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Luridis

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About Luridis

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    Nightfall of the Obsidian Order
    (5) Thaumaturgist

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    Dallas, TX
  • Interests
    On a high horse!!

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  1. IMO Wheel of Time is a mediocre story at best. And, of his personally stated goals for the series, the author really only achieved one of the two I know of. The one that failed, in my opinion, is women having privilege. If an author really intends to do such a thing, the characters should at least be consistent with the real world. i.e. Just because someone has privilege doesn't mean they can't also be brilliant, capable, etc. However, Jordan seems to think privilege means those characters that have said privilege must also be stupid, petty, chaotic, cynical, utterly illogical and/or display no subtlety at all. These universal female character flaws go extremes so fantastic that these people appear almost caricature in nature. There are many more glaring holes in the series: Why would anyone side with the dark one? They get nothing out of it, except abuse, a contradictory chain of command and death upon the smallest failure. Throughout that whole series I don't think I saw a single "dark friend" (goodness he needed help with naming things) be rewarded with anything save not getting killed or punished. Don't even get me started on the "Seanchan". Common sense would tell anyone that not only would such an empire survive only by the skin of its teeth, but simply could not exist as a "power" due to the chaos its leadership would breed with its behavior. Anyhow, the books are so much nonsense that on my second read through I wondered how they survived without scathing peer review.
  2. Witcher 3 Devs started out with no idea how to make games? More than a decade ago, I read that Blizzard had no idea how to make an MMO when it made WoW. (Now ruined by Activision IMO) Now, what the folks are saying in the comments is that this is because of publisher practices and "standard operating procedure" etc. My thought is this: While all of that is possible, could there be a much simpler explanation? I imagine when a lot of these successful games pop up from first time or near first time developers there is something they don't have, that very experienced developers do have... A concept of limitations. In fact, most of retro gaming is filled with titles that were made by people whom had no preconceptions about what is possible and what was not. Additionally, there were no curriculum for game design with professors telling them what's possible and what isn't. Perhaps the reason why what they try often works is because they have no reason to believe that it won't. After all, complacency is one sure way to undermine one's goals.
  3. I suspect the reason you're not getting much of a response is because your question isn't entirely clear.
  4. Wasn't really important to the point. My feelings are that a company cannot claim zero tolerance and then tolerate... regardless of circumstance. And, I'll say nothing more since I'd rather spend my time on more civil points. Like... free games! Here's one: They seem to need a better sound designer though...
  5. Not really interested in anything a company makes that seemingly does nothing when members of their team display open bigotry on social networks, regardless of which group that hostility is pointed at. No interest in MEA here. I mean, if the person in question didn't involve their prominent position as a game developer within a triple A publisher in said statements I'd be much more inclined to cut EA some slack but, that's not what is actually happening.
  6. Thinking about this... I like stylized stuff.
  7. TBH, I wonder too if the obnoxious stuff like the way pathing works might also be the result of maintaining a common codebase with a console-enabled game. And that is not to say that one method is better than the other. We've all seen poor console to PC ports. In past years I can remember poor PC to console ports. So, it's not about one being better than the other. It's about fundamentally different interfaces requiring entirely different approaches to game design in order to fit their target platform well. I can no more conceive of a good port of Neverwinter Nights 1 to PS4 than I could imagine playing the original Tomb Raider with a keyboard and mouse. Finally, on that note, I can't imagine a text-heavy game being well received on a console.
  8. I just woke up. I have a right - no, an obligation - to be grumpy :-P Maybe this will cheer you up... FloppyTron to the rescue.
  9. It's more about majority of actually good developers doing jobs with sane hours and good pay. That was actually a joke, the (_|_) hurt isn't necessary.
  10. Alright... WTF developers? Have they stopped teaching this in CS curriculums? First, there was the HWR effup! Video: 1998 formation behavior (beginning) vs what gearbox "programmers" came up with in 2015. (2nd Half) Now, this... So, I'm not imagining that its worse than it is. I really is that bad... Well, it all supports my theory that teaching OOP and "Java" as a curriculum result in halfwit devs.
  11. I backed the game and was enjoying it right up until the UI bit me in the face. Clicking on loot is hard and you can't seem to select a single character for an out-of-combat action. So, if you're in a dungeon and you click on loot that is not accessible to every member of your party... You end up with a party doing its best Benny Hill impersonation and creating a suicidal aggro chain. How such a blatantly obvious hole in game-mechanics makes its way past play-testing is probably the biggest mystery in game development to me. How the party running around aggroing willy-nilly in the first dungeon a play-tester tried didn't end up on tomorrow's "top issues" for the dev team is utterly mind boggling. Such to me is akin to an application bug that would, should you open an input form, decide not to input and click "cancel"... find yourself unceremoniously dumped to the desktop instead of back at the app's main window! "Wait, I didn't click X, I said cancel... Why did the whole thing shut down?" This sort of game logic behavior leaves me with a likewise feeling. If there's no solution I missed then I'm going to shelve TTON and perhaps try Horizon ZD while inxile sorts out the post-launch fixes. HZD actually looks decent in the action-rpg mechanics and excellent in the story area... from what I am hearing anyway.
  12. I should add this... This was done by someone whom understands the number scaling problems in space games. Kudos to them. http://youtu.be/OBYRIZA44Eg
  13. They so carefully pruned that pre-release footage that I never imagined gameplay would be so incredibly shallow. I dare say that most board games are more compelling than "scan creatures" and "refill your shields with titanium", as if the latter mechanic makes sense to anyone who's ever played Elite, Wing Commander, Independence War, Freelancer, etc.
  14. ...of every TOMB RAIDER since the first one? No. The first Tomb Raider actually had very little combat and what little combat there was was mostly against animals. That game was heavily focused on puzzle platforming, (I'm guesstimating here) about 85% exploration and puzzle platforming and 15% combat, and thus is my favorite game in the series. Every Tomb Raider after gradually increased the combat percentage (much to my dismay) to the point where Underworld was like 65% exploration and puzzle platforming and 35% combat. Even with the increase in combat, that game was still focused on puzzle platforming (though much less than I'd like). Then Torture Porn Rider pushed it much further in the combat direction to the point that the 2013 reboot was about 75% combat and 25% exploration. I purposely didn't mention puzzle platforming because, while technically there were some puzzles, they were so childishly easy that it was flat out insulting, thus I argue they don't count. I'm not saying this as an exaggeration for emphasis, I legitimately felt insulted by the "puzzles" in Tomb Raider 2013. The earlier games, though less about puzzle platforming than I'd like, still had puzzle platforming as an integral part. The "puzzle platforming" in the reboot felt like an afterthought, like they were patronizing me. It was sad. Anyway, what I want is a game even less combat focused than the first Tomb Raider and more open and with more human (non-killing) interactions with people. Like talking to them. Gen-Y developers are faced with a publishing world that loves FPS. Thus, everything must be FPS-like in order to get funding consideration. Indeed, I think a lot of them have never had the chance to even entertain the idea of depth in gameplay. If they did they'd understand why so many of us old-school game players find the idea of "press x at the right time" or "press O as fast as you can" as game mechanics to be incredibly un-inventive and shallow. I mean, I'm playing an RPG, not "Press Your Luck and come on no whammies!". If I want that sort of mechanic I'll go to Chucky Cheese and play whack-a-mole.
  15. I sure am sorry how it ended up turning out FlintlockJazz. No Man's Sky ended up being yet another failed space sim. Space games are hard to do well and those developers whom would attempt such without sufficient research are asking to put a lot of man-hours into reliving mistakes that countless others have made. It seems Hello Games went to the genre half-****ed and found themselves making the same mistake that the Limit Theory developer made. Perhaps I should make a rules list for the small team and indie devs that fancy the space genre... Rule #01: Understand the biggest problem in open world space sims: that of universe scale IRL, game world space and the limitation of floating point limits in consumer GPUs. Someone on your development team must understand linear algebra, trigonometry and Cartesian mathematics to a high degree. Indeed someone must understand 3D engine architecture deeply and be able to plan the game mechanics and/or 3D engine work-arounds from the very beginning to compensate for this core problem of the genre. Rule #02: Do not focus entirely upon Randomly Seeded Procedural Generation, if indeed you choose to use it at all. Commonly abbreviated as "Procedural Generation" is, by it's very nature, at odds with the depth design element. Things like faction affiliations, ship choice and universe economics become much more difficult when everything is randomized. Run afoul of #2 and people will accuse your game of being "a mile wide and an inch deep". Run afoul of #1 and you'll be announcing that the universe won't feature gas giants, planets will be small, and space backdrops will feel wrong because planets and moons are in gravitationally impossible proximity. It is pretty sad that it turned out the way it did and it's no wonder to me why publishers have largely abandoned the genre. Developers, indie or not, frequently bite off more than they can chew trying to make a space sim on a whim. The truth is, even if it's only single player, a modern space sim akin to 1994's Frontier Elite II would require a back-end nearly as complex as any MMO. Last time I looked at XML document from my latest X Rebirth save game, it was 1,340,766 lines long and it's only got half a dozen start systems in the whole game.
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