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March 28, 2024, 09:53:15 PM

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FPS NIGHTMARES

Started by Lemming, November 17, 2019, 12:23:16 PM

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H-O-W-L

Seems to fix it, yeah, I've had no issues like that recently, and I remember it happening a lot.

samadriel

Ahh, looking at the Mod DB page is informative. Sounds good, I'll have to get ahold of SWAT 4 again and give it a go.

popcorn

Quote from: Lemming on January 20, 2022, 06:45:08 PMthe marines are inhuman and frightening in both their appearance and voice.

Quote from: H-O-W-L on January 20, 2022, 06:48:58 PMBut I definitely feel that way about the HECU. Something about their voice acting and the way they behave feels way, way too "young" and "immature". In HL1 they're all deep-voiced, gravelly, Southern-accented Predator-merc-like motherfuckers. Evil and murderous and very, very dangerous. In BM they sound like 17-23 year old boot camp meat that screams and panics even before combat has even started.

The soldiers in HL1 are another example of how brilliant and original HL1 was. They're a truly eerie opponent, and miles from what any other dev would have imagined a FPS soldier enemy would be like. Even in Opposing Force they were suddenly just Full Metal Jacket grunts.

popcorn

Video breakdown of the HL grunt speech systems. Contrast this with the typical approach of writing and recording hundreds of lines of dialogue like "I'm gonna kick your ass, motherfucker!" etc. Instead they string together hundreds of individual words, pitch-shift them and cover them in distortion, so you get this uncanny and authentically inhuman result. Anything else would feel repetitive and cheesy, but this system capitalises on the limitations to create something quite different.

samadriel

Quote from: popcorn on January 20, 2022, 08:04:12 PMThe soldiers in HL1 are another example of how brilliant and original HL1 was. They're a truly eerie opponent, and miles from what any other dev would have imagined a FPS soldier enemy would be like. Even in Opposing Force they were suddenly just Full Metal Jacket grunts.

I liked the determination by an American developer not to paint US Marines as in any way heroic or admirable; inserting Black Ops troops into OpFor to wipe out the suddenly-nice HECU was amusing though. "Then we'll send the Pink Ops team to wipe out the Black Ops team! Then we'll send the Purple Ops team to wipe out the Pink Ops team! Then we'll nuke everybody."

H-O-W-L

#1445
Quote from: popcorn on January 20, 2022, 08:11:42 PMVideo breakdown of the HL grunt speech systems. Contrast this with the typical approach of writing and recording hundreds of lines of dialogue like "I'm gonna kick your ass, motherfucker!" etc. Instead they string together hundreds of individual words, pitch-shift them and cover them in distortion, so you get this uncanny and authentically inhuman result. Anything else would feel repetitive and cheesy, but this system capitalises on the limitations to create something quite different.

This is how the Combine work in HL2 too! Though by then the system is so refined as to sound completely seamless.

Infact something I like is that you only hear the grunts' radio chatter on the large -- you can hear them say stuff like "You got nothin'!" and "Medic!" with their actual mouths, but all the other idle/combat chatter is radio based, which is almost like their radio is leaking-- if that makes sense? They use hand signals dynamically in combat most of the time instead of shouting out their actions, so it makes me think that they're using in-helmet throatmic radios that Gordon is only hearing by accident. Does that make sense? It's a layer of authenticity I really like.

If I were ever to make me own game with enemy soldier squads, I'd have them be pretty quiet beyond exclamations or pain sounds or the odd swear-word, but then you'd be able to pick up radio decryptors off squad leaders that let you tap into their radio comms, revealing more HECU/FEAR style coordination shouts and stuff.

Lemming

Love how the HECU's speaking style mirrors that of the VOX system, which inexplicably had most of its lines cut even though they're one of the most effective things ever. Gives the impression the marines are about as emotionless, indifferent and dangerous to you as the Black Mesa facility itself is.

Kind of reminds me of the gangsters in the original Assault on Precinct 13 - they're technically human, but they're no longer people, they've somehow lost all reason and mercy. No reaction to being injured or killed and they just keep coming no matter what.

Mister Six

Quote from: H-O-W-L on January 20, 2022, 08:28:24 PMyou'd be able to pick up radio decryptors off squad leaders that let you tap into their radio comms, revealing more HECU/FEAR style coordination shouts and stuff.

FEAR was an odd one. It's a pretty key plot point that the grunts are all psychically linked and controlled clones created to form the perfect coordinated army, but then they all run around screaming "Cover me!"

I still loved that game, though. Well, for the most part - it ran thin towards the end, and I can't recall if I ever bothered finishing the expansion...

Spoiler alert
Wait, was that the one where you get raped by the ghost girl? Was that FEAR 2? I have dim memories of playing that on the 360, which I only just vaguely recalled this second.
[close]

I know we've moved past Bioshock a bit but while I won't argue the details on whether it was a brilliant shooter, as an experience I found it totally engrossing and absolutely perfect. I also pissed about trying lots of combinations of weapons and powers, which probably helped. The only point it slipped up was after the reveal that you had been railroaded down a particular path due to mind control, at which point... you were railroaded down a particular path due to game design. It should have turned into an open-world-type thing with a bunch of equally viable exit strategies. But oh well!

Pink Gregory

I feel like Bioshock could have done a lot more, but with its position as a game with that kind of budget targeting the mainstream and both PC and console skews that kind of risk taking was never going to exist in that space at that time.

evilcommiedictator

Look, BioShock is not GOTY.

System Shock is. Remaster this year babey!

oggyraiding

On the topic of Bioshock, there is one specific moment in Bioshock 2 that puzzles me to this day. There's a dude in a tank, who asks to be killed and put out of his misery. But if you kill him, that registers as a bad action, and can affect your ability to get the good ending. Not sure if it's an oversight, or if it's a sort of "euthanasia is bad" message.

Ferris

Quote from: oggyraiding on January 22, 2022, 01:27:36 PMOn the topic of Bioshock, there is one specific moment in Bioshock 2 that puzzles me to this day. There's a dude in a tank, who asks to be killed and put out of his misery. But if you kill him, that registers as a bad action, and can affect your ability to get the good ending. Not sure if it's an oversight, or if it's a sort of "euthanasia is bad" message.

It's a bad and lazy decision. It would have been more cohesive if the voice actor had lines about wanting to live but he explicitly doesn't want that so... what? Killing him because he's twisted and bonkers is the same justification used to mow down scores of sploicers, and they don't express any wish to be put out their misery at all (and our man has done some pretty heinous stuff in-game) so it's a very mixed message.

If you were a mega-apologist I suppose you could argue killing him has a negative impact on Eleanor? And "ooh not all choices have clear answers ahhh do you see?" but it doesn't really make sense.

I'd guess they initially had the morality of choices the other way round and changed it last minute (before they could re-write/record dialogue) so the game's eventual endings were "cleaner" (so 'save everyone' gets you the 'best' ending even if at a granular level that makes less sense) because otherwise the 'best' ending would be 'save everyone except that guy (because he was bad), but don't kill the other bad people, just that one... oh maybe that's complicated' and it loses its overall impact and moral certainty as a conclusion to the game.

Tl;dr has the feeling of a fudged decision to me.

popcorn

(psst: "moral choices" never fucking work in games)

H-O-W-L

The best moral choices I've encountered in games are ones that are clearly just a part and parcel of the gameplay design and not a signposted, designed "moral choice". Like yer SWAT 4 stuff I mentioned earlier-- nothing in the game encourages me to dome surrendered suspects, or even to shoot to kill (infact far from it) but I'm still able to do both, and the design of Yer Viddy Games makes me think that's a valid option, when truth be told it ain't at all.

Similarly in Prison Architect, sending prisoners to the 'lectric chair on Death Row is entirely optional and the game sees no issues with it if you do it via the provided processes -- and it can net you a packet of cash. But I definitely felt like shit when I established a Death Row in my prison. Could've just not -- but then again, would other prisons question it and not execute him? Am I justified in merely being the one where Johnny Bollocks dies? Or am I a monster for being complicit in it regardless, especially for profit? My opinion leans overwhelmingly to the latter, but y'know, it's at least interesting that the game can bring that thought up, and it doesn't have to have Troy Baker doing a hackneyed gravelman voice talkin' 'bout how justified he is because he's "the White Injun" or whatever bollocks Bioshock Infinite tried to justify you slaughtering dozens of people with.

I think games like Half-Life, as we discussed, show that you can have, say, justifiably murderable blokes without any of the bollocks questioning of whether or not it's justified, by making combatants into actual, justified-to-exist combatants. Maybe this is a fashy opinion but I dunno-- I've no qualms about murdering the HECU (or Metrocops in HL2) in the least. The latter are a little more grey since they're a faction in an authoritarian hellstate and some of them may be coerced or under threat-- but at the end of the day these boys are right buggers and I've absolutely no issues with Gordon Freeman twatting them over the head with a toilet.

Whereas in BS:I I find it a lot more grey because, like, all the Founders are racist cunts, and the Vox are needlessly murderous cunts, but at the same time it's not like they're all highly-trained professionally-paid soldiers, or fashy bully-boys for an alien genocide regime? It's fucking weird, it's like in trying to point at Shooty Man Bad games like CoD etc the critical games ended up making far less acceptable targets within their own games, as if that's alright, and somehow highlights a problem rather than exacerbating it?

I don't think you're a moral criminal for playing even the most shitty jingoistic CoD-alike game, provided you, you know, play it as just a game, and don't sit there pounding pud at the idea of SLOTTING REDS or what-have-you. Those games clearly have Soldier Men Cunts as the participants in the conflicty bang bang you do. Nobody's going to weep for LT. PVT. CPL. SHITS. There's doubtlessly, irrefutably cryptofascist, racist, nationalist bullshit going on with what nation/culture/color/creed these soldiers are portrayed as being from, but they're still the soldiers of these nations at the end of the day.

But games like BS:I... and, controversially as this will be to say, TLOU, have this almost cryptofascist veneer to them, to me -- Joel, Booker -- they're justified by the narrative in killing whoever they want because of the Sky Racists/Apocalypse World Wow Ahhh stuff. You're Just Some Cunt absolutely blasting the gills off Just Some Other Cunts. There's a gossamer-thin sheen of "Wow, Our Protag Shure Is A Cunt, Huh?" to both these games, and the writers basically stride through the frame and wag their fingers disapprovingly at the Bad Protagonist Cunt for doing this... but then-- they don't actually stop him/her? They still write him/her succeeding at gruesomely, viscerally "slotting cunts"? How is that, in any way, justifiable, when you look at it from that top-down level? If you're really condemning violence, senseless violence, dejustifying the Strong White Hero... why are you also embracing and adoring them? You cannot have both.

Conversely I think the new Wolfensteins managed to wholly justify BJ. Even the shit New Colossus didn't even go "wot if nazis not all baddies tho?" when you chop some bloke's fucking legs off for being a Nazi. Pretentious as MachineGames have gotten, they seem to understand not to play up to this dichotomy.

As much as I dislike SOTL this is at least one thing it got right-- Walker is never seen as a narrative hero by the writers, unlike Joel/Booker who still Stop Very Bad Men by virtue of directing their Thundercock Whiteman Bad Boy Violence.

There's this stupid, stupid fucking mentality with writers doing these take-down characters, where they seem to think that you have to win back the audience when you have a Bad Man as a protag by pitting him against someone even worse. You don't. You just need a good, salvageable world above and around this Bad Man protagonist. Both Red Dead Redemption games got this spot on, IMO.

Ferris

Quote from: popcorn on January 22, 2022, 02:51:33 PM(psst: "moral choices" never fucking work in games)

They can, but because ultimately there are no real-world consequences to the player, "moral" choices require you to already be immersed in the gameworld to some extent,or willing to buy-in at the point of quandary. That gets the player to make a proper choice rather than just meta-gaming the decision ("yeah whatever I'm just gonna kill this guy and see if he drops any good loot").

BioShock did that well, so ok cool. The problem with this one was wrong or unfair, and it's a pet peeve of mine in video games.

You, the game, have established the rules and the environment for me, the player, to make a decision. From what the game has presented, the right thing to do is XYZ, so now I make the decision if I want to do the right thing or not? I do, so ok I'll do XYZ as the game directed.

...gotcha!! Haha that wasn't really the right thing hahahah, we just told you it was and gave you no way of knowing otherwise and now the "good" ending is unavailable to you. Sucker!

It's not a criticism unique to BioShock either - player agency having frustratingly unintended consequences is how games are sometimes, but it isn't good. You can't give me a scenario, ask me to make a decision based on the information I have, then change the rules after the fact and expect me to not feel cheated. Maybe that makes a good plot twist and that has a positive impact on the game overall - ok, but I won't bother considering moral choices in that game in future because apparently we're playing Heideggerian calvin-ball.

Lemming

MMORPGs (with which I have fairly limited experience) strike me as the best place to put moral choices in, because the consequences could be very real for the player. Donating money to a character (in this context, a good action) would represent the loss of an actual resource that the player might have spent months/years building up. Whereas in shorter single-player games, it's all very meaningless - yes, I'll give my pistol to the hotel guy in Deus Ex to let him defend himself, because I can just go get another one easily (and if I don't like the outcome, I can just reload my quicksave, something that can't be done in MMORPGs). In a single-player game, you make a token sacrifice and the game pats you on the back and tells you how good you're being. In an MMORPG, at least, your sacrifice is more tangible.

What strikes me as really odd though is that so many games actually make it easier to be "good" than "evil". Dishonored being the first that leaps to mind, where playing non-lethally is not only very easy thanks to infinite always-reliable takedowns and sleep darts aplenty, but also makes the game easier by keeping the player's "chaos" level low, which ensures fewer enemy spawns on subsequent maps. Surely for the choice to even feel remotely meaningful, the game should actually get more and more difficult if the player insists on keeping their moral integrity, while the player should be (at least initially) rewarded for allowing their morals to slip.

Other than minor changes in gameplay (press Q to knock out the enemy, press Z to kill them!!! wow!!) and making the player give up resources, the only way moral choices can be done in single player games is through writing, but this seems to always go totally fucking wrong. Fallout games are an obvious one - the moral choice is always very clear*, there's never really any ambiguity to your actions and very little impedes you from getting the outcome you want. The alternative is to "trick" the player, but as Ferris just said, this is always unsatisfying - Fallout 3 attempted it with the Tenpenny Tower quest where the obviously "good" action backfires and leads to a horrible outcome, and while I genuinely appreciate their attempt to muddy the waters a bit, in practice this works only once on your first ever playthrough and after that is just annoying in that the quest is rigged to make sure you can't get an optimal outcome.

Dishonored (not trying to pick on it, I love Dishonored) tries to make the good option less apparent by making the non-lethal methods of removing enemies absolutely unconscionable to the point where you're tempted to kill them instead, but it still isn't really satisfying - you're being forced to make a judgment call but it's between a binary of two uninspiring choices and, rather than marvelling at the complexity of the dark moral dilemma they've been placed in, most players will just roll their eyes and either do the non-lethal option purely because they're trying to complete the game with no kills anyway, or do whichever option's easiest.

*the one exception being New Vegas' main quest


H-O-W-L

Dishonored also fucked up because killing only targets still enables a perfect Low Chaos run and the nonlethal options are so fucking evil. It's like, "Do you want to be a bit of a stabby cunt, having already canonically killed people anyway, or do you want to be an absolute fucking irredeemable monster?"

Zetetic

Quote from: H-O-W-L on January 22, 2022, 03:14:45 PMand, controversially as this will be to say, TLOU, have this almost cryptofascist veneer to them
And by TLOU2 it's not even a veneer - the core moral message of that game about cycles of violence fairly openly rooted in specific brand of ethnonationalism and an actually conflict with a massive power-imbalance.

H-O-W-L

Quote from: Zetetic on January 22, 2022, 06:13:57 PMAnd by TLOU2 it's not even a veneer - the core moral message of that game about cycles of violence fairly openly rooted in specific brand of ethnonationalism.

Glad someone else thinks so. I'm very wary of openly saying I think that TLOU2 is disgusting and wanks off its protagonists, because there's a very silly argument people make that
Spoiler alert
"but Abby thin and Ellie alone at end!"
[close]
as if that's somehow recompense for the literal acres of corpses they've stacked up throughout the game.

Zetetic

Quote from: H-O-W-L on January 22, 2022, 05:00:44 PMIt's like, "Do you want to be a bit of a stabby cunt, having already canonically killed people anyway, or do you want to be an absolute fucking irredeemable monster?"
It's extremely difficult to read anything really thoughtful into it, which I guess speaks to the way that non-lethal resolutions were fairly messily added at the end of the design and writing processes and for fairly gamey/aesthetic reasons rather than because they spoke to any grander plot.

H-O-W-L

It's also doubly messy when they've written Corvo as canonically racking up bodycounts post-DH1 anyway. Even in DH2's intro he flies through several traitor guards like a fucking combine harvester of heads... then you can take control of him and suddenly go all non-lethal. It's silly! It's why I save Corvo for lethal runs in DH2.

Zetetic

Quote from: Ferris on January 22, 2022, 03:59:12 PMYou, the game, have established the rules and the environment for me, the player, to make a decision. From what the game has presented, the right thing to do is XYZ, so now I make the decision if I want to do the right thing or not? I do, so ok I'll do XYZ as the game directed.

...

You can't give me a scenario, ask me to make a decision based on the information I have, then change the rules after the fact and expect me to not feel cheated

Is it always wrong to make the player feel cheated? If you can make them feel cheated by the world or characters depicted by the game, rather than the game and its designers... that's an okay outcome, I think.

The instance in SOTL of "how are you going to deal with this mob of civilians?" - and the player isn't told what options they have - has grown on me over the years (which admittedly says I like more in retrospect than at the time). If you can get over the general cake-having-and-eating of the whole thing, there's a neat merging of player and character and how they're both blinkered (or maybe not). Being generous, I think you can argue that the player really should be prepared to try to explore if they have other options than what they've been taught to revert to.

Ferris

Quote from: Zetetic on January 22, 2022, 06:32:06 PMIs it always wrong to make the player feel cheated? If you can make them feel cheated by the world or characters depicted by the game, rather than the game and its designers... that's an okay outcome, I think.

*Spoilers for BioShock!*

Yeah, that's a fair point. If you feel cheated by the gameworld (not the devs) then I think it's been used effectively, but I wouldn't want to be the person making those decisions because it's hard to know how some players would react. A dev might know what they're trying to say, but Joe soap may not.

In the BioShock example it makes no difference to gameplay, and only exists to make the "good" ending unattainable which is part of why it's so unsatisfying. I don't massively care if a fictional maniac is killed or not, but I'm being held accountable by the game's moral code (which was at best, poorly explained) so it feels like a bait and switch. I've been told the right thing to do in a moral grey area by the game, only to later be told by the same game that it was the wrong choice, actually ahhh.

Keeping it FPS, there are levels in mindless gun-'em-up Call of Duty: MW that kill you at the end. I kind of like those because as dumb as those games are, it's saying something about war. You can do all the objectives and a nuclear weapon will still blast you to bits and there's nothing you can do, mate. I didn't make any choices in those games (the modus operandi "walk to a point on the map and blast anyone and everyone"), so when I was killed off it felt like the world had done that.

BioShock kills off your protagonist in every game (except in one of the DLC chapters when it revives a previous protagonist only to kill them off again). I've been making choices all the way through that, so I feel like I've been cheated somewhat. They've broadened the scope of their games which leads to a richer experience but bigger swings may mean bigger misses.

I haven't really thought that through so forgive me if it's total shit. I mean, defending a Call of Duty game? Come on mate, do better.

Ferris

Reading that back, it's probable the reason I don't care about characters being bumped off in Call of Duty is that I didn't know their names in the first place.

"Oh that level has finished now. I wonder if I can fly a plane in the next one."

Jerzy Bondov


Zetetic


Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth

A walking simulator, about Johnny Cash getting eye surgery?

samadriel

Genre-wise it doesn't fit in this thread, but while we're talking about it... the 'moral choices' in The Witcher (the first game, I can't remember the second much and I've scarcely played the third) are easily the best I've seen in a game, probably because they branch the storyline in unpredictable ways you can't save-scum out of (usually the consequences appear hours after your choice).  Whether you choose 'religious fascists', 'anti-human revolutionaries' or 'weaselly neutral Witcher-style', someone's going to get hurt, and it probably won't be who you think it is.

Jerzy Bondov


Mister Six

Quote from: samadriel on January 23, 2022, 05:30:53 AMGenre-wise it doesn't fit in this thread, but while we're talking about it... the 'moral choices' in The Witcher (the first game, I can't remember the second much and I've scarcely played the third) are easily the best I've seen in a game, probably because they branch the storyline in unpredictable ways you can't save-scum out of (usually the consequences appear hours after your choice).  Whether you choose 'religious fascists', 'anti-human revolutionaries' or 'weaselly neutral Witcher-style', someone's going to get hurt, and it probably won't be who you think it is.

Conversely, I found this kind of wearying after a while in Witcher 3, because it made every subquest feel like a stressful slog until I just gave up caring and went with whatever felt right at the time. I suppose you could say that's accurately communicating the feeling of living in that oppressive and chaotic world, but it grated for me.