tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3656428975201272042.post6040050131003202954..comments2024-03-26T04:01:20.919-07:00Comments on Vigaroe: Difficulty, Yoshi's IslandVigaroehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02405424233776571308noreply@blogger.comBlogger10125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3656428975201272042.post-46874599113065756192022-08-23T06:08:00.830-07:002022-08-23T06:08:00.830-07:00Huh. There's an LP of the series I was vaguely...Huh. There's an LP of the series I was vaguely curious about but never checked out because it compares it to James Bond movies and I've never liked those, but I might check it out, at least long enough to see how this works in action. It certainly seems like a potentially solid solution to the issue of hitscan enemies.Ghoul Kinghttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15165232279081041131noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3656428975201272042.post-85862402020097008952022-08-23T00:10:09.397-07:002022-08-23T00:10:09.397-07:00I was just watching some retrospective reviews of ...I was just watching some retrospective reviews of old games, and encountered one for the PS1 game Syphon Filter, a third-person shooter that happens to be one of my favorites from way back then. It had an interesting take on the "how should a player be allowed to react against hitscan enemies" problem: the Danger meter.<br /><br />Here's how that works: if you stand in the open with enemies present, they will start shooting at you, while the Danger meter fills up. You don't actually start taking hits until it's full, at which point it's flashing red; and the meter can be reset by either doing an evasive roll or ducking back into some form of cover (or otherwise breaking line-of-sight with the enemy, quite possible just by running in some levels with the PS1's draw distance limitations). If there are more enemies present, and/or you're facing more "elite" enemies (e.g. elite mooks or bosses), the Danger meter fills up more quickly.<br /><br />SF still used a health/armor system where the Armor got consumed first, and was replenishable, while Health will get consumed once Armor is exhausted (and doesn't refill for the same given set of missions). That said, you can't take a lot of hits; I think Armor can only withstand three basic handgun hits while the Health bar can take just two, and weapons just get stronger from there in terms of DPS. It did give _some_ margin of error for the player to take a hit or two given that the combat system (being a product of its time) is a bit clunky. For the most part, though you were watching your Danger meter, not your Armor/Health.<br /><br />The two succeeding PS1 games in the series played largely similarly, including carrying over the Danger meter system. It also introduces enemies with armor piercing weapons (which goes straight against your health meter) and snipers going for headshots. Same deal, if the Danger meter fills, you take hits, but this time you die faster (or instantly), so there's even less focus on your Health/Armor.<br /><br />Overall I liked that system and thought it worked pretty well immersion-wise. I mean, it makes sense that the longer you stand in the open without taking evasive action, the more likely you'd actually get shot, and also that you could maybe take a couple of hits but not a lot. Heck, the games go so far as to not have your health restored between levels, if the level transitions are within the same plot-wise mission. It's a shame I don't think I've really seen anything similar to it since. Maybe the closest "in spirit" to the Danger system would be in Uncharted, which basically uses Call of Duty's "screen turns bloody red" regenerating health system, except it's hand-waved as the player's "luck running out" instead of the hero inexplicably being Wolverine.Carlos M.https://www.blogger.com/profile/00724030488394241024noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3656428975201272042.post-7945625802388090072021-08-28T23:01:55.972-07:002021-08-28T23:01:55.972-07:00Ah, yeah, that makes sense. It's surprising ho...Ah, yeah, that makes sense. It's surprising how often major design decisions get made due to technological limitations on the graphical end, where something gets done because it's new ground being broken and thus shinycool (The Total War series' core design has been heavily defined by the fact that they had a breakthrough that let them make non-flat 3D terrain that didn't look awful), or does not get done because the team couldn't make it happen without being unhappy with how ugly it looked. Ghoul Kinghttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15165232279081041131noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3656428975201272042.post-32171059159361311842021-08-28T17:43:38.792-07:002021-08-28T17:43:38.792-07:00There's some in-game justification about the s...There's some in-game justification about the shielding units not being able to scale to the size of capital ships. However, there is actually one capital ship in the story that canonically has shielding, but for the most part its shields are (literal, justified) plot armor; that particular ship does not meaningfully figure into the gameplay and mostly only shows up in cutscenes or heavily scripted sequences. There are a couple of times you get close enough to take shots at it, and if you do it doesn't produce any shielding visual or sound effects, it's just a regular ship that's flagged as being invincible.<br /><br />I suspect not giving large ships shielding had more to do with contemporary technological limitations than anything else. This was back in 1998, where "3D acceleration" was still a buzzword, and it was probably impractical to render the shielding effects for large objects (in a way that didn't look super weird, at least). There are later mods and total conversions that do give caps shields, but obviously they had bigger gameplay and balance tweaks to compensate.Carlos M.https://www.blogger.com/profile/00724030488394241024noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3656428975201272042.post-88260381774545934572021-08-25T18:57:41.088-07:002021-08-25T18:57:41.088-07:00Not sure I'd call that a counterpoint, but cer...Not sure I'd call that a counterpoint, but certainly interesting. I'm especially surprised to hear of a game avoiding passing out shields to capital ships -scifi usually runs the other way, where if shields exist and aren't completely universal its some of the fighters (Or all of them) that miss out.Ghoul Kinghttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15165232279081041131noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3656428975201272042.post-30496246395281658482021-08-25T18:25:14.163-07:002021-08-25T18:25:14.163-07:00Hmmm, as a counterpoint, the Freespace space-comba...Hmmm, as a counterpoint, the Freespace space-combat games come to mind. That series had shields (a standard sci-fi trope, at any rate) _before_ it had hitscan weapons.<br /><br />At the beginning of the first game, you don't have any shields. Your weapons are the standard spacefighter lasers-that-behave-like-slow-projectiles, and various types of missiles. There are also slow-moving torpedos for blowing up capital ships. Some way into the campaign, your fighters get upgraded with shields, but capital ships (with one exception) generally still don't have them and simply rely on having tons of HP for durability. This made them sitting ducks, however; the other fighters can chase you around and be shooting at you till you run out of shields, while the capital ships were slow so you can just afterburner out of its weapon range, shut off your engines so you can divert full power to shields and wait for them to come back, rinse and repeat until the target is dead. Kinda made them boring to fight, but it wasn't too important for the first game because technical limitations meant you can't have many large, very detailed ships present in the battlefield.<br /><br />When Freespace 2 rolled around, the devs clearly wanted more screen time and direct contribution from the capital ships, so two capship-type weapons were introduced: flak guns, which were area-of-effect weapons for stripping off attackers' shields, and _hitscan_ beam weapons which _ignored_ shields altogether. The shielding system didn't otherwise change, but this made the battles against caps very different. The beam weapons also have the side effect of ragdolling your fighter, which is really annoying but was actually a mercy because that meant getting hit immediately tosses you away from the path of the beam and any follow-up shots. I've played with mods that modified the beam weapon behavior, and without other changes the game gets severely imbalanced; turning off the ragdolling meant that a single hit was pretty much an instakill (because hitscan is undodegeable and staying in the beam's path meant you took instantaneous damage continuously), but making it not bypass shields made them ineffectual.<br /><br />The way FS2 dealt with enemy ships having beam weapons is mostly with Command yelling at you to stay outside the range of them when you got anywhere near. That meant wingman management was a huge pain, because they'd always end up inside enemy weapon range and end up however, because turn-of-the-century AI was really stupid and you can only give them very basic commands. Later in the game, you're given some long-range weapons for taking care of point defenses, and they are actually quite overpowered and seem to only be there to get you through the latter missions. Although that might just be the usual video game thing that later missions tend to be much poorer tuned than earlier ones (development schedules and all).<br /><br />Tl;dr, in FS shields came first and was so effective that the series introduced a hitscan weapon that bypassed them, effectively flipping Halo's problem _and_ solution!Carlos M.https://www.blogger.com/profile/00724030488394241024noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3656428975201272042.post-23814185485578168892021-08-25T16:08:43.185-07:002021-08-25T16:08:43.185-07:00Ah. I could buy convergent evolution just as readi...Ah. I could buy convergent evolution just as readily explaining this, but yeah, I can see the similarities. I swear I'm familiar with some other 2000-onward games that had you regenerate if you dropped below a minimum, like an FPS or something, but it's not coming to me.<br /><br />Halo's approach is mechanically similar but solving an entirely different problem -that FPSes struggle a lot with hitscan enemies demanding either stealth-heavy gameplay (Which most FPSes don't want to do at all) or that the player is something of a bullet sponge. A regenerating shield is basically perfect at resolving that issue by making it so getting hit at all isn't player failure, but there's still a clearly-defined 'you are taking too much damage too fast' cut-off point, which health-pack hitscan FPS end up producing anyway, just in a nebulous way a learning player can't predict. (ie if a fight has a full heal placed right after it, losing 99% of your HP in the fight isn't a serious problem, especially if you won't be able to come back for it later. On the other hand, if there's only a half-heal followed by a similarly difficult fight, losing 99% of your health in the first fight is a lethal problem...)<br /><br />And as a bonus, saying the shield is an in-universe technological widget helps with immersion; yes, Master Chief *is* supposed to shrug off a certain amount of small-arms fire over and over, in-universe and everything. Where a lot of FPS protagonists are, what, fantasy trolls who can literally regenerate lost limbs in minutes?Ghoul Kinghttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15165232279081041131noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3656428975201272042.post-82880029162255038792021-08-24T22:59:27.327-07:002021-08-24T22:59:27.327-07:00I'm not that up-to-date with games either, and...I'm not that up-to-date with games either, and I'm not sure it's as ubiquitous as I made it sound. I think most games still go one way or the other (no regen with healing items vs. pure regeneration). The more well known examples that I've played recently are the 2010s Deus Ex games, Human Revolution and Mankind Divided. It works quite similarly to the Yoshi's Island model; your character regenerates up to a certain amount of health, and there are also healing items which depending on how much health you had either made you heal faster or bumped it above the regen max up to a certain absolute maximum. In-universe this was justified by cybernetic enhancements, and you can get upgraded for faster healing and more health. That said, this really wasn't too important in the modern Deus Ex games because a) your character was always a glass cannon unless you maxed out all the health and armor upgrades, so an additional 20 HP here or a few seconds faster healing there didn't matter that much b) the series is less about open guns-blazing combat and more about having multiple ways of solving (or bypassing) your immediate problem. The developers justified the regen mechanic by saying they didn't want to derail players' experience such that if they ended up with low health the immediate thing to do is to look for healing opportunities.<br /><br />The original Deus Ex didn't have the hybrid mechanic, it had the usual food/health packs/health stations thing that contemporary games did. DX1 does have an (optional) regeneration enhancement but it needed to be triggered manually and consumed energy units when activated, so it's not quite the same as the Yoshi's Island model.<br /><br />Then there are also games like Halo which has the regenerating shields on top of non-regenerating health, the key difference to the YI style being that it's the regenerating part that (usually) got depleted first.Carlos M.https://www.blogger.com/profile/00724030488394241024noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3656428975201272042.post-25025913190646439842021-08-24T13:22:28.123-07:002021-08-24T13:22:28.123-07:00That's distinctly possible. I've yet to he...That's distinctly possible. I've yet to hear about an earlier game with a similar model, at least, and Yoshi's Island is (justifiably) plenty well-known. I'm personally not strongly familiar with the range of more modern action-adventure games, so I wouldn't know -I'm honestly a bit surprised to hear that hybrid regenerating health has become more ubiquitous- but I find it plausible.Ghoul Kinghttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15165232279081041131noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3656428975201272042.post-84090800515521899822021-08-24T01:03:06.651-07:002021-08-24T01:03:06.651-07:00Did Yoshi's Island actually pioneer the hybrid...Did Yoshi's Island actually pioneer the hybrid regenerating health model that's a staple of modern action/adventure type games?<br /><br />We had a SNES back in the day, however I only had a chance to play Yoshi's Island when we bought a SNES Classic. By the time it came out, the PS1 was all the rage, and because it used custom hardware on the cart the game never appeared on any of the pirate multicarts that were ubiquitous in my part of the world. I found it very enjoyable and thought that Yoshi's Island alone justified the SNES Classic's price!Carlos M.https://www.blogger.com/profile/00724030488394241024noreply@blogger.com