I want to see puzzles that are implemented using the physics engine. And I don’t mean “toss the axe in the proper arc to trigger the gate” physics. I mean “stack the bricks on one end of the seesaw to balance it long enough to make the jump to the next platform”. Or “use the blue barrels’ buoyancy to raise the platform out of the water”.
Yesss and more destruction physics. I miss watching cars crumple and get torn apart like in the burnout games. There was a really old ww2 dogfighting game where the plane wings could get sawn off and you’d see this smoking plane spiralling into the ground while the wing flew off in the opposite direction before the plane exploded on the ground.
Check out Wreckfest. It’s mostly basically rallycross with plenty of damage. The physics is better than in Burnout, afaik. The sequel game was just recently either released or announced.
I think those were mind blowing when I first played hl2, just because real time physics and destruction was novel, but now I think they grind the pacing to a halt. I think they just don’t work in an action shooter IMO.
My opinion is the exact opposite. Narrative games, even action shooters, need to have high action and low action parts in balance. If high action segments are excessive, it can lead to combat fatigue. If low action parts are excessive, the player gets bored and the pacing dies.
Half-Life 2 E1, the “Low Lives” chapter, has probably the most stressful combat in the game because the player has to balance so many things. Shooting the zombies attacking Gordon versus helping Alyx fight. Helping Alyx versus keeping the flashlight charged. Firearms versus explosive props. All of that in oppressive darkness. Combat fatigue sets in. The short puzzle segments, even as simple as crawling through a vent to flip a switch, are opportunities to take a breath, absorb the environment, and prepare for the next segment – especially at the end of that particular chapter, when the player escapes the zombies and has a chance to wind down.
At the same time, puzzles, by their slower nature, are excellent for delivering narrative and player training, and to let the player absorb the atmosphere. Alyx’s first encounter with the stalkers in “Undue Alarm” wouldn’t have had the same emotional impact if the player could just pop them in the head and move on.
In contrast, most of “Highway 17” is just a prolonged vehicle-based puzzle. By the time the player reaches the large railway bridge, they might be sick of driving. I know I was. It’s a relief to finally engage in some platforming and long-range combat while traversing the bridge.
So what are the narrative values of my two examples? The cinderblock seesaw in “Route Kanal” is just player training. A show, don’t tell method to let the player know that physics puzzles will be a factor. It’s also a short break after the on-foot chase, before the encounter with the hunter chopper. In “Water Hazard”, the contraptions serve a larger narrative purpose: they’re the tools of the rebels’ refugee evacuation effort. The player utilizes them like one of the refugees would have.
The best bits of the Half-Life games are the more slow parts. Just taking in the environmental storytelling, solving simple puzzles, etc. Helps to make the more action sequences feel more impactful and intense.
When I was replaying ‘HL2’ around ten years ago, I ran around the whole map looking for where I can get outside of the plot course, especially in the slower parts of the levels. This culminated in me driving the hoverboat up a three-meter-high wooden platform, falling from that platform myself, and not being able to climb up again to get the boat. After which I had to run from the attack helicopter on foot, and swim by myself later on that level.
I use about the same approach in the original ‘Deus Ex’, which I’ve been replaying recently: investigating every nook and cranny, being 100% stealthy, trying to go where the game shouldn’t allow me to be. I actually found an exit from a scripted part of a level where only one path is normally possible — though there was nothing to do outside of that part. The game also gives experience points for getting into some remote or secret places.
The Fiend's Cauldron from Kid Icarus Uprising. At the start of a stage, you have to wager currency on how high of a difficulty you want to attempt, on a sliding scale from 0.0 to 9.0. Higher difficulties cost more to play, and if you fail, you lose your bet and the difficulty drops if you choose Continue. It's an interesting system for how it forces you to check your ego and self-evaluate just how much you think you can handle.
If you want any games for switch to work as intended, without a bunch of lag or any major fiddling to get that one specific game to work, switch/2 is sadly the only way to go.
As for the deck route, absolutely depends on various things. Is she okay with piracy and will she know? Do y’all plan on using it just for switch emulation or are there other games on other consoles/Steam/other storefronts that are gonna be emulated/installed? If yes to questions like that, deck would be the way to go. More bang for your buck due to not being limited to a single games ecosystem.
Also, another thing to think about, is that there are current, IIRC, Zer0 switch 2 emulators that can do much of anything, so you’d have to emulate the switch 1 version of games on something like Ryubing Ryujinx. Do you wanna wait for a switch 2 emulator that might not be able to run that less popular title you like because they’re focusing on the big triple AAA titles? Good to keep this in mind, IMO.
The grappling hook was a common mod in the original QuakeWorld scene and was included in the official Quake II CTF game mod. I’m surprised it didn’t become a mainstay in games afterwards, it was so fun to use. Shogo: Mobile Armor Division had it built in and was one of the most fun FPS games I had ever played until cheaters took over.
Hmm so I would say go with the switch 2 mainly because you mentioned money isn’t an issue. It’s going to be purely peace of mind as you’re not going to need to do any major troubleshooting later.
Alternatively just go with the steam deck and let her use it normally and (I assume as I’ve never owned a steam deck) it should just be plug and play the same as a switch.
Coming from experience, if it was me and my mom in the same situation, I would go with the switch 2 because I know there would be less stress involved overall. I normally do the tech help requests for my parents’ pc’s and phones, and it always surprises me how they can sometimes manage to break things or get themselves into a pickle.
From my experience if you have something working then its fine. I mean if you are going to add the games and add them to the steam menu so she just needs to click on them to play. If she is not expecting to go out and find games and such which I assume she is not given she could not with the switch.
It didn’t really take off to begin with but dual screen support like Supreme Commander had with the real-time map overview on the 2nd monitor. It could be a skirmish map or live track map for a racing game, live scoreboard, player status or inventory system.
Racing sims typically support telemetry that can be used to display info for the driver or overall race info. E.g. a dashboard on a phone mounted to the wheel stand, or a realtime online display and timing. People even make devices like wind simulator or ass-shaker for immersion.
Check out SimHub for customizable widget software that supports many games.
Actually, when I played ‘OpenTTD’, i.e. the remake of ‘Transport Tycoon’, I wanted the game to broadcast telemetry of my enterprise’s economy, so I could dump it into a spreadsheet and gawk at the numbers. This indeed could’ve also been a second-monitor activity (or rather, second computer since I played on a tablet).
I wanna see games going wide again. Get me something like Sonic Adventure 2 Battle again where we got racing, going fast, a creature battler/care system, multiplayer. I miss when games were full of a wide variety of shit.
Oh I have, have probably like 4 years playtime in game for WoW. But it used to be common. Idk it feel like it used to be about fun and now everything takes itself too seriously.
Kirby Air Riders definitely feels like it keeps that spirit alive. The game could've just been City Trial and I would've paid $70 just to play City Trial, but they packed everything else in there too because they could.
The control scheme in Total Annihilation where you can que up lots of commands for units has largely been ignored by RTS game makers except in Supreme Commander and Spring/Recoil engine games such as Beyond All Reason and Zero-K. I think it is a perfect example of why the RTS genre in many respects died after hyperfocusing on making Starcraft-likes resulting in the stagnation of innovation in a genre that progressively catered more and more only to a very narrow range of brains/players who enjoyed simplistic explicit rock-paper-scissors unit relationships and endless fiddly micro.
Can you explain what you mean? I never played TA, but being able to queue commands is pretty common in RTS games. Did TA have some kind of system to further facilitate that, or was it just taken to an extreme?
In TA you could select a unit factory then issue move orders and set up patrol routes and then any units constructed by that factory would follow those orders. Also, if there was a unit executing a repeating move pattern, you could select it, hold shift and give it a new order. It would execute that order, then when done it would return to its original pattern.
To add to what the other guy said, Supreme commander allowed your units to synchronize shots, for example for the big guns on battleships, useful for punching through shields.
They also allowed you to queue orders, display them and then edit them. So you could set up one big patrol path for 100s of helis and fighters and defend your territory that way, and when you want to expand you can drag the patrol points and all of those 100s of units would automatically adjust.
Also there were heli transports with lift and drop points and you could use that to ferry units quicker than they would walk. So you could set the drop point closely behind the frontlines and advance the drop point with the front line, allowing for quicker resupply of troops.
Quite a bit more advanced than you would see in starcraft or AoE2 overall.
Well know that you have outed yourself as a cool indie dev you must eventually post some sneak previews of your game to a gaming/game development community on lemmy/the fediverse!
I was recently discussing Farcry 2 with some friends and how cool the fire spread system was - And how it essentially was never used again after that title.
In case you didn’t know, Zelda Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom have a very similar fire spread system.
When a fire breaks out on grass, it spreads like it would in real life. In FC2 you could watch a small flame spread and become an inferno. It was awesome. Games don’t have anything like that these days.
There’s plenty of better deep dives on YouTube, but basically it’s a system in Shadows of Mordor (and moreso in Shadows of War) that would take a random NPC you were fighting and were joined by (or almost killed,) and elevate them thematically. If one knocked you down there’s a chance they would pick up your sword and break it, smack talk you, and walk away. That guy, of his name was Doug, became Doug the Sword Breaker. Never time you saw him, he’d get a short introduction and a quip or two to remove you of who he was.
If you died, since you were a spirit they’d just mock that they already best you before. But if you were killing them, they might get a scene where they manage to get away to amplify the story. Or maybe you’ll just kill them. It was random and happened with random NPCs, elevating them in the enemy army.
I believe in the second one you could even mind control someone, and take out the people above them, and have a spy in the upper ranks.
Imagine an action game with some Crusader Kings plot drama happening.
Honestly I think there’s probably enough prior art to get away with using whatever you wanted from it. But a) I’m no lawyer and b) I’m not risking millions of dollars making a game.
The nemesis system patents and Namco’s loading screen mini game patent are two examples of why game mechanics and features should never be granted an exclusive patent.
Of course Namco’s patents expired in 2015 at a time when seamless load screens had become the industry standard.
Who knows what the gaming landscape will look like when people are finally able to get their hands on the nemesis system again?
I’m currently enjoying a Skyrim playthrough that uses the Nemesis mod. It doesn’t have ALL of the features that the shadow series does of course, but I’m really enjoying it!
Ooh, I started a new VR playthrough recently, without a concrete plan (well, beyond joining the Brotherhood, because Music of Life by Young Scrolls is amazing).
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