Messages

61

Offtopic / Re: What happened to Blizzard?

« on: February 08, 2020, 08:14:39 pm »

Ok. Blizzard has patched some of the issues and enabled refunds. Unfortunately the reboot of the franchise has fallen short, and could follow Command & Conquer's fate. And that is not because of outsourcing, but because their core team didn't care. As I understand the only thing that was outsourced were these nice detailed character models, which ended up being unused, due to the lack of the promised ingame cinematics, while remastered unit portraits got botched angles, so all portraits are looking improperly. For some stupid reason they re-recorded voices, and these came out of much worse than in the original. And original Blizzard voices talents were just common company employees. It is like everything was done by people without any enthusiasm or love for the game, and the new team included no people from the original team, who could have pointed out the mistakes.

Even fans made better "remastered" cutscenes:

62

Offtopic / Re: XCOM Inspired Fantasy Game

« on: February 06, 2020, 10:15:51 pm »

Fair, and I certainly won't criticize you for that. Just saying it's disappointing for me personally, because I don't care about this kind of games, and I thought your project was something different. But that's entirely on me.

Yeah. I've decided to take "no explicit PRNG" rule as a challenge, similar to "silence vow" monks take. Then again, there are many explicit PRNG strategy games, while almost no true deterministic ones (beside Chess and Go), and I'm trying to distance my game from the mainstream a bit, so I'm looking for obscure features and try to insert them into the game. Like I've adapted numerous ideas from the Lords of Magic.

As I mentioned, adding random chance is easy. It is a game design shortcut. But implementing actually believable world without any Deus ex Machina is hard. Because then everything have to be explained somehow using in-game rules. Randomness is similar to God. It is really simple explanation and works for most purposes. I.e. card games are completely chance driven, yet still believable for people with imagination. But then there are autistic people like me with poor imagination, who need everything detailed, who will ask what source of entropy God used for creating that exact star system, what clothes he wore, what hair style he had, and the magic just fades away...

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Offtopic / The Dark Crystal Tactics Game

« on: February 06, 2020, 12:42:49 am »

People say it is no that good.

64

Offtopic / Re: What happened to Blizzard?

« on: February 04, 2020, 05:27:27 pm »

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T37a8y5SRz8

He mention rumor that it is even not Blizzard "product" but outsourced one.

Blizzard of the old also outsourced that Warcraft Adventure game to the infamous Russian studio, which did CDI Zelda games before. When quality turned out to be subpar (although it was much better these CDI Zeldas), Blizzard just scrapped the almost completed project to avoid damaging the franchise. Then Blizzard also scrapped Starcraft based The Ghost adventure for the same reasons. And that was much poorer Blizzard, with no money to waste.

65

Offtopic / Re: XCOM Inspired Fantasy Game

« on: February 03, 2020, 06:00:38 pm »

But all this can be my misinterpretation. I was under the impression that you wanted to make a civilization game, since you keep referring to titles like Master of Magic which are such titles. If your goal instead is to make another chess variant, with closed information and only dependent on thinking X moves ahead, then you should have said so from the very beginning and I wouldn't bother getting excited about it.

My design idea is closer to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_chess and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer_random_chess

I.e. there are random starting conditions (i.e. map is randomly generated), in addition to fog of war, acting like your typical pseudo-random number generator. AI is allowed to throw a dice in its decision processes. Then there are spells like "mist", which obscure vision. But the idea is that player can choice a strategy to reduce randomness. For example, player can build more scout units.

66

Offtopic / Re: What happened to Blizzard?

« on: February 03, 2020, 01:47:03 pm »

Most employees at large companies are too far removed from the final product.  Their job performance isn't graded by how good or bad the company's products are.

That is solved by giving part of wages in company's shares, which cannot be sold immediately (i.e. futures). Now suddenly every employee is incentivized in the long term success of the company. IIRC, original Blizzard did exactly that.

Anyway, I hope fans could fix all the issues and make it closer to the original demo. Given that all the tools are there, including crowdfunding.

67

Offtopic / Re: What happened to Blizzard?

« on: February 02, 2020, 10:13:31 pm »

Also, if you look at their original demo footage, they had some totally different version of the engine running with actually HD user interface, and different more crisp looking tilesets. What they actually released uses the same WC3 engine, with a lot of stuff, like water waves, being out of place, and the water itself using some crazy looking quickly put together shader.

68

Offtopic / Re: What happened to Blizzard?

« on: February 02, 2020, 06:46:24 pm »

But WC3R is not that bad, it big meh but not crap that current score should suggest. This is perfect storm of bad decisions. Each on it own would not cause this uproar. This score is not quality of this remaster but number of people who lost fath in Blizzard, probably this is one rare case where critics score is more accurate than user ones, it cant be 0.6/10 or something because it still have most of WC3 inside and this was great game.

Best lesson form this should be that you should not preorder games (that TB said years ago) and do not get hyped.

It is worse than the original. They removed features and botched some existing features. It also runs much slower than the original, and crashes, while original Blizzard games were recognized for being very stable (I never had a single WC3, SC or Diablo 2 crash). Even graphics at some parts became worse, despite being of higher resolution. I.e. people doing it either didn't care, had no direction or had no idea what they were doing.

Here a guy complains they botched tilesets, which are now just some blurry mess of textures (the video is age restricted for some crazy reason):

69

Offtopic / Re: What happened to Blizzard?

« on: February 02, 2020, 11:03:13 am »

Probably biggest mistake is treating that any thing that Blizz doing as THE Blizzard. Right now it have pass 4,700 employees (by wiki).
Probably is too big to maintain same quality everywhere. And it very possible that most of they most skilled programmers never ever touch this WC3R mess.

Funny will be if mobile Diablo will be in long run better than WC3R

Large number of employees means you can handle large projects, or have several smaller project, and there are more talents. So there is just no excuse they botched the remake that badly. And you must have a skilled team lead on any project. Compare with Square-Enix: they first outsourced FF7 remake to some inexperienced company, but looking at the results, scrapped it and decided to do it properly, instead of damaging the franchise.

And it wasn't that a hard or expensive of a project to start with: just update the graphics engine to run in HD, redesign GUI for it and port it to smartphones and consoles. Compared to the massive FF7 remake, which totally overhauled everything. I.e. two skilled programmers and a several QA people could have handled the technical parts of it.

It required some special talent to mismanage such an easy project, when everything was already in place. And then management just approved releasing it. Is that some case of industrial sabotage?

70

Offtopic / What happened to Blizzard?

« on: February 01, 2020, 11:06:18 pm »

I'm not a huge fan of RTS games, but I liked WC2. I have skipped WC3, because of its early 3d graphics, so I had high hopes for the WC3 remaster, especially after the really good looking demo. And now it came out...

Just WTF?!!! Have Blizzard caught that Coronavirus at the infamous Honk Kong show, and it killed the whole team? Because it there is not other excuse to fail that badly. It must have been aliens kidnapping all programmers and artists, together with that early demo.

WC3 Reforged is just a badly reskinned Warcraft 3 mod, on the same engine, with just a bit higher poly models (closer to SC2). They haven't bothered even to rescale the UI for widescreen resolution. What was their SC2 team doing this whole time, after SC2 got released?

I cant believe AAA company can fsckup that badly and just kill their single goldmaking franchise. How can such mismanagement be even possible in theory? Is that the Westwood story repeating all again? What are they thinking?

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Offtopic / Re: XCOM Inspired Fantasy Game

« on: January 31, 2020, 11:32:06 pm »

Because it's a e-sport, I suppose. It's not meant to be immersive, or actually simulate anything.

It's basically chess with fireworks.

But a lot of randomness arises from player actions. Starcraft's deterministic rules coupled with unpredictable user input are as good as random, but without the nasty parts of the random. Lets not forget, that in reality there is no such thing as "random" - it is just a buzzword for describing complex things, we don't understand. As Einstein said "God doesn't play dice". What appears to be random to us is just some complex high frequency process, which our brain can't handle, so we see white/brown/pink noise.

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Offtopic / Re: Phoenix Point

« on: January 31, 2020, 03:50:49 pm »

What to do against enemies who douse the whole map in mist, etc..

That is actually the coolest feature

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Offtopic / Re: XCOM Inspired Fantasy Game

« on: January 31, 2020, 03:48:04 pm »

Sure, let's find the worst possible implementation and make it a strawman against the feature.

I never did and never will play games with no randomness. At least not the kind which emulates some reality. No randomness means no uncertainty, and therefore no life or immersion. Such a game is dead, dead and dead. It has no appeal. I'd rather play tic tac toe, at least it doesn't fail miserably at pretending to portray some sort of setting.

It doesn't matter how good your game is if it's dead.

Then why people play Starcraft?

74

Offtopic / Re: XCOM Inspired Fantasy Game

« on: January 31, 2020, 12:03:25 am »

Returning back to the item system. As I mentioned, it can be a bit hard to determine item value beforehand. If fact, items value can be dictated by world's state. Simplest example of that: player has full health, there is less demand for a healing potion. I remember Heroes of Might & Magic was notorious game for valuing items improperly, where some artifact place can have actually generally useful item, or some item protecting from some rare high level spell, which was never used by AI. Random item placement is generally involved problem, especially in games like Diablo, which are completely based around loot. Diablo-style games also have random item generation, where each item is composed of different parts, and can have some sockets on top of it, allowing player to further customize item for picked strategy.

Master of Magic was probably the first game to allow both composite items and player to create items, long before Diablo 2. Interesting is there some MoM making of interview? For what I can guess, the game was obviously heavily inspired by the MtG (i.e. magic the gathering on top of civ engine), but where did the composite item idea came from? Also, with all these MoM remakes, people forget that Japanese actually remade MoM for the original PlayStation console, calling it Civizard ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rm671VDbChs ).

Anyway, I dislike the idea of boring +1, +2, +3 items, so I will try making each item game changing. Items and prisoners would be the single reason for payer to explore dungeons. But some common items would still be produced at cities.

BTW, here is the meme on why I dislike RNG in games:

75

Offtopic / Phoenix Point

« on: January 28, 2020, 09:13:58 pm »

What are your thoughts on the game?

Virus seems to be the theme of the later XCOM-like games, starting with Abomination and UFO Aftermath.  And now China began bringing sci-fi into life.