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voiddaysrp · 3 years

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Name: Days

Gender: Female

Age: … Very old, she lost track long ago (she is however 18 physically like me ooc)

Species: Human-dragon hybrid Height: 6’2 in/ft | 187 cm

Other measurement things: Wingspan is about 12’3 in/ft or 374 cm (likely varies because i dont know what is actually “accurate”). Tail is about 6 feet long or 182 cm.

Personality: Quiet and contemplative, Days is not the most social person in the world- she's usually off doing her own thing unless someone else puts her to a task. These things of her own are often building- she’s not great at the creative aspect but she puts focus into practicality at the very least, expect her to have her nose in a book as she makes an exp farm that no one probably actually needs at that point in time. She is also one for experimentation, having a scientific mindset towards things- sometimes she may even go too far without realizing it, she rarely means bad by it but empathy is something that has left her mind long ago.

Due to her unique circumstances Days is not particularly in tune with her mob traits- she learned things in her time stuck in the End but there are some things that just… happen, for instance she often finds comfort in obsidian pillars, is drawn to end crystals, hates beds and often starts vibing around endermen in the overworld without really thinking. She tries not to think about how she has lost half her humanity, it’s not a pleasant thought.

Once upon a time she used to be a very adventurous sort of person- prone to going out on long trips and then taking five years to come back, down to earth but enthusiastic nonetheless (basically, my ooc personality). However… after her long fall in the void and then being trapped in the end even longer she has changed considerably, her emotions are incredibly dulled in many aspects which she sometimes tries to overcompensate for (you want melodramatic speeches? That’s how you get melodramatic speeches). She may often come off as rude, when usually she’s just trying to be honest.

Sometimes she does get the urge to explore though… hey, looking at that mansion may be good research…

Background:

Once long ago there was a wandering girl named Days, she lived out on her own- her family was god knows where and boy did she… not think about how to get back to her spawn when she started wandering out. Oops. It’s fine though… eventually she came upon a savanna village and in exchange for helping with basic work she took up one of the empty houses and lived among them (based on my singleplayer world).

But… that wasn’t enough for her, she wasn’t great at building pretty things, nor was she good in a real fight, and if she ever tried redstone she’d likely fail miserably… yet, there was one thing she knew she was good at. Exploring, seeing the unknown and taking note of it, perhaps bringing riches back home for those around her.

So she made a habit of it, going out for weeks seeing what lies in one direction of the vast world they lived in- making notes of what she sees, of what others could use and perhaps along the way she could find something to bring home with her…

Along the way she actually begun to see other people, adventurers like her. From them she heard a curious tale, one of “The End”, about how a dragon is said to live there and killing it could bring riches to those present… and what got Days’ attention was a rumor that the dragon’s breath could be collected and used in potions. Now wouldn’t that be something unique to bring home?

With this in mind she decided to follow a group to a stronghold they had found, they were mainly there for the fight it seems… and that was good, Days had no intention on trying to fight the dragon herself so they could do that for her, she just needed to get close enough to use those bottles she had on hand.

When they arrived well… Days had no words for the realm, it wasn’t like anything else she had ever seen… and boy was being around that bottomless pit of the void anxiety inducing. This was the hard part, she stuck close to the more combat trained players, as they got in range of the dragon.

Oh.

Oh that’s a large mob.

Maybe she had gotten in over her head but it’s fine… right?

She waited, and waited (maybe she should have also brought a pumpkin)- the opportunity had to come soon… and she saw it, the dragon flew close to the ground and attacks her current comrades with that strange purple breath.

Okay, there it is. She ran out and got as much of it as she could carry in her arms before running like mad back out of the way.

She heard a loud noise sometime after, like the crackling of a firecracker. What was that…

Erm.

Where did everyone go?

Slowly moves out of her hiding spot, no one around aside from a sea of enderman and a… that has to be the portal back yes?

… And another portal, suspended in air. What is that? Where did that lead? Curiosity overrode the basic sense of safety she should have been following and with some careful building she got up to it. It’s too small to crawl into… a pearl could do the trick though!

So she did…

But...

An odd feeling overcame her when she appeared on the other side, on a platform overlooking an expanse of islands. The view wasn’t what was on her mind though… her body was moving on it’s own, like some unknown force had taken control of her limbs and pushed her into the backseat.

There was no time to truly react until she had already stepped off the edge.

Like some sort of sick joke it was only at this point did she regain control of her body, when she was face to face with the abyss that surrounded the realm. She tried to in her panic send another pearl but it didn’t land, leaving her without anything she could do.

This wasn’t… this wasn’t how she wanted to die. What else could she do? She had a few seconds to at least try to see if she had anything else on her…

The bottles… she had never heard of using dragon breath on it’s own, it seemed more like it’d be an ingredient than anything else but…

She’s desperate, dragons live here right? Maybe it could do something. So she chugged it and hoped for the best.

Well.

Death never came to her.

But, she just kept falling…

...And falling…

Had she just locked herself into a fate worse than death in her attempt to survive? It came to a point where she couldn’t even see land anymore.

…

She didn’t know how long she had been there, there was no distinction of day or night in the End. Yet… there was a point she felt herself go eerily calm, no panic, no sadness.

She was just numb.

The void was an odd thing, at a glance it was only a silent empty space but at some point she heard… things. She didn’t know what it was saying, it was speaking a language she knew nothing of yet whatever presence it represented it seemed to overtime envelope her- not like the force that had forced her off the edge though, something more… benevolent? Was that even accurate? Either way that feeling corruption only grew over time.

Something had changed. An unfamiliar weight upon her back, an instinct she most certainly didn’t have before.

Fly. Get out. Home.

When faced with that after ages seeing nothing but fuzzy black there was no other option but to act right?

With that she… flew. She had wings. Where did that..

…

She can think on this later, her mind was mostly set on finding land. It took a long time, and by the time she managed to grip onto the edge of an island she was utterly exhausted.

But, she was a step closer to home.

Or was she already home?

It wasn’t until some hours later did she realize she had passed out, dragging herself up as she properly took in her situation. Not only did she find those wings but also a long tail, distinctly draconic but in colors of white and silver, some scales shining in an almost holographic color.

… She was no longer entirely human that’s for sure, was it the potion combined with the void that did something? She’ll… have to look into that. For now she had to get out.

How though? The islands were vast and she had been moving for who knows how long. She past by odd structures (cities?), many endermen and vast amounts of just… nothing. The only thing that kept her remotely grounded were old books she had in her bag, now that she could actually read them without fear of dropping them straight into nothing.

Years of being alone with creatures that couldn’t understand you was a terrible thing for the mind. She hadn’t realized it but at some point she has practically shut down aside from her singular goal of leaving.

It was that single mindedness that eventually got her back to the original island (what state was it in? Who knows that’s up to the greater lore people), thankfully the portal was still open for her to get the hell out.

… Uh…

Where--

Is she on a table?

… And that’s several different people just looking at her.

Oops.

#zablr syndicate au #long post #Posts from the void+#that'll be the character tag thing #this character has my name but lmao they have very little in common with me #totally not a kh bootleg

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holographic-bone-jester · 5 years

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Hey, I’ve been looking for a some sort of dinosaur game with accurate representations of dinosaurs for a while now. I’m wondering if you have any suggestions? I like the idea of ARK but obviously it’s.. ark. I’d like something at least a little more scientific. Also, have you heard of the fossils and archaeology mod for minecraft?

I do have the fossil and archaeology mod actually ! I like it a lot but i dislike that you have the option to have oldschool dinosaurs instead, to me this shouldn’t even be an option in the first place.

I’ve actually worked, and am still working on revamping some of ARK’s designs, with the wild dream of making a mod someday, but that would probably never happen since i am piss awful at programming and none of my close friends who would like to work on such a project can program either.

From my experience most people i’ve played ARK with mostly play it in this kind of sad idea that “god this could have been so good”, and so do i.

ARK could have been a great game, had they hired a paleoartist for their creature designs, stuck with the “mostly prehistoric animals” theme instead of branching out into out of place fantasy creatures, and paid more attention to the game and gameplay elements rather than rushing everything to launch DLC after DLC.

The creature designs look boring and ugly, and those that don’t look as boring are just ripped off of something else. The sizes are completely messed up even when it comes to the scale of creatures between themselves. The dossiers look like absolute garbage and the writing has no consistency at times.

Hell everything in this game is ugly: The male model, the female character on the official art, the outfits, the building elements, the costumes, the atmosphere and colors, literally nothing looks good in this game (aside from the female model which can sometimes look more like a real woman than like 90% of video game female characters, although that’s not saying much). They literally had to steal make mods official so that the game could have maps that don’t look like absolute garbage !

[Here is a comparison between the lara croft ripoff we got on the cover art compared to the surprisingly normal looking female model ingame (she is customized here and is skinny by default, but she’s still got modeled abs and no makeup, and her armor is the exact same as the male counterpart rather than a gross sexualized version, which is already miles ahead of anything Blizzard’s ever made, and certainly far better than the cover art)]

The story is confusing and very hard to grasp due to even the important dossiers being so scattered about all over the map. If you were completely new to the game you’d surely think there is no story until you get into some random cave and find a boss. Not to mention most of the game’s story is behind a paywall due to the bulk of the lore being in DLCs.

The game is glitchy, poorly optimized, and literally unplayable sometimes (my boyfriend legit cannot play ARK currently, it gets stuck in a loop upon loading the game). This is a 60$ game ! And it’s more even unstable than a Bethesda title !

And the cool RP gameplay elements such as building, painting and breeding are barebones and often don’t work properly either. Not to mention all of the game’s gameplay elements are mostly aimed at PVP, and the devs clearly only ever care about the PVP, they have several creatures that are ONLY useful in PVP, not to mention the official servers are unbearable trollfest mayhem because of their focus on PVP gameplay over everything else. The game is also barely playable without cheats in singleplayer because of all the creatures being so op and often almost requiring several players to take down, not even counting the bosses.

My perfect dinosaur game would honestly be ARK but with actual care put into it and more focus on PVE and singleplayer gameplay.

IDK if that helped, i kind of went on a rant here, sorry :’^(

But don’t hesitate to tell be via PM if that didn’t help, i’ll try to help more

#asks #ark survival evolved #non paleo

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zombiescantfly · 5 years

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Words About Games: Unreal Tournament (Epic Megagames, 1999)

In 2291, in an attempt to control violence among deep-space miners, the New Earth Government legalized no-holds-barred fighting.

291 years earlier, I heard that for the first time. Unreal Tournament begins with a narrated flythrough explaining two very simple things: there is a Tournament, and you are going to win it. After the lonely melancholy of Unreal, that's a pretty abrupt pivot. Why, after getting through most of the 90s with platformers, pinball, and fighting games, did Epic Megagames barrel in headfirst to the multiplayer arena shooter market, a playground run exclusively by industry already-giant id Software?

Because they wanted to.

As I mentioned in the Unreal essay, that game's multiplayer was a fun shell filled with horrible, horrible problems. Epic set to fixing it, but realized that beyond some quick and dirty surface-level patches, there wasn't a lot they could do within the same scope. So they broke away from a simple expansion pack and landed on creating a full separate release by the name of Unreal Tournament.

Unreal Tournament, UT99 from now on, was released on November 23, 1999, to an almost absurd level of praise. Quake 3 Arena, id’s latest offering in the Quake franchise and first multiplayer-only title, would come out just over a week later on December 2, pitching the two games into a deathmatch of their own which still rages to this day almost 20 years later.

Let's talk about Quake a bit. Shooters, up until around the time the first Quake came out and probably still after that, were commonly referred to as ‘Doom clones’ because, well, many were. Any unambitious dev could buy an engine license, whip up some sprites on a lunchbreak, and ship a game. There's a parallel to be drawn between that era and the current ongoing avalanche of Unity and Unreal asset flips, but you can turn to others for opinions on all that.

Quake was, famously, id Software’s followup to Doom 2, and an early frontrunner of fully-3d shooters. It was so popular and noteworthy that it even caused the term Doom Clone to fall away in favor of Quake Clone. Quake expanded the popularity of online play, and saw the creation of the some of the first AI bots made exclusively for deathmatch. Quake 2 came along not too far after and pulled in even more interest. If you remember from my Unreal essay, that was when it grabbed my own interest, and I became a frequent over-the-shoulder spectator of many a Quake 2 deathmatch.

But then, UT99. When I first played Unreal Tournament, I was blown away. By the bots. Meaning that they killed me a lot. I was very bad at it. I didn't even strafe back then, just ran forward and turned with the mouse. But I learned.

UT99 is actually quite an accommodating game. Bots have 9 skill levels ranging from drooling idiot to a fittingly-named godlike, and I remember bumping them up a level at a time over the years. UT’s bots were one of its largest selling points back then, and the cornerstone of the Tournament part of its name.

The titular Tournament in Unreal Tournament is a series of botmatches of increasing difficulty over the game’s five primary gamemodes: Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, Capture the Flag, Domination, and Assault. A final series of three 1v1 matches caps off the Tournament, the third of which pits you against the Big Bad Reigning Champ, a robot named Xan Kriegor.

There were a handful of firsts in that short bit, so let's take a look.

As stated, Quake 2 was the de facto king of online shooters at the time. But Quake 2, for all its fame, only had three gamemodes available: deathmatch, team deathmatch, and capture the flag. Unreal had dabbled with alternative styles of deathmatch and team deathmatch, but all of them were, more or less, the same gamemode, save one. In a unique take on King of the Hill, the first player to score a kill got a permanent damage boost until they were killed, at which point that buff was transferred to their killer. Killing the King awarded more points, matches were first to X points, you get the idea. RtNP added Cloak Match, a take on this KotH concept where instead of a damage boost, players fought for permanent partial invisibility and infinite jump boots.

Unreal Tournament was a little more ambitious than just reflavoring deathmatch, however. Domination used its own unique rotation of maps centered around controlling three points. Your team scores one point per every couple of seconds, per point held. Touching a point is enough to flip control of it to your side, and the result is a fun, frantic match with enough additional focus to guide it away from just another deathmatch. Map control becomes something more than just controlling various weapon spawns, and demands you keep your attention between the three points. Random respawns instead of near your team’s current territory and the instant capture of points meant the game never ground down to just being spawncamped, and helped reduce the prevalence of one-sided victories. Domination was great, the extra effort put in to creating its own category of maps was great, and games today still use the gamemode. That said, Destiny 2 really needs to make capture instant and not have you sit around for 5 seconds in a tiny room, like come on.

Domination may have been new for the time, and DM, TDM, and CTF made their own waves that I'll get into later, but Assault is what really caught people's attention. Assault was an attack and defense mode where one team was tasked with completing a series of varied objectives, while the defenders tried to stop them. The most similar thing we get in games now is pushing a cart down a predetermined path in TF2 or Overwatch. Payload gamemodes in those games are similar in the sense that one team must progress down a path to get to a specific location, and I suppose it might come across as a streamlining of the idea, but Assault is just more interesting.

UT99 shipped with seven Assault maps, and each one presented a different scenario. Assault was not just replacing the objective on an existing map, the same as Domination had its own maps. Each one had a little story it presented, from the attempted hijacking of a supersonic train, assaulting an ancient fortress on an alien planet, sabotaging an underwater research facility, stealing a Navy battleship, escaping a medieval castle, destroying an experimental battle tank, and even a recreation of the D-Day landing. Assault maps varied in how linear they were, with maps like Guardia, HiSpeed, and Overlord being fairly straightforward, to the more open-ended OceanFloor and Rook. It was, by design, an asymmetrical experience, but that design went so far as to change in-level as the attackers pushed further and further in. On HiSpeed, for example, the attackers start in a helicopter hovering over the rear of the train, and drop down largely uncontested. There's a full car where they can grab weapons and powerups, and then they reach where the defenders have spawned.

As objectives are met and various places in the map are reached by the attackers, spawn points start to change. On the same map, attackers spawn with a serviceable loadout of shock rifles and pulse guns (we'll get to the weapons later), both good options for the mixed-distance encounter they'll be facing as they move towards the next car. The defenders, however, spawn with access to flak cannons and rippers, which in the close quarters of the car’s interior are absolutely brutal. Once the attackers push far enough in to it, though, that car becomes their spawn point and the defenders are moved further back, thus giving the attackers access to those weapons for the next part of the map.

The same sort of design echoes throughout all seven Assault maps, and it creates a varied and frantic experience that was new at the time and still hasn't really been copied. The feeling of actually taking part in an event in the game’s world added so much to even the relatively sparse setting, and it remains a great example of an excellent piece of very quiet but highly effective worldbuilding.

The other gamemodes were again, team and free-for-all deathmatch, and as standard as that was at the time, UT99 made some weighty impressions on the genre. At the time of Quake 2’s release, it was common practice to just repurpose singleplayer campaign levels as the multiplayer maps. Quake 2 would get its own suite of maps designed explicitly for multiplayer later in its life, and Unreal shipped with 14 multiplayer-only maps, with a further 9 added later as free updates. UT99 shipped with multiple dozens of maps, each one presenting a different take on design and execution. You have a standard collection of flat-ish arenas, some truly impressive vertical design, maps with stage hazards, big maps, small maps, maps with areas of low gravity, and maps with secret passages leading to hidden weapon spawns. A handful of Unreal’s maps were even remade for UT99, and two in particular became series mainstays - Deck 16 and Curse. Both are still thought of as iconic maps, and for very good reason. They're well-balanced and play to the strengths of the game they're in while also, going back to Unreal’s bit here, feeling like they're a real space.

Because while UT99 may be a multiplayer-only fragfest with no real story, it has lore.

The opening narration is just a small bit of fluff, but it sets up a whole lot that the various designers had a ton of fun expanding on. Official weapon descriptions in the manual talk about the (in-game) real-world applications of each, and even set some up as not even being explicitly for combat. The Translocator, a personal teleporter by way of launching tiny disks, is a repurposed tool given to miners to help escape cave-ins. The GES Biorifle is a vacuum cleaner for toxic sludge instead of dust. The Impact Hammer is a jackhammer but sideways. The in-universe justification for those few weapons doesn't mean anything to the gameplay, but given that the Tournament was set up by Liandri Mining Corporation, it adds a bit of fun sense-making to the whole thing.

Maps, too, are part of that lore package. Each map throughout the Tournament ladder has a short description, and it's almost always about what this particular arena’s place in the world is. Most boil down to “this is a site built for the Tournament” or “Liandri bought this and made it a Tournament arena,” but it's about the tiny details hidden in the lines. Deck 16 is a toxic sludge refinery, but it's also a single deck of the spaceship Gaetano, rented out to Liandri whenever it's in drydock. Curse is an ancient temple that was an archaeological site until Liandri bought it after funding ran out. Arcane Temple is a Nali worship site on Na Pali left abandoned after the Skaarj invaded. Oblivion is a Liandri passenger ship that tricks Tournament entrants by being their first arena. Hyperblast, the final stage of the Tournament, is Xan Kriegor’s personal spaceship made specifically to be an arena.

The whole thing paints the Liandri Mining Corporation as this quirky half-malicious corporate giant, as big and influential as any sci-fi megacorp but out of an innocent love for their decidedly not-innocent game. It's a world where humanity spent seven days on the brink of destruction at the hands of the Skaarj, where the Corporation Wars tore entire planets apart, and where despite that everyone can get over it, crack some beers, and watch people blow each other away on live television, kept safe by technology that respawns them within seconds.

Character backgrounds, too, drop hints in their two to three sentence lengths. The bots you fight against or with all have tiny snippets of who they are, making reference to revolts, arrests, rebellions, other worlds, secret government experiments, and revenge.

The important thing to take away from this is that all of this was put in but none of it had to be. It doesn't affect the game and it's not even immediately noticeable unless you let every map and character description load before entering a Tournament match. Just going to map select for a practice session/instant action game doesn't show the same descriptions, so you have to go through the singleplayer ladder. It's work put in that shows a genuine and earnest excitement for the world the devs had created, and I still get a smile thinking about it. Unreal Tournament is such a weird celebration of every gritty science fiction trope, but turns them all on their heads to create a world for this game that feels exactly as expansive as it isn't. Because Unreal Tournament doesn't have anything to do with the lore it hides in all these corners, it's just a multiplayer shooter with no story beyond “kill better than the other guys.” And boy do they ever make that part feel great.

For better or worse, Wolfenstein 3D cemented FPS weapon progression. Ever since and with only a few minor alterations here and there, the loadout progression is melee weapon, bad pistol, automatic weapon, shotgun (though those sometimes switch position), a better version of one or both of those, some kind of explosive option, sniper rifle (that was a later addition), and then a superweapon of some kind. From Doom to Quake to our old nemesis Half-Life to our slightly newer nemesis Halo to Call of Duty, you get those weapons in roughly that order.

So let's talk about Unreal again for a second. I didn't mention that game's weapons because I wanted to bring the whole discussion in at once, but it does require me to go back in time a year and talk about where the series landed on its own weapons. The first thing to know about Unreal is that it was not immune to the Holy Progression of Gun, but it did make some incredibly noticeable changes. Unreal saw a videogame gun, famous for being a thing you can left click on men with, and asked “what if you could also right click on men?”

I'm moving a rough sort of progression, so be aware that this is only the general order you get these guns in. In Unreal, the first weapon you pick up is the Dispersion Pistol, a projectile-firing semi-auto gun that doesn't do a whole lot of damage. One fun thing about it is that its projectiles cast a real-time light on the environment so you can use it as a way to peek into dark areas before going in them with your vulnerable body. But another thing about the Dispersion Pistol is its alt fire, where you hold down the right mouse button to charge up a shot which then acts essentially as a rocket launcher shot - it deals better damage, it deals splash damage, and it can gib enemies. In-universe, the Dispersion Pistol is a Skaarj weapon, and you can also find hidden upgrades for it that boost the damage of both firemodes at the cost of taking more ammo per shot. Luckily, as your holdout weapon, the Dispersion Pistol recharges its ammo passively.

The second weapon you get is the automag, a basic hitscan pistol. Primary fire shoots a fairly accurate shot, alt fire has you hold the gun sideways to increase the fire rate at the cost of accuracy. It's dumb and I love it to this day.

Third up, the Tarydium Stinger, a projectile-based minigun with an alt fire that acts as a projectile shotgun. Here's where the lines start to get a bit blurred, but we're not totally out of the usual progression just yet.

After the Stinger you get the ASMD Shock Rifle, a famously curious gun that, as its primary fire, shoots a hitscan beam, and shoots a fast-moving projectile orb as its alt fire, trading perfect precision and speed for a little bit of splash damage. The thing about it is that if you shoot the orb with the beam you get a giant explosion that does an absolute ton of damage.

Moving from that piece of sweet hardware brings us to the GES Biorifle, a rapid-fire goop-throwing mine layer with a charged shot as its alt fire.

Then, the Eightball Launcher, a rocket launcher that has not two but four firemodes. Click primary fire to shoot a rocket, fast moving and with splash damage. Hold primary fire to charge up to six rockets that fire in a spread pattern, or click alt fire while charging to shoot them in a spiral formation. Also, you can get a mild lock-on effect by holding your mouse cursor over an enemy for about half a second. Alt fire is the same as primary but with grenades - click alt fire once to lob one, hold to charge up to six. The grenades bounce around for a set period of time, and also blow up on contact with an enemy.

Then possibly the series’ most famous weapon, the Flak Cannon. Primary fire is a projectile-based shotgun that fires individual shards that bounce around the environment for a bit, allowing you to fire around corners or even up at the ceiling to bank a shot over cover. Alt fire is another grenade launcher, though this one fires its shells at a shallower angle, a higher velocity, has a smaller up-front splash radius, and still creates little bits of flak that bounce around for a short time. This gun is my and many other people’s favorite gun in videogames.

The Razorjack is a strange gun that fires disks that bounce around the environment at scarily high velocities, and even have the ability to decapitate enemies if you hit their head, a useful feature in the Skaarj-infested levels where you first find it. Alt fire is a tricky system that lets you influence the path the disk takes, though its high velocity, bad turning radius, and small size makes “influence” a more appropriate word than “guide.”

Next is the Rifle, a high-powered hitscan primary fire with an alt fire that zooms in. Headshotting enemies decapitates them but other than that it's just a sniper rifle, let's move on.

Finally, Unreal has the Minigun, a hitscan bullet-spewing beast that shows up near the end of the game, leaving you with just barely too little time to get to use it as much as you want and also to realize that hey, it's just a minigun. Primary fire shoots with a short spool-up time, alt fire shoots faster but less accurately. Unfortunately this does not make you hold the Minigun sideways like the Automag.

So that was Unreal’s loadout, and it made some big waves at the time. Physics-based projectiles? Well sure, Quake had the bouncy grenade launcher, but the Flak Cannon and Razorjack made being aware of and using the environment second nature to players. The ASMD’s ability to produce a BFG shot on demand if you could combo properly was amazing. And the upgradeable nature of the Dispersion pistol made what was usually a loadout slot reserved for being sad about having to use a legitimate late-game complement to your arsenal.

So it stands to reason that Unreal Tournament barely changed it.

UT99’s arsenal did change a little bit, but not too drastically. Most changes were to damage or fire rate, and every weapon got a new model. Some weapons were slightly renamed, like the Automag becoming the Enforcer or the ASMD receiving its full title of ASMD Shock Rifle, the Eightball Launcher was just called the Rocket Launcher, the Rifle became the Sniper Rifle, and the Razorjack was renamed the Ripper.

The next level of changes was tweaking some alt fires. The biggest change here was the new Ripper losing its guided blade in favor of an alt fire that shot an explosive disk. Unlike the primary fire, it didn't bounce, and while it had only about half the splash radius of the Rocket Launcher proper, its fire rate and projectile speed were both much faster. Other than that, the only change to another gun was the Sniper Rifle getting a thematically appropriate overlay when you zoomed in, instead of Unreal’s Rifle not displaying anything. Additionally, because it seems to fit here more than the next bit, if you manage to find another Enforcer lying on the ground, you can pick it up and dual wield. It's pretty rad.

Larger changes came in the removal of both the Stinger and the Dispersion Pistol, and the addition of the Impact Hammer, Pulse Gun, and the series’ first superweapon, the Redeemer.

I'm personally a bit conflicted about trading the Stinger out for the Minigun. On one hand, UT99’s Minigun is a great piece of visual design - massive, chunky, and bold, with the added flair of seeing your arm holding onto a forward grip to really sell the vibe of that one scene in Predator. On the other hand, there's something to be said about a projectile weapon over a hitscan one, especially since so many high-powered hitscan weapons exist in the game already. But at the same time, UT99 does have an answer to the automatic projectile weapon, the Pulse Gun.

The Pulse Gun should be instantly familiar to anyone with a passing understanding of id Software’s early titles. Primary fire is just the Pulse Rifle from Doom, and alt fire is the Thunderbolt from Quake. But put together, married in this suitcase-sized brick of green polygons? A thing of beauty.

Let me at least address the Impact Hammer before moving on: it's a melee weapon you can charge up. It'll kill someone pretty good if you charge it up and manage to make contact. It has a pretty fun and inspired visual design but ultimately the only reason it's there is because you can run out of ammo with the Enforcer you spawn with. The end.

Alright, the Redeemer. The Redeemer is a man-portal nuclear warhead launcher, kind of like the Fat Man from Fallout 3 except way, way cooler. Primary fire launches a relatively slow-moving projectile that, on contact with anything, explodes in a shockwave that does enough damage to instantly gib anyone without 199 health and a Shield Belt powerup. It goes through walls, too. It's a very good superweapon. Making it better is its alt fire, where you take personal control of the missile as it travels, allowing you to guide it around the map with a surprising degree of maneuverability. The BFG may have a classic flair, but the Redeemer took the idea of a superweapon to a whole other level.

So how did all of these weapons actually play together? How did an arsenal designed for and balanced around a singleplayer game with fixed enemy spawns translate to a multiplayer arena? Quite well, in fact. Epic didn't design the game in a vacuum, and as Quake 2 was the reigning champ at the time, they didn't have to look far to see what worked and what could be changed for the better.

UT99 plays fast, hard, and unrelenting. People load into a map and immediately start running around picking up weapons and letting the lead fly. Now, it's time for my bias to show a bit. I only ever watched Quake 2 multiplayer, but I have in fact played Quake 3 and Quake Live, as well as a handful of hours of Quake Champions which I know isn't really comparable but it uses the same weapons so I'm still mentioning it. UT is my series, I have a preference for it, and this next bit is all my own opinion and observation.

Quake only has three weapons.

Quake is a game where movement is fast, projectiles are fast, and time to kill is fast. It's a fast game. But it's so fast that only three weapons end up mattering - the rocket launcher, railgun, and thunderbolt. They're the three highest-damage weapons in the game and they make up pretty much the entirety of its arsenal. Quake matches inevitably all play out as taking potshots at each other with rockets as everyone strafejumps around like crazy, switching to the railgun if someone manages to be in the open for more than half a second, and swapping to the thunderbolt if you manage to get close enough that another character model takes up more than a handful of pixels on your screen.

Quake is a very fast and chaotic game, and I'm not saying that this kind of play isn't skillful, it's just so fast that actual duels never really happen, and people just kind of end up taking damage from one end of the map when they're on the other. Quake’s other weapons just may as well not exist, because if you find yourself using your starting shotgun, the nailgun, or any other weapon you want to be close for, you're likely doing so in range of someone's Thunderbolt and that's not a race you're going to win.

It's a difficult point to make, so let me move back to UT and why I prefer it. UT is a small but noticeable bit slower than Quake in a way that I feel greatly benefits it. Overall, it comes down to bringing the action in a little closer, really making the fights seem more personal, and really giving players more of a chance to dance around each other rather than hopping around the level on their own accord until they find each other by chance. Projectiles are both slightly slower and much more visible than in Quake, so trying to slam a rocket into someone's face from three hundred meters isn't really going to happen. So, from further away, you'll want to use a hitscan weapon, but since your target will be smaller they'll be harder to hit. Unless you want to zoom in with the Sniper Rifle, but then you lose a bit of awareness of your immediate surroundings. Close up, the Flak Cannon is king, but its range is short enough to matter. The Pulse Gun’s alt fire is just the Thunderbolt, and it'll tear someone apart pretty handily, to say nothing of putting the Minigun into overdrive with its own alt fire. Even flipping your Enforcer sideways will get bullets into someone quickly, and with fancy enough footwork you can save yourself from a gruesome fate with the starting gun. Or, if you're trying to keep someone away, quickly laying down a gooey minefield with the Biorifle works just as well as filling a hallway with a dozen bouncing Ripper blades.

Every gun in UT99 can kill someone, and not just in theory. The game balances each of its weapons almost perfectly, and nothing ever feels totally useless or has an obvious better version (I am not counting the Impact Hammer or Enforcer in this statement). Jumping over or dodging away from rockets to close with the Pulse Gun’s alt fire is just as reasonable as forcing someone to switch away from their Flak Cannon by retreating backwards as your Biorifle makes it impossible for them to safely advance. Lobbing a Flak alt fire over that minefield is alway an option though, so be ready to get out of the way, and maybe pull out your Shock Rifle to push them backwards. A fully stocked Minigun can keep an approach locked off, but a quick sniper bullet right to the face will put an end to it.

Alright, admittedly the Biorifle is historically a bit ignored, and the Ripper didn't even show up in subsequent games, but both still had a purpose. I, personally, am a staunch defender of the Biorifle’s utility as an area denial tool, and the ability to charge its alt fire will instantly kill someone no matter their health and shield level, if you can hit them. It's certainly better in team gamemodes like Assault or CTF, though. But just shooting at people with the weapons does not an arena shooter make. For there to be the proper levels of frantic action, movement needs to have a strong focus.

As in Quake, you'll want to get familiar with your spacebar. Strafe jumping isn't a thing as far as constantly upping your own speed, but it sure does make you harder to hit, and getting decent at dodging rockets always helps. Double tap a movement key to do a quick dodge in that direction, useful not just for avoiding projectiles but for snaking down corridors. On an elevator? Jump just before it reaches the top to get a massive boost and go flying. The Impact Hammer isn't ideal as a weapon, but a quick blast downward makes a decent stand-in for a rocket jump, if at the cost of significantly more self-damage. Capping it all off is the Translocator, the aforementioned teleporting-disk-thrower. Primary fire to shoot a disk in a pretty generous arc, alt fire to teleport to it. Disks emit light and can be destroyed, if you teleport while carrying a flag you drop it, and yes, you do fall faster than the disk travels upward. Truth be told, I usually play with the Translocator turned off, but that's mainly because the bots, as good as they are at the rest of the game, are less than stellar at putting those disks where they want, often leading to a cluster of them bouncing their shot off a wall just inches under the ledge they want up to, and not taking any action until they get it. I think it has to do with the accuracy modifiers based on bot skill level, but I'm not sure.

The bots are great in every other respect, though. Sure, they'll never actually replace a human player, but they're more than good enough for a few hundred hours of offline play. All the tricks the Skaarj demonstrated in Unreal are on display again, and tuned up to use every weapon. Bots jump and dodge, retreat if they're low on health, make decisions about what weapon to use based on their proximity to you as well as their own inventories, switch between firemodes when it makes sense, and plenty else. Upping the bot difficulty doesn't just make them do more damage or give them more health (it doesn't even do that in the first place), it makes them smarter. Or ‘smarter’ if you really care - it changes their reaction times and how accurate they are, how aggressively they'll act, and even how good they are at using the weapons beyond just aiming. A low-level bot might not get close enough to hit you with the Pulse Gun’s alt fire, or will use a Rocket Launcher in close quarters with all the risks of splash damage and self-death that entails. Higher difficulty bots will bank Flak shots off walls and bounce grenades around corners, lay fields of Biorifle goop, or be deadly-accurate with a sniper rifle from above.

The bots are what really put UT99 firmly on the ‘classic’ shelf, because its contemporaries just didn't offer the same thing. Again, Quake 2 had bots, but they served the purpose of being moving targets and not much else. Driving UT’s bots was a dead-simple, if tedious to implement, system. If you'll indulge me, I'm gonna pull back the hood and reveal the not-at-all-secret ways Unreal Tournament made all of its bots so good at playing each map.

All over a map, there are invisible waypoints hand-placed by the designer. The goal is to make a rough trail of waypoints to each part of the map. Bots see each waypoint and have the ability to travel in a wide radius around each. Weapons, ammo, health, armor, and special powerups all act as special waypoints that a bot will see and travel to if they don't already have what that pickup is. Players and other bots are considered waypoints as well, and when all that comes together, a bot will very intuitively move around the level. Placing a waypoint higher in the air will make a bot jump to reach it, so having them move over obstacles is simple. Like I said, it only requires a loose sort of web across the level, as the world geometry itself is also something a bot sees. Going around a corner or a box in the middle of a room is no issue provided the waypoints are good enough.

So now that you know how the sausage is made, what does that mean for the game? Well, quite a lot. Bot support is built into every single one of the maps UT99 shipped with, which is no small feat considering the base game came with 53 maps across four gamemodes (deathmatch and team deathmatch use the same maps), with a further 30 maps added for every gamemode but Assault over the course of four free downloadable bonus packs.

Every single one of those is playable, to this day, offline with a complement of bots just as ready to rock as they were almost twenty years ago. And that's not event counting the thousands of user-made maps still available for download, but we'll talk about modding in a bit. Because right now, it's time to talk about another excellent thing present on each map - the music.

Returning from Unreal are indisputable gods of music Alexander Brandon and Michiel van den Bos, who trade the previous game's subdued alien score for a soundtrack full of some of the boppin’est, crunchiest, hypest EDM tracks of the late 90s. (Can you tell I don't know anything about music?)

Run, GoDown, and Organic provide the upbeat bleeps and bloops to murder by; Save Me, Razorback, and Superfist let you rock out with your shock (rifle) out; while Forgone Destruction, Skyward Fire, and The Course chill things out a bit so you can focus on getting sick headshots. The quality of the music in Unreal Tournament is impossible to overstate, just as it was in Unreal. Brandon and van den Bos are unrelentingly good at their jobs, and the mishmash of styles all grinds together across UT99’s broad palette of maps like butter full of shrapnel. It's good, is what I'm saying. The music's really good. Listen to it. Please.

Stage music is something I personally miss from shooters, if you'll indulge another tangent. I love hearing the gameworld as interpreted by the composers, it adds so much to the whole package, and we just don't really get it anymore. The rise of the modern military shooter in 2007 with the runaway success of Call of Duty 4 kind of slammed the door on stage music with a tactical-lite focus on identifying footsteps and directional fire, but even Halo’s deathmatches were filled with a blank silence. Or Halo 2, I suppose, since Halo 1 didn't have online play, except for the PC version, which did. No stage music though, that's the main takeaway.

UT99 had a truly odd mix of contemporaries, from the last days of Quake 2 and the imminent release of Quake 3 a week after UT itself came out, to Half-Life creating a mod scene in its multiplayer, to Halo a year or so later. The turn of the century would bring with it the generally-accepted death of the arena shooter, but they all went out kicking, and the few hundred people still populating UT99 servers to this day are a testament to its tight, clean design and no-frills focus on gameplay.

Unless, of course, they're playing a mod.

Truth be told, I never actually played much UT99 online. I was very bad, you see, and when I got better my horrible social anxiety had progressed to the point where the idea of even playing a game with faceless strangers was terrifying. I was 8. But anyway, modding! You may have, in your travels as someone who presumably plays videogames - an assumption I'm making because you're reading this - heard of the Unreal Engine. In a hidden bit of Trivia, Unreal was the first game on the Unreal Engine, and Unreal Tournament also used it. Wild!

Along with the game itself, both releases also shipped with the Unreal Editor, or UnrealEd. UnrealEd is the exact development tool the fine folks at Epic Megagames used to make those games, and they just casually handed them to the players. The result echoes throughout the game industry to this day, and while Epic was hardly the only developer supporting mods, they were the first to do so on that kind of level. As a result, there are thousands if not tens of thousands of user-made maps scattered around the web, along with new gamemodes, fan-made expansions for Unreal, new character models, weapons, and mutators.

Ah, mutators.

Mutators can be thought of as ‘mini-mods,’ if you want. There's a list of them you can select before each game that all change, or mutate (see?), the gameplay a bit. Superjump, low gravity, replacing each weapon spawn on a map with another, big head mode, stuff like that. Mutators are a fun addition that can mix up a usual match, but don't bring with them the sweeping changes of a full mod or total conversion. They were a way to illustrate how flexible the development options were, and a nifty thing for players to have available to them.

So, Unreal Tournament had lots of ways to keep the game fresh, either built-in or crafted by other players. Turn a small map into Explosion Hell with the Rocket Arena mutator, or download a player-made weapon pack filled with weird goodies. Wondering how Quake’s iconic maps play in UT? Somebody's made them. Hell, someone's even made a bunch of UT2004 maps for UT99, complete with de-made character and weapon models. A lasting legacy of creativity is what UT99 brought above all else, and the fact that so much of what it did can remain as the primary example of how to do something right says more than I can about its impact on videogames as a whole.

Unreal Tournament is a fast, brutal game balancing all of its various systems on the edge of a spinning razor blade, and it does so with a mastery that I feel was not seen among its peers of the time. From the weapons, the movement, the maps, and the gamemodes, Unreal Tournament presents you the player with so many options, but it never feels like a generic crowd-pleasing paste has been slathered over everything. The game's core is simple and well defined, and everything else builds on that. It has a certain tightly-realized identity that I feel is missing from a lot of games that try to have the same sort of arcady arena vibe - Halo was probably its closest rival as far as small genre shifts go, and looking at Destiny 2 as the latest version of that is a weird mix of procedurally generated weapons, hero abilities, flat maps, and very few projectile weapons. Skill has been taken out of some areas and added to others, but the design feels looser, less actualized. Call of Duty is fast, but still has that small desire to be somewhat tactical, so there are recoil patterns and weapon attachments, the rich-get-richer killstreaks, and a progression system that murders any attempt at balancing their arsenal. Quake Live, from what I understand, has a healthy enough playerbase, but my preference has already been stated. Quake Champions tries to marry its classic gameplay with that of Overwatch, and the reactions have been mixed. Team Fortress 2 has been bogged down with more and more weapons that blur the lines between classes, and the official map rotation - already small on launch - has barely been added to in twelve years.

This isn't a “games are different now and that's bad” sort of thing, my point is just that UT99 had a much cleaner mission statement, if you will, than what we get now. The industry's gotten bigger, and budgets followed. Expectations of sales rose, leading developers to want to bring in as many players as they could. Games can't really be niche anymore.

Or maybe that was true five years ago, but now the indie scene’s getting huge, and you can find a revival of your favorite genre just about anywhere. Most aren't super well polished, but isn't that what made games like Unreal, Quake, and Half-Life into what we remember? They all had more ambition than was perhaps warranted, and each made their huge impacts despite a healthy amount of blemishes. Endless polish makes for a good player experience, but maybe not as much of a memorable one.

Unreal Tournament all but made me into an FPS fan, and I think it's great that we all have so many types to choose from now. Public tastes have shifted and evolutions of the genre happened. I've enjoyed my fair share of Calls of Duty and Battlefields, I plugged hundreds of hours into TF2 throughout highschool, I've ridden the Overwatch hype train, and I love poking holes in walls and getting sneaky kills in Rainbow Six: Siege. But Unreal Tournament is my oldest bastion, and one I return to every now and then when the whim takes me. It occupies my top slot, though admittedly in an endless 1v1 with Unreal Tournament 2004.

But there was another Unreal Tournament between the two, one that came and went with mild fanfare while paving the way for what I feel is, hands down, the best game ever crafted by human hands. Check back at the end of the month for a short look at the odd little Unreal Tournament 2003.

#unreal tournament #ut99 #words about games #videogame #review #essay #fortnite #unreal retrospective

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soulkiba · 5 years

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3, 10, 11, and 26 for the gaming asks !

3. A game that holds a special place in your heart?- So there kinda are a few but the most memorable one probably is Dragon Age Inquisition which not only helped me be more comfortable with my sexuality, thanks to the canon LGBT characters like Dorian, but also was a huge inspiration and motivator for drawing back then. Its definetely a game with flaws and all but it was just really important for me and helped alot getting me where I am now.10. Hardest video game you’ve played?- Gotta stick with good old Dark Souls here, the first one only cause it was my entrance into the series and god was it a rough one even with help from Guides and Videos. I swear to god the midway point almost broke me especially cause I had to do it twice but I’m really glad I stuck through it so I could experience Bloodborne and Sekiro too without too much struggles :’D11. Video game you’ve spent the most time on?- I...really regret that I have to say League of Legends here. I just played it over a few years almost daily with a friend and it was fun no question but the game and the company really went to hell and kids just don’t invest in Online Games too much please. I still don’t think the game itself or the Lore and Art is bad but the Community and Producer is just god awful.But when it comes to Singleplayer games, probably the plenty of Pokemon Games I played as a kid. Some other RPG’s like Dragon Quest and Monster Hunter too though.26. Favorite gaming series?- Oh dear thats a tough one but I really gotta say Metal Gear here. I expected nothing when I went into the Games and just played them cause my Brother had like, all of them but what I got was more then I ever expected. All the games are just so well made, the Story and Characters are wonderfully made and it’s just incredible, even though the beginning can be real tough. It’s an amazing game series and I really do recommend everyone who’s interested to try and check it out. Thank you so much for asking!

#ask #raccodactyl

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bluebudgie · 6 years

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RAMBLING about ffxiv in comparison to gw2 under the cut. ive been thinking about this a lot in the past years already, comparing the two and their features. spoiler tl;dr: in my personal opinion gw2′s positive points heavily outweigh what ffxiv has to offer, but there’s a handful of things i wish that gw2 did similar to ffxiv.

this excludes both expansions for gw2 and ffxiv, since ive never played heavensward and stormblood and it would be unfair to compare gw2 with all its expansions to just the core game of ffxiv.

warning, there are highly subjective onions in this. oh boi here we go

Let’s start with the things that i like about FFXIV that I wish gw2 implemented in a similar way:

First of all, different transmuted gearsets that you can save and then switch to on demand. It’s just nice having different gear sets (not even necessarily with different stats imo, thats what legendary armour is for) and switch around. Probably interesting for roleplayers.

Beast Tribe crafting quests. This is probably the feature i’d want the most in gw2. It would have two big advantages: 1) Get to know other tribes better and in more detail. We could have Tengu, Skritt, Kodan, Quaggan, Hylek, Grawl, Jotun.. probably more. And an even more important side effect this would have in my opinion: It would make people actually use crafting professions. The crafting professions are highly underused (mainly because they’re honestly useless for 95% of content) and having daily tribe quests attached to them would at least make them less obsolete? The crafted items could be soul- or accountbound so that there wouldn’t be any way to just simply buy them off the trading post either. Then again, FFXIV overall has the more interesting approach to crafting and gathering so I’m not sure this would really work out in the same way. Nontheless, for sake of different tribe lore..pls anet, make it happen.

The second most important thing i want implemented in GW2: FISHING!!!!!

I also like the Hunting Log. GW2 sorta has a similar system in the achievements tab but I think FFXIV presents it in a nicer way.

All those emotes. FFXIV has so many and you can even use some while sitting or being on a mount etc.

...dodo. FFXIV just overall has the cuter minis, and there’s.. the dodo. Dodo is better than any other mini ever in any game.

The problem is.. that’s already kinda about it. And with exception of the whole tribe crafting thing and dodo it’s also like.. really minor stuff that doesn’t really affect gameplay.

Now things that I personally (!!!) prefer about GW2 that overall just make it the better game for me to play:

And that is... the core gameplay.

I know. It’s an MMO. MMOs are supposed to be played with other people. But I hate, absolutely despise, instanced group content. I come from a singelplayer RPG background (that sounds overly dramatic) and let’s be honest..... all content in GW2′s pve (excluding raids) can be solo’d. Story? Soloable. Dungeons? Soloable mostly. Fractals? At least low level fractals are soloable. Open world content? Soloable, apart from a few events like bigger world bosses. GW2 can be entirely played as a singleplayer game (which, again, I know is not necessarily the purpose of an MMO) and... i love that.........

Other things I prefer about GW2 in contrast to FFXIV:

More customization options during character creation.

Very subjective opinion but i find the player races a lot more visually appealing and diverse.

The wardrobe and dye system is INFINITELY superior, like i cant even imagine how anyone could justify anything else. But then again I guess that’s fashion wars 2′s speciality.

very personal taste but i also like the look of most armours and weapons better

No ‘end game’, everything feels equally accessible, and the level limit is set at 80 without having to upgrade to better armour constantly (in the same time i can also imagine that precisely this would be a negative point to many people and they like the constant upgrading)

A lot, lot, lot less grinding

Explorable underwater areas and underwater combat

Now MMOs arent really known for delivering the storytelling depth of a delicately crafted singleplayer RPG but overall GW2 has interesting lore and also some nice characters.. and i just cant get into neither ffxivs story nor lore at all. not blaming that on the game and i dont think any of the two games has “better” or “worse” storytelling but it’s just an experience ive made. i realized while playing that i absorb every single text box and piece of lore in gw2 like a sponge, and in ffxiv i just want to hit the skip button as fast as possible during every dialogue. Can’t really explain why either.

Being able to trade across several characters on your account.. i know ffxiv isnt really made to have several alts since you can play every class on a single character but i still find it annoying that i cannot trade any items at all to other characters on my own account

Much bigger maps with the whole vista and poi system that rewards you just for exploring maps, which is.. well thanks to having more open world content in constrast to instanced content

More customization and gear options while playing classes. I know blabla there’s always an optimal combination of gear and traits and skills that will be meta but... it’s just not necessary as long as you stay out of lvl 100 fractals and raids. Play a tank thief? Go ahead. Make a heal engineer? Noone stops you. It just doesn’t matter and you can find your own personal playstyle with a lot more different traits and skills. And no we didn’t fail chak gerent event because 1 person was in knight’s gear which made the boss scale too much. Yes i read that on the forum.

And also, while i don’t want to take this as an actual argument, but.. u have to consider that you buy GW2 once and then play forever, and every single “cash shop” (aka gemstore) item can be purchased with the ingame currency if you have enough time and patience for farming gold. There is no need to ever spend a single penny on anything. FFXIV.... has a monthly fee AND cash shop items that as far as i know can only be purchased with real money and.. while i know that this is the norm in other MMOs (I believe WoW has a similar system?) I just find that very questionable. I know it’s all optional so it doesn’t influence anything, but still I believe this is a point worth mentioning.

Now I’m not saying all of this to make FFXIV sound bad. As mentioned there are a bunch of things I like better in it, and after all I liked the game enough to actively play it for a year. FFXIV and GW2 are both good games, but thinking about it i just realize a lot of times why exactly i feel so much more at home in gw2 than i do in ffxiv.

#THIS IS LONG BE wARNED #it also sounds a lot more dramatic than its intended to be lol?? im just trying to make a list

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nazih-fares · 7 years

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It’s been eight long years since the Halo series ventured into the ruthless world of “PC-only” RTS with Halo Wars back on the Xbox 360. Halo Wars is probably a title that is on this list of surprising games, and ended up becoming one of my most memorable gaming experiences as well as others, but sadly the developers – Ensemble Studios – close house roughly a year after launching the game. Probably most known for their work on Age Empires, Ensemble Studios was acquired in 2001 by Microsoft, and all of its assets remained with the Redmond publisher and developer, and now comes its sequel, simply named Halo Wars 2 under the care of 343 Industries as caretaker of the Halo franchise and The Creative Assembly, a studio renown for its Total War RTS series. Will this be the same experience as it was on Xbox 360, or just a simple upgrade of a former gaming sensation?

The story starts with the cryogenic awakening of James Cutter, Captain of the brave UNSC Spirit of Fire, 28 years of a long sleep. For those of you which played Halo Wars, this is the same crew that you played as in the first game, waking up and embarked in a new conflict against the insurgents of the alien coalition: The Banished led by the Brute warlord Atriox. In any case, the storyline has deep root with the Halo lore – as you would expect – and will be perfect for fans of the franchise, even if it’s a rather short campaign with only 12 missions, which will take 5 to 8 hours to finished depending on difficulty or if you’re a Halo Wars veteran. In the end, even if you peak beyond the cutscenes which are on par with the quality of a certain iconic competing RTS developer (Blizzard Entertainment) – Halo Wars 2’s narrative is all in all particularly faithful to the franchise’s universe, which is great considering it was given to new hands.

Newcomers to Bungie’s original Sci-Fi might find this game a good entry point for the franchise, especially since a “definitive edition” of the first title is paired with Halo Wars 2 as a preorder incentive. Yet there’s nothing groundbreaking, and the campaign basically sees you play as the UNSC, leading Cutter and the Red Team in missions that are not really inspired where you’ll have to destroy Atriox bases, kills X many enemies, defend checkpoints under the pressure of a stopwatch. Nothing that reinvents the wheel for fans of the genre, especially since these are usually winning conditions and goals that will be re-purposed in multiplayer which is the major upgrade in this episode, but we’ll get to that later on.

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On the point of view of gameplay, the original Halo Wars smooth playability with the controller is yet again as a success, especially in a game genre that is usually on PC and played with mouse/keyboard combination. For those that never played the first game, the first missions will obviously teach you all the subtleties of the controls, which have been a bit reworked on the interface front as well as adding some new possibilities. Would you like quickly navigate from one base to another? Quickly jump on alert points? Assign tactical groups to the D-pad arrows? It’s all in here. I will though spare you from falling into a very complex description of each unit, its use or hero special skills, as they are mainly based on successful mechanics of the original Halo Wars and are worth discovering on your own. The only inconvenience I wished they fixed from the first game is the unit and building production system, which is as always tedious.

Why tedious? Well you mainly start with a base of command, a limited number of spots on which you can build add-ons to either harvest resources (mainly supplies and power) or assign to other kind of productions like building military units. The whole is ruled by a set of timers based on what build you are going for, and there comes the eternal RTS dilemma between either farming resources to better plan or just playing aggressive and destroy the opponent before he gets a chance to prepare for an attack. While the latter is the wrong approach in this game, the game system induces to build more resource modules (at the beginning of the game) than production, and thus giving you an unbalanced harvest/production ratio. The result is that it makes the matches extremely slow in the beginning, filled with farming and light map scouting, and while there’s always strategic points with fresh resource around the map that will initiate probably early confrontations, they are not enough to build a stable economy and favor a truly aggressive expansion strategy.

These rules of direction are obviously applied both in multiplayer and singleplayer, which gives a slow playing pace that really struggles to take off. Thankfully, when it comes to singleplayer, the most interesting – and challenging – missions of the campaign are those that require almost no economy management, centered around the combat. But with an AI that is not that smart, and the lack of mission diversity, you’ll quickly forget the campaign and jump in the core of the game: the multiplayer mode.

When it comes to multiplayer, don’t expect major clashes and the depth of a StarCraft II, as Halo Wars 2 is an easier RTS game to tame… as well as simpler to master. Multiplayer games start the same as the previous Halo Wars, where you are asked to choose a Leader, with their specific attributes and powers, before each match. You soon get used to the very balanced Stone/Paper/Scissor strategy of the game, even if sadly fades quickly when you are faster at building your economy, and can literally dump insane amount of units, overwhelming any weakness or strength of the opposing force… After all, like all RTS, strength in numbers can mean an easier victory. Bigger matches with allies can be more more interesting and fun, but there are more complete alternatives of this game genre on PC, but it remains one of the rare options on Xbox One for now.

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While the original Halo Wars only had one PVP competitive mode which was Skirmish, Halo Wars 2 adds Blitz mode, offering a new take on RTS with a blend of Hearthstone-ish deck building strategies. The concept is simple: open card packs that you obtain by finishing the campaign, performing daily and weekly goals or buy them with real-life money and build decks to use in battle. Blitz mechanics remove the whole need of building specific base modules to build units, instead the cards themselves once played will call upon that same card unit, having only one resource to take in consideration which is energy. It’s a more fun and simpler take on the Stone/Paper/Scissor strategy of each faction, and matches can be finished quickly, in comparison to a more traditional skirmish mode.

On the point of view of graphic engine and the more technical front, Halo Wars 2 is a clean and smooth experience, even if the framerate drops on some rare occasions when there’s too many units on the battlefield, but remains an overall visual success. The special effects such as explosions add some fun flair to the visual output, with overdoing it and removing the attention of the player on the field of action.

Halo Wars 2 was reviewed using an Xbox One and Windows 10 downloadable copy of the game provided by Microsoft. The game was tested on an Xbox One and a PC running Windows 10 Pro, with a 4GB NVIDIA Geforce GTX 960 fitted on a 5th Generation Intel i7 4720HQ 3.2Ghz CPU and topped with 16GB of RAM. We don’t discuss review scores with publishers or developers prior to the review being published

The first Halo Wars was intended for Halo fans, and Halo Wars 2 is no different even with a new multiplayer modes and story. It's been eight long years since the Halo series ventured into the ruthless world of "PC-only" RTS with Halo Wars back on the Xbox 360.

#343 Industries #Creative Assembly #Halo #Microsoft Studios #pc #RTS #Strategy (real-time)#Xbox Exclusive

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d3dman · 7 years

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Titanfall 2 Analysis

Daniel Duby

Ashley Godbold

GADA101 – Intoduction to Game Development

1/17/2017

Week 2 Assignment 1: Game Analysis

Titanfall 2

*minor spoiler warning*

Titanfall was Respawn Entertainment's first game released in 2014 as their own company and was published by Electronic Arts. The founders of the company, Jason West and Vince Zampella, were responsible for the Call of Duty franchise at Infinity Ward before founding Respawn in 2010. The game is a first-person shooter that puts you in the role of a Pilot, a specially trained and highly skilled soldier with a jump-kit, an arsenal of specialized equipment along with the military rank and clearance to call in and pilot the game's namesake, Titans. The Titan is a devastating, mech-style exo-suit and essentially a vaguely human-shaped tank with its own set of various abilities and weapons. When a Pilot calls in their Titan, it's delivered to an open area on the map via orbital drop; the deployment method known as Titanfall.

The game featured quite a few interesting innovations to the shooter genre, the most noticeable of which was its movement system. With the pilot's “Jump-kit”(essentially some miniature rocket thrusters attached to the Pilot's back) the player could double-jump and run along walls and parkour over obstacles. This was something I was very much a fan of. When asked to describe it the first thing that came to mind was: “Imagine Call of Duty + simplified Mirror's edge”. Another interesting innovation was the A.I. Grunt soldiers and various robotic units which accompanied players on the battlefield. These computer controlled forces would make battles feel far larger in scale and gave players more to shoot at while running around the maps hunting for enemy players.

Unfortunately, for Respawn and fans of the game(myself included), the lack of variety in game modes and community features, the disappointing artificial intelligence, and the lackluster attempt at delivering story through radio chatter over the multiplayer matches, rather than through a cohesive single player campaign, left a lot of players underwhelmed. Soon after its release on March 11th of 2014, its community started dwindling rapidly. Two or three months later it was difficult to find full matches on any platform. It looked as though Titanfall would be one of those great ideas that wasn't quite executed properly and would fade into obscurity, but Respawn wasn't done with it just yet.

Enter Titanfall 2. This game is everything the first one should have been. It features a new and improved multiplayer with far more Pilot abilities and a greater variety of Titans to choose from, a wider variety of maps and game modes, and better artificial intelligence that makes the ground forces on each side much more useful and the battles feel like war-zones. In addition they made some additions to the movement system with the ability to slide, and pilot abilities like the grappling hook and invisibility cloaking. The movement system has definitely been refined and feels awesome to play in the first-person perspective.

Alongside its improved multiplayer, Titanfall 2 also has a fully fleshed out, singleplayer campaign in which you take on the role of Jack Cooper (voiced by Matthew Mercer), a rifleman in the Militia and aspiring Pilot. During a battle gone horribly wrong, the Militia is over-run and Jack watches his mentor, a Pilot named Tai Lastimosa, die in front of him. In his dying breaths Lastimosa transfers control of his Titan, B.T. 7274, to Jack and gives him a field promotion to Pilot. From there Jack must travel and work with B.T. to survive on the hostile enemy planet named Typhon, uncover secrets of an experimental weapon designed to destroy planets, reconnect with the Militia and deliver this intel to his higher ups, and finally to destroy the weapon before it can be fired on the Militia's capital planet, Harmony. Throughout the game, Jack and B.T. begin to get closer and develop a real tangible friendship which is an interesting dynamic to have between a smart-mouth soldier and a giant, mostly logic-based robot. There's a simplistic dialogue system to reinforce this bond where occasionally the player will get to pick between 2 or 3 things to say. This system is really effective at allowing the player to step into Pvt. Jack Cooper's shoes when combined with the first-person perspective, the training being cut short just before the Titan section during the tutorial, and the lore-dump the player is given via voice-over at the beginning describing the bond between Pilot and Titan. Thrown in to the role of Pilot with nothing but the basic training, forced to survive on an enemy planet with this odd A.I. partner, you really do start to feel a connection to B.T. and begin to trust him as Jack does. This in itself is interesting, as “Trust me” is a line said many times by the metal giant throughout the game and sets the player up perfectly for the final twist and B.T.'s final words.

I played through the campaign on Regular difficulty even though, after running through the gauntlet in the tutorial a few times, it had recommended I play on Hard. I was very glad for my decision as the game is truly challenging and makes you master both its movement and its combat, forcing you to put them to use in tandem in order to progress. Along with this, the game will occasionally throw a curve ball at you, such as the level where you get a device that can alternate the player between the post disaster, creature infested present and the pristine, well guarded, and heavily armed past. You can do this at will and must do so in combination with the game's core mechanics to effectively deal with all threats across both timelines. This was a strange but welcome little diversion from the otherwise fairly standard Titanfall fare and I thoroughly enjoyed it as I did with the rest of the game. So much so that prior to writing this report, instead of the recommended “four hours” from the assignment instructions, I actually just played through the whole game and a couple of the multiplayer matches too. I couldn't put it down.

Although your experience may vary, I played on PS4 as I prefer the way the movement feels on a controller as opposed to a keyboard and mouse, though I'm sure the PC version would be much more accurate to aim with. The multiplayer communities are very different between platforms as many people find the PC crowd more skilled and harder to compete with along with reports of longer wait times for servers indicating a potentially smaller community. The game is also available for Xbox One but as I have not, nor do I know anyone who has played this version, I am unable to comment on it.

In some ways, I think the first game was a test to see if there was an audience for a fast paced shooter with more depth than just run and shoot, while still keeping those mechanics very polished. Many of Respawn's employees being former Infinity Ward devs, it only made sense that they'd want to expand on that experience, but perhaps they weren't sure players would accept the extra depth and added mechanics. Luckily, people like me exist! An audience who craves more depth and mechanical complexity from our games. That's not to say that Titanfall 2 doesn't appeal to all C.o.D. Players or those who like simple shooter fun. The game supports a wide range of play-styles and does each very well, but teaches you that the high movement play is where it truly shines through its campaign. Titanfall 2 has a very wide reach, and rightfully so.

The game was rated M for Mature, deservingly so due the graphic violence of war and the enemy pilots' foul mouths in the campaign. I give this game a rating of 9 out of 10 as its mechanics (the perspective, movement, ground and Titan combat) all work so well with its story and aesthetics (characters, dialogue, world building and sound design) and the technology brought to the table (the innovations in the movement, the time switching between two different, parallel versions of the same level and the A.I. for ground units and Titans) all come together to make something that, to me, was nearly perfect. Unfortunately it didn't quite make it as I do have some minor gripes with the game. Certain animations can be buggy regarding the hacking system with certain robotic enemies and sometimes when attempting to “Rodeo” enemy Titans, resulting in deaths that feel undeserved and frustrating. Otherwise Titanfall 2 is a great game. Highly recommended.

#titanfallgame #titanfall 2 #respawn entertainment #game analysis

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nazih-fares · 7 years

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Over the past two years, between a hostile takedown by Vivendi and numerous other industry stories, I saw French publisher and development house Ubisoft continue to take risks and launch new IPs. After the recent Steep (which I said in my review needed a bit more of finishing touch), it is now the turn for For Honor to emerge, in a weird genre between a fighting game and MOBA mechanics, where three mighty Middle-Age warrior tribes fight an eternal war. Weird? Maybe, but it works.

First, let me start by saying that MOBA are not really my thing, and while I had fun with MMOs back in days (mostly World of Warcraft and Guild Wars), DOTA 2 or League of Legends are games that didn’t get the patience – or time for that matter – to fully get into it to a point that I know stats and traits of over 100 different characters. Even with my short phase of playing both DOTA 2 and League of Legends, I had enough to understand the core concept of a MOBA, which is basically supporting a bunch of creeps that are your canon-fodder while you gain experience and be strong enough with your team to take over the enemy base. For Honor in this case is neither a MOBA nor an MMO, and feels more a fighting game that anything else, which was shocking for me as being in my top three most played gaming genre.

The MOBA and fantasy part of the game comes with its lore, arena fight mechanics as well as its character designs and choices (which can be also compared with the Omega Force’s titles). For Honor’s story is grounded by a fictional and eternal fight between Knights, Vikings, and Samurais, even though in real-life history, these “factions” never fought, but they do now because of some sort of world-changing cataclysm. Anyway the story is quite strange, and you discover slowly that there’s a mastermind behind this whole clash between factions, but what’s important to know is that the script of this game is not really what will get it awards. Nevertheless, there’s a “story” mode that tells the tale of three mighty Knight, Viking, and Samurai warriors, that will attempt to explain the mystic scenario of this game, while basically act as a long tutorial of each character class in each faction. Because of the AI enemy not being optimal in this story mode, I would advise to play this campaign with a friend that just grabbed the game as yourself, and play coop trough these 18 missions that need around 10-15 hours to finish depending on the difficulty levels, alongside the chance to find collectibles and other actions that will help you in customizing your gaming experience.

As you advance throughout the story, you’ll gain gold coins based on some criteria, and once you reach the 500 count, you’ll be able to start buying your very own new warrior class on top of the three starting one for each faction. Like the same strategy as Rainbow Six Siege’s operatives unlocking mechanics, Ubisoft Montreal decided to follow the same pattern and give you the chance as a player to unlock new characters the more you play the game (12 in total, 4 per faction). This logic also applies to the season pass owners, which will only get a seven-day head start to unlock the new characters, but if you wallet is heavy, you can also buy yourself the same coins with real-life currency and “speed” things up or unlock cosmetic upgrades to make each character unique in their own way.

In any case, let’s talk about each character class, shall we? First to be introduced in the story mode, are the Knight’s Vanguard, being the most versatile, easier to handle and do not have complex attack combos. However, don’t see them as the beginner class as they can become effective once you learn the depth of their technique, and their Viking counterpart can be tricky to handle with its two-handed ax, followed by the Samurai’s version with a long reach Katana. The second category includes the assassins (fitting for a Ubisoft game), which are weaker in terms of armor, more difficult to handle as they agile dual-handed warriors, except for the Samurai’ Orochi. Finally, the Heavy class of the game are like any tank in RPG: a beast of a warrior in terms of defense, and hit hard at the expense of slow movements. Finally, the hybrids are combinations of these three previously mentioned classes, with my personal one being the Viking’s Valkyrie armed which can harass swiftly like an Assassin, has Disabler abilities of the Samurai Heavy, and a long reach attack thanks to its lance (like the Samurai Vanguard).

With all this to take in consideration, and the depth of each faction’s differences even within each classes, comes the importance of training, and lots of it. The heart of the gameplay resides in a smart and simple to understand guard position (or stance), which is done to control which part of your body you want to attack and defend. So on screen, you’ll see this small chest overlay, with an arrow that is oriented up, left or right which respectively means that you are about to attack/defend your upper body, left or right side. While this seems simple by base, you discover a deeper and richer attack and defend mechanic, with a parry function that needs to be timed at the exact moment, counter attack combos, guardbreaks, and finally the map/arena itself plays a big part in the combat. You see, each arena has its own amount of obstacles, traps and cliffs which can become a viable solution to get rid of enemies, by using these environments to your advantage. There’s a fire in the middle of the field? No problem, harass your opponent until he’s forced to back into the pit and see its health fall dramatically. present in each arena make it a viable solution when it comes to getting rid of an enemy who is unconcerned. When it comes to singleplayer, all these actions are perfectly responsive on the controller, but watch out when you play online, as a strict NAT will make you fall into the same misery of every fighting game: not being able to hit that perfect milliseconds life-saving parry because of lag. Technically speaking it’s worth mentioning that there’s difference between all platforms, with both base consoles running the game at a locked 1080p and 30 frames per second, while the PlayStation 4 Pro can reach 1440p and 30 frames per second, and PC can go as high 4K resolution but locked to roughly 40 fps (in comparison up to 90 fps with 1080p).

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Considering the fact that its main multiplayer mode sets up large battle scenes with dozens of soldiers duking it out, For Honor runs the risk of making your system stutter and lag as it tries to render all the carnage. However, I’m pleased to report that the game manages to pull off its epic stabfests with nary a stutter. Optimization is top-notch here, even with fires raging and explosions popping up. I set the dial to Ultra at 1080 and ran the game’s benchmark tool, which put my fps between 70 and 90. In real combat scenarios, I was able to hit 100 without Vsync, and with Vsync I managed a smooth 60. There were some minor stutters while turning quickly, but other than that the experience was noticeably hitch-free. In terms of controls, I will firmly recommend a controller. The reason for this is that the game’s super-intuitive and fun blocking mechanic is bound to the mouse on PC.

So instead of just flicking the right analog in the direction you wanna block, you flick your wrist to move the mouse. It’s uncomfortable and less precise, and I barely managed a few rounds with it. Stick to controller with this one, people. All in all, the game does a great job on PC and I had no trouble even when I scaled it up to 1440. Great optimization job all around.

Now as mentioned above, each “hero” will have its own advantage depending on the faction, meaning simply that my Knight Vanguard will not play the same as your Samurai version. For example, the Viking Heavy called Warlords is equipped with a heavy shield and Gladius (Ancient Roman primary sword), which allows him to deflect blows easily and counter at close range. The list of combo styles are roughly no more than 8 or 9 variants, but the game is not lacking in depth as mastering each attack timing will require hours of actual AI or real-life opponent before it becomes a reflex.

For Honor as a game is played in confined arenas, which replicate what a medieval battle looks like without turning into an open-world game. This restriction is logical, as it helps makes the environment look stunning, whether it is the European style forest of the Knights to the exotic maps of the Samurai, passing by the snowy peaks of the Vikings. Yet the real prowess of the game lies in its engine and how it handles animations, with a realism that obviously reinforce the sheer power of some attacks, and how visually painful a hit can be. You just wait until you get to do your first assassination, you’ll just want to see more of that, like some sort of medieval Mortal Kombat style Fatalities.

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The game also has a great and effective UI and HUD, which pair visually in a great way with all actions done. For example, when you are in guard mode (a sort of lock-on aiming), the edges of the screen darken to better concentrate your attention on the locked enemy. Or my favorite is something called Revenge mode, which activates when you attack chain combos, or get damaged to near-death, and gives you this short couple of second invulnerable moment, and flashes with bright fire orange colors on screen. All these visual output are clearly Inspired by fighting games and the effect spectacle that follows great combos and super attacks.

But like most things in life, For Honor is not perfect, and has sadly the typical flaws of a newly launched internet-required game. First of all Matchmaking seems to be illogical for me, and getting paired with players of quite different skill levels, which explains the fact that the eSports/Ranked mode of the multiplayer is not launching until late April (in 2 month basically). It could be normal as matchmaking algorithms usually take time to identify a bunch of newly created accounts, but at the same time a technical beta, closed beta and open beta seemed to have not helped prevent server issues. In my case I managed to switch from a Strict to an Open NAT connection, but even that didn’t help with random disconnections from a multiplayer game.

Nevertheless, these launch issues will probably be fixed soon with a patch no doubt (as Ubisoft proved it with constant support on Rainbow Six Siege and The Division), but the biggest issue I believe is how niche this game is. You see, the campaign can be played alone or in coop, which offers several levels of difficulty thus could expand the lifespan of the game, but it’s the multiplayer modes and the number of variety that will truly make the game a long-term investment for players. Sadly due to this rare mix between a fighting game and MOBA style multiplayer modes, the complexity of it might not get the amount of players to truly make this a competitive or eSports hit, but who knows, it could become what Wargaming did with World of Tanks in Europe. In any case, its originality of gameplay features might arise curiosity in players, which will find everything you need of a game that is multiplayer firstly and a traditional singleplayer campaign game second. There’s 9 characters to unlock, a ranking system, “loot boxes” that contain equipment that boost your stats, or just cosmetic changes like a majestic mountain of golden spikes on top of helmet. To top thing off, there’s a sort of constant online Faction War (similar to the Mortal Kombat X system), which has you fight for one specific Faction, and all your feats during your multiplayer game will contribute War Assets to that banner. What this affects is the what territory each faction occupies on the For Honor world, which dictates which map you’ll be playing on as a defender in multiplayer, and which one when you’ll be the attacker.

One last thing to close this review, which is always a topic dear to me in videogames: the soundtrack. Sadly this is the thing that felt very unoriginal and bland, and even if some tunes are quite majestic, they don’t really ooze power and the fantastic theme that is a war between three iconic warrior factions of our history.

For Honor was reviewed using an Xbox One, PlayStation 4 and PC downloadable code of the game provided by Ubisoft Middle East. The PC version was tested by Mazen Abdallah on a PC running Windows 10, with an 8GB NVIDIA Geforce GTX 1070 fitted on a 4th Generation Intel i7 4790 3.6Ghz CPU and topped with 16GB of RAM, while the console versions were tested by Nazih Fares and Luciano Rahal. We don’t discuss review scores with publishers or developers prior to the review being published.

Ubisoft’s For Honor is an enjoyable, visually stunning and gritty experience that might be a bit too original for its own good. Over the past two years, between a hostile takedown by Vivendi and numerous other industry stories, I saw French publisher and development house Ubisoft continue to take risks and launch new IPs.

#Action game #Featured #Fighting Game #Hack and slash #Medieval Warfare #MOBA #Ubisoft

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