Random Video Game Crap
- Thread starter Frank
- Start date
And here I thought that was only a feature if you used the Flash version. Nope. Works in html player, too, just responds much more slowly.
--Patrick
figmentPez
Staff member
More from the psychopath, who is complaining that combat is too easy, and has been told to turn up the difficulty...
"Yeah, that's true but feels fake to me. I usually play all games on the default, normal setting that they start with. I never modify difficulty settings because it feels kind of like purposely handicapping yourself....like I am fighting an enemy and decide, "Hey, I think I'll just cut off one of my arms because they are too easy...."
Ironic that he's talking about a game where you literally get to use your own severed arm as a weapon.
"gamers" like this make me *facepalm*
Well, there's Mass Ef-oh they killed it.
Yeah, Pirate101 has never lived up to the success of its big brother Wizard101.
Wiz101 is actually decent, even for adults. But it's Fantasy-based ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
--Patrick
I want a god damned modern day RPG without any magical elements. There's potential there... it would essentially be Fallout without the wacky sci-fi shit and set during a period where civilization is still in order.
Think of it: you could do a crime angle, with your team of investigators, informants, and victims working together to unveil a criminal conspiracy. Fights could be X-COM style, turn-based with cover being a huge part of combat or even Fallout 4 style, with something like VATS. Multiple approaches could lead to different evidence; folks good at crime scene investigation might find physical evidence, while your detectives with good people skills might be able to get crucial info from a witness.
There's potential here.
It'd definitely have to be X-COM-style (probably much harder) when it comes to HP and recuperation times. Healthpacks/medic-magic break my immersion like whoa. Breaking those expectations is one of my favorite things when running present time-ish tabletop RPGs.
It's why I liked Alpha Protocol so much. Despite it's roughness, there's so much to love there.
I would probably do it like Divinity 2: Original Sin and make your HP and Armor separate meters, where you CAN soak shots but it shreds your vest and you need to worry about the kind of heat the other guy is packing. I have no problem with going "Blood Opera" in style when it comes to things like damage, where folks can take hits way better than they could in real life but only because it keeps the action going. Maybe have things like pain killers and adrenaline give you temporary health that ticks down but doesn't recover actual health: only getting to a doctor would do that.
I'm fond of the armor model in Unisystem. Location-based, soaks variable damage (lessened vs wrong type--e.g. bullets vs a stab-vest), has an optional durability system.
Instead of adding temporary health, just have a gradient system for how well the character is performing. No amount of painkillers will fix a mangled hand (and thus get the character above, say, dark yellow), but it could remove the penalties to all actions not related to the hand due to "OW OUCH MOTHER".
Thinking about it, my favorite videogame in terms of handling character health/injury is Neo Scavenger. It's geared towards survival and single-character, so I cannot picture scaling it up to a squad game set in a non-shithole, but it's a direction.
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Sometimes those are necessary to keep a game from grinding to a halt. "Well, after that last fight, everyone's going to be out of action for at least six weeks, and I don't have enough resources to equip a new team, so guess I just do nothing for a while."
GasBandit
Staff member
Heh, yeah, sorry about all those abductions, China, but all my soldiers have boo boos.
"Whaddaya mean, 'Injured, out for 9 days?' I used a medikit on him and it brought him back to full health!"
Sometimes. What you described sounds like someone choosing to add "hardcore" health management to a team management game and then not accounting for it in a holistic manner--what you described is a very predictable design issue (what happens if the player screws up their roster/resources/flow due to feature #23 and can't unfuck it?) that should have a variety of in-game solutions (be it speed up time, rookie rosters, loan from above, the commander is dead long live the commander, easier missions to recoup, difficulty levels that explain this being a possibility, etc).
That's what killed the Dead Reign campaign I was trying to run. Palladium doesn't have a lot of rapid healing aside from magic and bio-regeneration in their system, and Dead Reign doesn't have those. So by the end of the first week, 1 party member was in a coma with a low chance of survival if he got to a hospital, 1 had been killed, reanimated as a zombie, and dispatched by the party, and 2 had numerous broken limbs and severe enough injuries to require 8 to 12 weeks to recover.
Even with doing a time skip until later, it kind of soured us on continuing.
Even with doing a time skip until later, it kind of soured us on continuing.
This is sort of why I went with "gives temporary health" as an idea. "I don't think you could have walked in here with that fractured rib if you weren't on all these drugs, but you're going to be out of it for a good bit if you want it to heal right." Healing times wouldn't be realistic... they'd be movie "You shouldn't be walking right now but you got a job to do" levels, complete with casts/bandages that affect what you can do/use in the meantime.
Maybe each party member has a special effect they give you when their on the bench to help mitigate some of this. Perhaps your cop buddy can delay/accelerate police response, while your gang informant can convince some of the boys to take off to the other side of town for the night. That sort of thing.
Guess it's not for everyone. I try to make my table engaging enough that players don't mind the reduction in agency that comes with injury or death. I also make it crystal clear that if you can't empathize with your character and correctly gauge situational risk, they will probably end up dead or maimed.
Yesterday's session of 5-minutes-into-the-future-cyberpunk (AfterCLAIRE) consisted of the players carrying their teammate out of the area they were in (funny thing, turns out you can pretty much waste a child by shooting them once in the torso with a 9 mil), getting to a safe zone, securing a doctor, and getting looked after. The payoff (table-tension-wise) was getting to their safe area and eating a bowl of fish stew. By all accounts it was a blast. If it wasn't because they're running out of a McGuffin drug, the party would be more than happy to spend a session or more on working out an extended downtime.
Backup characters are also useful. I like how DCCRPG handles those. Doesn't work so well in story-heavy games, but instead I try to rotate a lot of 1-paragraph NPCs near the players, so that their interactions give rise to both plot hooks and organic backup PCs.[DOUBLEPOST=1517508158,1517508059][/DOUBLEPOST]
Oooh, I like that, passive abilities when in an "operator" slot. Could assign some XP to it, so benched characters don't fall too far behind the curve.
Square Enix sort of has the same philosophy with game pricing that Nintendo does, in that they believe their brand is valuable enough to surcharge for it and really, REALLY don't like discounting games in the series on the belief that it damages the franchise.
Even a remaster doesn't deserve that. Considering the original assets were relatively high resolution as seen by people who emulated the PS2 version. It's a "remaster".
...unless you’re talking about finding an unopened copy at Wal-Mart.
I hear you can still buy 4GB flash drives for $29.97 there, too.
—Patrick
GasBandit
Staff member
Well, there's gotta be SOMETHING to it, the mother fucker is 30 gigs. Jibbers Crabst.
figmentPez
Staff member
But is it pulling a Marvel Ultimate Alliance where there's actually less content than the original version, redesigned menus that are less functional, and was released with game breaking bugs?
Nah, it's that Zodiac International version that was never released here and some uprezzed, uncompressed textures.