Install Steam
login
|
language
简体中文 (Simplified Chinese)
繁體中文 (Traditional Chinese)
日本語 (Japanese)
한국어 (Korean)
ไทย (Thai)
Български (Bulgarian)
Čeština (Czech)
Dansk (Danish)
Deutsch (German)
Español - España (Spanish - Spain)
Español - Latinoamérica (Spanish - Latin America)
Ελληνικά (Greek)
Français (French)
Italiano (Italian)
Bahasa Indonesia (Indonesian)
Magyar (Hungarian)
Nederlands (Dutch)
Norsk (Norwegian)
Polski (Polish)
Português (Portuguese - Portugal)
Português - Brasil (Portuguese - Brazil)
Română (Romanian)
Русский (Russian)
Suomi (Finnish)
Svenska (Swedish)
Türkçe (Turkish)
Tiếng Việt (Vietnamese)
Українська (Ukrainian)
Report a translation problem
Discussions Rules and Guidelines
Report this post
So the "trick" in UFO:EU/Xcom was that yes, you did get a completely accurate percentage point calculator for the shots. But the calculator didn't necessarily account for all elements on the screen. There are not many elements that can obstruct you, and you do rely on looking at the percentage calculator, of course.
But because you know the indicator is lying to you sometimes, you start trying to look at the game world on the screen, instead of just looking at the math-calculator. In the same way, because you are gaming for a "best possible odds", you're reliant on trying to minimize risk for unknown factors.
So not having a perfect indicator of where the shot is going, and not knowing for certain what is going to happen, this is actually central to making the player immersed in the game-world, instead of just immersed in maximizing the number on the side of the reticle.
Have been a while since I've been playing xcom games now, not in the least because of how simplistic the new xcoms were. But turns out Gollop has been involved in another game, called Phoenix Point. That game also has this trick - you use the indicator, but it's not a pure math-calculation, it's an estimate.
So although you can't escape the fact that it's a game, and all the calculations are random and predictable and so on - not making them completely transparent to the player is kind of where the immersion is.
tl;dr: Because you're not playing from the point of view of the game, you're playing from the point of view of the soliders.
The background calculation abstractions for the alien AI is similar, right? What we are supposed to see as a player is what you would see in the HQ from the point of view of the commander or something of that sort.
It's similar to the difference between having a counter that spawns an "incident" with increasingly higher and higher probability, and between having a bunch of simulations going on with activity happening off screen/outside detection range, that you then have a chance of seeing based on your coverage.
Etc., etc.
...Also, of course, there's the weird theory that just because you're not required to make guesses about the chances of the shot you're about to take, you don't need to look at the environment to figure out what shot you should take. Like, the most normal Xenonauts gunfight scenario IME is 'where can I stand to not be blocked by that cover and still be in or able to reach cover after shooting?'
You get immersion from winning fights by standing in a spot that just happens to negate the stiff cover pose, or by making a called shot to a raised arm at just the right part of an idle animation?
I played a good bit of Phoenix Point....
It does occur to me that your request would surely be incredibly simple to implement as a check box option like with ironman when you start the game up? One tick and it hides the obstacle effect from for that run. That way everyone should be happy, no?
Not a fan of Phoenix Point either, promised much but delivered little and the whole gameplay flow of it never won me over and I wasn't one of the ones burned by the early controversy with it so that didn't sour me going into it. It was nearly a great game but became a mediocre wannabe instead, a pale pretender to the throne. All the more tragic because of the name attached but then we probably wouldn't even talk about it if it didn't have that name. If he had put out something that could put to shame the old gems like Jagged Alliance 2 then I'd have been over the moon. Sad that in all those years even the big names keep struggling to reach those heights once more. I suspect in reality it is because it wasn't just those few names that should get all the credit but maybe others on the team at the very least helped guide them and played a valuable but less noticeable role. I think with a better team and plan it could have gone somewhere good. The early material gave a lot of promise.
But I don't think you understand what I'm describing, or realize that this was one of the most important elements that made the original games interesting, and scary to the point of making me paranoid in the game about what the aliens are planning next.
The problem is that if you put the player in the game while seeing all the information for the background calculations in the engine - you are not going to look at the game playing out and react to that. You are going to look at the numbers, and make choices based on that.
In the same way, if you design the game to mechanically work slavisly around the same calculations that the player is seeing, you are now choosing cover based on the blip on whether it's high or low, not how it looks strategically in that half-imaginary game-world. You are shooting when the indicator - for some completely immaterial game-world reason - says you have a good hit-chance, because you know the calculation is correct. You choose cover, not on how the line of sight will look in the game, but on how high of a percentage point bonus cover you have.
What you should be doing is instead to have a solider-view that builds the command view of the world, that then has another layer of calculation that you don't see: the soliders have hit-calculation instruments, they can spot aliens and have line of sight, etc. But what you get from hit-calculation should not be the actual hit-calculation, but an estimate. The machine and the instruments may be perfect - but they shouldn't have all the data.
So the hit-indicator should lie to you in a predictable fashion, just like instruments do in real life. They account for some of the obstacles, but they are just a tool, to help you make strategically sound choices.
That's the difference between playing rng and playing an immersive strategy game. And I don't mind telling you that it's kind of disturbing to see the amount of people - even at Firaxis - who don't seem to understand that. When a games-media outlet, loudly supported by commenters all round, and extremely loud people in betas and focus-groups -- praise games that basically only appeal to someone who likes counting trains in a train-station, and making sure they are on time... I don't know. I don't understand that.
I mean, you do understand what I'm describing here, surely? The difference between sailing a sailship and holding the wind-indicator perfectly in the middle of the guidance-dot for maximum speed? Between skillfully shooting a weapon down range, or mechanically holding the crosshairs in the right alignment and pulling the firing device? Between playing a carefully crafted dnd-campaign by a world-class GM, and throwing dice a lot?
You understand what I'm getting at here, surely.
Retroquark... I do totally understand where you are coming from on this, the title on your Post however is quite harsh... just a thought :)
What you say regarding the "Colour by numbers" approach to a lot of games now, is completely right, it's not just games .. it's everything now .. movies/TV ..everything is telegraphed due to a very lazy audience,like the whole "Yellow brick road" showing player where every objective/location in rather than then working it out for themselves and guides and spoiler filled Youtube videos hand holding the whole way.
But...each to their own, but I'd rather have the choice rather than it forced on me!
The aiming on this game and many others looks like something a T-800 might see, angle of attack, hit percentage,intervening cover/objects lowering the chance of a hit!
I used to love it when I played a game (like UFO Enemy Unknown/X-com) and had no idea what to expect from the Aliens/their technology or their progression/increase in Hostilities or Unit upgrades etc.
The aiming was again the same, I could not truly know what to expect from my shots beyond the TU put into the shot say as a Snap shot/Normal or Aimed the the fact the I thought , this is a good position to shoot from and my cover looks good, and then landing the hail Mary shot and being pleased with myself or panicking when things went wrong.
Also follow up shots on a target that is not moving(non-reaction fire) should increase in a hit possibility not have the roll reset each shot, unless the soldier is stupid or has the short term memory of a gold fish, this is just wrong,
Many of the old games had amazingly well thought out Manuals too, they had loads of information but the rest was up to the player to investigate and a lot of the time, be rewarded for creative thinking, and the developers hid many such surprises, good and bad for players who went the extra mile!
I remember making my own maps, my own Excel charts and stat sheets and friends sharing them.
The original X-Com terrified me and I think that's how it truly would be if Aliens were indeed invading and the sheer horror of not knowing and being outclassed and outgunned and in the dark so to speak and only slowly but surely gaining a footing but never truly getting ahead of your Enemy.
A bit like the paranoia in the John Carpenter film The Thing and the Original film Alien... truly terrifying stuff when you imagine yourself in that situation trying to do the best you can to not only win but mainly just to survive!
That said, I do still appreciate what the developers are trying to accomplish with Xenonauts 2, perhaps an option to turn off the advanced targeting feedback and perhaps tweak the game so that follow up shots matter and make the game loose some of the granularity on harder setting!
I imagine, given time and with community feedback/patches and MODS it will all come together!
I don't think I've seen a game yet where playing command but getting your real information from first-person trooper perspective was a good idea.
As for your lying hit calculator, what is the point, exactly? The only possible benefit of having the calculator lie to you is so that you can be better at its job than it is. And that, as I'll get to after the next quote block, is actually really quite bad.
Maybe, but if I do it's half ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ and half something I think is actually bad. Actually, they're both the same thing perhaps, looked at different ways.
The ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ way: Computer games don't do what you're asking for, pretty much ever, and largely can't. Obscuring the mechanic doesn't change the mechanic, it just creates a petty memorization exercise for the more serious players and frustration for the players not willing to look up what it is they need to memorize. (Also, games played with mouse+keyboard or controller simply can't replicate the real physical/tactile tasks you're referencing a lot.)
It's possible to count squares and measure geometries to figure out your chance to hit manually. But doing so would be wildly unfun for nearly everyone, and doing so but failing because you don't know the exact hitboxes of cover objects or whatever would be even less fun.
The bad way: This is an isometric turn based tactics/strategy game. There's no basic reason it needs to try to subject players to physical execution challenges or visual analysis problems. Why create accessibility barriers that are orthogonal to the actual core play?
For example, and this is not unique to me, there will be a point in UFO where you realize that these sectoids that have been terrorizing you in the early game are actually really weak. And that not only do they have limited visual range and don't go hunting for you very often - they are really scared and panic easily. And figuring out that is going to take you a few attempts.
So how can I say, then, that the "AI" is not successful in the original xcom? When it successfully fools a large amount of players into genuinely being terrorized?
In the same way: when there are limited amounts of choices humans can make for their soldiers in the game -- what is it that distinguishes our behaviour from a routine with a couple of optional choices? From our point of view, there's a lot. We make plans, we predict, we look ahead, we look for patterns, etc. But from the perspective of the game-board, the routine doesn't have to be that clever to appear slightly sentient for a little while.
So you don't aggressively display that the AI is just an AI to the player. You let it appear to have behaviour that has weaknesses, that shows varying goals, that makes it panic, etc. Or, the goal isn't to make a sentient AI, it's to make it appear a little bit sentient.
That's what makes the overworld events in UFO so weird as well. The AI isn't very smart. But the world has events that you don't see, and the aliens act within some sort of reasonable constraints. They have missions, they conduct the missions, and you can figure that out - that's a large part of the game, to figure out the rules that the aliens are playing by. There are some really clever designs programmed in here, that has much more involved logic than just launching retaliations against cities for successful xcom missions. But most importantly, the events that happen still happens when you don't see them. That's really the secret to it, that you're not just getting a percentage-chance for an incursion - the AI calculates (very straight forward) where your weaknesses lie, and then go there.
And like I said, I'm not even remotely the only person in the world who got completely fooled by the AI here. I know people who completed the game on Superhuman (by spam-saving, admittedly) without realizing that the scout ships they shot down consistently alerted the aliens to where your bases would be. From the game's point of view, the commander took a huge risk and managed to shoot down one out of two battleships launched against the base, and stocked up on etherium. But from their point of view, they were just defending themselves for dear life during the first half of the game, before then basically acing everything afterwards if they survived and trained their soldiers well enough.
I'm not asking for that. The obstacles are the obstacles you see. But the hit-indicator, range, cover, etc. doesn't need to be directly telegraphed to you as objective game-world fact.
It's the difference between going like this a) It is a difficult shot [yeah, throw the dice - looks at them], but you succeed spectacularly and put the arrow in the troll's eye! It screams so it's ancestors in the mountains rumble in their slumber! [throw the damage-dice. Ooh, ok] It is horribly wounded, but it charges you in a death-defying rage!
And b) It's a troll. Throw the dice. You need 16 to hit. Ok, I see you have this class, this weapon, and the table here, ok, magic blessing, shield of torpor, vapor of cheetos, battle priest's three shillelagh attacks of yore with lore bonus over five, so the interval over the derivative of pi/alphax squared times temporal delta. That means your 15 to hit is a good hit. Now throw the damage-dice - that is three 1d6 + sneak attack plus free attack and the opportunity action saved up from this wayfinder update and also the racial blessing of wokeness over the base weapon damage - that will be a minimum of 17 damage up to a total of over 9000. Well played! And the result is 8569, which, being a percentage-wise probability, I had calculated on beforehand will reduce the troll to what is about half of it's total hit-points, to make sure that you will always need to hit the troll four times on an average hit. Goodness, you are doing so well, throw the dice again!
No one wants to play with a dm like that. And I don't want the game to telegraph the inner workings outside of the console, perhaps, during a beta-test. What I want to do is play the game as if the game-world is somewhat real, and then have a sufficiently clever design behind it that will end up with a satisfying narrative from the commander's point of view.
And this is all about narrative, and intermingling technical game-design with abstract story-telling. I.e., I'm not suggesting that we should need to have total immersion VR in order to have a semi-believable appearance of firing a gun. And that anything less than that is a waste of time. It's the opposite of that. You just need to make sure that semi-realistic elements can be covered by the logic in the game world. So if you want to aim further than the immediate area in front of you - perhaps you need to reposition your feet, and drag the weapon a bit extra? Perhaps you can turn much easier when not having the weapon attached to your nose? There are tons of these subtleties here that can be added (and lots of game-designers do, to great effect - most of the time no one even notices anything of the game-mechanical programming, because they are just looking at the game and believing what they see).
But then you have the dark side: the people who want the utterly unrealistic and "pure" game-design in the game to not just be visible to the player - no, it has to be part of the game-design. I used to call this the Molyneux-barrier, jokingly. That it's what Molyneux tried to get past, and clearly tried very hard at, but never could manage.
But what I'm seeing more and more is that designers, random gamers, publishers, focus-groups, and very loud people on the forums everywhere - keep arguing that immersion is not about imagining yourself into a virtual story. But instead that immersion is mastering the game's mechanics, grinding to a point where you can overcome the right amount of damage, and then instinctively trigger the right button-sequences -- after having played Elden Ring for so long you now speak in Elden tones and say you want to torch the World Tree if someone asks how you're doing.
This is not immersion in the game-world, it's obsessing over details and getting distracted by them to avoid immersion in the story-telling altogether. And I really don't understand the appeal of this.
For example, I had a sort of feud at Sony with a group of people who wanted damage numbers to pop up over the heads of soldiers in MGS. Kojima had put it in there in one of the slightly more serious games as a sort of homage, and playing into the whole gamification of the universe, and so on. But these guys wanted it to be part of all the games now, because it was ...part of the game-universe now, or something..? And so there wasn't just a bar or something to show you you're doing something, but a non-game world type of extra layer that these people wanted on top of the whole thing. In the end, I think they chose to put in some large numbers on the big explosions, and then let it just be very subtle when you are in combat with other soldiers. But the arguments... god the arguments.. about how this /should/ and /must/ be. How crucial it was that these games must have a hit-indicator and a number -- otherwise, how would you know you hit the soldiers! And there's game-mechanical reasons to have it, so you can see you're making damage and that you're hitting. Some people might just be happy with a small red blip on the crosshairs or something, but not these guys! They needed big numbers to pop up over the heads of the soldiers in a very careful and 3d world consistent, and utterly non-ironic game font, to be happy.
I don't get it. I really don't. I never have. I'm old as ♥♥♥♥ now, I don't get it. When I played xcom when I was a kid and got scared to death -- I didn't get it then, either. I didn't like games like that.
That people do, that's fine. I'll judge you and move on, but it's fine. But again: why do you genuinely not see that the original game that spawned this endless ream of remakes -- was not a game that transparently showed you everything that went on, down to the perfect hit-calculation and the path of the chrysalis, the number of movement points it has, and the ultimate range of it on the end of the turn?
I mean, I played some of these games, and I literally encounter a rude, deflating spoiler that blasts immersion out of the whole thing in an instant. And it's designed to be like that. What in the world is that? It's like watching Star Wars and seeing a rising counter of stormtrooper deaths, that keeps going until it reaches a pre-established number, with the same scene looping and looping until it reaches that -- so the movie can continue to the next stage? No one would watch that movie! Even George Lucas would understand that would be a bad idea!