 News | Forum | People | FAQ | Links | Search | Register |
Log in |
|
|
That's a great review. I found myself agreeing almost 100% with it.
The learning WALL at the start of the game is what put me off the first time I tried the game. I didn't have a clue how the game worked. When I played it on stream I took the time to read the wiki and ov. chat helped a lot too and it turned into a fantastic game and one of my favourite 3rd person action games ever. Pumped for DS2 QTE exists because it lets you script a fantasy of player interaction that you can't possibly do as regular gameplay.
Done well and sparingly, it's not the most terrible thing to happen in games... but it's been overdone to death by now and more often than not it's in lieu of gameplay instead of supplementing it. Concerning AI:
- They seem to be oblivious to everything that's above their heads, even if you're in broad daylight. - They lose your trail very easily. - At one point I replicated something I saw on a stream: I fought a guard in the brothel mission next to a courtesan and a client, and both of them didn't care at all. What's worse is that the guards downstairs didn't hear a thing. In the originals even the tiniest disturbance could make the whole houseguard come after you. Played through Darksiders now (and reviewed it). Pretty cool game, 8/10. Wicked characters, story, epic large design. Just the puzzles ruined it a bit. Shame the studio closed down because they were capable of doing some really great games.
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2014/03/05/wot-i-think-tower-of-guns
Tower of Guns is very silly and it�s mostly very enjoyable as well, playing out like a blended distillation of old-school FPS systems and the current obsession with procedural everything. The most important piece of advice, as in Quake or UT deathmatch, is to keep moving at all times I am listening. There�s a toybox full of arena designs, varying from walkways hanging over lava or infinite drops, to complex structures dotted with teleporters and boost pads. Immediately, as the door closes behind you, enemies appear all around each chamber. I am no longer listening. getting all giddy about how this game is like old school fps games. As someone who plays old school fps games all the time I have to think that maybe a lot of journalists play so many of these shitty new games they have forgotten what an old school fps game feels like to play.
It's sad really. Tower of guns looks ok but it's a procedurally first person bullet hell game. It has more in common with ikaruga than doom. I think after Half-Life came out everyone's memory of what games were like before that kind of warped into this image of "they didn't know any of the rules we have now so everything must have been shit and we just didn't know it." Rather than inhabit a world where it was okay for the level designer to directly use the level to interact with the player, apparently all anyone remembers Doom actually doing is seal you in a giant thoughtless arena, lock the doors, and spawn guys until it was time to open the doors again and let you into the next, bigger arena.
Did Doom *ever* actually do that, even once? Quake only did it once IIRC, in that long slow elevator ride to hell (so it didn't even have locked doors, just a natural timer). Doom, and by extension, Quake didn't just define the genre because they were first.
Old == Bad to the lazy minded, whereas comparing most modern games, in terms of content and creativity to in games from the 90's is pretty depressing. Games have taken a serious downturn since they went mass market; the industry is still incredibly immature in this respect. A good comparison is film. Studios will gamble billions of dollars on a production, and sometimes they lose. Games studios wouldn't dare take such a risk, and with the cash cow of casual gaming they don't have to. The small publisher / lone developer ('indie' is a misnomer) scene keeps struggling on, producing the majority of the genuinely creative content. If games like Doom are misrepresented by the slack jawed gaming press then that's a shame - the young whipasnapper developers of tomorrow are growing up on such poor journalism. "Did Doom *ever* actually do that, even once?"
It did at least once. There's an exit trick where you go to press the button and, oops, floor drops out - combat bowl! Lun: you may be on to something there. I keep seeing people referring to older FPS games as 'arcade shooters'... and I think they actually think that Doom and such were 3d versions of Robotron or SmashTV
It did at least once. There's an exit trick where you go to press the button and, oops, floor drops out - combat bowl!
Yeah, I had that one in mind, but it signals itself as a trap (it's too early for the exit and you're carrying unused keys) and you're free to just dash across the room and leave by the escape route so I held off on mentioning it. It isn't really an arena with rounds of monsters, just a nasty 270-degree ambush. "Let's lock the player in a big room and just spawn guys for a while" is like the level designer throwing up his hands and admitting he can't think of anything. They have environments and combat encounters, and never shall the two meet.
similarities in the expectation of the player in ToG to dodge fire to survive. But the similarity to Doom ends there. Doom has nice level design and you feel like you're exploring as you progress due to the branching nature of the levels. Quake usually has this exploration element in a lot of its maps where you can deviate from "the path".
As soon as someone mentions a game feeling like a classic game, for example painkiller, I always get annoyed because for me the level design is always lacking in those games. I think the "getting locked in and killing predetermined number of guys" is a boring mechanic usually. It can be done well though, like in Sock's maps where he mixes up the enemy types along with having the neat traps to play with. "A good comparison is film. Studios will gamble billions of dollars on a production, and sometimes they lose.
Games studios wouldn't dare take such a risk, and with the cash cow of casual gaming they don't have to." Don't know if I fully agree with this, at least if we're talking about Hollywood, because that is one thing I feel both mass/casual AAA gaming and movies have in common - never daring to try anything new and just recycling the same old safe crap in the form of sequels, prequels, remakes and whatever else. Another comparison between movies and games is that flashy stuff sells more than actual content, even with productions that are supposedly "critically acclaimed", like Gravity - real pretty to look at, but not much more depth apart from that. Same goes for alot of overhyped games. As soon as someone mentions a game feeling like a classic game, for example painkiller, I always get annoyed because for me the level design is always lacking in those games. I think the "getting locked in and killing predetermined number of guys" is a boring mechanic usually.
Nail + head. I dont mind barriers as long as they make sense. As a designer it can be a real slog to make intricate levels without them conforming to the flow of the level, however it's also poor to constrain your gameplay too much because you want to make something that is fun to replay.
The reason why Doom and Quake are nice to play is that you can approach the levels differently each time if you like, this is especially true for Quake as the rocket/grenade jumping allows for lots of very creative routes. who gives a shit about a light showing you subconsciously where to go next, when most games still can't even get the basic gameplay right (fun)?
Immediately, as the door closes behind you, enemies appear all around each chamber.
I am no longer listening. Yeah, sounds boring if that's all the game is. But this pattern can be sparingly put to good use, can't it? I'm thinking of the horde of zendar, sock used this at least twice (the cathedral, and the final fight before the exit unlocks) - imo it was a significant part of the gameplay - and the map was pretty universally loved. In Daz's videos, he's recently pointed out several points in Q1 maps where a fight is boring because the best strategy is to wait at the entrance to an arena and snipe enemies, rather than going in. I wasn't about to put one of these locking arenas in a q1 map or anything :P 1) I'm pretty sure the final monster-deathmatch was not why Zendar was loved.
2) The solution to a player standing in a doorway shooting all the enemies is not to wait until he goes through it to spawn them and then arbitrarily block backward progression. That's a forced fix; a level design hack.
|
|
| You must be logged in to post in this thread. |
|
| Website copyright © 2002-2025 John Fitzgibbons. All posts are copyright their respective authors. |