Should games open up more options for customisation? *spinoff*

[obonicus]

Mod : this thread is spawned from the Uncharted 2 game thread. The opint is raised that different people want a different game experience, and I suggested providing options for players to customise the experience to their tastes.

In short: guys with the bulletproof vests should go down when you shoot them with your AK Kevlar vests is allmost as bad protection as a piece of paper against such rifle rounds.

Sure, but maybe it's more like action-film bullet penetration. Think Lethal Weapon 3, in which the armor-piercing bullets will go through one layer of anything (even a steel tractor scoop) but not 2 layers of bulletproof vests.

 

[Nesh]

Why are we discussing this? It is a game and chose that route for obvious reasons.

If we go by that then we should start looking too much into any shooter out there.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Why are we discussing this? It is a game and chose that route for obvious reasons.

These sorts of discussions often crop up. The real solution here is, give the player options! Let people choose damage ratio to suit. If some players want realistic firefights, it's just change a variable on the damage/health points and job done!

 

[Npl]

These sorts of discussions often crop up. The real solution here is, give the player options! Let people choose damage ratio to suit. If some players want realistic firefights, it's just change a variable on the damage/health points and job done!

And who tests and balances the game for all variables?
Its bad enough if alot games have totally broken hard (or harder) modes (Far Cry comes to my mind, the part where you lose the guns and have to sneak is impossible on higher difficulty), I don't think adding tons of more variables will help.

If you want for realism then games where a group of 2-3 people kill a thousand enemies in straight combat is just not possible in "realistic" firefights.

 

[Acert93]

These sorts of discussions often crop up. The real solution here is, give the player options! Let people choose damage ratio to suit. If some players want realistic firefights, it's just change a variable on the damage/health points and job done!

I wish developers would open up options like this, esp. for bots. e.g. in CS:S you can set the AI difficulty. The problem is that aiming and intelligence are tied together. It would be nice to have level 5 AI with a level 3 or 4 aiming, etc. And of course for a game like this allowing users a mode to have fewer enemies who can be killed with a single shot--but also more leathal--would be a nice change of pace from "higher difficulty = more baddies who are better and more resilient." Oh well, probablly really hard to test this stuff... hence why it should be a post-game unlock!

 

[JardeL]

The real solution here is, give the player options!

Players already have the option. Don't you like the way it is , alright don't play then. Or get used to it.

Just like KZ2 situation. " Oh god , it is so bad , I can't even play , make the controls like COD4!!!!! " . No. You are the bad one , if you can't play that's your problem. You gonna get used to it or quit playing it.

So , if you want realistic gunfights , go&play SOCOM. Uncharted is not famous with its "realistic gunfights" , and I don't think ND tried to make realistic gunfights. I'm sure they are capable of making it but they didn't because it does not fit into Uncharted world imo.

Just stop trying to standardise games.

@Joshua Luna
So what are the difficulty settings [ Easy, Normal, Hard, Crushing ] for ? This is not a PC game.

Regarding to one-shot kills , if you know how to do it there are lots of one-shot kills. SAS-12 , Pistolé, sniper rifle [ even for heavy armored villians , just aim for the head ]. Even standart pistol , if you aim at head.

Oh and my fav weapon is

Spoiler

crossbow

. It is so awesome and best solution for

Spoiler

guardians &

chain gun guys.

 

[Acert93]

Just like KZ2 situation. " Oh god , it is so bad , I can't even play , make the controls like COD4!!!!! " . No. You are the bad one , if you can't play that's your problem. You gonna get used to it or quit playing it.

It's a feature!

Not necessarily the best business approach, especially when your target audience can articulate the problem they are having. Alas longevity and sales will be the metric to determine whether your above approach is the better one or not.

Just stop trying to standardise games.

I am not sure that is what others were doing (e.g. I was actually argueing for more options to make them less standard/more flexible to meet various consumer desires) but the flip side is if consumers like something because it works is there a need to re-invent the wheel for the sake of re-inventing the wheel...

@Joshua Luna
So what are the difficulty settings [ Easy, Normal, Hard, Crushing ] for ? This is not a PC game.

I think my point was lost on you. I was only replying to Shifty in regards to how frequently *difficulty* is an escellation of certain parameters. In the vein of non-standardization (what you were arguing for above) why not allow the parameters to be tweaked independently. Games with exceptional AI (like CS:S) it doesn't make sense when increasing the difficulty that the AI aim also has to be tied to their "intelligence."

This point pretty much stands for most games. I see people telling homer he is "wrong" for wanting enemies a certain way when there is little reason why a game couldn't offer an unlock where these sort of variables could be exposed to a small degree.

It is this kind of stuff that gives MP games amazing legs if the core game is good. It would be nice to see this same flexibility extended to SP games. And if you don't want that sort of stuff don't touch it

 

[tha_con]

Huh? People here arent saying that they want one shot kills, they just want more realistic reactions to shots. Getting shot in the chest by a high powered rifle should result in a bigger impact than getting shot by a pistol. In U2 they are the same, the only difference is that an AK shot will drop X% of enemies life and pistol will drop Y%. We want rifle shots to have bigger impact, having enemies taking multiple AK47 rounds to chest and only getting thrown a little bit off balance, (and having the exact same effect when getting shot by handguns) can break the immersion for some people.

Also, people are not retards. They completely understand that headshots kill people in one shot. That is beside the point.

itsagame.gif

Seriously man, things like this are gamebreaking. As in, you have to now change the way you balance things. If you increase the damage that enemies take from rifles, you also have to increase the damage that drake takes. Blind fire and a 3rd person camera (that allows you to "aim") will break the game and remove almost any challange it has. Then you're forced to make enemies 'flank you' or move you out of cover, making them predictable. Or you have them throw grenades to flush you out, at which point you're vulnurable to high damage rounds that can kill you nearly instantly.

Or did you not think all of this through? It's not just as simple as "oh just change the damage values". Things like this need to be play tested and balanced, everything is effected by this. They would have to change a LOT of things with regard to the single player, and tons of tuning would have to be done. It would have been a completely different game and experience. Not to mention a lot less "fun".

With regard to 1 shot kills...a direct hit to the chest with an AK-47 is death. You're almost certainly not going to survive. You'll have a collapsed lung, excessive bleeding, and possibly other damage (heart, spine, and other organs). You're most certainly not going to get back up and continue your gun fight if you suffer a direct hit to the chest. Hell, even if you get hit in the arm or leg you're going to be 'taken out of action' for the most part.

You ARE asking for 1 hit kills, essentially. If you want "realistic" damage, that is.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

And who tests and balances the game for all variables?

Why do we have to test every single combination?

Its bad enough if alot games have totally broken hard (or harder) modes (Far Cry comes to my mind, the part where you lose the guns and have to sneak is impossible on higher difficulty), I don't think adding tons of more variables will help.

I think you and others misunderstand me. I'm not suggesting just provide an engine and parameters for gamers to tweak. I'm saying provide the carefully crafted game finely balanced according to the developer's artistic vision, and then also open up some parameters so that those with different tastes who just want to try some weird options are free to do so! Some games already do this to a degree, like Halo 2's Skulls (right game, right?) where you can change the game behaviour. Unlocking a one-shot kill mode is a similar game changing aspect that you wouldn't need to test to prove it works. You just give it as an option for players to experiment with. I recall very fondly UFO Enemy Unknown on PC, and Star Control, the great fun I had with a hex editor changing parameters and changing the gameplay. UFO with massively overpowered explosive rounds was great fun. Of course it was completely imbalanced, but if I want to play a completely imbalanced game where I'm unstoppable, what's wrong with that? I'm playing games for fun, not to test my abilitity to overcome important challenges! And Star Control was very different when you had HUGE numbers of bubbles from the Androsynth, or a flaming-comet supernuke Earthling Cruiser. I sped the whole game up and it was more fun IMO. What's wrong with that?! What's wrong with giving more fun to people when it costs next to nothing to implement?

In this case, all ND would have to do is have damage settings for different weapons and villains, and let the player, having played the awesome single player, carefully balanced game, be able to fine tune the game to their personal tastes. Like vinegar and salt on fish-and-chips. You could go into a chippy on a cold day wanting a perfect cod. The chef may have an aristic vision of what true cod-and-chips is, in their mind rich in vinegar and light on salt. But they don't force that onto shoppers, instead leaving the vinegar and salt to personal preference. It's clear from the posts here and in many other game related threads that one man's ideal game is another man's poorly balanced plop. Give everyone the opportunity to tweak it, and suddenly your game is a 10/10 on everyone's rating list, instead of a range of 8/10 to 10/10 depending on how well the player's tastes matched the developers.

 

[Npl]

Why do we have to test every single combination?

In case you want to make the options a part of the game and not unlockable cheat then you`d have to make sure the game aint getting ridiculous spikes in difficulty. Like setting options that prefer a "stealthy" approach, making you pretty much dead if you`re spotted and then having a level later where you cant hide. Ie you have to think of all possible combinations when designing the level.

I think you and others misunderstand me. I'm not suggesting just provide an engine and parameters for gamers to tweak. I'm saying provide the carefully crafted game finely balanced according to the developer's artistic vision, and then also open up some parameters so that those with different tastes who just want to try some weird options are free to do so!
<snip>
Give everyone the opportunity to tweak it, and suddenly your game is a 10/10 on everyone's rating list, instead of a range of 8/10 to 10/10 depending on how well the player's tastes matched the developers.

To me this tinkering sound alot like modding or cheating. It could work if you could easily share a set of parameters (somewhat official through the game with ratings/reviews ala LBP).
I dont think tinkering with the parameters would and should affect the scores on reviews, its not something I expect to have widespread resonance. Nosing about a games (subjective or objective) faults is one thing, beeing able to make it a better game yourself is another thing entirely. And the above point still stands - you have to make sure the experience is a good one, from start to finish and not just playing the first 2 levels - likely you`d need several iterations to get it right even for yourself.

 

[obonicus]

Just fo r the record, I wasn't saying bullets should be realistic. I was saying that Uncharted might be following the tropes of its storytelling genre and might be using 'movie' bullets, with variable lethality.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

In case you want to make the options a part of the game and not unlockable cheat then you`d have to make sure the game aint getting ridiculous spikes in difficulty.

I don't think you would. It's down to the player to make changes, and if it gets 'broken' to change them to something workable. Provide a few defaults, and if they're fool enough to mess them up and break the game, that's their problem. The game they bought, balanced according to specific settings, would be a fully working game (within the limits of the designer's abilities to design balanced gameplay!) so players would have no cause for complaint.

Like setting options that prefer a "stealthy" approach, making you pretty much dead if you`re spotted and then having a level later where you cant hide. Ie you have to think of all possible combinations when designing the level.

If you let the player skip levels, they can try whatever gameplay they want in whatever levels they want. I would probably have open customisation only as an unlockable requiring a first playthrough, or allow players to tinker before levels maybe.

To me this tinkering sound alot like modding or cheating.

How can it be cheating?! I'm not playing against anyone. Are you saying it'd be unfair on the AI bots and I'd hurt their feelings if I set them to one shot kills and me to virtually indestructible?!

I dont think tinkering with the parameters would and should affect the scores on reviews.

I agree. The game should be rated on the official experience, but with bonus points for letting players tweak it to suit their tastes.

And the above point still stands - you have to make sure the experience is a good one, from start to finish and not just playing the first 2 levels - likely you`d need several iterations to get it right even for yourself.

But why? Why does a bunch of settings need to work for the whole game? Let's say I play a level with lots of corridors and a I want to make it ultra realistic, just to see if in real life, Drake could make his way through. That doesn't necessitate that on another level, I may just want to run around with an RPG that comes loaded with 100 rounds! The whole point of the game is to provide the players a fun experience, no?

In my Star Control example, I'd hack the ship parameters to change the ships. I'd try one ship design against another particular ship to see how it would fair. It may totally obliterate that other ship, but be crippled versus another. It's no big deal. I don't care if it's not balanced. I just wanted to see what it would be like. It would have been zero fun to have to make custom edits that conformed to some sense of balance.

If one person's fun is the challenge of being fragile and needing to execute combat perfectly, and another's idea of fun after work wanting to wind down is mindless run-and-gun, rather than the effort of building two different games, the one game could serve them both.

 

[JardeL]

If you let the player skip levels, they can try whatever gameplay they want in whatever levels they want.

 

[Npl]

I hate quoting long posts, especially as my own response is short:

Shifty Geezer: What you seem to want is a "sandbox mode" and not a whole game with tweakable parameters. This is getting more into wanting a fully moddable game if you continue down that path, sure I would love to see something like the "Uncharted Editor" (ala Unreal Editor) and what the community would come up with it. But is this reasonable to expect from any game?

regarding "cheating": you missunderstood me, I was comparing the possibility to tweak parameters with having cheats (unlockable or not) in a game - to an extend thats already in all ND-Games since Jak & Daxter.

 

[Acert93]

I think Scott's example is a pretty nice compromise.

2 sliders:

* AI Difficulty => Easy, Normal, Pro, All-Star

* Style => Arcade, Casual, Normal, Realism

As the game market expands, and big titles dominate mindshare, it could be helpful to grow a user base, and retain it, by allow basic options to appeal to as many gamers as possible. We have all kinds of options (gore filter, use your own music) and gameplay types (SP, Coop, team based MP, competitive MP, etc) so it would be nice to see continued evolution in SP (which imo really lags in progress).

Allowing someone to do a runthrough on a game in "Pro-AI, Arcade Gameplay" and then turn around and do "Normal-AI, Realism Gameplay" would offer a new twist on a SP experience. As it stands most of the SP games I see everyone ooohing and aaaahing over are 6-10hr games that would never be worth a replay (let me search for ours for magic pixie dust to get all my achievements/trophies! yaaawn). How about toss in some Coop, connect SP progress with some neat MP unlocks, and allow the SP to be spiced up to offer new experiences.

I know this message isn't well received (but then again MP games generally kick SP games butts in terms of sales). But I will probably have to wait for CrossPlayer to get anywhere near this. I can see that game having some interesting "ladders" e.g. if you are good, maybe you have to take on 5 real humans. Best them, you go up the ladder to 6. On the defensive side you could get trophies for being the cannon fodder who took our the hero.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Shifty Geezer: What you seem to want is a "sandbox mode" and not a whole game with tweakable parameters.

No, I want games to be as they are only with a few tweakables. I don't know what I said to give the impression I want sandbox games and extensive editors. I'm not asking for level design features or import custom character designs or build your own moves or somesuch. I just think games where you have basic numbers to determine outcomes, like damage and hitpoints, offering settings for these can make for great variations at no cost to the developer. In the Star Control example, they were just parameters for fire-rate, speed, turning, power regen, etc. In the game proper this were hard coded values. I had to use a hex editor to change the code. The same result could have been achieved officially with a 'custom game' mode or somesuch.

And I'd probably be okay with the idea of limited sliders as Joshua suggests, although numeric sliders would be a bit more flexible.

eg. Let's take Uncharted 2. How's about a Custom game mode that runs through the campaign, where you choose which bit you want to play. Sliders might be...

Health points Nate - Torso : 1 to 50
Health points Nate - Head : 1 to 50
Heatlh recovery rate : 1 to 50 per second
Health points small enemy - Torso : 1 to 50
Health points small enemy - Head : 1 to 50
Health points large enemy - Torso : 1 to 50
Health points large enemy - Head : 1 to 50

Weapons page
Pistol ammo : 1 to 50
Pistol damage : 1 to 50
RPG damage : 1 to 50
etc...

You could extend it to AI sensitivities too. But everything else stays exactly the same.

A lot of PC games enable this through setup files, and I don't know of anyone who complains about the abiliity to adjust gravity, AI etc. I remember the original WORMS on Amiga was wildly received for being customisable.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Je ne comprends pas.

 

[vazel]

I've seen a lot of tweaking in Left 4 Dead. My favorite server mod to play on is one that makes the zombies tougher, it's very fun. Although to be fair I've rarely seen the kind of tweaks that I've seen in Left 4 Dead in other games. I think in general expecting that kind of tweaking is expecting too much.

 

[Acert93]

You scoff but some of the best games allow you to replay segments whenever you want. I know a lot of the big games (Halo 3, CoD4, GeoW2, FM2, on and on) allow gamers to replay what they like, when they like. Knowing how few gamers finish games, allowing an option in the option menu ("unlock access to all levels") could be seen as a way to give value to gamers who struggle. Games already do this in Coop (e.g. my first experience with Halo 3 was coop about 2/3 through the game).

 

[Acert93]

I've seen a lot of tweaking in Left 4 Dead. My favorite server mod to play on is one that makes the zombies tougher, it's very fun. Although to be fair I've rarely seen the kind of tweaks that I've seen in Left 4 Dead in other games. I think in general expecting that kind of tweaking is expecting too much.

NFL2K5 underwent a lot of tweaking as well. A good game that opens up features to games can go a long way. Some of the worse examples is opening up features and then NOT allowing them to be used socially to any relevant degree (e.g. Halo 3).