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First 25 minutes of Skyrim
- Thread starter planar1280
- Start date
Dwight Schrute
Member
Durante said:
Reading this sentence, seeing your avatar...
I LOVE YOU
D
Deleted member 30609
Unconfirmed Member
I mean, it doesn't look great, but uh, it didn't show any of the parts that made Oblivion or Fallout 3 enjoyable in the first place. I'd have liked better animations and combat, but I'm not drinking the spiked punch just yet.
Ken Masters
Banned
I wonder if the vg "journalist" who made the dancing video for the game maintained his enthusiasm when he started to play it
freenudemacusers
Member
I don't really follow the press; can someone link or relay what was said?Lakitu said:
fizzelopeguss
Banned
See You Next Wednesday said:
You're relentlessly wrong in every thread.
Gothic 2 bends all those games over the sofa and gives them a damn good scuttling.
Zoso
It's been a long time, been a long time, been a long lonely lonely lonely lonely lonely time.
So I broke down and watched it. Honestly, it looked great. So many improvements from Oblivion. I particularly loved the opening wagon ride. Makes me wish we could do that from city to city in real time(like RDR). From previews it sounds like it's just another form of fast travel.
Very excited for the 11th.
Very excited for the 11th.
BakedPigeon
Banned
is the video down or just not working for me only? is it posted somewhere else?
BakedPigeon
Banned
Great, right when I get on the internet for the first time today they decide to take it down. fuck off kotaku.
bananaman1234
Unconfirmed Member
He said one of four major titles this fall was a slight disappointment.macuser1of5 said:
Mango Positive
Member
See You Next Wednesday said:
I don't know if it was "great" or not, but Risen was some of the most fun I've had with an RPG in years. I do agree that the Witchers were better.
hitmon said:
I didn't say forced upon in the sense that everyone who played the game must play that way, more that having an option that would force the permadeath when the player death occurred (i.e. no cheating).
As for just doing ironman challenges (and any other self-imposed resrictions) - yes, those have always existed. I just think it is far more interesting to actually implement the option and explore it a little. They could take the difficulty option out of a game and I could make up even more rules to bind myself by to make up for that, but it's not really as rewarding or interesting from a design perspective.
water_wendi
Water is not wet!
Difficulty options actually change the difficulty of the gameplay (enemies hit harder, have more abilities, more health, etc). Ironman/Hardcore modes like you are talking about only require you to abide by your own rules. Save game erasing/permadeath in single-player games dont need to be coded into the game. i cant make Radscorpion poison hit harder in the Fallout games myself but i can create a "permadeath" scenario with every single game out there.Wallach said:
water_wendi said:
Sometimes difficulty does things that changes the dynamics like giving enemies new abilities, sure. I could gimp my character to make a Radscorpion hit me harder than it would have if I was playing without restriction, though - whether that's wearing less armor, taking less END, etc; difficulty modifying damage values only multiplies the effect of my choices. Now, those other dynamics like new enemy abilities could be implemented into the core game aside from many of the other changes that happen with most difficulty settings, which is kind of what I was getting at - by actually putting it into the game and designing for it and building on it, you can create more interesting gameplay dynamics. Lots of players out there aren't that creative, but if the game set the option before them, they might find the way it changes their approach.
Just for example, permadeath basically mandates that all consequence of choice is forced for the entirety of a playthrough. No saving & loading, so any theft attempts, conversation choices, etc are taken in stride to their final outcome. That alone would have a significant impact on how people play even though it is only a side effect of the restriction. Dark Souls' gameplay basically hinges on that; were it removed and the player able to save and load at will, it would be a completely different game. For a game like Fallout, I just think a permadeath option would be an intuitive way to apply a similar restriction on the player and I think it would have made a fantastic opportunity.
water_wendi
Water is not wet!
Difficulty settings generally cannot be altered by the player. You can make things more difficult for yourself by playing solo or not using healing items or another self-imposed challenge but these are not adjusting the difficulty using the games difficulty options. Whereas playing ironman/permadeath in single-player is completely up to you. You can add this "feature" to any game you want. You cannot add friendly-fire/more enemy health/greater numbers of enemies/higher enemy damage/additional enemy skills and tactics/etc/etc/etc to any game you want unless the developers code it in. You are wrong, plain and simple.Wallach said:
water_wendi said:
I'm trying to get you to understand how the game offering to force a restriction and simply having the player keep themselves beholden to a restriction themselves are different from a design perspective, even if the results of both play out similarly.
Let me ask you this: how many players that played New Vegas in hardcore mode ever intentionally limited the amount of ammunition they were carrying in Fallout 3? That was not a restriction that needed to be added to hardcore mode because the player is always in control of what they are carrying, right? Do you think taking that restriction off hardcore mode would have had a negative impact?
Wallach said:
The Witcher games achieve this without permadeath. They do this by having the consequences of your choice not be immediately known. The ramifications of some choices don't become apparent until later chapters and after enough hours of playtime have elapsed that loading up an earlier save is not feasible.
freenudemacusers
Member
I liked hardcore mode in diablo 2 since it make otherwise intense areas absolutely terrifying, but I don't think I could trust a bethesda game with something like this. My death would not be a glorious battle with a dragon, I'd probably just get stuck behind a table.
I was really not satisfied with how that discussion played out and it was bothering me all morning. I think there's an opportunity to salvage it in a way that is constructive and helps illustrate what my overall point was, though in doing so I'm going to indulge myself a bit.
So, the topic of permadeath. The relevant questions that have been asked here are:
The first thing that was brought up was that this is a concept that can be satisfied totally in the meta. That is, if the player realizes that idea on their own, they can impose upon themselves a set of restrictions that will emulate this gameplay concept to where the core of it is fully realized. For permadeath, this is essentially a raw observation and objectively true - we can see that a player is able to make themselves beholden to this idea and fulfills all responsibility themselves, the way it affects the player's gameplay experience will be successfully changed in the fundamental ways that permadeath as a standalone concept seeks to accomplish.
What is missed in this observation is the effect that passivity of pushing the responsibility from the game to the player has on the whole of the audience instead of the individual. There is a fundamental change that occurs if we take the concept - even without any design consideration whatsoever - out of the meta and actually put it in the game. It causes the concept to be put forth for consideration by the entire audience; it gives the opportunity to make the appeal to everyone that comes to experience your game. Even by taking only that first and most basic responsibility back into the design, you'll expose orders of magnitude more people to an interesting way of changing how they might experience the game.
That is a very important distinction because when a game is engaging an individual, the game itself is the authoritative voice in that relationship and you can take advantage of that from a design standpoint. It's essentially a core responsibility of good game design; not understanding what your audience already knows they don't like, but trying to understand what your audience doesn't know they may enjoy.
The primary reason I brought up the very basic example of ammo weight in Fallout is that it is an example of the game shirking that responsibility. The game never makes the appeal that maybe not being able to carry all the ammunition in the world would make you think about what you carried and what you did not, and would make it more interesting by forcing you to make considerations and compromises. The silence on the authority's part is the exact reason the vast majority of players scooped up all the ammo without consideration. Fast forward to New Vegas, and the designers have taken that responsibility upon themselves - and not only just in that but with a bevy of other similar concepts of new restrictions creating new considerations out of the same content. The most important part of this is that it makes this appeal to every single player that tries to walk out of the Doc's house at the start of the game, and just that one thing changed the game for many people.
Now, one of the other things I brought up was the concept of difficulty settings. The response I got is the one I expected, but the context was missing. Difficulty is a concept that also can exist only in the meta should the game shrug off that responsibility, and through the same reductive process a player could try and bear it themselves to achieve an individual result. However, the observation was that difficulty doesn't fit that definition, because we have a receipt of progress in the form of many video games that do implement a difficulty option in ways that could not have been replicated by a player. We saw examples of enemies that might launch new attacks, changes in boss patterns, or modifications of actual core game values that the player does not have access to. That is the observation, but the part that wasn't understood clearly is why those things actually exist.
If you pause for a moment and actually consider the question, you'll come to realize that those things are the direct result of the creative process being active instead of passive. Had any game that has a difficulty option been passive in this area, and not directly applied that idea in the course of the game's development, the outcome in that specific case would have never come to be. A player would still have been able to try and find that themselves (ex. intentionally playing less than optimally to impose challenge upon themselves), but there is a hard limit to what can be achieved through a reductive process - you can only draw down upon what is given to you. By instead taking that responsibility into account during the creative process, new ideas are formed about what could be accomplished and incorporated into the design. In pursuing that, completely new design outlets are found, and progress goes on further. This is where we start to understand how the value of a concept is modified just by including it in the game and the creative process where it can be scrutinized. By considering the concept of difficulty and how we can include it within the game as a functional option, we have created new value and new outlets for gameplay within content we already had.
This is what makes the two questions so intrinsic to one another. If I can see the value of a concept that is sitting only in the abstract, by simply including it in the creative process it will not just remove the need for a player to take a reductive approach to find it, we'll be able to flip it into a constructive process where we'll find new ways to modify content that the player couldn't find through reduction. We see the receipt of that already in the discussion of difficulty options, as designers found new ways to modify their game that offered something to the player they previously did not have. Once we agree to the idea that difficulty can be an element within the game players can directly modify, only then we are offered the opportunity to build on the concept and see just how limited the passive path really was.
To try to add a more vivid picture of this, I did a brief exercise earlier when making coffee just taking that idea and applying it to the concept of permadeath. Instead of only taking the bare minimum of what the concept already is, I thought about what might come forward if it was considered just in the context of implementing it in Skyrim. Here's a few examples of what I mean:
Heritage - If a player dies in a permadeath scenario above level (X), in the next session the player has the option of taking a passive trait when creating another character of the same race, with each race offering a different Heritage bonus.
Inheritance - When a player dies in a permadeath scenario, in the next session the player will receive a letter upon hitting level (X) telling a vague (and intentionally slightly incorrect) recollection of the previous death and informs that since this character was of some blood relation (possibly in relation or in place of Heritage) the player is entitled to collect belongings of that person. The amount of items recovered may be tied to the level reached by the previous character.
Grudge - If a player dies in a permadeath scenario to a unique (named) enemy, in the next session the player gains a passive trait that grants combat bonuses specifically against that one target. This bonus would be allowed to stack more than once. It is lost when the player kills the enemy that inflicted the grudge.
Remembrance - When the player dies in a permadeath scenario, a grave is placed in the world at the place of death. If the player finds this place and activates the gravestone, they can inherit some fraction of the strength from the previous character. You could do this as a percentage of the five highest skills that character had, for example.
I am not providing these as examples of what I personally wanted when I brought up the topic - I'm offering them only as evidence that the value of a concept is not self-evident when simply left in the abstract. They're the result of maybe thirty minutes of my own pondering, not what a team of skilled designers might discover with months of speculation, investigation and creativity.
If the options above were all actually implemented and offered within the game, would you still say that permadeath is something that could be fully realized by the player simply holding themselves to arbitrary restrictions? Or could we now say that what was previously objectively true in our original observation is now objectively false as it has created new design elements and thus actually created new value? If we did not do this but instead only implemented the barest minimum of this concept, and in doing so thousands out of the millions that experience Skyrim had their experienced altered just for being exposed to it, is there value in that alone? I mentioned difficulty options only to draw out a specific example that we have evidence for and is easy to identify the evolution of, but the reality is this is something that defines the nature of progress in game design.
I apologize for derailing the thread, but I felt like it was worth expounding.
So, the topic of permadeath. The relevant questions that have been asked here are:
- What value does this gameplay idea offer that makes it worth consideration?
- Is there value in introducing this idea directly through the game, or does all of that value already exist via leaving it in the abstract?
The first thing that was brought up was that this is a concept that can be satisfied totally in the meta. That is, if the player realizes that idea on their own, they can impose upon themselves a set of restrictions that will emulate this gameplay concept to where the core of it is fully realized. For permadeath, this is essentially a raw observation and objectively true - we can see that a player is able to make themselves beholden to this idea and fulfills all responsibility themselves, the way it affects the player's gameplay experience will be successfully changed in the fundamental ways that permadeath as a standalone concept seeks to accomplish.
What is missed in this observation is the effect that passivity of pushing the responsibility from the game to the player has on the whole of the audience instead of the individual. There is a fundamental change that occurs if we take the concept - even without any design consideration whatsoever - out of the meta and actually put it in the game. It causes the concept to be put forth for consideration by the entire audience; it gives the opportunity to make the appeal to everyone that comes to experience your game. Even by taking only that first and most basic responsibility back into the design, you'll expose orders of magnitude more people to an interesting way of changing how they might experience the game.
That is a very important distinction because when a game is engaging an individual, the game itself is the authoritative voice in that relationship and you can take advantage of that from a design standpoint. It's essentially a core responsibility of good game design; not understanding what your audience already knows they don't like, but trying to understand what your audience doesn't know they may enjoy.
The primary reason I brought up the very basic example of ammo weight in Fallout is that it is an example of the game shirking that responsibility. The game never makes the appeal that maybe not being able to carry all the ammunition in the world would make you think about what you carried and what you did not, and would make it more interesting by forcing you to make considerations and compromises. The silence on the authority's part is the exact reason the vast majority of players scooped up all the ammo without consideration. Fast forward to New Vegas, and the designers have taken that responsibility upon themselves - and not only just in that but with a bevy of other similar concepts of new restrictions creating new considerations out of the same content. The most important part of this is that it makes this appeal to every single player that tries to walk out of the Doc's house at the start of the game, and just that one thing changed the game for many people.
Now, one of the other things I brought up was the concept of difficulty settings. The response I got is the one I expected, but the context was missing. Difficulty is a concept that also can exist only in the meta should the game shrug off that responsibility, and through the same reductive process a player could try and bear it themselves to achieve an individual result. However, the observation was that difficulty doesn't fit that definition, because we have a receipt of progress in the form of many video games that do implement a difficulty option in ways that could not have been replicated by a player. We saw examples of enemies that might launch new attacks, changes in boss patterns, or modifications of actual core game values that the player does not have access to. That is the observation, but the part that wasn't understood clearly is why those things actually exist.
If you pause for a moment and actually consider the question, you'll come to realize that those things are the direct result of the creative process being active instead of passive. Had any game that has a difficulty option been passive in this area, and not directly applied that idea in the course of the game's development, the outcome in that specific case would have never come to be. A player would still have been able to try and find that themselves (ex. intentionally playing less than optimally to impose challenge upon themselves), but there is a hard limit to what can be achieved through a reductive process - you can only draw down upon what is given to you. By instead taking that responsibility into account during the creative process, new ideas are formed about what could be accomplished and incorporated into the design. In pursuing that, completely new design outlets are found, and progress goes on further. This is where we start to understand how the value of a concept is modified just by including it in the game and the creative process where it can be scrutinized. By considering the concept of difficulty and how we can include it within the game as a functional option, we have created new value and new outlets for gameplay within content we already had.
This is what makes the two questions so intrinsic to one another. If I can see the value of a concept that is sitting only in the abstract, by simply including it in the creative process it will not just remove the need for a player to take a reductive approach to find it, we'll be able to flip it into a constructive process where we'll find new ways to modify content that the player couldn't find through reduction. We see the receipt of that already in the discussion of difficulty options, as designers found new ways to modify their game that offered something to the player they previously did not have. Once we agree to the idea that difficulty can be an element within the game players can directly modify, only then we are offered the opportunity to build on the concept and see just how limited the passive path really was.
To try to add a more vivid picture of this, I did a brief exercise earlier when making coffee just taking that idea and applying it to the concept of permadeath. Instead of only taking the bare minimum of what the concept already is, I thought about what might come forward if it was considered just in the context of implementing it in Skyrim. Here's a few examples of what I mean:
Heritage - If a player dies in a permadeath scenario above level (X), in the next session the player has the option of taking a passive trait when creating another character of the same race, with each race offering a different Heritage bonus.
Inheritance - When a player dies in a permadeath scenario, in the next session the player will receive a letter upon hitting level (X) telling a vague (and intentionally slightly incorrect) recollection of the previous death and informs that since this character was of some blood relation (possibly in relation or in place of Heritage) the player is entitled to collect belongings of that person. The amount of items recovered may be tied to the level reached by the previous character.
Grudge - If a player dies in a permadeath scenario to a unique (named) enemy, in the next session the player gains a passive trait that grants combat bonuses specifically against that one target. This bonus would be allowed to stack more than once. It is lost when the player kills the enemy that inflicted the grudge.
Remembrance - When the player dies in a permadeath scenario, a grave is placed in the world at the place of death. If the player finds this place and activates the gravestone, they can inherit some fraction of the strength from the previous character. You could do this as a percentage of the five highest skills that character had, for example.
I am not providing these as examples of what I personally wanted when I brought up the topic - I'm offering them only as evidence that the value of a concept is not self-evident when simply left in the abstract. They're the result of maybe thirty minutes of my own pondering, not what a team of skilled designers might discover with months of speculation, investigation and creativity.
If the options above were all actually implemented and offered within the game, would you still say that permadeath is something that could be fully realized by the player simply holding themselves to arbitrary restrictions? Or could we now say that what was previously objectively true in our original observation is now objectively false as it has created new design elements and thus actually created new value? If we did not do this but instead only implemented the barest minimum of this concept, and in doing so thousands out of the millions that experience Skyrim had their experienced altered just for being exposed to it, is there value in that alone? I mentioned difficulty options only to draw out a specific example that we have evidence for and is easy to identify the evolution of, but the reality is this is something that defines the nature of progress in game design.
I apologize for derailing the thread, but I felt like it was worth expounding.
ZombieSupaStar
Member
JasoNsider said:
Souls is like 3D Zelda's, We want good first person melee combat. And as far as Souls go, if they enjoy getting their balls stomped on every 5 minutes, yes Dark Souls would be right up their ally (a split second of "yay!", followed by pain and anguish the other 99% of the time).
D
Deleted member 30609
Unconfirmed Member
Spoken like someone who's never played more than an hour of a Souls game and believes the myth.ZombieSupaStar said:
Unknown Soldier
Member
So is this rehosted anywhere else?