Yeah, I’m loving AC6, but the design decisions that make the game so much better on the KB+M are actually kind of baffling from a console-first company like FROM. I played the hell out of the AC1 games back in the day and while that series’ aiming controls were a joke, the fact that you cycled through your ranged weapons instead of having all 3 accessible at the same time, combined with the fact that the game used only one button for “boost” which covered both jumping and dodging, meant the weapons and boosting actions fit nicely on the 4 face-buttons. Now, AC1’s weapons were very flawed in that there was often minimal reason to cycle through them - they didn’t generally have cooldowns or meters so putting a weapon away wasn’t super useful. Best strategy was a 1-weapon mech, generally. But still, the simpler controls were a lot more pleasant on a game controller.
And author is quite right about how rotation rate has grossly changed the game’s strategy and feel. For example, if somebody got behind you in old AC, the strategy was to get to cover while you ponderously rotate, or to burn energy like a fiend boosting backwards to get them into your cone of fire.
Not that I dislike AC6 - I love the game - but I hope this renewed interest in the AC series will lead us to a simplified spin-off or copycat 3rd-party game that properly fits onto the controller.
I just think there was some good gameplay lost.
But yeah, I’m playing it on KB+mouse, and I’m a PC gamer primarily.
This kind of stuff was what turned me off the Armored Core “Spiritual Successor” game Daemon X Machina. So many fights involved scripted foes where it wasn’t obvious they were scripted as undefeatable until I’d burned out half my ammunition.
Well the Curtis rifle is hardly forgotten-about, it’s just that high ROF weapons that can charge are super tedious to wield in this dual-wielding meta.
Oh of course. I don’t actually blame AMD for those kinds of bugs. But it’s the reality as a user, at least in my experience… but it’s been like stupid long time since I’ve used a machine with an AMD card.
Ugh. A part of me wants to give AMD a chance for my next upgrade and push back against Nvidia’s near-monopoly of GPUs but I really don’t want to deal with how everything kinda-sorta works on Radeons.
Honestly, realism justifications for encumbrance outside of survival-type games where basic biological needs are the core gameplay loop have always been silly to me… but the latter one about wheels of cheese rings true.
To me the argument is “what does optimal play look like”? Without encumbrance, there’s no reason not to pick up every wheel of cheese, so optimal play is to pick up every wheel of cheese, which is tedious and dumb. But with encumbrance, every wheel of cheese becomes a tedious decision, and completionist-optimal play is to burn endless time ferrying stuff to the shops or storage or whatever. But as you said, making every wheel of cheese not something you can pick up breaks immersion.
So what’s the compromise that actually makes sense for the “wheel of cheese” problem? A realistic setting is cluttered with “slightly-useful” items. Don’t put so many “slightly-useful” items outside of settings with NPCs that will have realistic reactions to you stealing their stuff? But coding those realistic reactions (“uh, you’re The Savior, I guess you can steal all my food… a bit… okay that tears it call the guards!”) would be some more dev-work in these already-bloated projects.
But the problem still exists in hostile locales. A lived-in enemy camp is going to have store-rooms of “slightly useful” stuff. If the hero stops to raid the larder while massacring nameless Stormtroopers, is that a problem? I can see the immersion argument that “well, if you can, you probably should since you might need it and that breaks immersion” and therefore that justifies the encumbrance idea, but I also see Steph Sterling’s argument “this is just a game and I wanna!” And I have trouble defending realism in these games about butchering your way across the landscape without ever stopping to poop.
I don’t mind the idea of an encumbrance system where it makes sense. Like, the idea of being able to carry whatever you want into combat feels obviously wrong to me, since you can just overwhelm any challenge with endless inventory - like you just grinded an endless supply of healing potions and smart-bombs. Encumbrance caused by your combat-relevant inventory creates the idea of a “build” of your character, it creates interesting decisions about which combat gear you’re going to keep available to roll with (or non-combat gear if your game’s core loop isn’t combat-driven).
Although I do see the argument that it shouldn’t be coupled to a weapon-durability system. I like weapon-durability as a way to make players fully explore all of the gear available instead of just getting “The Good One” and then never ever switching and making the optimal strategy super boring (yes, Steph Sterling, I’m That Guy) but it means working on the “build” of your character is constant fiddling and decision fatigue.
Either way, all that falls apart when it’s stuff you’re only carrying for saleable loot or for crafting materials. Unless you have an interesting and fun gameplay mechanic to provide supply-lines, that’s just adding tedium for the sake of realism. Yes, it’s not realistic that you can carry unlimited bricks, but taking that away doesn’t add anything interesting to the game, it just adds tedium.
I’m curious, can a standard Blu-ray drive on a PC rip PS3 games? Or do you need special hardware? I was pleasantly surprised how easy it was to rip PS1 games.
Battlezone '98: One of the first notable RTS/FPS hybrids. You drive hovertanks and you build bases and you command other tanks. Set in a secret live war on the Moon, Mars, and Venus between the USSR and the USA during the cold war.
If you’re trying to do it legally, you can easily to rip your own ps1 games with a drive bay. Haven’t tried it on PS2 or ps3 games. And ps1 emulation runs amazing on phones and raspberry pis.
Buggywhip salesman demands accomodation from the horseless carriage industry.
Yes, I’m upset at the licenseification of the gaming industry as much as the next guy but that died long before physical media did. As long as a game can die without its first-party servers, games are leased and not owned.