03.22.08
Follow the Rules
I have a problem with turn-based combat. It usually relies entirely on its general ruleset and tries to avoid special case rules. This can create some really counterintuitive situations - why is it that as a well trained and superbly experienced Soviet commando, I can’t seem to kill a technician by shooting him in the back of the head at point blank range? Let’s ignore for a moment the interesting fact that my chance to hit him at point blank is 87%. Why when I do hit him (in the head) does he not die? Why is my best chance at killing him to shoot him twice in the torso?
I thought we’d moved away from games where abstract rulesets meant to be understood by players governed everything and towards games where actions and reactions more closely resemble what you’d expect to see in the real world. I guess it’s a matter of preference, there are certainly merits to having an exposed rule system that the player can understand and act on, but I think you’ll need a lot of special cases. Hammer & Sickle is very good for a turn-based game, but if I sneak up on an enemy who is completely oblivious to my presence and shoot him in the back of the head, I don’t want a “very high probability” of a “critical hit”. I want a definite one-hit kill.
Milton said,
March 23, 2008 at 00:35
That urge is probably Crysis after effect
I understand what you feel when playing these games (I guess) but wouldn’t one-hit kill kind of make the whole turn-based gameplay useless?
btw: what did you thought of massive effect gameplay? isn’t it a hybrid of turn-based/realtime? (I haven’t played it) do you think more turn-based games should take a hybrid approach?
Jonas said,
March 23, 2008 at 01:11
Not just Crysis, most FPS games these days have one-hit kill headshots because it just makes sense. What annoys me is that H&S gives me the option of sneaking up on an enemy and then backstabbing him but I can’t be certain of actually killing them this way, which sort of renders the whole thing a bit useless - if they see me before I’m there, then sure of course I should fail, but if I can get up to them without alerting them to my presence (which I can), I should get to kill them in one shot, anything else is just stupid. Especially because if I don’t kill them, they’ll turn around and make me into Swiss cheese with a full-auto burst.
Anyway, in spite of certain flaws, it’s a good game and I’ll post more on it later.
Mass Effect isn’t really hybrid, I wouldn’t call it that. It pauses when you call up the ability menu so you have time to tell your allies who to target and which weapons to use and so you have time to use your abilities on the enemies, but it’s only paused as long as that GUI is visible, so I wouldn’t call it outright hybrid, but it’s true that it has… a touch of turn-based combat
And generally I don’t think more games should do one thing or the other, I tend to enjoy real-time games more than turn-based games, but that’s mainly because TB games tend to be very complicated and ruthless. H&S has excellent difficulty options so you can almost entirely prevent the game from arbitrarily wiping you out at regular intervals. What I want is for games to do what they do really well, no matter if it’s real-time, turn-based, or something in between.
Milton said,
March 23, 2008 at 02:23
You can sneak and then you have to take attack turns?! Now I can see your frustration. It really is dumb.
I know that more Fps have one-hit kill headshots, deus ex had it and it’s pretty old. I mentioned Crysis because you posted some entries about it and you appeared to have liked it, to the point where you almost made a fan fic. So you can say that the whole Crysis thing was an attemp to make a joke (it was sort of an ironic remark)
Finally, to answer a previous question I first heard of you through TNM and then because of your blog links I heard of Rasmus Boserup’s blog. (why not make mention of other links? because his blog is for me, as a programer, the most interesting and of course he has some very interesting ideas in game development)
Jonas said,
March 23, 2008 at 02:41
Aye Rasmus has some good ideas. He’s about to launch a new blog soon, so keep an eye out for that.
And you’re right, I did enjoy Crysis, but it’s not that I like headshots because of Crysis of course, it’s that I enjoy Crysis because of headshots (and other things, clearly). The reason I love stealth games so much is that I enjoy building up to a stealth kill - all the planning, the careful movement and timing all building up to the final coup de grace. The more rewarding that kill, the better.
Dark Messiah did it best with the fantastically brutal dagger animation, the Splinter Cell games tend to do a great job of it as well with all the options you get for the takedown, but any old one-hit kill would do. Relying on a dice roll is… unimpressive. A bit of a let-down, really.
Casper said,
March 23, 2008 at 08:39
Because some developers doesn’t like sneaky stealth bastards like you, they want real men to play the game, men like Marcus Fenix.
But if there is a stealth ability then it doesn’t make sense that you can’t sneak up behind someone and shoot them in the back.
Jonas said,
March 23, 2008 at 18:40
Hahah very funny
But yeah the thing is they explicitly mention a greater chance to roll critical if your enemy is unaware and they teach you to sneak past enemies by sticking to the darkness and use knives so all the makings of fine stealth gameplay is there. But backstabbing? Depends on a random chance. It’s terrible.
Shacker said,
March 24, 2008 at 00:59
I don’t mind probabilities being an integral part of turn based games, I think they’re fundamentally arbitrary based on the fact that they’re not real time so even when the ruleset has a disparity between the consequence of an action and what intuitively should probably happen (like the backstabbing thing) I don’t particularly mind. I find it’s more about how much I enjoy the ruleset.
Jonas said,
March 24, 2008 at 03:02
So you wouldn’t get annoyed if the game offered you the ability to sneak up on people and then completely failed to give you any advantage from doing so in many situations…?
Shacker said,
March 24, 2008 at 18:42
I thought you said it gave you a higher crit chance and stuff?
Jonas said,
March 24, 2008 at 19:22
Oh eh. Yeah it does.
I guess you’re right, it’s mostly about how much you enjoy the ruleset. I enjoy H&S’ ruleset so far, but the lousy sneak attacks gets a big black mark in my book.