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  • KobaCumTribute [she/her]
    ·
    2 years ago

    How much more throwing weird complex shit at the wall do you need?

    I was talking specifically about strategy games and RPGs getting watered down and made overwhelmingly empty and shit during the early through mid 2000s, even as interfaces improved. It was part of a general commentary on the environment that Halo came into and in many ways defined.

    Fr There’s a lot of innovation and experimentation in mechanics that’s going unrepresented here. Plus a fundamental aspect of 3d games and the 90s was the development of the media and medium alongside each other. The technology that allowed the representation fpses rely on was growing by leaps and bounds every year and I’d argue that it wasn’t until the very tail end of the 90s and the 0s that the capital juggernaut that is the graphics card industry had enough feet under it to really push fidelity for fidelity’s sake. Games up until maybe 99 we’re genuinely boasting not cryteks nice pretty jungle but to what end, but instead real tangible improvements to legibility and through that, gameplay.

    My entire premise is that things like Doom were technically important and steps forward towards games being less bad, but still bad in their own right. They were in a struggle to do the bare minimum with hardware that just wasn't there yet, and that led to a lot of clever improvements to stuff like rasterization math to enable them. They are historically important for that reason, but they're still just not good as games.

    The rpg genre had also already existed for 25 years in tabletop form and at least ten in a form we’d call a computer rpg or video game rpg or whatever now. Fpses wouldn’t reach that point till 93.

    Comparing Doom and other 90s shooter to stuff like Chainmail and really early D&D editions is very much on point and I agree: they're important for historical reasons, but do not at all hold up due to lacking all the accumulated design knowledge that would develop after them. And just like with boomer shooters, TTRPGs also have a "what if we just, like, forgot every improvement of the past 40 years and made clunky random chargen dungeon crawlers for tabletop again?" scene too.

    What are you talking about there?

    Specifically the old standard of "you have a cone of fire, when you shoot it goes somewhere in that, also it's like a 45 degree cone in front of you lmao enjoy waiting for RNG to let your shots hit the thing the reticule is over" which is basically just a less honest version of the shit Arena/Daggerfall/Morrowind did where you first had to hit an enemy and then the game would roll a dice to see if you actually hit it or not. That's largely been supplanted by much tighter base bloom cones and various recoil solutions ranging from just making the bloom cone bigger until it's the size that used to be the standard, to more specific patterns whether that's jerking it in a specific direction or having a specific and consistent back and forth wiggle.

    • xXthrowawayXx [none/use name]
      ·
      2 years ago

      Your point about strategy and rpg games might have validity. I have to just believe you. I stopped at morrowind out of lack of time and can’t lodge a response without spending time on the source material.

      I think doom wasn’t an example of hardware that wasn’t there yet. I played it on a 486. You could play doom on everything but the 286 I think. And the software they were developing (and maps they were making) are examples of still making something that works as a game despite that constraint. Which it very much does. You say that doom is bad as a game but that’s tough to swallow. Theres a release history, nostalgia buffs like to compare ultimate doom to stuff without realizing that we weren’t trading floppies with v1.666 on em, but even taking into account the buggy release and the years of fixes and bugs which are now just part of compatibility it’s still something that I would easily say works as a game at release and now.

      I guess let’s separate the Janus layout from the chessboard itself: do you think that the rules of doom, the collection of player interactions, enemies, objects, weapons etc. work as a game? Do the chapters themselves, the level packs with interstitial screens, work as games? Would you make a meaningful distinction between doom and doom 2 for that? Would something like Culture Shock work as a game?

      Once again, I’m sorry for grilling you, it’s just like meeting someone who’s willing to defend the idea that oranges are a mineral instead of a fruit. I gotta learn more.

      I wouldn’t compare doom and chainmail, maybe faceball or one of those vector graphics tank sims and chainmail. Doom is way more like ultima. It’s an establishment of the format that the genre is gonna operate in. Maybe it’s one of the formats the genre will operate within. I think pathways was coming out at the same time.

      This is wild. By bloom you mean how when you’re running or shooting fast in halo there’s less accuracy? I always liked that part of the game. One of the things that bugged me about ut was that your character could blast someone across the map using a pistol at a full sprint.

      My old college roommate hated that part though. He wanted ut with a controller on live.

      That was one of those bush era developments to slow the gameplay down and take the shooter out of the ghetto of deathmatch twitch play and expose it to a new audience.