Fun Stuff > CLIKC

Alpha Protocol photo depository thread

<< < (36/45) > >>

KvP:
As I said, Bethsoft has more or less abandoned stat-based gameplay since Oblivion. The only example of your stats actually mattering were a handful of skill contexts (hacking / lockpick / persuasion) in Fallout 3. I don't think it's doomsaying to say that stat-based gameplay is going the way of the dinosaurs. Without turn-based time progression it doesn't have a home, and turn-based time progression is most definitely dead in mainstream RPGs. Actually having stats impact core gameplay in a real-time context, as they did in Alpha Protocol, makes people unhappy. So there are two options. Either you phase out stats more or less completely and replace them with choice of activated abilities and such, as Bioware has with ME2, or you make them meaningless, as Bethsoft has. I fully expect lots of people to be unhappy with the "unfair" penalties they'll be getting for trying to use things they have no skill with in New Vegas. It's going to happen.

As for DA, my sense was that it was Bioware's throwback to earlier times. I don't expect its systems to stay the same over time and they're not going to make them more complex.

Alex C:
To me, it's less about turn based and more about scope and strategy in general. As a rule, FPS games favor immersion, intimacy and immediacy over being able to practically consider the stats of all the units involved or even handle multiple characters in the first place. Further, since you typically control a primary character that character MUST be capable of progressing through the game on their own merits without being too frustrating. As I pointed out when discussing the original X-COM, it's OK if a slow poke rookie gets turned into chunky salsa by the alien menace as you try navigating a blind corner because well, you have more rookies. It feels like a kick to the teeth, but there's an entire management apparatus in place and meaningful decisions to be made that lead directly to how many you have and how well-equipped they are. While jokes about strategy games and re-loads are common, such things are often more about maintaining your pristine score or having a "completist" inventory/civ/whatever at the end of the game. Likewise in MMOs (or hell, even Team Fuckin' Fortress) you can have many people working together to mitigate the weaknesses of any one individual-- If you die, you get scrape yourself back up, grab some friends and go at it again. In a solo FPS-RPG hybrid, however, shit like Brayko is just going to plain piss people off if they went the "wrong" build, full stop, because your protagonist is pretty much your only true weapon. So characters end up being capable of trying everything, more or less, and if you can read the tea leaves and predict what the game is going to require from you, it's usually quite easy to just grab an uber build and slouch your way through the rest of the game. I don't know about the rest of you, but it's hard for me to feel any tension once everything just starts bouncing off my power armor, a phenomenon that kinda defeats the purpose of going first person and strongly identifying with a single character in the first place.

Personally, I think stat based gameplay will survive, but I expect it to exist mostly in the form of RTS derived games like League of Legends and DotA AllStars. Such games are committed to implementing stats in a meaningful way, an impulse that I think is mostly just plain misguided in solo FPS games. Bleh, sometimes I wish I was in the industry 'cuz I've been thinking about this kinda shit entirely too much for the better part of two decades now.

Johnny C:
ok the game's a lot better on the second playthrough. i think it's not even so much the gunplay that's broken as the stealth is broken and the gunplay is tied into the stealth in a real profound way and maybe that's why everything feels so off. the stealth is basically divided into two sections which are Are You Standing And Moving and Are You In An AI Character's Hard-To-Discern Field Of Vision and the cover is fairly lamentable so the gunplay is only as bad as it is by virtue of you needing it way more than you should.

but at the same time, the second time through you've probably got know-how for the mechanics and you've figured out workarounds and therefore even sneaking and shooting in the early levels is fun (see: parker's secret op in the beginning, in which i accidentally killed a marine with only my fists, which i only discovered because i read that i somehow created an orphan during the greybox intro mission)

Johnny C:
so i'm now disappointed that there won't be a sequel where they could learn from their mistakes but with any luck we'll see traces of AP in future original IPs from obsidian, especially in terms of lessons learned

Ozymandias:

--- Quote from: Johnny C on 10 Jul 2010, 01:06 ---but at the same time, the second time through you've probably got know-how for the mechanics and you've figured out workarounds and therefore even sneaking and shooting in the early levels is fun

--- End quote ---

See this, I think, is the inherent problem of the entire genre, which Alex already well stated: you can't derive full enjoyment until subsequent playthroughs. Your first playthrough of any such game, be it Fallout, Deus Ex, or Alpha Protocol, is going to be a mess because everything you do is guesswork which, in theory, should be fun and exciting, but in practice is just frustrating. With subsequent playthroughs, you understand the game and can therefore play with it, trying to squeeze out every possible avenue and bit of emergent narrative you can think of- which is neat but it's not hard to see why that can never make it in mainstream sales.

Which, I guess, "hurf durf modern gamers want fun handed to them on a silver platter" or something but I mean...I like fun? If I die in a game I want it to be because I failed as a player, not because of a random die roll or failure to anticipate the game's mechanics.

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page

[*] Previous page