Author Topic: How do you win? Some other stuff  (Read 4323 times)

Offline x4000

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Re: How do you win? Some other stuff
« Reply #15 on: May 12, 2011, 03:56:15 pm »
It actually is sort of on topic, though -- it's really useful and interesting for me to hear why you love other games that are somewhat similar to AVWW.  Not so that we can take their mechanics or whatever -- we already have our own ideas about that -- but because it's viable to hear "user stories" that were particularly fun, to use the technical jargon.  Keith and I each know what sort of carrots keep us motivated and coming back to a game, but it's interesting and probably important to be thinking in terms of broader types of carrots than just what works on the two of us.  Having that sort of feedback on AI War post-1.0 is what has really let it shine, I think.
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Offline Nalgas

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Re: How do you win? Some other stuff
« Reply #16 on: May 12, 2011, 07:28:57 pm »
Making all different class combiations and leveling them to as high as possible just keeps me entertained to no end. Plus the whole difficulty lvl thing is what keeps me interested as well (clear the game on normal with a character, move to epic. Clear on epic, move to Legendary. Create a new character and you have to do it al over again for that character).

That's pretty much exactly why it keeps me playing, too.  Each class by itself is as fleshed out as what you'd find in most games, but being able to mix and match them lets you try out a ton of different things and come up with wildly different ways to play.  It's sort of similar to how changing map and ship types and minor factions can turn AI War almost into a completely different game, and you keep discovering surprising/fun new combinations even after playing for what seems like forever.

The completely static game world/content does make the multiple difficulties and starting new characters get a little tedious, though.  It wouldn't be a problem that it doesn't change if it just weren't so long.  Unless you do something like use Deflier to cheat and start a new character at level 35 on Epic, it takes a long, long time trudging through stuff you've already seen and done repeatedly before getting to the point that you get to play with your new stuff much.

The bosses are always fun, and some of the areas/levels are, but half of them just get boring.  Sometimes I never make it past Act 1 because I've already gone through it so many times, and you can't even sprint through stuff like the labyrinth to save time because there are no shortcuts.  Basically, as much fun as the gameplay is, the pacing is terrible at times.  If I were less lazy, I'd make a custom map that removes half the content but gives you twice the experience and hope it's somehow balanced or something.

Go look at Grim Dawn if you haven't already, by the way.  Some of the guys who worked on TQ started a new company (after the old one went out of business) and are making a new game using an improved version of the engine, complete with all the multiclassing stuff.

It actually is sort of on topic, though -- it's really useful and interesting for me to hear why you love other games that are somewhat similar to AVWW.  Not so that we can take their mechanics or whatever -- we already have our own ideas about that -- but because it's viable to hear "user stories" that were particularly fun, to use the technical jargon.  Keith and I each know what sort of carrots keep us motivated and coming back to a game, but it's interesting and probably important to be thinking in terms of broader types of carrots than just what works on the two of us.  Having that sort of feedback on AI War post-1.0 is what has really let it shine, I think.

I had sort of meant to address that more directly, but it seems to have gotten mixed up into what I already said above.  I hadn't really consciously considered before that some of what I like about TQ and AI War is the same, despite them being completely different genres.  I did already know that that's something I tend to like, though, and have sought out at times in games I play or included in things I've worked on.

Having many interacting systems or gameplay options gives people a lot of ways to approach things and seems like it can appeal to different types of people (as long as it's not so overwhelmingly complex that it scares most of them off before they learn to appreciate it, which does happen with AI War sometimes, unfortunately).  Some of them like to figure out all the details of how they work.  Some of them like to figure out what the "optimal" way of doing things is and what the strongest combinations are.  I do some of both of those, but I also like finding things that are unexpected.  There's just something satisfying about finding a weird/unusual but not buggy interaction between two (or more) things that make a class or playstyle that was previously thought to be unplayably bad actually viable (although not necessarily "good").  I've been known to do stupid things like solo a game with a character that only has group-based abilities, just to show that it's possible, and figuring out how is sometimes more fun than actually doing it.

Offline superking

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Re: How do you win? Some other stuff
« Reply #17 on: May 13, 2011, 06:19:00 am »
Bear in mind that DF has an enormous time advantage on us, having had years more to work on their engine while also not needing to worry particularly about graphics (a huge time savings, I'm sure).  That said, there are two of us programmers, and one of him. :P 

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Offline zoutzakje

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Re: How do you win? Some other stuff
« Reply #18 on: May 13, 2011, 07:36:16 am »
I don't think the area's in titan quest are to big at all. Of course you've seen it all before when you've cleared the game once and some of the places are really annoying indeed... but finding out a way to get past the annoying places with as few deaths as possible and learning to play a new class makes me just continue playing. And before I know it, I find myself preparing to face the Titan again (stockpiling 400+ potions on legendary and making sure I got at least 30-45 mins of free time to play).
I'm one of the people who considers modding as cheating. I only use TQdefiler for a bugfix so that I can play online now. If a mod adds new content and quests to a game I'm fine with it ( I believe Elder Scrolls Oblivion has a lot of mods like that), but in Defiler I've seen mods like 250 times the normal exp or finding rare items only or something and that would spoil the fun for me. When I reach lvl 50+ with a character and start playing on Legendary, I  want it to feel like I accomplished something, instead of getting there to easy.

And cool that our brabbling about other games might actually be usefull to you, Chris :P

Offline Nalgas

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Re: How do you win? Some other stuff
« Reply #19 on: May 13, 2011, 09:28:03 am »
I don't think the area's in titan quest are to big at all. Of course you've seen it all before when you've cleared the game once and some of the places are really annoying indeed... but finding out a way to get past the annoying places with as few deaths as possible and learning to play a new class makes me just continue playing. And before I know it, I find myself preparing to face the Titan again (stockpiling 400+ potions on legendary and making sure I got at least 30-45 mins of free time to play).

See, if that were true (it's not for me, at least), that would be another story.  It's completely trivial to make it through normal with zero deaths with many, many classes.  Off the top of my head, I can think of ways to do it with hunting, dream, defense, and storm that almost require you to actively try to kill yourself if you want to die on normal, and some of the others are only slightly more difficult than that early in the game.  The only challenge is whether or not you can survive the boredom for however many hours it takes to get to epic, although even that tends to be pretty easy until nearly the end.

I'm one of the people who considers modding as cheating. I only use TQdefiler for a bugfix so that I can play online now. If a mod adds new content and quests to a game I'm fine with it ( I believe Elder Scrolls Oblivion has a lot of mods like that), but in Defiler I've seen mods like 250 times the normal exp or finding rare items only or something and that would spoil the fun for me. When I reach lvl 50+ with a character and start playing on Legendary, I  want it to feel like I accomplished something, instead of getting there to easy.

If I have to use mods to make a game fun, that's what I'm going to do.  Not surprisingly, most of the ones I use for TQ make the game harder, not easier.  The only thing I use that's easier than normal is unlimited potion stacking, but that's just about universally accepted on the forums as being ok and something the game should've let you do anyway.  The main thing I refuse to play without (other than potion stacking and the fanpatch that fixes all the bugs) is xMax, though, which makes the game spawn as many enemies as it can possibly handle, which in some cases ends up being more in single-player than you'd see in multiplayer with six people.  There are up to ten times as many regular enemies, depending on the area, and it applies to bosses, too.  Fighting three of every boss by yourself finally makes some of them almost hard on normal (and kind of absurd by legendary if you have a crappy build).

Without that, I probably would've gotten more bored even faster and not replayed the game much after the first time through, because it doesn't exactly have a built-in "walk a few squares farther on the map if the game is too easy" option like AVWW, just "keep playing for another 20 hours and the game will eventually catch up with you".  Heh.

 

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