[Article] Hardcore Game Design and Subsystems
" what he said....PoE hasnt' brought any revolutionary ideas to the genre...he just took the old recipe copied it, put the FF skill system and you done.... UNOFRTUNATELY diablo3 BROUGHT revolutionary ideas to the genre it doesnt' matter if some of you guys like it or not...it doesnt' matter even if they are good/bad, it brought and develop new ideas a) AH b) instanced looting c) 4 difficulties they are not all good (i.e. 4 diffs are hard to balance) but they are all inovative in the genre PoE brought the skillsystem which is good, but it is only that (do NOT tell MAPS..cause TL1 bought them 1st...and in a wayyy better development) we all here love PoE but...some truths must be told to When you judge another, you do not define them, you define yourself Last edited by killbilly on Mar 8, 2013, 12:59:19 PM
| |
| |
|
The only difficult in D3 was that the gear increased in power exponentially over the levels. When in inferno you could throw away all your 59-60 gear. That's it, it was purely a gear problem.
4 difficulties is dumb (poe had it too but with just 2 acts) AH pretty much ruined the game for most of the people. I "hipsterelly" did self-found gear until late act 3 in hell on my first char. Meanwhile my friends where just bored since normal difficulty because they always had OP gear for their level. Last edited by lepre84 on Mar 9, 2013, 9:28:23 AM
| |
" I feel the bolded part here (bolding added by me) is extremely important. In fact I'd go further and say that game mechanics are completely separate from UI, regardless of the intentions of game designers. The quality of a UI can be judged completely separately from the quality of game mechanics. A good UI is one that both communicates to the player the current state of the game and allows the player to efficiently tell the game what he wants to do. | |
" I'd like to hear why you think the bolded part above is the case. I think GGG are posing themselves a particularly challenging task in balancing POE as they seem to be trying to produce one set of game mechanics which is balanced for the permanent hardcore and softcore leagues, as well as the shorter term leagues. It seems to me that this is an impossible task and that one or more of these leagues will have to suffer. One example of another game that posed itself a similar balancing challenge and had at best limited success is Dark Souls. That game seems to have been balanced primarily around PvE, with PvP as an afterthought. | |
" The hardcore principle is directly applied to a fucking lamp in the OP; it went for pages without anyone complaining about it, and there's a reason for that. You can see the hardcore principle in all sorts of things, from Rubik's cubes to learning calculus to mountain climbing to career advancement. Anyone who's a parent is going to remember the look on their child's face as they conquer a learning objective they'd been working at tirelessly and with considerable frustration; it's almost like a miniature version of the Helen Keller story. I'm not comparing apples to oranges. You're trying to say "your" apple is special. Maybe it is, but it's still just an apple. " I can agree that grouping make the game too easy and very much threatens the hardcore status of PoE. The logical part about the system is that adding extra players gives +x% more item quantity, and +x% more monster health; they stupid part of the system is that x=50 and not a number closer to 100. " If you left around 1.03, D3 might have been a harder game. They nerfed difficulty in 1.04, and again in 1.05, and now it's super-easy steamroll mode. " Sherlock Holmes would be ashamed... obviously people with zero MtG interest are able to quote Rosewater on specific topics. " The trick is to go for the "balanced very well" option, at a somewhat higher difficulty standard, and to make the number of "cookie-cutter builds" vast enough that people can't count them all on two hands. When Stephen Colbert was killed by HYDRA's Project Insight in 2014, the comedy world lost a hero. Since his life model decoy isn't up to the task, please do not mistake my performance as political discussion. I'm just doing what Steve would have wanted. Last edited by ScrotieMcB on Mar 9, 2013, 10:52:27 AM
|
|
|
Most of the OP was great, with the glaring exception being "subsections".
Game difficulty should never, ever, EVER come from limitations in the UI. In a perfect game, the UI does not exist. Restrictions, as the post quoted in the OP called them, are only positive increases in difficulty if they pertain to actual gameplay, rather than interaction with your machine. The auction house had NOTHING to do with the failure of D3. It was simply the means by which the failed item-creation system exerted its influence. Without the Auction House, this process would have fallen to the forums, or to third party auction-house replacements. On the flip side, the auction house would have been a fantastic addition to the game given much stricter item creation controls. On a different note, it is almost impossible to balance an ARPG for multiplayer without making group based play harder than solo, and at best equally rewarding. The interplay of abilities you can garner with multiple characters is almost completely un-quantifiable, and is definitely impossible to balance with a universally applied "monster hp number"; a number which affects the duration of a fight and not much else. It's the same reason why 10 and 25 man raids in WoW will never, ever be equally balanced, no matter how much each subset of players tries to argue it is. |
|
|
The problem with terms like "hardcore" and "difficulty" is that they cover very different things.
A game can be "hardcore" because it offers an intellectual challenge and requires a lot of involvement on the part of the player. That can be termes "hardcore", I guess. To a point, POE used to be like this with builds. But then, "hardcore" can also be applied to players that don't care what the "difficulty" is based upon, as long as it separates them from the "casuals". That's the kind that's always telling ppl to just "go back to XXX". Then it's less about overcoming a challenge yourself, it's more about ensuring that as many others as possible cannot In that sort of "harcore", no matter that you're playing a cookie-cutter build directly copied from the web... And that only one or 2 of them are valid. Quite the contrary. The more people attempt to do something creative and fail because of bad game design, overtuning or the like, the better. In fact, the more people leave in disgust, the more exclusive their status is. And frankly, that sort of "hardcore" is just stupid. As for the part of hiding numbers... That just doesn' make sense. You know very well that the min-maxers that create the cookie cutter builds WILL analyze the numbers even if you try to obfuscate them. They just need to spend enough time recording data and crunching it. All it does is hide it from people that won't look for the data on the net or follow the patterns. Which, I guess, is the idea. | |
|
What the hell man.
It's a game. You play it for a couple of hours, grind some maps, get some orbs, ignore people in global and try to bargain in trade. That's it. The game isn't inherently difficult. If it wasn't for desync, I'd be playing 24/7, like in D2 times. The game is fun, easy, MMO style grind-n-farm. Don't you think you're taking this a bit far? | |
|
Prompted by another post, I mentally substituted 'hardcore' with 'Alt F4' and the result is hilarious.
I don't know what you're playing at, Scrotes. General Discussion is meant for bot spam, the occasionally misplaced trade attempt, guild recruitment and complaints about the latest changes to the game. Your attempts to usurp this ancient order with such comprehensive, informative posts is not appreciated in the slightest! https://linktr.ee/wjameschan -- everything I've ever done worth talking about, and even that is debatable.
|
|
