Modern Design

Not all modern games have stupidly simple level design.

Hating the retarded fanbase is not the same as hating the game. We don't hate new games because they are new, we hate them because they are shit.

"Shit until proven otherwise" is the sad state of affairs that the industry finds itself in. It used to be that you could give a new release the benefit of the doubt, but we've been burned so many times that now it's safer to believe that any new purchase is just going to be a waste of $60+.

really wish i had a ps4 to play this game

the whole lore and setting of the game is appealing to me

Please note that an excessive number of details and a certain "style" do not make a short series of rooms more complex.

Are you saying that because some people hate a game you generally like?
Because that's the only reason anybody says this.

The reason for this (beyond retarded play testers) is that modern games have to look so graphically fancy and packed with detail that making anything large and complex is pretty much a fucking nightmare.

Back when most levels were little more than a floor, a ceiling, and some walls, you could go absolutely bonkers with the design and it didn't matter. The same design with modern visual standards would take too long to make or be downright impossible.

I think FEAR was a good game to identify as the turning point. It still wanted to have fairly complex level design in there somewhere, but the need to look good caused the "logic" of the layout to struggle to stay together. That's why you end up walking through an endless series of offices and garages, it was the best theme to match what they were going for with the design, while still "making sense."

no

Its really not just Holla Forums.

A pretty general question that has a lot of different and sometimes conflicting answers. It really depends on the game. Even recent disaster Mighty No. 9 had redeeming factors (had a lot of options that some games would forego.)

Example: If I say Dead or Alive Xtreme 3 was a step in the right direction as it was just a fun relaxing game you can pick up and play and put down, you could immediately jump on me and say I want all games to be casual. If I said the new Odinsphere was a step in the right direction in terms of remakes, you may think I just want everything to be old. If I say EYE is a step in the right direction, you may just think I want bizarre niche games.

I think ultimately has a point here. When you try to make a game "the right way" it ultimately just winds up less interesting. I tend to prefer games that know exactly what they want to be over games that appeal to everyone. Its a lot like people if you think about it. If you wind up trying to please everyone, it usually doesn't end up well. If you just be the person you know you want to be, the results end up better.

Fallout 4's problem isn't its environment's layout. I will give you that. Its problem is the plot isn't compelling, everything looks the same, and the gunplay is so mundane it makes me wish I were just playing Skyrim instead. Piper being a thing probably also didn't help the game's case.

This is fixed with simple, clear landmarks. A vivid EXIT sign. A big advertisement with a smirking face on it. A radio playing a tune.

And of course good ole realistic signs. Everywhere you go there's signs above doors, maps saying where you are, arrows to toilets, arrows to exits, arrows to elevators, arrows to reception etc. Just add these in and it makes perfect sense + helps the player navigate the place immsersively,

For slower paced games, the ability to write on the map and make notes has sadly vanished from modern games. Not even the player character will automatically make notes anymore even if a place is obviously obstructed.

Also, even if you do get disorientated… so what? There's nothing wrong with getting a little bit lost and just going with whatever's in front of you. I think Doom did that a lot actually. Instead of trying to understand the map beforehand and going in strategically sometimes you just had to let your balls drop, run in to whatever was in front of you and fucking deal with it. then later on when you've dealt with any threats you could start to make sense of where you are and what you actually did in terms of the whole level's enemy placement.

My regret was Crysis 1 never getting the map variety it needed. Closed quarter urban areas would've been amazing. There were only a few indoor locations and they were all amazing last I remember.

If you'd lurk more instead of being a retard, you'd know why it's that way.

Cool blog, not vidya, reported.

Fallout 4's problem is that it's a fucking theme park and not an actual game. There's zero challenge anywhere after the first few hours and zero impetus to complete or even participate in the story so all you do is wander around to look at the various attractions and maybe even interact with them a little. Boston is fucking Disneyland.
USS Constitution
Institute
Glowing Sea
Diamond City

It's disgusting.

Correction:
Disneyland actually has interesting things going on at its attractions, has lots of varying sights to see and doesn't constantly bombard you with a neverending grime and deterioration aesthetic. I mean, come on. I get the game is supposed to be post-nuke, but the question then becomes if that is the best environment to base a big open world game on.

Whenever I think of Doom level design I remember Monster Condo.

Exploration and mining autism done right, oh so right. 2D pixel but without the shit. Beautiful, massive and with more content that probably all the AAA 8th gen console games combined. on every platform known to man. Performs well. Crossplay with mac+windows+linux or PS3+PS4+VITA. DRM free versions completely compatible to play with DRM versian via direct IP connect & dedicated server hosting tools.

Flawed for sure but kicks the every living shit out of every other modern game's attempt at 'open world'. You can truly feel like you're actually in a damn forest instead of a 2 minute continuous sprint away from leaving the forest block. Not only are you immersed in actual environments by design, there's meaningful content there too. Quests to stumble upon that may link to other quests or even the main one, all with great VA, facial animation etc. Just about the only flaws with this game are its consolitus. Dumbed down combat (but at least with superb animation), gamepad designed and shitty performance.

Say what you want, it's one of the best movie-games we've ever gotten. All the aesthetics are so true to the source material it's unreal. As a standalone game it's not that much to talk about but as an alien fan it's pretty amazing. It's also not a terrible first person horror game so its got that going for it. Biggest problem is the QTE aids and sluggish consolised movement speed.

Any game can be made fun with friends? Well any friends can be made fun with this shit if you both know a classic board game you used to enjoy. Or just one nerd teaches the rest about a game he knew about. So fucking awesome. Even just jigsaws with le memes is a laugh and a half. Insane value for money. Now lets just hope Steam Jew Workshop doesn't censor everything into oblivion. YOU WOULDN'T DOWNLOAD A JPEG OF OF A BOARD.

AAA gaming hasn't moved in the right direction for a good while now. Heck, (((they))) even realized this and decided to just rehash the games where they did go in the right direction, hence all of the remakes, reboots, and remasters we see these days, and even then you can still count on the devs to fuck something up in some way for the dumbest of reasons. People get butthurt about "le vee hivemind haets games," but the fact of the matter is that many of us used to get excited for games. We would be able to hear about upcoming releases and get excited to play them. Hell, there was even a time when we used to watch E3 without intending to mock itand see what new franchise will disappoint us next. But terrible game after terrible game after terrible game and we got jaded as hell. We are not so keen on parting with our dollars anymore since we've been burned too many times from buying SHINY NEW AAA GAME LOOKAT THE GRAFIX HOLY SHIT and getting crap instead. We started to notice why games started being so shit. All of the dumbed down mechanics to appeal to the most retarded common denominator, the steadily declining level design quality, the overuse of cutscenes and QTE to the point where we might as well be watching a fucking movie, the constant push towards multiplayer and MUH ESPORTS, the fact that optimization has been tossed so low on the priority list that your typical AAA shootem garbage is a 65 fucking GB download plus 15 GB day one patch and a game with early-PS3 tier graphics is somehow more system intensive than fucking 3 instances of Crysis 3 running simultaneously. Then we saw the developers resorting to all of the downright Jewish business practices we all know and hate like preorder bonuses/exclusives, Pay2Win, microtransactions out the ass, cutting content to sell to us later, On-Disk DLC, always online, etc. Then came GamerGate and Kikestarter/Crowdfunding and we saw the true colors of a lot of the developers we used to love and respect. SJWs, greedy kikes, incompetent morons, incestuous cliques of pretentious indiefags with egos that would make Narcissus look like a self-loathing /r9k/ browser by comparison, and an entire industry comprised of people who have nothing but contempt for the very people who made them who they are now.

So if "le v hivmeind" seems jaded to you, yes. "They" fucking are. And unless games start becoming great again, "they" always will be. Fuck your "it's ok", fuck your "it's kind of good", and especially fuck your "it's not as bad as we thought it was going to be." Until games start making us say "HOLY SHIT THIS IS FUCKING GREAT", "THIS SHIT IS FUCKING FUN," and "SEQUEL WHEN" again, AAA games can fuck off right back into the marketing committee board room they came from.

When people complain about the hivemind on Holla Forums, they're complaining about the kneejerk reactionary nostalgia fueled stupidity that goes on around here.

The part of Holla Forums that forgot that back in the day 90% of the games being made were shit and only a handful of games were truly great.
The part of Holla Forums that forgot that back in the day many games, EVEN games that are considred masterpieces today, came out in such a buggy state that they were literally unplayable, and back then patching games wasn't as common or easy as it is today, so a broken game often would be broken for a long period of time before being fixed, IF it was ever fixed.
The part of Holla Forums that will flat out refuse to discuss all indie games because of some bad apples, or refuse to discuss games that have their creators with opposing political views, regardless of the quality of the gameplay itself, while at the same time parading around how gameplay is the most important part of a game in the same posts.
That part of Holla Forums that will refuse to buy ANY game, even if they like a game, and will make up endless excuses on why thatì's the case, and then complain that video games aren't catering to them anymore, in the same exact posts.

There's a good chunk of Holla Forums that is composed of the biggest hypocrites on planet earth, a group of people that forgot exactly why people hated modern video games in the first place and are just trying too hard to fit in, it's the stupidest part of Holla Forums that lacks any rationality and acts exclusively on kneejerk reaction, hipsterism and emotional impulse over objective analysis of video games.

I've seen people on Holla Forums start to call entire genres shit because those genres either don't cater to them, or they're literally shit at them.
This isn't the Holla Forums i know, this is a bunch of millennials masking themselves in the Holla Forums hivemind to justify their own inexperience and limitations as video game enthusiasts, instead of taking the time to understand video games it's easier for them to shitpost about them, and the hivemind encourages this shitty behaviour.

Nothing positive comes from ecnouraging this, it just makes Holla Forums worse, i can't believe we need containment threads about video game discussion because Holla Forums has become a tumblr tier hive of easily triggered screaming baboons, while shitposting is encouraged all across the board with no limitations whatsoever.

I want summer to go away already.

Nah it's not this.

Bare in mind that making large levels is a staple of modern game design now with open worlds.

The reason why it's not done that often is entirely because around 2006 or so it started to seep into game design that backtracking was something to be avoided at all costs in game design. And that "going back" at any point is a flaw in the game's design.

You can see this a lot with very modern games. You almost never have to return to a prior area. Almost all third person shooters now are just a linear series of corridors, and you don't go backwards.

The reason this occurred was to avoid players getting confused about the game which is what happened in the past. But now game designers expect if a player gets confused in a game, they'll drop it instantly.

And the sad thing is, they're probably right.

Bare in mind modern games are all about leading you to places in a big area. Like think of GTA4's radar and GPS that points you in the exact direction you're supposed to go at all times. That's a design mechanic that was deliberately designed so players wouldn't get awkwardly stuck or lost while going to objectives.

This

just as many shit games were made in the 80s and 90s. Nobody remembers them because our memories are selective.

Shit is also usually better on retrospect as well. Nobody really considers that a big reason why they value a lot of older titles is largely out of sentimentality

They actually would have been right even "back in the day".

I've mentioned it before, but I firmly believe that the entire modern state of gaming can be summed up in a few pivotal moments in the industry.

One of which being this landmark study published which studied how far into a video game the average customer progresses.

I've been looking for the exact study, but at this point it's near 20 years old so it's a little tough to find. But the numbers were awful. It was something incredibly weird like only 50% of players ever make it past the first stage or level of a game. And only a tiny tiny % ever actually beat a game.

I remember reading multiple articles (in magazines no less) where developers said this was a HUGE PROBLEM since it meant their budget was funding 90% of a game that no one ever saw.

I can hear some jewish person screaming "oy gevalt!" when I think about this. I guaran-fucking-tee you that some boomer executive was told about this study, shit his pants at the idea of paying for something that was "useless" and immediately started screaming into phones.

It's why games today seem their absolute hardest to shuffle people along and not let ANYONE get confused. Because it seems back in the day, the vast majority of people did get confused and just quit. But now that game which most people miss cost so much fucking money to produce, you get where I am going with this.

Dude, play the new Quake episode.

Devs nowadays have no fucking idea how to design a good level.
They have this one set of how a level has to look and just do it over and over again.

Yeah.
I remember a shit ton of reviews for games back in the day would ALWAYS complain if a game had backtracking, it was a constant element in most of the reviews on magazines and such.

People despising backtracking in games isn't anything new, nor modern developers catering to them, they saw decades of reviews complaining about backtracking and just went "well i guess we can't do that anymore then".

I think a big problem with modern devs is that often they have no finesse.
It's either 1 or 0, let's take this backtacking problem for example, and let's bring up Bloodborne here and why i said it has good level design.
What Miya did with BB (and what he also did with DaS) was to implement backtracking in such a way that it doesn't feel like backtracking.
What that means is that he gives the player one path, and then tons of shortcuts along that path.
So while you're exploring that path, and the side paths, eventually a side path will open up a shortcut to the main path so you can travel around the map organically, you're not going from A to B and then back from B to A, he uses a couple of tricks to keep things fresh.

This is called COMPROMISING, it means that a modern developer saw a trend, something people hated, but instead of eliminating it completely he found a way to work around this limitation, so that it can still be partially implemented in the game.
A lot of developers don't understand the art of compromising and finding a middle ground when it comes to game design, being able to do the shit you want to do while catering to the modern audience and finding a middle of the road solution is what can save or break a video game.
It takes effort and time to think up ways to accomplish this compared to just removing features and streamlining shit, but it's always worth it.

Amen.

quality vs quantity brother. great discussion is found on tiny, almost mailing-list-tier chans

and if I might comment, being a millennial, was mass marketing and such blatant disrespect of the customer and their intelligence the primary feature of the gaming industry 20 years ago?

Seems like the advent of "fast travel" really kind of defeats this.

and if I remember correctly, "fast travel" has been around since at least fallout 1

It was called experimentation.

This. Also, look at the interview that Pete Hines gave on a possible Morrowind remaster.
archive.is/COE5E

I hope people won't be delusional enough to believe that buying a remake would make company want to make new games in that style again.

Not always, but sometimes.
Well, not 20 years, but 16 years ago, wich is pretty close, pic related.
…however it backfired more often, also pic related.

But to be honest it still backfires today when it's too hamfisted, just think of any of the marketing involving Mighty No.9 and how people are reacting to that shit.

I like doom but its neither perfect nor the best example of design. Its just mazes with not a lot of reason to it.

I like the new Quake episode

Had the Machine games Quake episode come out like in 1998 I'm pretty sure everyone would have liked it.

If you compare it to fan based maps on source ports of course there's no contest but it feels more like the devs behind it were also fans of Quake and were just given an excuse to design a few levels as part of the promotion for the game's anniversary.

Thank you. And yet people hold up the original dooms as some sort of fucking paragon of shooter design.

I've been playing it recently as I got a PS4, the level design so far is really good.

You know what's sad? Everyone always posts Daikatana's box art or advertisement, but never any screenshots.

I have no idea what the game looks like, because no one ever shows it.

Use the Morrowind solution.
You have your map and all the places you can go to, and then you've got a "taxi service" that teleports you from all the major places.

Why the fuck don't all open world games use this solution?

If, in real life, you want to go to point A to point B, but it's too tiresome to walk from A to B, you take the train, you take a taxi, you take an airplane, you're essentially fast traveling.
But you're not fast traveling from, let's say, your room to an office somewhere in canada, like you teleport from one place to another place on the fly, you have to take a number of steps to go to places where veicle based traveling works and is connected to another place so you skip certain PARTS of the trip, but not all of it.

This isn't about realism per se, and some people might argue that getting to a city to then fast travel to another city is boring, but to that i counter, then what's the point of an open world game?
Isn't part of the experience of an open world game, to travel around, to take in the sights and experience this world that has been presented to you and memorize the landmarks, create your own landmarks and spots where something memorable happened to you, and so on?
I'm not saying in an open world game the player should just walk everywhere with no fast travel, that might get grating, but try to at least implement fast travel in a logical way, make it so it's veicles that connect each city, boats, it's such an intelligent system, why the fuck do we have to de-evolve this to a star trek teleport anywhere, everywhere, at any time, at that point you might as well not have a map at all and just have a set of rooms you debug teleport yourself in to advance the game.

Imagine Quake 2 but with shit level design, annoying ass badly designed enemies, and completely broken in every way.
That's Daikatana.

>Metal Gear Solid V

nuDooM was ok. The key issues they fucked up where due to lazy map/Game design so that snap map would be noob friendly.

-Glory Kills suck
-Glory kills give health and ammo so that the map designer does not need to plan encounters
-99% of the encounters are just a baby's first horde-mode arena battle.
-the Puzzle/Maze aspect of the Map design was completely ignored.
-no weak grunt hit scan enemies so that you needed to priorities who you killed first.
-Poor designed boss battles
-Missed opportunity to use bosses as common spawns in maps later in the game because they where scripted events
-The Art design was ok, but really is too sterilized, alien and missed the gritty "Metal" Practical effect look of 80's Demon's
-no bunny hopping for strafe jumping

If they had just gave proper mod tools and spent a little more time on the maps. Made the moment x1.5 faster.

Its still not Blood, Shadow Warrior (dos), Quake or Doom II good. I don't mind it but they still haven't yet made a true return to form.

Bunch of reasons

The biggest being that the majority of people who use fast travel do it to save themselves on a hassle. Like they just did a dungeon and they want to sell off all of the shit they got from it really fast and don't want to walk back to the nearest town. Or they don't like a particular quest so they just fast travel to speed it up.

Fast travel was just added as a method of convenience. Something people don't consider with Morrowind is that the game had loads of different methods of transportation. Not just Silt striders. For instance you could use teleport, you could buff your speed, you could levatate. I remember one of my favorite things to do in Morrowind was to use mark and recall to recall back to my house in Balmora to store all of my equipment.

In Bethesda's case they just wanted to cut out the middleman and let you do it whenever you wanted.

You're right about backtracking though. Gaming mags used to always shit on games for it. Except Half-Life 2.

Have you actually read it? He's saying that liking certain games is thought crime, and [game] was always shit = we've always been at war with Eurasia.

Pic related is shit with as much value as a common political cartoon.
You didn't even post an actual level, but rather a strawman.

It wasn't even a "study," it was literally just the advent of achievements sending back data to the developers. If you make each game award and achievement after each level, then you'll know when only X% of people manage to get past even the first level:

steamcommunity.com/stats/HL2/achievements

It's exagerrated.

Ok, do you think an old game can learn new tricks?

is it too late for some games (they are defined by their formulas and tropes)

Do you think that maybe some games ahve been effectively dead for so long that their resurgence is a farce?

is the extreme cynicism both the reason why new IPs are barely ever tried and yet the lack of new IPs (jadedness at the old shit) the reason why every new offering seems to get instant super success?

because i've been having tons of fun with it. Fun I havent' had in a single player shooter in a long fucking time. Yet I recognize the differences.

This was done on purpose

had the game been more confusing and had even more keyfinding/puzzle solving it would've alienated new players. And the game wasn't just designed to appeal to older players.

I think having hitscan enemies would've been a mistake. I don't consider Shotgun guys or chaingun guys in Doom 2 an enjoyable enemy to fight and they tend to be just more annoying than anything else.

I actually found the game was very faithful to the original design. Much moreso than Doom 3 was. Especially when you look at the individual designs for demons like the Mancubus and Cacodemon.

This was likely done on purpose because very few players actually take advantage of either.

Bare in mind strafe jumping is literally the result of a bug in the game's movement. Something the devs didn't care enough about to remove that also existed in other games at the time (and in some games there was a function called "Strafe running" where you just ran up against a wall while strafing. Or you just ran diagonally).

The main people who take advantage of bunny hopping/strafe jumping are speedrunners or people who usually want an unfair advantage in the multiplayer. So I can see why it was removed entirely. It's not the first game to do it either.

I actually see why they designed the system the way they did. They wanted the player to be near constantly killing things and not stopping or slowing down.

It was also a very convenient way of tying resource management into combat. So that killing things is always a means to an end. I think it's an interesting system and a more original one than just having regenerating health.

Personally I like that they tried something new and different than just doing something just because the old game did it. A lot of older "styled" shooters like Wrack are like that and they mostly remind you of how much you'd rather be playing something like Quake or Doom instead.

Three things have contributed to the fall of the modern game design, and they are all very easy to explain.

There is a frankly disgusting amount of resources dedicated to game environments to the detriment of everything else. I am not talking about actual level design, but rather the visual quality of game levels and the objects within them. This has been ridiculously exacerbated by the recent trend of so called "open world" games with gaudy maps that frankly have the depth of a piss puddle.

The problem here is not that time and man power are being diverted towards graphical fidelity however, but rather power. With consoles being the predominant focus for most developers getting these AAA behemoths to even chug along on your dinky consumer console is taking up every spare bit and byte these retrograde boxes can muster. With all the processing power tied up there's no room to innovate mechanically. We no longer see games using new hardware to push the boundaries of what was possible a generation prior, rather we are getting the same games with a fresh coat of paint. It's sad really, but nothings going to change as long as shit like Uncharted continues to top the charts and winning the critics' praises. People really do judge by the cover.

A large majority of the AAA games being released have a realistic aesthetic. Even properties on the fringes of believability like Deus Ex or Assassins Creed are still hamstrung by the creative restrictions of their settings. The juggernauts of this gen remain the Call of Duty and Battlefields of the world, and while it seems the "open world" snorefests Ubisoft churns out on a yearly basis are starting to make some headway even these still feel utterly generic and boring.

The problem boils down to the fact that it is very difficult to make interesting game designs when 90% of your enemy types are going to be guy with gun. I know that sounds incredibly reductive, and dismissive of entire genres, but when we are talking about the AAA sphere this is going to have an effect on a vast majority of games. While you could argue last gen wasn't much better, even one gen removed we had games like Halo and Gears of War dominating the shooter genre, bringing with them strange alien worlds that were absolutely ripe for letting designers create interesting enemy types and engaging combat situations.

There are a sparse few points of light in the darkness on this issue however. The popularity of games like Skyrim, The Witcher, and the Souls series (and the popularity of Game of Thrones doesn't hurt) has opened a huge door for fantasy to come back in a big way. I'm really hoping for some developers to capitalize on this in the next few years.

I also hope that Overwatch, while perhaps not bringing us back to the classical shooters design wise, will at least finally put a dent in the horribly outdated military shooters that are currently gasping their last futile breath. While I am skeptical that the "hero shooter" will bring us anything truly innovative in the coming years, at the very least it will hopefully do away with the horribly restrictive military trappings that have been strangling the industry for nearly a decade.

One only has to look to the recent trouble The Last Guardian developers have admitted to running into to see where this comes into play. This has obviously been a problem in generations prior, but I don't think it has ever been quite this bad and it ties in closely to point #1.

Quite frankly the video game industry has become more of a contest of one-upmanship. While this obviously existed in the past, Sega does what Nintendon't after all, the problem is the selling points have become very minute. Previous it was the console manufacturers competing with one another to see who could put out the better box with the actual game developers kind of just coming along for the ride, but really that's not the case anymore. I think it's safe to say that consoles this generation have never been more similar, and with these proposed incremental "4.5" upgrades things aren't going to get any better. The competition has shifted between drastically different pieces of hardware to software, and from manufacturers to developers and publishers. This means the onus is now on these development studios to put out the biggest, flashiest, and prettiest game not only to keep their own companies afloat, but also to get these shitty boxes off the shelves. This means developers must constantly be scraping at the boundaries of what these boxes can do, constantly trying to push ahead of the competition, and when a new box gets released, well… You're not exactly going to release on an "inferior" console are you?

You can see where this ties into point #1, although rather than a design trend I fear this is a market trend that isn't going to stop unless something drastic changes. I don't see that happening anytime soon, and neither should you. Expect long awaited sequels to keep getting delayed, new games being announced to not show their faces again for 4-5 years, and to keep having to pony up $400 for a new box unless you're finally going to ditch the racket entirely and go PC.

That about sums it up. Quite frankly I'm absolutely done with the modern gaming industry. While there may be a few a few slivers of potential for recovery left I'm much more comfortable watching the boat sink from the sidelines rather than drown with the optimists.

Let me stop you right there.
Removing this in an ID game is a big fucking deal.
Back in the Quake 3 era, when strafe jumping was discovered in the game, Carmack instead of patching it out actually implemented it even more within the engine, as a gift for the competitive community that was forming around the game at the time.
This is a pretty important shift in developer mindset.
Entire mechanics have been born out of bugs, combos in street fighter were a bug originally.

I haven't played D44M yet, but I watched the SuperBunnyHop video on it. He says that enemies spit out more health items the more injured you are, which means that the player is rewarded for engaging in combat while at low health.

Sounded pretty decent to me, miles ahead of regenerating health shit.

some call it learning

Rewriting history to better fit your current agenda isn't learning.
Learning is understanding elements in their proper historical context and then using the lessons from the past guide us towards the future.

Quake 3 was like 15 years ago. To me it's like disliking the game because you can look up and down.

I can understand being nostalgic over strafe jumping but I don't consider it the pinnacle of game design. I thought Unreal Tournament's dodge function was way more intuitive and useful, and UT4 still has it because of that.

But user, aren't you forgetting the greatest fantasy franchise ever made? Dragon Age? :^)

In the latest Doom's case, it is a big departure from what would be expected from modern game design, isn't it?
Modern game design would favor a regenerating health, hide behind walls, wack-a-mole style of gameplay mechanic.
This not only disregards that, but it wants you to stay mobile and aggressive. The design acknowledgement that they either had no time or no will to balance things perfectly with item locations is not tacked on with a regenerating health but rather a system that rewards you for being aggressive with your enemies.

Works for me and honestly more shooters need this.

I want to make one final aside. About how modern shooters ruined me. For a while I found myself trying to press "R" to reload after kills.

Suppose that for years go out and get fucked up every weekend. I love it, it's great, I have a good time with my friends. The consequences become clear, and in the future I decide that all of those actions, even if I enjoyed them at the time, were wrong, and promote the opposite for its worth.

Could it be that rewriting history to fit my current agenda is in fact learning?

Why don't they use a system similar to FO1 and FO2? Where you can fast-travel but you maybe interrupted by random encounters.

Fast travel in FO1 was a way to avoid the problem of the compressed map in comparison to real life.

Sorry but no, Duke Nukem Forever is still the king of "game is delayed because we scrapped everything for our new engine." Second Place is probably Team Fortress 2, and third place is Prey.

The Last Guardian hasn't actually scrapped everything and started over. It's clearly still primarily the same engine, and using much of the same assets as what we saw when it was still a PS3 game.

So? Perhaps they didn't have strafe jumping, but the movement mechanics leave much to be desired. For a game designed to be fast, they sure do put in a lot of effort to make you go slow.

(checked)
being lazy about design doesn't make it better, user. Its miles ahead of regenerating health, for sure, but this is doom, nigga. We can't hold it up to the standards of modern shooters, we have to hold it up to the standards of the greatest shooters ever made. That's the problem with your mindset. You're so utterly ruined by the dearth of decent shooters to come out, anything better than the shit to come out in recent years seems like a gift from god.

We're not nostalgic over strafe jumping you dunce. We're pissed off that skill based movement is removed and replaced by nothing.
We're pissed off that a system of careful resource management in form of health and ammo pickups is removed by a system that punishes more skilled play-styles (head-shots) and rewards QTE executions with fulfilling whatever need the player has.

This makes no sense to me. Would you decry the renaissance era of art and engineering to be shit because it didn't pick up exactly where the anceint Romans and Greeks left off?

I think all things need a dark age, even in their own age.

yeah I understand why they designed it the way they did, but it doesn't make for a great game, let alone a great FPS. Shotgun guy's for example do not need to be everywhere. However the game was designed with the accessibility of snap map in mind. There where no real planed encounters and the lack of Shotgun guy's are a clear example of this lazy design philosophy. Doom 4 could have almost been turned into a Roguelike because it all could have been randomized and nothing would have changed because Glory kills are how you get health and ammo making everything self-contained. A Doom Map designer had to actually think about monster placement.

that's a ether a strawman or a misunderstanding. I mean it should have looked more like something out of an 80's move, a Heavy Metal Album cover or something from the cover of Biomechanical Demonic Tattoo art. It was missing that personality. While better then Doom 3 it still was too clean Alien and bug like, too close to world of warcraft over-designed.

Its Ok, and better then most modern FPS, but its still not even Duke Nukem 3D great.

I played a bit of Hard Reset and Jedi Outcast lately, and the same thing happened to me. "Oh right, this game doesn't have reloads. Oops."

Did you think people were happy about degredation of art, culture and technology? The Dark Ages, as you post below, are what I'm criticizing, not the Renaissance. We've advanced in every possible way except for the thing we already had - creativity. That's not something that just "goes away". It's willed away, taken by greed and cut corners and "good enough".

You know what makes no sense to me? The ability to see something be worse than it was and go "this is okay". Like if you went to an ice cream, ate the best ice cream you ever had, then went back the next day and it was all terrible. And you just kept eating that ice cream.

Look, all i'm asking is a simple thing.
Are old games capable of learning new tricks? if so? why? if not? Why not?

and also, what is the value of old design elements applied today.

I would say from the example i'm going to put out (the new Doom) that there is some value in old design being there. The lack of a need for a reload, the push for aggressiveness, these old school designs can make modern games seems NEW again because modern games have been too fucking boxed in by this "realism" design aspect.

That's something else I want to talk about. The role of "realism" in video games and how it has fucked creativity.

my mouse is fucking up and giving double clicks sometimes.

Honestly the only recent games are good seem to harken back to a simple style of game play, you know games like EDF, Risk of Rain and Kirby Planet Robobot

Get out faggot
Have you considered that most modern games just suck regardless of their politics

I only referenced Last Guardian as it is the most recent example. Duke will always be the king, though I would argue TF2's case was due more to Valve's design process than anything else.

Sure they're design process is fucking nutty (Episode 3, anyone?) but TF2 still went though (from what they told us) multiple iterations of near-complete games before they finally showed us what we have now.

Rise of the Triad 2013 would have been Amazing if it stayed way from jumping puzzles and was optimized to run property at a stable frame rate. All modern FPS designers need to do is remake Quake but quadruple the spawn count (make the mobs a bit less tanky to account for the greater numbers) and give a AAA coat of paint. There is no reason to fix whats not broken. Games like Cancer Souls and Hot Meme Miami have proven normal fags love "challenging" games as long as they are fun and old school FPS are fun.

Never played Quake but loved ZGDoom.
Is there something similar for Q1 and 2?

No, it wouldn't.

The levels have almost all the same layout with one hub area and two paths, one left, one right, that lead back to the hub, leading to one final area. I think E5M5 was the only one that wasn't designed that way.
So very little to no variation in the general layout.

And the enemy placement itself is just straight up from the mind of a fucking 6 year old who was doing his first map.
Quake gives you a nice roster of enemies that complement each other, which has been tested to death within the last 15 years, yet they decided to almost always just place one enemy type into a room. Making any kind of strategic gameplay on what to kill first and how to mix up your movment to avoid the danger from the other enemies obsolete, leading to fuckass boring fights.

Only later it seems that they started to discvover that you can combine enemies in a single room, but never more then 2.

I never expected it to be on the same level as fanmade maps. That would've been a stretch.
But even the most simple design principles that you should follow to have a good Quake map were just thrown straight out of the window.

Let's not forget that a "game-y" level design conflicts with immersion. Most levels in doom make no fucking sense whatsoever.

...

But how many normalfags have actually played those games through and aren't just virtue signaling that they're a "real gamer"?

I've noticed that modern game engines seem to hate the idea of having lots of enemies at once. I'm still scratching my head as to why they just keep limiting it so heavily.

...

And yet DOOM is also arguably the single most successful PC game of all time.

"Immersion" has become a fucking buzzword tied at the hip with "cinematic".

Thief.
Checkmate.

I would wager enough to make it worth publishing and profitable so satisfy the (((investigators))) profit motive. Virtue signaling is free advertising.

You mean investors?

I would like to save this for a separate thread but I think the push for "realism" in "video games" as a function of better graphics is possibly a reason why some games seem ultimately lifeless, uninspired, and boring.

I'm not looking for true 1 to 1 simulated experiences in games. Even in games like Sim City or Sim Ant. I want an approximation that can be fun.

Give it 10 years and we'll know what some of the better games from this era are. It's the whole dadrock thing. It's generally seen as being "better" because what you're listening to is pre-filtered. Nobody plays the bad or filler songs anymore. Just the good ones. Similar idea here. There were tons of boring or garbage games even going back. Nobody really talks about most of them because they aren't worth talking about. Just the best and the ones that are so bad that they leave you wondering how they got made.

quake.wikia.com/wiki/Darkplaces_(engine)

Profit is a function of how many people bought the game, not how many actually finished it.

yes

may be rendering/graphical issues.
not many people want to admit it, but better graphics come at a price.

every single object on screen takes up some processor cycle, be it GPU or CPU.

That's not rewriting history. Rewriting history would be saying you never enjoyed yourself, and were forced to go out. Or, more in tune with 1984, you would say that you never went out, and your brain was fucked over by Eurasians instead of alcohol and drugs.

Likening Holla Forums to 1984 is on point, since so many people will say things were 'always' shit and they never liked them, rather than they liked them at the time and now they have changed their mind, or the games were always shit but they just didn't realise it at the time.

It's easy to change the past since everyone is anonymous.

...

When you think about it though, the push for more realistic graphics also ends up developing cool new ways to render surreal shit with the same tech. The problem is that it's being under-utilized for that purpose.

Or maybe the people saying they liked them and the people later saying they didn't like them are two different groups.
Nah, that's too fucking sane.

That is retarded.

Even then you know certain eras are better than others and that's the case here, there are shovelware PS2 games that are better than anything released this year for example

I would like to say that "Blood Dragon" was a great example of this.
And you're right. unfortunately the amazing breadth and width that the latest graphical abilities give are rarely explored.

I would say so, yeah. I think that we have more good/really good games than in some older eras, just by virtue of how many games are getting released now. At the same time, because most devs want to reach a wider audience and such now, we have fewer amazing, groundbreaking, must-play games. More 7s and 8s, probably around the same number of 2s-6s, and fewer 9s and 10s.

It's just a coincidence that games are popular and well liked, and then as soon as some SJW shit arises, suddenly the entire series is a write off?

The new Quake led people to claim they always hated Quake 2/3, which is strange since that opinion never really came up before at all. It could be that they always hated it and just never said anything, sure, then in that case it's just people following the popular opinion until they feel it's safe to go against it. So a different level of 1984.

I'm not saying it happens all the time, I'm saying that some people do it.

Well, I hate Call of Duty, and I used to like it. A while back I reinstalled CoD4 so that I could see if it was the games that had changed, or if it was me.

It was me.

Eh, you're sort of right. For instance, whilst I recognize that good music is made nowadays, it still doesn't even near the "top ten" songs I've heard, which generally consists of music from the 70s. Sometimes eras are just shittier than others, in different categories, for different people. I really don't like any music from the 90s, but enjoy a lot of games from that time, in example. A lot of this "games are shittier" mentality, probably has to do with the whole SJW thing, though. Getting battered by faggots who come out of nowhere to tell you that you're a sexist bastard for liking games doesn't do much for optimism.

I can't speak for other genres, but there is actually a pretty simple reason for the quality of design quality in first and third person shooters.

Demands for more sophisticated graphics/physics/ai/etc. leave devs with less time to iterate on level design. This has led to everyone jumping on the open world/procedural generation bandwagon, since it requires a lot less thought and effort to pull off effectively.

Open world and procedural generation have basically become the cal-tech of video games. The designers at AAA companies have lost the ability to construct and balance interesting levels for their games.

For example, do you really think that the load-outs in Doom were out of stubbornness? The level designers didn't know how to do weapon placement properly, so they skipped it. I wouldn't be surprised if that was part of the reason Quake Champions has classes as well.

I've known for longer than 10 years that graphics ruined the game development. It was evident when the x360/ps3 were released, that not only was I getting less good games to play on xbox (xbox used to be bombarded with tons of games, some good and some bad, but I loved it), but PC started to get less exclusives, and more bad console ports. All the ubisoft games (like rainbow six vegas) come to mind.

Suddenly everyone lost, the consoles weren't getting games anymore (I went through 30-40 xbox games, and at one point owned 22 or something), my PC suddenly games series started to die, there was nothing interesting to play anymore, what used to be 100+ game releases a year (rough estimation, probably much higher than that) now became closer to 50, and today probably 30.

One of the sign that shit was getting fucking fucked was when Microsoft bought Rare from Nintendo, and Rare who was known for making Goldeneye and Perfect Dark FAILED to make a good game for either xbox or x360 (no good launch title was the reason I never bought the x360). Imo that was beginning of the end, where currently we're living in mad max style wasteland scavenging what little we have left.

What saddens me the most however is that I've talked to point out couple of times to people how graphics utterly is cause video games moved from morrowind to skyrim, and how games have moved from "control your characters actions 100%" (deus ex) to "press X Y B W to perform scripted animated action".. Nobody would believe me, all these people have been so blind that what they're playing is actually a babby's version of video games.

Did it not occur to you that maybe the people who like it stop talking about it? Or maybe the people who didn't like it were ignoring it before and are gloating? Plus sometimes you get people who are just kind of undecided on a game at first, and need time to reflect on it and realize, "You know, I didn't care either way about it when I was playing it, but looking at it now, that game was kind of ass."

Yeah, you do get shit eras here and there, and I would argue that experimental eras for music are the best ones, when the new styles are being melded and maybe technology is being implemented in new ways. But a lot of it is the pre-filtering.

I have never seen anyone shit on quake 2 or 3 just because of how shit the new game will be. You compared the whole board to being 1984 just because people shat on SFV. SFV is a shit game even outside of the censorship to the point it sold well and the competitive scene is dying.

His argument is that every person who hates a game must have liked it.

Yep, which of course isn't true as a whole, but I do feel like Holla Forums users are going to be more prone to having their "eyes opened" on how bad certain games really are, and where good games are hiding.

When CoD 4 came, I never gave it a chance. Unlike other faggots who were of same age as me when it came, I saw "why would I want to fill my screen with this gun viewmodel, why would I want to play reskinned cod 1-2 when I've already played those games for 1-2 years,, why would I revisit this same game engine with its invisible walls / unjumpable small fences with small maps"

Call me elitist if you want, but Crysis 1 MP stole my heart, and I've been sad to see how they took all that fun away from crysis 2 or 3 , just to follow the CoD model.

I mean, its more than just that though. The procedural nonsense is also part of the bigger machine learning fad happening in CS departments right now. I'm in school for a CS and Math degree right now and all the game programming people ever talk about is machine learning and procedural content. The problems are interesting from a technical point of view, but they don't make for very interesting games. Its basically the John Carmak effect, where games just become a vehicle for them to solve CS puzzles.

I never had the chance to play Crysis MP. My machine could barely run CoD4, and even after I got a better graphics card, Crysis was still far beyond my reach.

I get the procedural content boners (that dial got turned up to 11 when Spore finally released), but what use is machine learning in games other than for matchmaking?

I would link to shit but it would give away where I go to school :\

Procedural generation could be fucking amazing if done right. How many threads have you seen with people bitching about how large games are getting these days?

Ever played .kkrieger? It's an FPS game that clocks in at a whopping 64 kilobytes.

It's not the greatest game in the world, but as a proof of concept I find it fantastic.

and there are amazingly few Math + CS people

Err, 96kb actually, but still.

My point isn't that it is inherently bad. The problem is that it is used as a crutch for good level design. See

Yeah true.

This is not procedural content in a game design sense, it's procedural in a technical sense. The game is exactly the same every time you play it and no matter what you play it on.

Thank you

I think one way to combat this problem is just to support smaller devs that value good level design over sophisticated graphics/programming. I see threads all the time on here shitting on indie devs that make platformers or use pixel art / low-poly graphics. I think people who haven't made games before don't realize that the reason that is done isn't just because it is trendy. Those games require way fewer assets, which give the developer time to actually focus on making the game fun.

Or they just waste 4 million dollars

Yep, but still, it's the same idea but used for a different purpose.

but just how hard is to make weapon placements?

there's a place away from the arena with a nice view on it - a good spot for sniper rifle type weapon. area full of corridors where you can be ambushed can be complimented nicely with plasma rifle. sprinkle shotguns or other basic weapons here and there near spawn points and place better weapons out of reach of regular combat or in tricky places.

then have players constantly travel from other area to other area to replenish ammo or get valuable health pickups.

those are things that CAN be procedurally generated too - look at Oblige, level generator for doom. it can generate enemy encounters and then account them into when genrating ammo and weapon placements, giving you enough ammo to engage enemy and rewarding you for exploring and beating them all

yep, in the sense it is procedural in that the assets are determined through a series of algorithms that end up not being heavy in file size. Nothing about the actual design is left up to the computer to generate randomly and procedurally.

That same idea offers very limited opportunities in games, and is at best, a novel concept, not agood one for playing or design.

Please do not use "perfectly" as a synonym for "competently".

Which is why Console X-COM, that wonderful triple-AAA beast, is so much worse than the original, right?

That's decent for the individual, sure, but it's mass population dynamics that will decide a product's commercial success, not the rationality of an individual - obviously.

I made the mistake of going through a game design degree in college 9 years ago and towards the end of it I had this horrible realization that the courses were teaching the technical side of game development, but there was no actual design theory being taught.

I was play testing some Unreal Tournament 3 maps that students a couple years below me had made, and I remember telling them that I loved the level except for the weapon and ammo placement. I told them they needed to spread out ammo away from the actual weapon spawns on the map to encourage player movement as opposed to just camping the weapon/ammo spawn of rocket launchers and shit.

They all looked at me like I had told them the sky is green.

I demonstrated that I was just able to sit in one corner of the map with a rocket launcher and fuck up everyone that came towards me, I had no reason to go anywhere, and they refused to believe that what I was talking about was the correct thing to do.

hey it's kyle johnson

You mean from GYP?

LOL can't wait to post this le epic screenshot to le reddit for karma!!!! xD

The strange bit is I found ammo placement very good. I can't remember who said it (Rich in Previously Recorded?) but I fonud I could get out whatever weapon I needed without having to worry about ammo… unless I relied on it excessively, and then I'd tank ammo and have to use something else. That suggests they actually thought about stuff.

Ironically enough in the snapmap shit, you can disable the health drops. I've played one or two maps that have done that.

yeah, he's told this story before on the podcast, and he is right.

I'm also from gyp but who I am doesn't matter, what matters is level design. I personally look at modern q1sp level design. Visually it's superb, and design wise they are excellently paced, appropriately challenging for high level players, and feature tons of creative level mechanics and motifs that make them stand out beyond the rest.

Some of the best examples are Nyarlathotep map 1, the horde of zendar, metal monstrosity, and mfx's map jam 2 map and his map klein's bottle.

I have no idea why people say this. I've just killed the witch and I've pretty much stopped playing. The levels don't seem to have much in the way of personality, with lots of detail and environmental set pieces but no real direction of defining characteristics, and it's so god damn dark I can't see what little there is. It just blends into one dark grey/black mess.

Holla Forums is full of cockloving sheep. But that's not really the problem. Holla Forums would love all games and cocks if the majority would do that. And I don't mean majority of Holla Forums, I mean your own little hug boxes, where you group up and verbally masturbate to get each other off.

Pretty impressive: You have created a cockfondling secret sect. A "low expectations" herd of sheep who know no better. Well done.

But why hate everything? Just teen angst doesn't fit the puzzle. How about: all 13-40 years old people that use chans are sadfucks. Sadfucks are bitter, and reflect to what ever they see negatively. What the fuck am I writing? Why am I writing this shit on the internet? Fuck you and fuck me. Freud is a cockfondler.

If we are strictly talking about arena shooters, then there is more to item placement than you probably think. You gotta worry a lot about timing, choke points, map flow, etc. It's not rocket science but it is definitely a skill that must be learned and perfected. You have to actively think about when blocking out a map. You can't just add the weapons in after setting up the geometry and expect things to flow.

I think there are three types of backtracking.

Active Backtracking.

Secondary Backtracking.

Empty Backtracking.

Active backtracking is where you go back through an area you have already been while doing what you did when you went through it forward. For example, if you were killing enemies going through the level forward, you will be killing enemies going through it backward.

Secondary backtracking is where you go back through a level to do something that is still important, but isn't what you did when you went through it forward. For example, if you were killing enemies going though the level forward, you may be searching for health packs or learning the level better going through it backward.

Empty backtracking is where you backtrack through a level where there is nothing to do, nothing to learn, and the reason for backtracking can be avoided pretty easily. For example, you kill all the enemies in a hallway, then you are told to walk back to the beginning of the hallway to get a key that is only accessible once you clear the hallway.

"Modern" game design is fine with active backtracking, though I don't think a lot of people really like it. This is what exists in the Souls games. When you go through a level backwards you will most likely be killing enemies while doing it, which is what you did when you went through it forward, kill the enemies.

"Modern" game design doesn't like secondary backtracking, even through it can be good if done well (as with OG Doom). When it is the kind of backtracking that involves familiarizing one's self with the map, Journalists and the mainstream audience will most likely hate it.

I think pretty much everyone can agree that if empty backtracking can be avoided, it should be avoided.

The witches are the lamest boss in the game. The game's not that dark, your monitor/TV probably needs proper calibration.

Its obvious you're a commie

I've tried it on two different monitors, one being a horrible piece of un-calibrated shit, I get the same issue on both but perhaps it's because I'm using a monitor for a game with color design assuming a TV screen.
I didn't mind the witches. I think it was an interesting boss fight vs most other bosses I'd fought so far which were 'giant quadruped beast with an AOE attack, a rage, a bunch of swipes, and a leap attack'. It was confusing and I think kind of stupid to let the player find and attack the second witch but not show her health bar, when I first saw it I thought it meant I had to kill the summons before I could damage her.
It was just too easy once you got passed the gimmicks. If the witches could actually defend themselves in combat it might have been nice.

If you are convinced that Holla Forums is covering up history, the better book to use as your weak anecdote is Fahrenheit 451. Now go try to sound smart somewhere else.

Also:

Wrong post. Forgive me.

Come to think of it, I did notice that it was darker on my monitor than my TV, and I have both of them very well calibrated. Ended up turning up the brightness on my monitor and angling it down a bit to get it to be better.

There's also the in-game brightness that can be messed with.

Not all FPS'es are Doom or Duke Nukem, nor should they emulate or try to be them.
There's variety inside the FPS genre.
As much as I like ti, not ever game has to be like Doom.

Maybe you should learn to appreciate things for what they do well, and not expect them to follow a single recepie.

COD is not designed like Doom, it had different priorities. SWAT or ARMA is different again. Crysis is different again.

Some focus more on simulation, other on getting the military feel right, others on exploration or open worlds, other on fast-paced action. There is no "One True FPS".
Sure, you can debate about mechanic and implementation, but one has to do it with the understanding of what the game was trying to achieve, rather then focusing on how "not Doom" it is. It's like going to the movies to watch a drama and then complaining that there's too little action in it.

So fuck you and the horse you rode on.
Stop pretending like the Doom design is the holy grail. Stop pretending like it's the greatest game design ever - or even that it's intentional. Often people ascribe deeper meaning to randomness or chance.

Aren't you a dick loving total faggot, op?

yes but we tried it your way for the last 15 years and no fps game been closet to as fun as Doom or Duke Nukem so get off your high house. The people have spoken.

Fun is subjective.
People derive different amount of fun from different things.

Get off that dragon dildo and use your brain for a change.

I honestly hope you are that this stupid.

Like all games. Remember the endless conga line of generic platformers with way past cool furry mascots following Sanic's success?

I actually think Civ V and Endless Legends made huge contributions to the genre insofar as 4X goes. Civ V is the first title in the series where I actually relish the end game I have IV open right now and I'm bored out of my mind prosecuting a victorious lategame war on multiple fronts and Endless Legend introduced customization options and interesting new mechanics for developing territory.

Also, both games have moved away from spending most of your production cycle producing troops for the inevitable inter-continental wars and towards using it to develop held territory. Population has inherent value and you can win without even thinking about going to war.

Name a FPS with more cohesive design then

The removal of unit stacking made it more difficult to create nigh-invincible regions as well, which increases pressure to adapt. And culture, which I guess you pointed out.

Oh and hex tiles.

And you are calling me stupid? Being this blind and ignorant should be impossible.

What you expect and how much value you give to certain elements affects your enjoyment. People invariably have different priorities, values and expectations.

If you are incapable of finding fun outside of your narrow vision, then I can only pity you.

What exactly do you mean by that?

Stupidest design choice, hands down, was to let the best defender always defend. Coupled with the AI's massive production bonuses and its practical immunity to war weariness, it turns every war into a meatgrinder as both sides throw away hundreds of hammers of production for no real gains.

Thank Sid for the whip, eh?

If you were talking about the difference between puzzles and shooters, you would have a point. Modern shooters on the other hand have become about "Cinematic experiences" and "shocking twists" and have let everything else deteriorate.
Are you also going to make the argument that Michael Bay is actually a genius auteur because he panders to the LCD? They just enjoy something different, don't judge!

As I said:
If you get mad that someone says this board is like 1984, because you know there are a lot of different opinions, then you need to take a step back and realise that the person was probably referring to a particular group of people ON the board, or one particular opinion. Nobody actually believes that every single fucking Holla Forums user says the same thing every single time.

oh wah wah wah I used hyperbole. Except I actually did say:

No it wasn't. My argument was that the anonymous scene makes it easy to rewrite history, and you would never be able to challenge it. I also said it was more than coincidence that well liked games from the past get shat on after SJW changes, or after bad installments, and no, that doesn't mean it's the only reason people shit on games.

When one talks about shit game design, they usually mean poor balance, poor variety in challenge/levels, poor sound design and so on. In a well designed game, all elements (visuals, sound, gameplay, AI, etc) come together to provide a cohesive whole and provide a fine-tuned gameplay dynamic which is constantly used in different ways (in Doom's case, through varying level design). The rules are always clear and the player is always challenged in those aspects.

Devil Daggers is a great example, where the gameplay is all about crowd control, so the audio and visuals have been greatly tweaked for maximum situational awareness. Each enemy is unique and can be told apart immediately from the rest. One could even play the game blindfolded. The challenge curve amps up slowly but surely. As shit gets harder, you also become stronger to be able to deal with the shit on screen. Basically, there is a clear goal, everything in the game is made with that purpose in mind, and there exists room for the player to improve himself.

A badly designed game would be Fallout 4. The story wants you to go to Point A in order to find SHAAAAAAAAWN, but everything else begs to be explored. Creating settlements is pointless in the grand scale of things and its benefits are also rather useless. The world feels inconsistent as what you do in one part has no effect in the other. Dialogue 'choices' are often just incredibly meaningless. Little is done to spice up the shooting, but still an improvement over FO3. It's always a problem with large games that not everything feels cohesive, but sometimes the core design in games like Deus Ex is good enough to overlook all that.

Consider this, come up with a gameplay dynamic you want it to be at the center of the game. Like 'brewing potions' or 'cutting shit up'. Then try to look at and deconstuct it from every angle possible. Come up with challenges to challenge that main dynamic, just look at SpaceChem and how ridiculously complex the process of transporting atoms can be, or how MGR is all about cutting shit up and then has you fight a boss which is already cut into pieces, or JRPGs where you have to use every trick in the book during combat, or Doom and Quake's many varied levels, or scoring systems in any SHMUP.

For some games it becomes obvious that the designers were just flinging shit at the wall until something stuck, or sometimes there is just a plain amount of useless bullshit on top of a decent concept. I can't find much wrong with the core design of Doom, and the result was a timeless classic with tons of user-made content. For good design, you should look at smaller games like arcade games or older console games. If you look deep enough, you'll see basic design principles which are lost in the modern age. The problem is not that everything should be Doom, but there's not a lot of shooters as tight as Doom. You have all these cool games where you're Predator Man, but often the challenges you face are not that unique or different. Instead it's just liberating camp after camp after camp.

And here you are again, talking as if all shooters must follow the same pattern. They don't
Withing a genre, there are sub-genres. Withing sub-genres, there are further divisions. It's not black and white.

Are you also going to make the argument that Michael Bay is actually a genius auteur because he panders to the LCD?
Nope. His movies are generally terribly written. Though he is good at what he does.
If you like action and explosions galore, but don't care much for plot, he's your man. But if you care for other aspect, he is not.

Games are entertainment medium. Are you entertained? Yes? Then it does it's job.

You are bringing in some design and mechanical solutions that are important to YOU, but fail to realize others don't CARE.

For example - visually distinctive enemies make sense form a gamey perspective. But if you're making a game set in vietnam, it would be fucking stupid for vietcong to wear brightly colored outfits so you can stop them. Or to have some aritificaly created distinct roles.

Yeah, FPS's today are all samey, but that was ALWAYS the case. When doom was popular, everyone copied it. You want Doom-like games, there's plenty of older ones to be found. The trends change and there will come a time where Doom will be popular again. But for now, we're in a different cycle.

No shit, sherlock.

I happen to like Crysis more than Doom, so there. Fuck uniquness.

How do these fags quantify a good mechanic? This is basically just regenerating health that encourages more offensive play. It is still turning an aspect of the game into a secondary or non-issue. The ammo system wasn't there just because it was realistic.

Are healthpacks actually a superior mechanic, though? Backtracking can be, and often is, tedious, especially when you have to remember where specific items are.

Yeah, they might not care because they have no idea they exist?
Or is that too fucking logical for your tiny brain that you proudly show off.

...

There is no one objectively superior mechanic when it comes to letting the player decide when to and when not to take risks.

Healthpacks are good when they're designed for because they free you, the player, from the constraint of looking for a place to cool down during periods of action. They encourage motion and exploration within the game world which is a great way to tell a story without drowning you in forced exposition.

Crysis is far more unique than DOOM though, which is why it's even noticeable to begin with since the execution is mediocre at best.

It is a balancing act of rewards and punishments.

That's your opinion. I like everything about Crysis.

When Doom came, there was a flood of Doom-like games. DNF, Hexen, Blood, etc, etc..
I played all of them. Doom isn't really as special as many here claim. Massive nostalgia goggles.

But it's boring- and that's the most cardinal sin of all for entertainment. If you can carry them with you, fine and dandy, but having to backtrack is dull.

Don't forget

Except those all came after DOOM, would be like shitting on Chrome because Crysis came 4 year after it.

Even the 0G level, even the dumb as fuck AI, even the on-rails last 3rd etc

Crysis is good but it's not that well executed and has loads of wasted potential.

Games are just as much as an entertainment medium as books or movies. Even books or movies have a level of artistic integrity that can determine if one is good or bad, based off objective qualities of the product itself. The same can be said about video games, or any other entertainment medium. You say you don't care about having standards in the medium. This same stigma was thought about art, which resulted in the shittiest art era to date, with a race to the bottom, full of lazy artists with inflated prices on their "works".

A game set on realism should obviously stay true to enemy colors and tactics, but that also means vietnam's geography doesn't consist entirely of corridors with invisible walls on either side. It also doesn't mean you can sit behind a wall for 30 seconds after getting shot in the face and be completely recovered, or that you could kill 500 people in the course of 1 or 2 days. The game's tone should match its gameplay mechanics (there's a couple .webm comparing Far Cry 2 with 4 that talks a lot about this aspect).
Besides, all these above criticisms aren't even about the quality of the game itself. All games should relish in the fact that it is a game, its main mode mechanics (shooting, platforming, puzzle solving) should be deep and thought-out, but consistent through the game. Super Metroid does this perfectly: it starts you off with the basic jump/shoot/run, and all upgrades past that manipulate how you can jump/shoot/run, even adding the morph ball which gets 2 (3 if you count power bombs) upgrades. The final boss doesn't really require you to use any of these upgrades, you are solely tested on your ability to deal and avoid taking damage. A game like Call of Duty (singleplayer campaign) doesn't improve upon itself, or challenge the player based on the mechanics they learn. Sure, the game will get harder with harder enemy placement, or more aggressive enemies as you near the end, but you don't get any tests. The initially easy game gets a touch harder, then it ends, dumping you out into the multiplayer.

As a side note, nobody should ever accept something to be true if "that's the standard for today". If everyone on the street is eating shit, and all your friends are eating shit, does that make you want to eat shit? Are you OK with people eating shit? Popular taste nowadays is bad, and most people on Holla Forums knows. Just because everything else is bad, doesn't mean a good thing can flourish despite its environment. That's what this thread is for

Well, yes. Something has to be made first before it can be copied. What are you, retarded?

Yes.
0G was good.
Fly segment was fun.
AI? No worse than in any other game. Certainly better than in Doom.

I'm going to hop in and say this. Doom II had terrible level design. Doom was mostly consistently pretty good but not amazing.

However, with the availability of more advanced tools, Doom received some fucking top-notch level design from the community.

I didn't say that.
I said that your preferences don't make an objective standard, and very, VERY few things are objectively better in terms of mechanical design.

Precisely. Consequently, just because a couple of faggots on Holla Forums think Doom is gods gift to gaming, doesn't mean I have to accept it as a gospel.

You want one thing from a game. I want another.

I can have fun with shitty games, but I am still able to see design flaws and things that prevent the game from being even better.

I am well aware that people just want instant gratification as a result of standards being lowered over the decades, but if you only start judging games in terms of 'fun' and 'not fun' there is not much to discuss as what one considers fun is entirely subjective. Games, however, are a machine of interconnected mechanics requiring player input. Games can to some extent be judged objectively based on these mechanics and how well they achieve their intended goals. Just look at any game you consider shit and contemplate why it is shit compared to games you like. But if you start arguing in terms of fun, what is there to talk about? Endless circlejerking? Once somebody calls a game shit, they (usually) say why it is shit. Sometimes it's just a matter of preference, but sometimes it's really a mistake on the developer's part.
What kind of answer is 'good point, but other people don't care' anyways? Some people do, some don't. Usually the ones who do come to these kind of discussions.

What's wrong with Battlefield and classes? It's like nobody is creative enough anymore to get past the constraints of realism. Everything in Thief and Deus Ex managed to feel realistic (graphics and setting notwithstanding) as in, it makes sense that something this 'gamey' exists in this world. People just naturally assume your stamina is limited or that you can't carry more than two weapons because you can't do so either in real life, and that's often more of a detriment nobody has properly thought through how it would fit the game.

Yeah, for about three years. And even then there is a greater variety to be found amongst Doom clones in terms of setting and overall style than today. Douk's interactivity, Blood's first-person Max Payne action, Shadow Warrior's focus on melee, Marathon's storytelling and first-person bullet helling (Marathon was never really a Doom clone though), motherfucking Descent, Strife's open-endedness and Hexen/Heretics' fucking puzzles. And even AFTER Doom there was more variety to be found than today with Unreal's bot-like enemies and hueg environments, Quake's hectic Lovecraftian action, Serious Sam's massive enemy armies, Half-Life's immersive narrative and puzzling, Jedi Knight's lightsaber fights (even if that's third-person), System Shock 2's cyberpunk dungeon crawling, and Shogo's mechs. You needed more than being a Doom clone in order to get bought, whereas nowadays every FPS seems to be a variant of FarCry with a gimmick attached which isn't even used to its fullest potential. Most people used Doom as a base in order to create shooters which play differently.

But do you know why Doom is cloned so often? Because all it needs is different levels in order to feel fresh, you can even wear the skins of fucking Chex Quest, but the gameplay still remains. To say that all 'Doom clones' have the same gameplay is largely ignorance.

the problem is both on the dev side and the player side.

a playerbase that settles for a mediocre product that doesn't challenge them, and a constant stream of developers who think that type of thinking is "good".

look at the most successful vidya franchise in history. by any Holla Forumsirgin taste, that should be the objectively best game ever made. it's call of duty. the reason is because an entire generation of people want to play the same game over and over again while they stare at the screen slack jawed, feeling good about pressing "F" to pay respects.

fuck. you can start up any COD past 4 and you will find a playerbase that still plays the game in the exact same way that they did 7 years ago.

"Fun" in the traditional sense of challenge, risk, and exploration, not to mention the capturing of imagination, is all but dead. Most of us are trying to find that ourselves these days.

Ring Runner Flight of the Sages does all of these things and more

While it isn't very recent, I though Mirror's edge had pretty good design. The levels nicely complex and the art style that went with them looked amazing. The parkour felt great and the runner vision was pretty well done too. The only issue I had was with a few sections later in the game. They had less of an action aspect to them and felt more like a puzzle. But overall, the game was pretty solid in terms of design.

I think you don't know where I'm coming from
I never mentioned Doom, I was actually referring to EDF

They came way after DOOM, hence the "When Doom came, there was a flood of Doom-like games" is retarded

Even just the mods for it make it closer to being acceptable, and even then it's still not as good as the merc Ai in Far Cry which is made ain a similar engine with a similar level design.

What an accomplishment..

Reminds me that MatthewShillosis has made a video about SpaceChem explaining why it's so good.

Expect I'm not.
I'm saying that because you like a mechanic doesn't make it objectively better.
A good example is no weapon limit vs. weapon limit. They both have their reasons and pros/cons.

Only partially correct. You seem to forget that these days you have more companies and more competition, and more reach for games. Information on games was trickling in the early days - we used to buy gaming magazines. The flow of information, the volume of the industry, etc - these things changed. One cannot look at games outside of that. This also colored perceptions about games, old and new.

Your only argument is that not every FPS is Doom. You're right, RPGs like New Vegas, military sims like Arma, co-operative objective games like Payday, or puzzle games like Portal are all very good games in the FPS genre that don't emulate Doom. This doesn't mean any FPS can be a good game regardless of quality, even if it is fun. Like you said, "your preferences don't make an objective standard". With that quote in mind, we should be discussing, "examples of modern game design moving in or being in the "right direction" as far as gaming goes"

...

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Divine/Almsivi Intervention and Mark + Recall spells/scrolls/enchanted items were also available in Morrowind. Your argument is worthless.

You have no business calling anyone retarded.

Learn to read before answering to points that were never raised or claims that were never made.
FFS, some basic comprehension of language is required.

What argument are you making here, or are you just nitpicking?
If Doom is best FPS and has shit AI, then CLEARLY AI is not that relevant for a good FPS, no? Or are oyu saying Doom is shit because that element is shit? If not, you admit that OBVIOUSLY some elements carry more weight or are more important than others. And if that is so - who decides how important an element is?

I'm not saying that it is inherently superior but I wouldn't be convinced that nu-Doom is good on Yahtzee's or SuperBunnyhop's flimsy excuse.
Yes, you use melees when you are low on ammo so you would need more ammo. However being low in ammo also means that you fucked up unless there is no ammo pickup system but it just makes like level scaling or regenerating health where there is no consequences for playing badly.

Level scaling accomplishes the opposite- it makes it so that encounters are always as difficult no matter how well you build your character. Oblivion was particularly egregious as it just made the game harder and harder, turning even basic enemies into damage sponges.

Oh, another thing killing Stacks of Doom did was make the game run better. Civ IV still has problems with larger maps on modern hardware because of how many fucking units end up cluttering the map.

I don't play or talk about many modern games, but if you people hate this board so much why do you still come here? That's what I don't understand.

Was the hit/shit ratio as abysmally low as now?

Pretty much.
You just never heard of most of them.

Yes. Hell yes. Remember Action 52? The endless parade of generic platformers with totally radical animal mascots? The Space Invader knock offs?

One or at best two good games per genre per year?

Genres were WAY more restricted back in the day. First 4X was 1991 with Civilization, first RTS was 1992 with Dune II. Most titles would have been platformers.

In the arcade era, you'd be lucky to have one good game per genre per three or four years. Things used to move much more slowly.

And an even better question, were the good games actually good or just not shit?

So if you don't consider it bad or lesser because it was copied later what is even your point to begin with?

And yeah DOOM isn't special but almost every game directly derived from it is just as good if not better. even if they generally involve you fighting a lesser quantity of harder enemies with worse weapons

It has relevance depending on the style of game and whether having good AI is necessary for the game to provide a challenge, the AI following you like a sheep and firing at you as soon as they see you doesn't impede DOOM because it's made around it, but it impedes Crysis because of what you can do and the small number of enemies.

Having a better AI does a lot of good to Crysis even if you don't agree with me using Far Cry as a basis for that argument for some reason every mod that makes it less terrible is a massive improvement to the game (and those just involve the AIbeing able to throw grenades and making half-assed attempt to flank if you take cover for too long), whereas in DOOM AI improvements are generally not noticeable unless you know about them or they involve entirely new behaviors (ceiling imps, rolls) and even then they don't really add much to the challenge.

Not to mention stronghold pylons.

Did you miss the part where I said that games are a machine of interconnected mechanics?
One mechanic alone does not make a game automatically better, it depends on how it works with other mechanics and the rest of the game. Serious Sam wouldn't work with a two-weapon limit because then you wouldn't have enough weapons and ammo to deal with the enemies the game throws at you. However, some people naturally assume there HAS to be a two-weapon limit because it is realistic, with little regard for cohesion. A good example of a two-weapon limit is Halo, which is actually balanced around that limit as is explained by this frog in embed related. For most shooters, such a limit is usually thoughtlessly put in.

A mechanic by itself can't really be considered shit or good, it all depends on the implementation. Mechanics that are often badly implemented like regen health and level scaling get a bad rep because of that. There are some mechanics which people like like canceling and juggling, but as always, it depends on execution. Games can be (and are usually) built around limits, which is nowhere more apparent than in Castlevania and Castlevania 4. Castlevania 4 gave more freedom in the direction of your attack, and ended up making the game (too) easy. The subweapons were meant to offset your limited attack range, and through clever subweapon placement a clever player could turn the situation to his advantage. A Medusa Head wouldn't be a problem to deal with in Mario, in CV it's a fucking cunt to deal with. Point being, that you can have limits in your game, as long as the game is balanced around it.

You can also have the blandest and most unoriginal gameplay concept, which may still be good if you execute it just right. Thunder Force 4 looks bland on paper, but is a blast to play.

There's more competition, so people are more willing to follow/copy trends instead of standing out? I don't think that's how it works.

Concerning the usage of AI in games, consider the following: All zombies usually do is crawl towards you and try claw your face off, their pathfinding is capable enough to follow you around, but it doesn't really do anything but follow you and mug you from up close because it is a zombie. Does the lack of intelligence present in a zombie mean it has poor AI? If so, what would a zombie with good AI even look like?

Sometimes, an enemy doesn't need 'good' AI if it accomplishes in role in combat just fine. A better question, how are you even supposed to notice the effects of good individual AI when you're fighting dozens of various enemies at a time? What would Doom have to improve on in order for its AI to be considered good? You're making Carmack angry here.

You'd have a point if you were fighting the same enemy type most of the time where everyone would behave the fucking same. In a game like FEAR, the AI is what helps makes the combat feel unique and different from other encounters since you usually fight a bunch of identical replicas, whereas in Doom it's the enemy placement and enemies used that make each encounters feel different, by using different enemy types in different ways. If an enemy accomplishes its role on the battlefield (trying to kill you by doing X) then what's there to complain about poor AI? That's not even considering the limited processing power at the time of Doom's release and how demanding it would be for the CPU if it tried to compute dozens of enemies with complicated AI subroutines.

They'll tell you it was just as bad then, but a peek at the covers of a run of any videogame magazine from 1998 to the early 2000's would probably make you cry.

Oh, another limiting factor was shelf space. You had to deal with brick and mortar stores and it was a lot harder getting them to stock titles after the market crashed. It was difficult finding niche games at all.

On top of that, it was difficult to distinguish good games from bad games. You had word of mouth and magazines and that was it. Nintendo created their seal of approval as an effort to bolster consumer faith and weed out a lot of the shit that choked the market.

AVGN does a good job of covering a lot of the horrendous shit that flooded the market back in the 80s and 90s.

Most of the genres we have today didn't even exist back then, only after PC gaming did we get genres which would never be playable in the arcades like strategy and RPGs.

*only after PC gaming took off

I started gaming in late nineties, that's why I'm asking. And I have no idea about events outside the PC market.

You'll cry because you'll nostalgiagasm over your favorites from when you were a kid. I remember spending a lot of time with that shitty Jaws game for Sega Genesis because I was a dumb kid and everything was exciting and mysterious.

The PC market didn't even really exist until the mid nineties. Before that, it was consoles, mostly, as arcades slowly died out.

And there were massive flops for consoles, too, at least on par with the Xbone, if not even worse. The Atari Jaguar, for example.

No It wasn't. Flying controls were practically non-existent, shitty and the V-TOL wouldn't take more than 3 farts to go down because PRESSURE and WE HAVE TO KEEP THE STORY GOING.
As much as I love Crysis, 0G was terrible because it was both too linear and too confusing at the same time, AI was TOO fucking dumb, you could break the engine easily, like throwing ducks/frogs/chickens into something and watch them float away into space.

Hell, Doom's AI was better than Crysis. Monsters had predefined patterns that you could IMMEDIATELY recognize and react upon, thus why they are so iconic and well remembered.
Yes, they were limited due to technology those days, but they were STILL more functional than today's AI, where it bugs out and walks into a wall/decides to not give a shit about it's surroundings/shoot at a wall/etc.

The reason is because they were so simple. That's like saying that a pointed stick is more functional than a railgun. It's technically true, but not for the reasons you're implying.

...

Go back to Reddit summerfag

No it wasn't, yes there was a fucking ocean of shitty shovelware but there was a sizable amount of very good games, even "must play before you die tier" shit. If back then was something like 1/10 good games, today it is something like 1/100.
Like said, you just have to peek at the covers of any gaming magazine from that era.

That's because back then it was much harder to find and acquire games user, good games ran mouth to mouth and hand to hand more than anything else.
Just make some fucking math, assuming the amount of shitty games stays equal we can probably count 100 excellent games in 1998 without much effort, can we do the same in 2015?

Fantasy getting big again does me little good if it's fantasy with a realistic aesthetic. (Because that generally means all the monster are going to be ugly, if nothing else.) I'm sick of realistic subject matter in my games AND realistic visuals. I live in realistic realism every day, I don't need that in my games too.

My single biggest complaint about modern games is that when graphics finally started getting good, art direction took a nose dive into realism and never recovered. I'd actually buy new games at release again if we got modern budgets and art effort applied to the style old games used to have. When it's realistic modern setting, or a realistic futuristic setting, or a realistic fantasy setting… Well, call me too caught up on visuals, fine, I'm guilty. I can't get truly excited about any game without a style I like, and I do not like realism. At the very least, stylize the characters, I'm less picky about backgrounds than characters. Otherwise, I'll never have another personal 10/10 until you finally get top of the line production values and stylized visuals in the same package again.

Personally, switching guns not because I want to use a different one, but because one's empty and the other is leaving ammo behind is one of the things I never much liked about classic FPS game design. If you ask me, that just gets in the way of focusing on the right gun for the current situation first and foremost, which to me is the entire point of having different guns that work differently. So if new Doom's universal ammo system doesn't fix that either, bleh, there goes the one thing I expected was actually better about it.

The only kind of backtracking that really gets to me is, I guess, "repetitive backtracking," walking between specific locations over and over and over and over. For example, in an adventure/RPG game, walking between the shop and the forge or the player's house or whatever is commonly used in that particular game every single time you come back to town. Don't get me wrong, I love exploring in-game worlds, but walking back and forth across the same space gets really old the twentieth time. The places the player will clearly visit over and over many many times should be designed as close as possible.

Leveling scaling is a shit mechanic because it messes up the rewards and punishments and it ruins any sense of progression.

Yes, that's what I've said.
Here's my point: How come that a game 20+ years old manages to not freak the fuck itself out of existance with a technology that compared to nowadays is "simple" As simple as technology nowadays goes but today's games can fail spectacularly to such a degree that a company will go in full damage control mode?
There's something terribly wrong here.
And a example of a new game fucking up hard is HelixSnake's channel. Just all of it. Either Skate3's videos or non Skate3's where he's just trying to play a game. Specially look at D44M's that have been released on his channel recently.

Murphy's Law. That's about the long and short of it- as things grow more complex, there's more points of failure.

The only recent instance of level scaling being used decently enough is Grim Dawn. There are different zones, and in each zone each monster can scale between X-Y level depending on yours. There is a limit to how much upwards each monster can scale, so you won't find tough as shit monsters when you backtrack an area. However, since there are plenty of secret areas and quests which involve backtracking in Grim Dawn, having level scaling isn't such a bad idea so you won't have to deal with cannon fodder all the time if you're backtracking. As Oblivion is an open world where you can access any area at any time and will often go to random places in the map, level scaling ruins all sense of progression and challenge.
In Grim Dawn the main path is (largely) linear, and the effects of level scaling aren't that noticeable if you are going about in one area.

That is true, but how hard is it to have some basic level of proofing so that it doesn't happen so much or at least not as often as it does on SO MANY GAMES. Example being: Fallout 3, NV and 4. Specially 4. Also TeS Oblivion and Skyrim. Is it because "lel bethesda is so bad" or because they just don't make sure that things have a lesser likelihood of happening?
Because I'm pretty sure it's the latter.

It can't help that Bethesda apparently has a QA team consisting of 2 people.

Not so much in the AAA scene. Combined with Shareware and the cheap made shovelware and weird ports it was close. The reason why it is so bad nowadays there are no long lasting superhits. Most AAA games are forgotten after a month or so. Everything below doesn't last that long. Nowadays there are not that many universally liked good games that are also known by every gutter punk who has at least one machine to play video games with.

How about we do some little counting right here, genius? I have PC Joker from March 98 and a PC Games from exactly 18 years later. The results may blow your mind.

Feels like that, doesn't it? Pretty sure it does have a larger team than 2 pèople.

Part of that stems from the engine, which doesn't lend itself well to highly-interactive environments. It works well for games like Bully and Catherine because both have game worlds with not much interactivity, but for RPGs like TES and Fallout it can't handle the number of objects and other interactive bits.

It also doesn't help that Bethesda's QA team is smaller than most indie development teams and they're told that modders will fix 90% of issues with anything they release.

Bull-fucking-shit.
I have PC Gaming magazines from '95 and upwards. And I'm from Spain.
Pretty sure I could photo/scan some and translate them for you.

Magazines have been dead for a decade, user. They survive on ad revenue and are basically paid shills.

Have you learned nothing over the past two years?

I'm so tired of hearing this "selective memory bullshit.

If you bought a game back then, it was either great, good, or just glaringly obviously shit.

It wasn't like today where a game just works and is praised by the masses despite not really having a care about good design. No, if a game was shot, that game was shit and would fly off the counters within a week or so of launch and no one would buy it ever again and there ESPECIALLY wouldn't be any developers trying to follow in their footsteps.

The problem today is that game DESIGN is shit. Even the developers who do seem to care don't really know how to make a good level or mechanics that actually work well.

And yeah, there are some good games being released today, but thing is we can't really rely on ANYONE anymore. Its like they're all ticking time bombs ready to explode into shit. Used to you could trust a certain company to make a good game because good game design was the popular norm back then and they were a pretty big studio.

Nowadays you have people who made a really good game but then saw money into making their games shit because the masses would prefer if it were more linear or something.

Indies went to shit once they started selling simple arcade games like they were hot stuff.

Eurocucks don't make anymore.

Japanese games are only good when they aren't making RPGs or PC games.

It's like you have to lower your standards to enjoy even the "good" modern games.

True to a certain degree. Depends on the magazine, if it's a Sony/Nintendo/Microsoft magazine of course it is.
If it's a General Purpose gaming magazine, specially for PC, it's 50/50.
Search Micromania or take a look at this **wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micromanía_(computer_game_magazine)**

If it's a magazine, period, it's mostly ads.

It's like telling me that people aren't using phones anymore because the yellowpages are shrinking.

If you were designing an arcade, you'd design it to punish the player with random bullshit from off screen.

Why? To make them spend more money. It had nothing to do with difficulty or design but profits. This design philosophy followed gaming until the mid nineties. Actual content was always really slim- Castlevania is about two to three hours, Super Mario Brothers is maybe two, Ninja Gaidan can be beaten in an hour.

>no not that one, i want more!
sick goalpost retard

Oh so wrong.
Everything that was a threat to you was on screen.
And they had a clear pattern that could be avoided or eliminated completely.
Also, that was a bad example.
Want an arcade game?
Metal Slug.
Was it difficult because it threw shit at you from outside the screen?
No. It was because the game would throw a challange at you.
Same with Space Invaders. It never threw shit at you off-screen. All was there.

Yes I am calling you stupid because if there was not a generally agreed upon value for X then there would be no such think a game of the year and by your subjective reasoning one could say Depression quest is just as fun as Super Mario Brother 3. However in terms of general liability there is one clearly superior in term of fun. Moreover their is still objective qualitative standards that seem to play a roll into what constitutes a good game, and those objective values often determine if its a fun experience. For example I doubt many would consider Mighty No. 9 crashing and Bricking there Wii U "fun", but by your subjectivisit perceptive we must reject all general standards of fun for the sake of the one deranged masochist who may or may not enjoyed their property being destroyed by a substandard product.

like-ablility*

Fuck off summerfag

was meant for

Filename of pic related confirmed.

Striving for realism above all else indicates the death of the art form. Art is representational, why would it need to be "real"?

As I've said, 50/50 if it's a general purpose magazine.
And the fun fact is that these magazines tend to not drink the SJW Kool-Aid and stick to the facts of the game's quality when they review it.

What do you think happened with Capcom and RE?

I will say that if there is any sort of 'future' for published magazines, I'd predict the majority to become much more like strict mail-order quarterlies or semiannuals. Either that or I was thinking about even more niche publications, because I don't fucking know.

PewDiePie

The one I'm talking about, Micromania, is monthly.
And they tend to stick to actually doing their job.

Pfft. Even though he's a retard and his fanbase is even more retarded, he's not the reason RE's going the way it is.

That's an ableist image user, don't you know the mentally disabled are just as capable as everyone else?

Then why is it first person instead of third person?

That's the super popular streamer right? What would he have to do with resident evil?

Remember how well RE4 did in sales?
That's the start.
Otherwise we could attribute it to RE:Survivor. Which is bland, boring and generally bad.

Shut up fag, Bloodborne is boring as fuck

RE4 was third person and the start of the actiony RE.

Why would you screenshot a picture from a neo/v/ sophist bemoaning board culture because it's not like reddit or Holla Forums?

Personally I think Doom's level design is too labyrinthy

I think user is talking about how Youtubers/streamers have ruined horror games. More specifically, how they have ruined what part of horror games is considered "scary".

PewDiePie and his ilk screaming in terror in their videos is great "viral marketing" for games. It happens that jump scares are the easiest way to elicit screams. Things like creepy visuals and atmosphere or limited resources on the mechanics side of things are too hard to design well and don't make 30-year-old men cry like little girls on streams.

As a result, the new wave of "revival" horror games relies strongly on cheap "PewDieBait" jump scares to the detriment of other horror elements.

Some levels certainly, though most levels outside of TFC were relatively straightforward.

Basically this is what I meant. I thought people would get what I was implying earlier.

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Original Doom?
To some extent, that statement is true.
Depends on who developed the levels.

Then that is a different reason, but not THE reason why RE has gone to shit.
I would love a horror game that depended more on the ambience, visuals and atmosphere than on easy jumpscares littered everywhere.
What was the name of that one First Person horror game that was in space where you had some sort of computer gun and had a 80's-90's movie tech vibe? I keep forgetting the name.
Because it had one hell of an ambience, visuals, pacing and atmosphere.

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I thought what you were implying was that RE7's horror direction was a result of the remaster of the remake of RE1 selling.

Bullshit! PC ravaged Amiga and other 16 bit Homecomputers since 1992. PC games existed since the mid 80s. If you claim there wasn't a PC gaming market before the Windows 95 rolled out, you are more retarded than the Commodorefags who were surprised by the triumph of the office machine PC in gaming. Almost every title that was on Amiga was also available for PC in slightly superior from 1991 onwards if I got that right.

Pretty much this. Not only that, but the Gaming press was honest enough to outright tell you which game were blatantly shit and that was usually a lot of games. It is very telling that nobody came up to the plate right after I have offered to compare a magazine 98 with one from this year. The notion that things used to be different is utterly alien to them. Maybe terrifying.

This. Games are getting worse. Bioshock could have been a good game but it had deliberate design choices that made it shit. It wasn't lack of time, laziness, or shoddy coding but just badly designed.

You almost had me up to here, it's not as simple as "opposing political views". these "developers" literally want us out of the industry and want to replace us with a more casual market. Why on earth would we defend or even buy from a developer who hates our guts? Unlike you I would pirate the game to see if the game is actually good. In the case of warren spector I would buy his old games and then pirate all of his new ones. It's not a hivemind mentality to not support developers who want you dead so they can appeal to a more casual market and not have to put in as much effort into their games. it's common fucking sense to want developers and games to be held to a higher fucking standard.

Why should Holla Forums have to BUY anything, you're talking about this like we don't pirate mostly everything to get a taste of it. Maybe in the case of the new DOOM Holla Forums was slightly wrong, but the game does indeed LOOK like shit judging by the pre-release footage and trailers. You expect me to believe that a slow moving DOOM is a good DOOM? thankfully they fixed it last second, but you have to be a fucking retard if you think the new DOOM looked good on video, hell even Brutal DOOM looked better than that garbage. Not to mention Holla Forums was right about everything else, since they have something most people in this Industry lack aka Common Sense.

Also you can like a game and still hate the person behind it. For example I recommend playing an Indie title called Aces Wild, but I tell people to pirate because the faggot who made it also supports Zoey Fucking Quinn and constantly hates on the core consumer base in favor of his clique.

Bullshit, I've been here for a long time and while I've seen some people try to fit in, they're usually humiliated and laughed at. It's not hypocritical to shit on modern games because they ARE objectively shit and they ARE factually mismarketed. Compare Watch_Dogs and MGSV and tell me the pre release footage looks the same as the final release. you'll find out that it not only looks worse but the final release also has lesser elements in the final build. The Last of Us is a good example of a game that was marketed as a game with revolutionary AI, but was scrapped to appeal to "a wider audience". This isn't a kneejeck reaction to an emotional impulse. It's judgement base on previous experiences that Holla Forums has had, and while Holla Forums has its biases, they're pretty clear about what they like and what they don't. Unlike many online communities most of Holla Forums will call out games like DmC and Dragon Age 2 for looking like shit, while other communities will praise them to be part of the "in" crowd. it's again, common sense.

Which ones?

I cannot deny that there are people like this, I believe they're in the minority of the site. Maybe they're a majority of halfchan, but here they're usually laughed at for being misinformed and treated with smug anime girls.

Are you talking about General threads? Nigga, general threads have existed for a long time now. The only real containment thread I can think of are the Undertale and Overwatch threads, and even those are filled with cancer by a large amount. Not to mention that before Mark made the Overwatch cycle, there was like 10 threads shilling for the damn game. He never banned discussion of it, he just put it in a cycled thread until shit dies down. Nothing wrong with that

Now you just sound like a bitch ass nigga, go cry on tumblr.

its just the fightan, doom and quake cucks who say that
nobody cares about them

Which part of liking fighting games makes you a cuckold?

Shadow Warrior is cramped with details, although it used different kind of graphics.

Just goes to show that stylized graphics are always superior to realistic graphics.

the same part that makes you a fag

Although there is some truth in this post, there is also the fact that we can't deny that old games were for the most part, superior to the new ones. This isn't something that only nostalgiafags will tell you, when confronted with retro gaming and forced to actually play the fucking games,even someone that was raised with newer vidya like me I'm 18, can say, that old games are more likely to experiment, are by far better designed in term of level designs (Old shooters vs new shooters), story (Old isometric RPGs vs new WRPGs, adventure games), gameplay (Have you seen a good fucking platformer in years? Or a good fucking FPS? I only can think of a few examples) and arstyle (stylized artstyle>realistic arstyle). I can't believe that someone can play through some of the older SNES games, NES games or DOS games and not fall in love with them. Or with games made in the 2000-2010 period I'm pretty sure that there were still good games in 2012, but I might be wrong. New games are not being made as pieces of entertainment and art anymore, but as mass-produced products, meant to appeal to the largest audience. Only the indie scene is actually worth anything in modern times, and there were two, maybe three modern games that I "kind of" enjoyed The first two Asscreeds were fun, until the formula got old, the first Mass Effect wasn't really that bad, Dishonored was okay, but a complete waste of potential and absolute shit when compared to THIEF, and some of the modern Strategy games were also okay

That's just shitposting, I think.

Procedural generation can be done well too, look at Dwarf Fortress

D44M shilling as always. At least stuff will get back to normal when after steam summer sale.

Or Oblige for fucking Doom.

Existence of that thing drives me mad ever since it can do true 3D maps for some of the experimental Doom ports, while "handcrafted" by "professionals" in "AAA development houses" maps are shit.

The way Oblige works is the developer just makes pre-made sectors and Oblige just stitches them together. You'll notice the true 3D parts in Oblige maps are usually placed in the same way in what particular room they're in.

You can notice this if you play like 10 Oblige maps in a row with the same settings that there are a huge amount that just repeat. It's why even the creator said it's not a replacement for a handmade map. And even he said it's still not finished yet.

It's certainly amazing someone actually made a random map generator for Doom but it's not that complex when you really look at it.

Yes, but keep in mind it can mix and match partial rooms and decide where to place items and actors too.

Between the extremes of symbolism and realism, I don't know which is worse.

Bot AI?

This is called a strawman.

Nothing he said indicated that, and no that isn't what all games were like back then, not even arcade games. Good console games were usually fair but challenging with what they hit you with.

Even where this is actually true (which again isn't everywhere) maybe not every game needs to be a mountain of meaningless bullshit. Maybe its good to have something short but challenging just to see how far you get. Maybe this special snowflake mentality that challenge is always bad and movie-like story advancement is always good is just retarded.

SMT4F may have rebalanced SMTIV's formula for the better. But I have yet to play it, so I can't confirm it at this time.

I'M NOT A HIVEMIND YOU FUCKING SUMMERFAG SHILL Holla Forums GOON NIGGERFAGGOT Holla Forums KIKE

GO BACK TO REDDITUMBLR OR CUCKCHAN YOU MEMEING FUCK

← This video gives good commentary on why modern game design is fucked, just take it to a general level instead of just Thief.

Game design is absolutely fucked and no game dev even fucking notices it, they just keep ticking away on that fucking checklist.

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You can literally download the entire library of official NES games and a majority of them are actually not half bad. To say its as bad now as it was then it a bit misleading. However, you not exactly wrong ether. A better analogy of the trashcan of gaming would be too look at the shovelware on the PC and Amiga market in the 80's and 90's

All i'm going to say to this is that there were like 3 super autists who were outright stating it was their duty to preserve "Holla Forums culture" by shitposting the hell out of an overwatch cyclical thread.
Any time you want to talk about a game, especially a new game, there is always an effort put forth by fuckwads who will just proclaim anybody talking anything positive about any particular game a shill and then there will be just endless dubposting and other shit.

Its really honestly very tiring to try to actually talk about a game that isn't at least 10 years old here unless your goal is to shit all over it and circle jerk about how bad it is.

When this place is good, its really good.
But its still like finding diamond rings in dog turds.

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This is a great example of why modern games are shit. Thanks user.

fuck off summerfag

How did they do it?
Just increased the general player speed?
I though they had some progession system in place that makes you faster over time.

No dude, almost all modern gaming is shit. It's why I prefer to play /vr/ games with some select post 2000 games like postal 2.

They didnt fix it, you can play the doom levels in doom 4 and not get some secrets because your character just cant move fast enough

Fuck, that's both hilarious and a fucking new low.

This guy is 100% spot on. You can tell straight away that Thi4f is both a massive step down from the originals and no better than any of the other "cinematic experience" games out there. I hope Square dies and Eidos goes with them

Weeeell, you're 75% right.

Oblige uses line-def data from wads that detail a specific prefabbed sector, taking the data to create a bigger room. It then takes in the user data–of which not all of it is even configurable without manually editing the .lua files (looking at Step Height and Jump Height, which tweaking can lead to larger gaps, higher rooms, crouch requirements for some tunnels, etc.)–and applies things from there. This all gets, as you say, stiched together to form one larger prefab room, which is then stiched as a prefab itself, to other prefab rooms like it. It's essentially prefabs stiched to prefabs, combined to a larger prefab to be stiched to other prefabs.

Saying it's "not that complex" isn't giving it enough credit, it's just that the end results can and often do look repetetive even if internally the rooms are vastly different.

They literally disabled some secrets from even happening because they are unreachable at the regular speed. For example on Map 2 there's a secret room that opens when the player steps over a linedef *in another secret room* and the player has to leg it at full sprint to the other secret's entrance, or else you miss your timing and have to redo it. DOOM 4 just doesn't even activate the secret because there's no way you'd ever reach it, even with powerups or double jumping.

Also have you noticed half the textures are so lazily applied and misaligned? It's disgusting, as if they looked at a couple screenshots and rebuilt the levels from there.

I liked Thief 4, but it should of been a new IP or something because it's a complete departure from the classic Thief games settings/enemies/lore/everything but the stealth

Eh, I kind of get where this guy is coming from.
There is a point where the game writing is just so fucking long winded that its like the writers forgot they were writing for a video game.

But I think that's more of a switch in my tastes as a function of my more busy life.
I find, however, this is mainly an issue with japanese RPG games.

I think quake champions has classes because they want in on the overwatch crowd/genre

all these nostalgia levels show is how horrible doom looked

This is super obvious. the cgi trailer they did looks so fucking half-assed it's convincing me they just did it a few weeks before E3 because the amount of attention the fps-with-abilities "genre" was gaining sales.

They didn't have to add in the classic maps. I suppose they did so just for nostalgia's sake. To be honest, I would have preferred if they would have given me an option to turn on the classic soundtrack.

The arguments about the player speed compared to the older games always kind of falls flat for me. There is a bigger focus in the modern doom on the vertical axis in the map design and traversing things through jumping and climbing. The old doom only had the ground level to deal with. So when you dump a very differently designed game into an old one you're going to get losses and gains in some areas. As far as modern shooters go this is one of the faster ones i've played lately. A good amount of that "speed" is really felt in that you have to be aggressive. You can't play defensively and win which is a BIG departure from the design of shooters for the last, what, 10 fucking years?
Its the step in the right direction for once because it seems to be making a video game rather than some SUPER EPIC STORY or other shit that plagues modern development.

Bottom line, most fun iv'e been having in a single player shooter in years. I may just go back to the old ones since I never actually beat them through (got pretty far in 64 though).

Its not hard to be the best if the last 7 or so years have been complete shit. Its still shit, but less shit compared to this bigger pile of shit.

Thi4f and all the other games like it need their own genre so they can die out faster.

The problem is that games these days are just badly written, Fallout 4 is case in point

Decent point. Still, the game feels like it was made by people who were interested in making it as a game. That's always a plus.

I guess man, I don't know.
My latest horror story was checking out a Neptunia game. After so long of hearing how great they were from Holla Forums and figuring if a large amount of people on Holla Forums like it, then it must have some merit.
I was wrong. Dead fucking wrong.
Out of the 2 hours I put into "playing" the game, I would say a sum total of 30 minutes of it was actual game play. The rest was dialogue dialogue dialogue.
It was worse than FFXIII
At least FFXIII would give me some pretty animated thing to look at when it tried to be a movie. Neptunia just gave me static images to stare at.

Waifufaggotry is cancer.

How is Matt a shill?

You actually believed that moe shit would have been good? Come on, now.

They put in the classic maps because that's a traditional id thing they did back in the day, and they sure do want you to think "they still got it" by carrying on the trend, even if they do it so lazily.

Doom and Doom 2 had loads, and I mean loads, of verticality done in the best ways they could despite the fact they had no real verticle movement besides falling. Doom 2 especially had narrow paths through high pit falls, and a level taking place inside a city where enemies would be firing on you from several floors up.

Not to mention that Cacodemon's and Pain Elementals and Lost Souls could move freely in verticle space and could essentially chase a player anywhere through a level.

To say the original doom games only had "the ground" to deal with is just ignorant, but as you said you haven't even beat the originals, so I doubt you actually experienced half of what made the games great.

And there is also the fact that the creators couldnt even remember the difference between the archvile and the revenants, neither could the "fans" though.

Hold the fuck up Nigga are you serious? nuDoom wasn't designed to appeal to older players at all.

I wonder who is behind this post?

meanwhile every time Serious Engine gets updated the changelog always said "added ability to add more enemies"

You're forgetting the part where there was barely any aiming as well.
All you needed was for the enemies to be in your line of sight. There was no aiming up and down.

Look, none of what you said actually matters when the player is not expected to be moving and doing actions in those vertical spaces.
As a player, I can't move on that Z axis on my own accord unless there is a pitfall or an elevator. When I don't need to actually look/aim upwards (because I can't anyway) to shoot something that is positioned higher than me then it may as well be on the same flat plane as me.

I'm not trying to convince you that this new one is better or the same as the old ones. That's impossible. But do recognize that they were designed differently. Within the constraints of their own designs, they both work great independently.
You have to also consider that even the monsters are different. What would normally be that shotgun zombie guy is now replaced by some guy with a megaman arm canon that can shoot an explosive burst round that can instant kill you.
If anything, THAT doesn't work in the old maps. Nor does the movement abilities of the imps.

If you ask me, this should have been Doom 3 and Doom 3 should have been spooky space adventure 1.

They're so fucking horrible…and these are the sorts of game players that kids like to watch?

Is it the jews? Are the jews behind a conspiracy to talk about video games on a video game board?

BTW, may as well toss this in here. But I remember when DaS3 came out and a good amount of venom was spat at it saying that it was a horrible suckfest and a betrayal of the other games and blah blah blah.
Just wanted to say that I went back and played 1.
Nostalgia goggles are pretty god damn thick for some people I guess.

The difference is now no modern game is truly great. Even the best ones are decent at best. The "quality floor", if you will, has remained the same, but the "quality ceiling" has lowered considerably. When people on Holla Forums complain about the state of modern gaming, they're not complaining about excessive amounts of bad games, they're complaining about the lack of good ones.

hownu.ru

That was giant bomb.

The problem is that Doom 4 uses this verticality poorly at best, and in most cases where it is used at all it's pretty much as a platforming segment with clear pointers telling you which ledge to jump towards. This might tickle your fancy but as a person who prefers not to be hand-held through everything, I find this use of verticle space to just be a waste. There's rarely a moment where you actually need to look all the way up or down due to enemies on different levels engaging you. The jumping in this game is essentially just a pathway you have to press a button other than "w" to progress through.

Get the fuck out summerfag

if mark wasn't a faggot he would be an accurate representation of us

(checked)

Eh, I honestly think part of the problem is that people are just getting too absorbed into the hype trains that the marketing for these games make. I also think part of the issue is that its too easy for people to get "inside information" about these video games.

Take MGS5 for example of this. Hyped so god damn much by the marketing that the final product seemed lackluster in comparison.
And then all the knowledge of cut content and shit started rolling in so people are getting mad at what could have been and projecting that on to what they already have.
Meanwhile, MGS5 is a very solid game in itself. Second in the series to perhaps MGS3 and a pretty good game on its own right in stealth and such.

I don't know though, I generally don't get sucked into hype trains and I don't follow video game news or anything like that. I don't even care to keep up with E3 or anything. I used to, but I realized what a fools errand it truly was. Causes nothing but frustrations and its always filled with nothing but lies.

Oh, more game "journalists"?

Unreal Tournament 4 is a lot like old school UT except they added some cool parkour stuff and added more unique functionality to the guns (like how you can pull enemies with the link gun)

Then you could say the Souls games do a good job of blending the numbers from RPGs with traditional action combat, though the thing I think they do really well is the way stamina works. It seems pretty straightforward, but the point is that every attack drains your stamina, every dodge drains your stamina, and blocking hits drains your stamina. You have to manage it pretty carefully and let down your guard for it to replenish faster.

I do recognize it and most Anons who actually were in the nuDoom threads understood this, your failure to understand this is why most of your posts comes off as pretentious. The big whopping consensus out of those threads has been one big collective divide into three opinions of nuDoom in order from most well received to least well received:

Average
Mediocre
Boring

Math was done and the enemies in nuDoom are so jacked up on health the weakest enemy has 100s of more HP then the weakest Doom enemy and dies without head shots or Glory Kills only after 5-7+ shots compared to the Troopers 2-3, nuDoom's emphasis on Glory Kills is exactly why Glory Kills is horrible for the pacing of the game The Darkness had a similar mechanic and is executed much better by not emphasizing it and not making you invincible when you do it, the "vertical" design you speak of is pretty much there for the sake of being there every fucking thing is on a ledge to justify you being able to climb a ledge, the engine itself can only pump out a baffling limited amount of enemies when older 3d engines and even modern engines can and do put out more then fucking twelve ((X)x255 3D objects is a good rule of thumb to measure and is easy to do), it's such an unoptimized piece of shit the demo they put out fucked toasters side ways in the ears for no reason besides "fuck code optimization", and finally the reason why nuDoom is shat on for it's lack of speed is because Bethesda advertised it to be fast and speedy which you fail to realize.

Overall i'd say nuDoom is a failure.

Bringing up the darkness really makes me think how much better the darkness 2 was than nudoom.

Yo, enemy variety. Weapon Variety. Emphasis on how you move around enemies, where you move across the level. Where you shoot from. How you aim as you shoot. Moving and shooting is complicated.

You take away the ability to move and shoot at the same time, you make the game simple. It's like as if you're removing the way mario jumps higher when he runs. Or removing his ability to jump higher or lower at all.

COMBINE THINGS TOGETHER. THIS IS DEPTH.

Why is reading so hard?

The whole point is that some people here cry "all FPS's today are the same", when that is true for all games all the time. Successful things (and mechanics) are copied, just as Doom was copied in it's day and age.

Video related.

No one can possibly this full of shit. Doom was as simple as you can get, with AI as simple as you can get..and the monsters got stuck there too. Pre-defined patters? For human soldiers? In an open jungle? Are you retarded?

Most amateur programmers could made Doom today. Try making Crysis.
It's the same schtick as a stick and railgun. Even a monkey can sharpen a stick.

That's how it was back in the day too. Or are you forgetting the first MUDs?

I'm not questioning if some things about games can be (somewhat) objectively appraised, you dimwit.

I'm questioning your ability to be objective, I'm questioning your judgment and I'm questioning your methods.

So?
When you copy something good you at-least will get something decent provided you're not an idiot, when you copy something that's already mediocre it only goes down from here.

You probably don't even know how the Crysis AI work at all so I'd suggest you shut the fuck up.

and all I am saying is things are not nearly as subjective as people like to pretend. Their is a general standard of excellence for all sorts of things in life. Sure it may not be a black and white as some would like or easily measured as a utilitarian would wish. However their are certain things which are virtues, which are transcendent like Renaissance Art or Classical Music Composers while other things are undoubtedly slothful, lazy and ugly. Likewise its practically a universal know idiom that watching paint dry is not fun. Therefore subjectivity can not justify all opinions as equally valid.