364 réponses à ce sujet

[The Hardest Thing In The World]

I'll play nightmare if that's the only way I can have FF. But a toggle woud've been better.

[omghithere]

no one ever said that nightmare was the only way you could play ff

Modifié par omghithere, 18 décembre 2010 - 09:23 .

[TucoBenedicto]

omghithere wrote...

4 pages and people still dont get that ff goes with the difficulty of the setting.

Tons of argomentations and people still don't get why this is a very stupid idea.

[Amioran]

Sylvius the Mad wrote...

but the toggle isn't for everyone.  The toggle is only for those players who want to fiddle with that particular aspect of the game's design.

Irrelevant. If you include an option it must work for everyone, it cannot be a specific thing for a specific audience. It must work for everybody and in this case, as I already explained, it isn't possible.

Simply you cannot do a thing for a specific audience in a game open to everybody, it makes no sense logically.

Modifié par Amioran, 18 décembre 2010 - 10:32 .

[Amioran]

TucoBenedicto wrote...

The whole thing about "friendly fire being hard to balance" is just bull****.

Beep... Wrong. Thanks for partecipating.

Btw I'm still waiting on those famous rpgs games that already "did it a lot of times".

You don't know of what you are talking about. Inform a little better than try again next time, thx. It seemed I was enough clear in my explanations on how it works, but I suppose not everybody can have the ability to understand basic things.

[Amioran]

The Lyons wrote...

Amioran: Yes, I understand how smart and clever you think you are. It is quite charming And I would love to hear more on this subject.

Because I am? And btw not clever, just intelligent, thanks. I'm not modest, I will never be. I know what I am and I've no motive to denigrade myself just look fine to the eyes of others. I know much too well the old motto: "do you want to win her affinity? Then show yourself embarassed before her" but I don't need these tricks. I use a mask as I always have and all intelligent people do one way or another, but I'm not a slave of it, I don't need morale.

I suggest you to try to understand what is being said and try to form an opinion. Let's see if from an argument well concepted and one that has no basics what you will choose.

Modifié par Amioran, 18 décembre 2010 - 10:30 .

[Maria Caliban]

Sylvius the Mad wrote...

Maria Caliban wrote...

Good documentation is good. Civilization gives you a wide range of options under the advanced user screen, but only half of them are actually documented. Do you want your world to start at 5 billion, 4 billion, or 3 billion years of age?

Outside of someone who's majored in earth sciences, I can't imagine anyone would know what to expect when playing with that toggle.

Anyone who remembers Alpha Centauri well would have a pretty good guess.

But yes, that should have been documented.

I remember Alpha Centarui, but not the differences the time scale makes.

Good documentation (especially in the form of a manual) is something every complex game should have. I recall spells and runes in DA:O where it told you that it added weapon penetration or damage to darkspawn, but didn't tell you how much penetration or extra damage it gave you. And I presume that my mage's magic attribute increased the amount of penetration, but that's just a guess.

[Sepewrath]

Well I don't see why the FF settings were changed from Origin, half on hard mode and full on nightmare worked just fine. And people are underestimating the balancing issues of a toggle, the game has to be balanced for FF either being on or off. Lets say the game is balanced for FF to be off, when you turn it on, its going to make the game much harder than the difficulty level would indicate. If its balanced for on, then when you turn it off, combat would be a joke. When its tied up in the difficulty, its in the middle ground.

[-flashblade-]

David Gaider wrote...

Or that, anyhow, is what I assume. Attaching things to toggles is great, but if someone flips that on and doesn't know that it will suddenly make their "Easy" game not quite so Easy anymore... well, that wouldn't be good.

Normally I don't post here at all and just keep on lurking and reading, but this REALLY gets to me. Are you really the people that created Baldur's Gate and Baldur's Gate II or was that subcontracted to somebody and those people all died til now? Because when I read a statement like this it just makes me doubt this.

Speaking of Baldur's Gate are any players on here left who, you know, played those games? When you put your game on Core AD&D difficulty those nasty fireballs from your mage actually burnt you party to a crisp as well or with a misplaced Lightning bolt you could easily electrocute 2 or 3 party members or all. Anyone remember when you walked up unprepared to Firkraag with lets say level 12 and challenged him to a battle and with his first dragon breath he killed up to 2 or 3 of your party members freakin PERMANENTLY? Their portrait *poof* just vanished from you party bar which meant no ressurection for you good sir or lady. So if you did not want to permanently loose your beloved party member you had to reload an earlier save game. A decade ago that was absolutely fine and nobody complained at all. Today oh noes we just can not do that to the poor player.

I really can't believe that there are people on here who are butt hurt when somebody says that games such is this have been dumbed down for the masses when presented with this evidence.

[TucoBenedicto]

Amioran wrote...

TucoBenedicto wrote...

The whole thing about "friendly fire being hard to balance" is just bull****.

Beep... Wrong. Thanks for partecipating.

I'm sorry but I don't really care about how hard you try to advocate this bollocks, they still untrue, and you still an incompetent.

Friendly fire can be an issue to balance in multiplayer co-op games, where many players are sharing the same area.
Not surely in a single player RPG where the player can coordinate the whole party.

[Amioran]

-flashblade- wrote...

Normally I don't post here at all and just keep on lurking and reading, but this REALLY gets to me. Are you really the people that created Baldur's Gate and Baldur's Gate II or was that subcontracted to somebody and those people all died til now? Because when I read a statement like this it just makes me doubt this.

What the hell have you read on that statement of David is beyond me really. What BG have to do with this is, again, beyond me. BG didn't have a toggle, FF was tied to difficulty. So what the hell are you talking about? He was referring that doing a toggle for FF that would work for *everybody* (as it should be if you put it in a game) it's an impossible thing to do for balance reasons (as I tried to explain already).

It is not difficult to understand why that's so, but it seems for a lot of people here it is, either because they cannot make some clear connections (at last to me), or because they just think money grow on trees and you speak "I want this" and then it can be done, without knowing the implications.

Just one advice: be wary of what you ask, you could obtain it. Do with this what you want.

[TucoBenedicto]

Sepewrath wrote...
Well I don't see why the FF settings were changed from Origin, half on hard mode and full on nightmare worked just fine.

Actually that was on the sad console version.
On PC it was 50% at normal and 100% at hard.
And it was a poor choice anyway.

And people are underestimating the balancing issues of a toggle, the game has to be balanced for FF either being on or off. Lets say the game is balanced for FF to be off, when you turn it on, its going to make the game much harder than the difficulty level would indicate. If its balanced for on, then when you turn it off, combat would be a joke. When its tied up in the difficulty, its in the middle ground.

That's cause what you are suggesting it's the wrong way to handle it.

You don't create a tactical battle balancing FF off. You balance your combat system with FF turned on, to any difficulty level, and just then you give an ulterior option to incompetent players which want an easy mode where they don't have to think or plan anything and can just nuke everything AOE, mindlessly.

Modifié par TucoBenedicto, 18 décembre 2010 - 10:43 .

[Amioran]

TucoBenedicto wrote...

I'm sorry but I don't really care about how hard you try to advocate this bollocks, they still untrue, and you still an incompetent.

Yes, how not. Still waiting for all those rpgs that did it a lot of times as you stated. What is, cannot confirm your own statements? I'm not surprised, at all.

TucoBenedicto wrote...
Friendly fire can be an issue to balance in multiplayer co-op games, where many players are sharing the same area.
Not surely in a single player RPG where the player can coordinate the whole party.

Again, wrong. The fact that you can coordinate the party is irrelevant because in rpgs player skill is just a part of the balance. You can micromanage how much you like, if you balance an rpg party based without FF on, if you enable the same, difficulty of encounters will increase in undeterminable ways, depending on the situation. To balance a difficulty to work without FF enemies will have parameters tied to that situation, if you alter that situation, from the root (as enabling FF does) all the parameters will become unbalanced, and that unbalance will be difficult to mathematically ascertain (so that you can balance it indipendently from difficulty levels).

You can use all the skill you want, it will change the thing only in part, because: A) you cannot expect everybody to have that same skill (and as I said if you insert a toggle everybody should be able to use it), so the variations will wary difficulties in unpredictable ways and balance will be broken and parameters of an rpg consider many things more than just player skill. There's area construction, abilities, enemies aggro, enemies levels, all these things togheter when the context is different can variate range of difficulty in ways unexpected.

More, as I already explained, the tolerability on that range of difficulty is not the same from person to person. How can you balance something specific to work for everybody in a plausible way?

Again, you don't have a clue. Sorry to say that, but that's the truth.

Modifié par Amioran, 18 décembre 2010 - 10:48 .

[Amioran]

TucoBenedicto wrote...

You don't create a tactical battle balancing FF off. You balance your combat system with FF turned on, to any difficulty level, and just then you give an ulterior option to incompetent players which want an easy mode where they don't have to think or plan anything and can just nuke everything AOE, mindlessly.

It is the same thing. You just think that because you balance with FF on then noob players will remove it to be l33t players, but that just simplifing things. Sure, there would be an audience like that, but there would be also other people that would like a challenge without FF. What they will have to abide to then? An easy game that they can beat without challenge?

Really, what you say make no sense. Think not only for yourself or in groups, think in a wide audience, with all parameters included. Balancing a game is not an easy thing, you must consider many factors.

[TucoBenedicto]

Amioran wrote...

It is the same thing. You just think that because you balance with FF on then noob players will remove it to be l33t players, but that just simplifing things. Sure, there would be an audience like that, but there would be also other people that would like a challenge without FF. What they will have to abide to then? An easy game that they can beat without challenge?

Really, what you say make no sense. Think not only for yourself or in groups, think in a wide audience, with all parameters included. Balancing a game is not an easy thing, you must consider many factors.

Ironically enough, it's what are you saying which doesn't make any sense.
You argued about giving people an option to play an entirely different gamestyle, and yet you are speaking as if FF was part of the core balancing of the difficulty level.
What I'm suggesting about FF  ("balance ANY difficulty level around FF turned on, then give people the chance to turn it off if they don't like it or it's too much challenging") gives to the players all the freedom you're advocating; and what you are suggesting about FF ("lock friendly fire on/off just to some specific difficulty setting") is preventing players to have this freedom, cause force anyone who wants to play meaningfull tactical battles to handle even monsters harder to kill etc.

So no, it's not the same thing at all, and you clearly can say it without shame cause you are a totally clueless incompetent which try desperately to act as an  experienced designer.

Also, what are you saying doesn't make any sense at all. How can a player even dare to ask for a more challenging game when he turns off the MAIN mechanic which give depth to a party based battle system, making the accurate use of area effects useless, and allowing mindless spam?
It can just be a clueless moron.

Modifié par TucoBenedicto, 18 décembre 2010 - 11:27 .

[FedericoV]

About FF: I'm replaying BG2 right now and I begin to think that FF it's not so important as many seems to think for a party based game. In many ways, FF reduces the tactical and cooperative use of the powers of your party because AOE powers become too situational. If difficulty is raised by other means, it's not so necessary.

And btw, in most party based game you solve the FF issue pumping your warrior/rogues with elemental/magical protection. And I think that it's in some way a form of "circular" design. You introduce an element (FF) and then have to give many ways to avoid it. It's not fun or tactical, it only becomes a question of micromanagement.

Modifié par FedericoV, 18 décembre 2010 - 12:17 .

[TucoBenedicto]

FedericoV wrote...
 FF reduces the tactical and cooperative use of the powers of your party because AOE powers become too situational

Are you kidding? That's exactly the best part about FF, it forces the player to think about how he places his party, when to use a spell, etc.
If you can use any AOE at any moment where is the fun?

Modifié par TucoBenedicto, 18 décembre 2010 - 12:08 .

[Akka le Vil]

David Gaider wrote...

Because it has a profound effect on the difficulty. Hence it being attached to the difficulty.

Sure, but it also have an even deeper effect about "world consistency", and I don't really see why not giving enemies bonuses should suddendly allow my party members to walk through fire.

Or that, anyhow, is what I assume. Attaching things to toggles is great, but if someone flips that on and doesn't know that it will suddenly make their "Easy" game not quite so Easy anymore... well, that wouldn't be good.

Are we gonna start design game for retards who can't realize that allowing your spells to hurt your companions is gonna make the game harder ?
If they realize the game is not so easy anymore... they can, I don't know, TURN FF OFF ?

At the very least, give us the possibility to mod FF in by tweaking with files...

[upsettingshorts]

TucoBenedicto wrote...
If you can use any AOE at any moment where is the fun?

'splosions.

Personally I'll probably play on Normal or Hard and then just self-restrict myself from utilizing AOE when my team is in the blast zone.  

Except cone spells.  I can believe my mage is deft enough to alter that blast enough as to not glance the hand of a teammate and therefore snap-freeze their entire body like Cone of Cold in DA:O.

Modifié par Upsettingshorts, 18 décembre 2010 - 12:12 .

[FedericoV]

TucoBenedicto wrote...

FedericoV wrote...
 FF reduces the tactical and cooperative use of the powers of your party because AOE powers become too situational

Are you kidding? That's exactly the best part about FF, it forces the player to think about how he places his party, when to use a spell, etc.
If you can use any AOE at any moment where is the fun?

I'm not kidding. I've played many games with friendly fire and the point is not to place your spells carefully but to activate the right protections for the member of your party through scrolls, spells, items, potions and whatnot (otherwise you're not playing smart and just penalizing yourself for the sake of it).

My point is: what is the need of FF if the only result is to add a pletora of "protection from x" items in the game?

"Oh I cannot use a Fireball otherwise I will toast my tank".
"Wait, let's give him the ring of fire protection, the sword of fire, the girlde of friendly fire and let's even use a protection from fire spell before the batte so he is immune to that kind of damage".
That's the tactical depth of FF in most party based games I've played.

In DA:O the sytem was even less interesting because you have not a real buffer/debuffer/healer class, and most of those things are solved with inventory management. 

Modifié par FedericoV, 18 décembre 2010 - 12:25 .

[Vaeliorin]

Amioran wrote...

Sylvius the Mad wrote...
but the toggle isn't for everyone.  The toggle is only for those players who want to fiddle with that particular aspect of the game's design.

Irrelevant. If you include an option it must work for everyone, it cannot be a specific thing for a specific audience. It must work for everybody and in this case, as I already explained, it isn't possible.

Simply you cannot do a thing for a specific audience in a game open to everybody, it makes no sense logically.

That's a terrible argument.  With that logic, you should also remove all the advanced graphics options, because they don't work for everyone.  Just have a slider with poor/mediocre/good/great.  And heaven forbid that your operating system should have advanced user options, and maybe even a command prompt (where you can do all kinds of damage to your installation, and there's nothing to stop you!)

At some point, you have to stop trying to protect people from their own stupidity.  If someone were to turn on a friendly fire toggle and find it made the game too hard, it's not like they couldn't go back and turn it off (or turn down the overall difficulty to compensate.)  It's not a crime to give people options, and there's no reason that every option has to work for everyone (do the different difficulty options work for everyone?  Aren't Nightmare and Easy specific things for a specific audience?)

Unless a particular option breaks the game in a way that can't be easily fixed at any point in a playthrough (if, for example, you had to pick a particular difficulty or whether or not friendly fire was on/off when you started the game and couldn't change it thereafter), there's no reason not to give options that are reasonable to provide.

[TucoBenedicto]

Vaeliorin wrote...

That's a terrible argument.  With that logic, you should also remove all the advanced graphics options, because they don't work for everyone.

Pretty much like any argument he usually makes, I would say.

At some point, you have to stop trying to protect people from their own stupidity. If someone were to turn on a friendly fire toggle and find it made the game too hard, it's not like they couldn't go back and turn it off

I absolutely agree, I cound't have said it better (which is not very surprising, I guess, considering that I'm not an english speaker).

Modifié par TucoBenedicto, 18 décembre 2010 - 01:00 .

[Amioran]

TucoBenedicto wrote...
Ironically enough, it's what are you saying which doesn't make any sense.
You argued about giving people an option to play an entirely different gamestyle, and yet you are speaking as if FF was part of the core balancing of the difficulty level.

In fact FF is a CORE balancing aspect of the difficulty level. What this have to do with playing "an entirely different gamestyle" is really beyond me. "Gameplay style" is not the only thing changed by removing/adding FF indipendently. Difficulty is much more fundamental and yet you seem to don't understand why that's so. I'm becoming tired of talking of this since you seem to don't understand either simple logic.

TucoBenedicto wrote...
What I'm suggesting about FF  ("balance ANY difficulty level around FF turned on, then give people the chance to turn it off if they don't like it or it's too much challenging") gives to the players all the freedom you're advocating; and what you are suggesting about FF ("lock friendly fire on/off just to some specific difficulty setting") is preventing players to have this freedom, cause force anyone who wants to play meaningfull tactical battles to handle even monsters harder to kill etc.

Giving freedom doesn't equal being feasible in a game that should be so for everyone. If that freedom can break balance for another individual then it cannot be done. A toggle for FF will destroy balance since you change a core dynamic of the gameplay from the root. It is very simple to understand. Why don't you try yourself doing a mod for DAO that give the option to remove FF from nightmare difficulty and try to see how it is difficult to balance the same with the vanilla one? And that would only mean balancing *a* difficulty, now expand the same to other levels, as hard and normal. Good luck.

As David says these type of parameters are better handled by changing .ini files, since in this case the audience is restricted and not open for everybody. Without open support you know what you are about to face, either with consequences on broking gameplay balance. On the other hand if you include an option open to *everyone* (again, try to comprehend the word, it doesn't mean just you and those who think like you) then it must be supported and not potentially broke balance between difficulty levels etc.

TucoBenedicto wrote...
So no, it's not the same thing at all, and you clearly can say it without shame cause you are a totally clueless incompetent which try desperately to act as an  experienced designer.

Maybe because I worked with Simulmondo back in the days when Amiga games where produced? You don't know me, so don't pretend you do. Usually when I talk about a thing it is because I know of what I speak about, or I don't; my auto-criticism is too strong to accept to being ashamed just because I was too idiot to just shut up instead of trying to argue something I've no clue on.

Then I never said it's the same thing, I'm just trying to make you understand that you don't comprehend the difficulty of doing what you ask. In theory it's easy, in practice it's not. You just look at what you like to look and discard all the rest. Sadly, this is not how things work in practice.

TucoBenedicto wrote...ì
Also, what are you saying doesn't make any sense at all. How can a player even dare to ask for a more challenging game when he turns off the MAIN mechanic which give depth to a party based battle system, making the accurate use of area effects useless, and allowing mindless spam?
It can just be a clueless moron.

So you think all players that want a gameplay without FF are just not caring about depth? This can be your point of view but it's a too much simplicistic one at that. Depth is not given only by context but by many, many other factors. Either if you remove FF from the equation you can create a challenging and depth gameplay. The fact that you cannot either grasp this already speaks volumes of your knowledge on the matter.

Think what you like, if you add a toggle in a game the same should work for everyone, and not everybody can think as you or like what you like. They can have different skills, different approaches, different expectations. Yet they deserve to have a balanced gameplay suited to the difficulty they are playing, or they will complain, rightly so. Since a developer must consider these things, and since FF change core dynamics on the root in unpredictable way (since the parameters tied to it are too many), the two things are mutually exclusive. If you don't get it then this discussion is really hopeless, and I have no time to waste with idiocies.

Modifié par Amioran, 18 décembre 2010 - 01:47 .

[Amioran]

Vaeliorin wrote...
That's a terrible argument.  With that logic, you should also remove all the advanced graphics options, because they don't work for everyone.  Just have a slider with poor/mediocre/good/great.  And heaven forbid that your operating system should have advanced user options, and maybe even a command prompt (where you can do all kinds of damage to your installation, and there's nothing to stop you!)

They are not the same thing, do you get it? Altering advanced graphic options or similar doesn't change gameplay balance against a suitable range, and above all doesn't *break* anything (in fact if it did, either for one person, no matter how "advanced", that person would complain, and rightly so). Have you ever read a word of what I said, for god's sake?

Sometimes I'm really astonished at how people cannot either grasp basic concepts. You can continue comparing lemons to oranges thinking they are the same thing just because they are grapefruits, but would they really be the same thing?

Vaeliorin wrote...
At some point, you have to stop trying to protect people from their own stupidity.  If someone were to turn on a friendly fire toggle and find it made the game too hard, it's not like they couldn't go back and turn it off (or turn down the overall difficulty to compensate.)  It's not a crime to give people options, and there's no reason that every option has to work for everyone (do the different difficulty options work for everyone?  Aren't Nightmare and Easy specific things for a specific audience?)

Protecting people have NOTHING to do with what I'm talking about. If you include a toggle then you must be sure that the same can work within the parameters it changes. In this case a toggle for FF will break gameplay balance for the reasons I've already explained, and what's worse is that it is almost impossible to balance a FF toggle indipendently from difficulty . There's a reason it has never been done before for a party rpg (either after all these years and all the advances in code, etc.), or do you really think all the devs so stupid as to never have thought of giving this type of freedom to players? Really, just this fact alone should ring a bell and should make you ponder a little more (apart all I've said before). 

Reverting back, then, doesn't change the fact that if one use it then it must work within the range of the parameters it changes, or better to just not doing it. Using your same example before would you accept a toggle for helmets that broke faces mesh for you just because then you can revert it back?

If you include an OPEN, SUPPORTED option that that option must work for everybody using the same. The thing is different for something more specific as an .ini change, for example.

Modifié par Amioran, 18 décembre 2010 - 01:39 .