing: the less control the player has over these features and the more rarely they happen, the more satisfying the experience is when it happens. Hardly the case here, in my opinion.
There are people who like fast-paced action and others who like the calm, planned and methodical approach.
Some like nondeterministic risk/reward mechanics and and others prefer a more deterministic approach (they also don't get a rush when winning at a slot machine and are immune to modern loot box mechanics).
And then there are people who like some mix of it.
He decided to go slow and careful and trained until he scored the hit.Whether Boy Lag truly enjoys playing TDM or just does it for the ad money generated by the 100 views of his 500 subscribers i obviously can't be absolutely sure about. But i am of the opinion, that he is mainly doing it for fun...
He said a really revealing thing regarding broadhead headshots at 17:20: It's the first time in a long time, that i found regular arrows to be of use - beyond, you know, flipping switches.
So he seems to have some experience with helmet-wearing guards...He gave the prime example of how to make players use tools: Just make the tool useful.
If i remember correctly, i came there from the top and rolled down one of the conveniently placed heavy urns first. It didn't do enough damage, so i quickloaded and used a fire arrow because i didn't know about the altered headshot mechanic yet. So my playstyle seems to be similar to his and i enjoyed the mission.
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9 hours ago, Obsttorte said:
I never understood that labeling. Are there any nonimmersive stealth arcade titles available?
Well, there are regular brawlers or shooters which also happen to have have some stealth mechanics. Maps are normally still designed for combat. The stealth mechanics are way less sophisticated than in TDM.
For immersive sim, i just cite Wikipedia: An immersive sim (simulation) is a video game genre that emphasizes player choice. Its core, defining trait is the use of simulated systems that respond to a variety of player actions which, combined with a comparatively broad array of player abilities, allow the game to support varied and creative solutions to problems, as well as emergent gameplay beyond what has been explicitly designed by the developer.
So an immersive stealth sim is a stealth-focused immersive sim.
Obviously, game categories are a bit fuzzy. But TDM is an extreme example of both, the stealth and the immersive sim categories.
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10 hours ago, Obsttorte said:
@OktokoloWhat would be the point then? You have two key to control speed now and you would have two keys to control speed then. The only addition might be to allow players to turn those keys into toggles.
The difference would be the additional speeds between the three currently available speeds - still controlled by only two remappable keys.
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10 hours ago, Obsttorte said:
There is no point in giving the player tons of water arrows if the mission mainly features electric lights.
Yep, that is another one:
Giving the player mines but also having a mandatory no-kill objective.
Having tons of water arrows lying around. But there are electric lights everywhere. Would be awesome if you could find the generator and kill it with a water arrow though...Nothing wrong with having some useless tools lying around. But you are right: Only provide plenty if the player can actually use them.
Missions designed without any opportunity for verticality shouldn't contain rope arrows. Because if they do, players assume verticality and are disappointed when they don't find any...10 hours ago, Obsttorte said:Why do you assume there stim doesn't travel through portals?
Because i had guards ignore noise arrows shot into another room. Could also be a severly limited noise propagation range in general though. Has been a while since i used a noise arrow.
10 hours ago, Obsttorte said:In TDM the fm authors seem to design their mission for one extreme only, and only give players gear because they may need it and to make it simpler for newbies. Therefore they don't really consider their useability regarding the situations provided in their missions or whether a modified tool would be better.
TDM caters to a rather extreme audience - and actually seems to be the only visually (sortof) modern option for that audience for some years now. I would call the genre immersive stealth sim. Combat always is the inferior option and most often not even viable. But you can disable AI stealthily and most missions are ghostable (very important for the extreme part of the already extreme audience - the ghosts).
Players that like this genre reload when a guard draws his sword - even when they actually could just outgun their enemies.
Maps get designed differently when combat isn't considered an option. And immersive stealth sim fans like the result...But yes, map authors should still think about tools and whether they just made water arrows obsolete by making the city have electric lights only. Some immersive stealth sim players still like to lay traps and disable stuff (like torches) with tools.
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On 3/19/2021 at 12:01 AM, datiswous said:
The code blocks look kind of ugly, too bright. Problem is that if I want to darken that, I also have to change all the colors for the syntax highlighting.
Or just add ".ipsCode { filter: invert(1); }" to the style.
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On 6/11/2022 at 2:06 PM, freyk said:
Demo video:
The voices are still in the uncanny valley. But they definitely aren't sounding as monotonic and glitchy as in the ole Microsoft Sam times...
It should be possible to get a sortof good sounding voice when feeding it with some weeks worth of audio books or youtube videos featuring only one speaker and no background noise.
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The UK is as relevant as the Vatican when it comes to my internet consumption.
They just perform another Brexit - this time leaving the world wide web instead of the European Union...-
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Nice idea and i don't think, it would hurt core mod to have it. But i have no mouse wheel, so would like rebindability of the "keys" if it does end up making it in somehow.
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On 6/23/2022 at 6:35 PM, Wellingtoncrab said:
One of my favorite moments in TDM ever was when I head shot a zombie in front of a security camera in HP and the corpse sent the camera into an alarm state pulling 4 more zombies into the area (not even sure if this was intended design for the security camera). I actually hit the reload key out of habit but of course nothing happened. Then I remembered I had picked up a vial of holy water and and I still had a couple of water arrows left. Here were four zombies all clustered right together and this problem became an opportunity. Wouldn't of happened if that reload key worked.
I actually happened to have a similar moment. I was at an elevated position unreachable for the zombies and quicksaved before i heatshot the zombie in front of the cam. As expected, the cam draw the other zombies and made them sitting ducks from my sniper position. Didn't use the holy water - just good ole broadheads to the zombies' heads...
That was before i made a safe restriction disabler mod - so i played on a non-restricted difficulty of course. -
On 6/24/2022 at 5:08 PM, OrbWeaver said:
It's just a fan account run by an individual.
Yep, just someone begging really hard for a cease and desist letter with that logo abuse.
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I am happy with the cheap 32" 16:9 2160p60 VA (Samsung LU32J590UQRXEN), that i got last year.
It has pretty good blackness for a non-OLED. I normally play TDM at 5% brightness and work at 10% to 20% (depends on weather).
Colors look consistently good over the entire screen when sitting 30 cm away from the matte screen.There definitely is ghosting though - so not a good monitor for fast-paced shooters.
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In general, tools tend to get used when they are actually useful and of unlimited use or recoverable. Everyone likes to use rope arrows and the monocular. Everyone who isn't a hardcore ghoster uses either the blackjack or the sword.
But here comes what i think of the other tools:Broadheads are useful for remotely activating things or killing AI that deserves it. So i mostly use them for killing bad guy AI which isn't protected by objective armor. Also waste tons of them when killing spiders as being half-sunken into the ground still is the norm for spiders.
Water arrows are very useful but i still tend to spare them for later and end missions without using them.
Should really start using them more - especially when already carrying twenty of them...Moss arrows are alway in short supply, so i spare them for when i actually need them (which normally is never as i am not a ghoster). Please gimme more so i can start actually using them.
Noise makers are less reliable than crouchjumping or otherwise drawing AI attention to a location. So i rarely use them.
Please make their stim travel through portals to make me using them.Vine arrows are a rare sight and felt pretty unpredictable. I tend to still use them though.
Please give me more of them and make them actually grow a vine from bottom to top.Gas arrows are great. Gassing three AI with one arrow feels like scoring a tripple-headshot with one bullet in a sniper game - Very satisfying.
Please provide more opportunities to score nice multiknockouts while keeping ko-immune guards a rare sight.Fire arrows are the least stealthy weapon in the game. They would fit perfectly for stealthily assassinating heavy monsters and automatons from afar - if they wouldn't glow. I only use them as a last resort when there is no other way to solve the situation.
Please stop them from glowing to make me use them more.Finished most of the TDM missons on hardest without ever figuring out, how to use flash bombs correctly. The throw mechanic is pretty bad. So i never use them.
Please make throwing a reliable mechanic to make me throw things (including flash bombs).Mines are really hard to actually use as a mine. So i use them by throwing them at the feet of my enemies with maximum force which gets them alerted and triggers them to shuffle around a bit until the mine triggers... But they are very unstealthy and therefore get used right before the fire arrows as a last resort only.
Please enlarge their detection radius to make me actually use them as mines.Healing potions are nice. I always use one when i lost more than a third of my fall damage points.
Food is pretty nice too. I eat most of what i find because you sadly can't carry it in your inventory. It also heals tiny amounts of fall damage which is a nice bonus.
Please turn food into normal lootable items.Holy water is one of the pretty useful items i still don't use if i don't have to. You never have plenty of them. They involve an annoying timer mechanic for no apparent reason (instead of just turning N water arrows into holy arrows). Using it on just one undead feels like wasting it. And i always feel like i might need it later (but i actually don't).
Please give me more or axe the timer to make me use it more.Breath potions are also useful. But they don't last that long. So i tend to use them when i didn't forget to select them before diving and oxygen runs out. There also aren't much occasions to use them.
I would use them more if there where more places to use them.
All in all i am of the opinion, that only small improvements are needed to encourage more tool usage. I am a horder. But i still tend to use the non-annoying-to-use tools more when i have plenty of them. So maybe just giving players more and providing some difficulty spikes throughout the map will make players use more... -
On 6/21/2022 at 8:20 AM, Obsttorte said:
Death means defeat. Everything else should be considered challenges to deal with.
The challenge to deal with boils down to: Wait in a dark area AI can't reach (under or on top of furniture is perfect) until cooldown happens. The most often used ways to eliminate the wait are:
- Making fighting a viable option. But at least i play TDM especially for the stealth underdog power fantasy.
- Making the cooldown timer laughably short.I like the way Styx does it: If you get cought, you just die in one or two hits. I learned how to fight and then was able to reliably win fights but it didn't feel good as stealth wasn't required anymore. Didn't try to learn fighting in TDM, but would expect the same to happen here (i saw videos of a dev defending themselves against multiple AI with a sword on hardest settings, so it definitely is possible).
An actually (for me) fun mechanic would also be to just do what real thiefs do when they are cought and leaving the area fails: Surrender and get arrested. and since this is a game, the main objective would then temporarily change to escaping the jail. But this sort of gameplay isn't a mechanic you could just add to the core and be done with it. While it probably could already be pulled off using existing features, it is significant work and has to be done for each map separately.
A still better than now improvement would be to limit alert propagation to a radius from where the event happened. So i could just sneakily flee the area and continue exploring without the whole map being in full alert state (including the lowest citizen) and immune to KO (i am not a ghoster; i love the KO mechanic and excessively use it).
This is implementable in core and wouldn't need any support from map authors to work on the bigger maps (doesn't have to be Iris-sized, but obviously needs to be bigger than a single mansion). -
13 minutes ago, wesp5 said:
So how long does it take? I can't remember ever seeing a guard sheathing his sword again...
It doesn't always happen and when it happens it takes pretty darn long - so it actually is pretty relistic in that regard...
I normally just treat full detection as a fail and pretend it didn't happen (by quickloading). Today there is no way to pull deescallation off in a believable way - in the general case. Authors obviously could add reinforcements and methodical room cleaning to their maps. But no one actually does as deescallation obviously isn't seen as part of the intended gameplay...
I wouldn't even have added player combat at all. Detection means defeat. Fade-to-black and then you either get the mission failed screen or wake up wherever the map author defined (probably the local holding cell) and perform your escape from there. -
5 hours ago, Wellingtoncrab said:
One of the criticisms I often read of TDM, especially in other venues where it is being unfavorably compared to the thief - is that AI acuity balance by default seems a little unfair where a slight misstep can feel like it brings the whole map down on you.
I have the suspicion, that most of the unfair acuity is caused by room-to-room leaks. When you can hear a guard walking by outside the room as if it where inside the room, chances are that the audio system actually assumes it being inside the room. Dmap can't warn you about improper room-to-room sealing - and beta testers are often experienced players, which barely make any noise anyways. I expect there to be tons of these internal sealing bugs in existing missions.
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I really doubt that i would use this feature myself and chases are a pretty rare occurence in my playstyle anyway.
But enabling humanoid AI in general to open unlocked doors whithout pausing could make AI door handling look way less robotic.
Slamming em open would definitely be a bit over the top most of the time though. So the quick open probability and door open/close speed factors should probably be configurable for each alert level on the AI. -
Iris. After that you should abstain from TDM for some weeks, to let your spoiledness level cool down to a reasonable level again before playing the other top-rated missions.
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On 6/18/2022 at 2:40 PM, Obsttorte said:
I made a little test run on a new job using this feature.
Looks like multiloot® finally solves the problem with hard-to-frob coin stacks in the common under-the-counter cash box. Almost every mission has one or more of these. It is a far better solution to the problem than the totally-not-a-crosshair frob helper.
I will definitely use it.Btw I played Prey too - but totally missed the multiloot® feature. Would be nice to mention it in the tutorial and have a descriptive tooltip in the settings as it is quite an unexpected quality of life feature when comming from games which don't have it.
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Most spacious rooms, best ventilation and comfortable beds - had fun robbing this train and would definitely do it again.
I would like to carefully place this here.
in Off-Topic
Posted
That, quite literally, is a dark game. Didn't see nough to decide whether it looks good. It definitely needs sound randomization - multiple clips for each sound to shoose from and could also randomize volume and pitch. Footsteps seem to be pretty loud in general when compared to voice lines.