Be Excellent To Each Other

Morrowind, Daggerfall and Oblivion are three FPSRPG I can think of from the top of my head.

And who in games runs backwards when fight enemies?

What guff is being talked.

Is Oblivion a shit RPG because it gives you direct control of your player? Because Borderlands certainly is better at the first person shootery part than many FPSes I've played. And at least Oblivion let you hack things with your sword instead of many RPGs where you click and then watch your avatar have all the fun.

Frontlines: FUEL OF WAR finally finished downloading yesterday, so I did the BEST RESPONSE and played it. It's pretty good fun. Well worth the £4. There aren't that many people online, however, and the shooting a bit off over long range. I think you have to lead for lag in this game (no client side predication?)

ALSO:

Does S.T.A.L.K.E.R. fit into the RPG/FPS catergory? If so, that was pretty brills.

No, it doesn't, because it's not an RPG.

Also, it was shitty shit shit shit.

Please don't post links to that site. Please?

What qualifies as RPG/NOTRPG? Skills? Talking to people? Equipment? Inventories?



Maybe you played a different game?

Nope. I hated STALKER with a passion. It's one of the worst games I've ever played. Hideous, tedious, shite.

How on earth Oblivion could be classed as a First Person Shooter is beyond my ken.

Which one, Destructoid or Cracked? And why?

(only just noticed that link goes to Destructoid and not straight to Cracked.com; I must have fumbled it.)

I was talking codswallop up there. No idea why I thought this was a Cracked.com article. Anyway, Pod, what's wrong with Destructoid?

i have to remember that as to ignore every opinion you give from now on.

STALKER is one of the best games ever. I did not found any fault in it, except for the sarcophagus part which was just impossible.

And no, it's not an RPGs.

John Coffey, i wish Fallout 3 had Borderlands combat, it would be a much better game then.

I'm with Craster on this one. Stalker was fucking dire.

Fair enough It comes down to personal preference really.

Fallout to me was only a little bit about combat. I just felt very at home with the game and it's story. Probably because just prior to coming back to the UK I had spent three years mostly completely alone. I had no family, few friends (that I didn't really have any time to hang with because I was busting a gut). I did a lot of travelling and slept in some pretty shit places (one minute a $2.5m mansion and the next an unfinished concrete basement) and so on. I felt like a lone wanderer so the game made a lot of sense to me.

The combat parts were fun but tbh I would have given them all up for more story and more involvement. I loved every last minute.

Borderlands? well right from the first line "you have to find the vault !" it felt like a bad rip. I know imitation is flattery but not when you are worlds apart.

The rest? well I know it's labelled as an RPG but to me it just felt like a FPS with XP, and a boring limp one at that. As I say, character involvement is everything and it just left me dissapointed.

See also STALKER. I tried SO HARD to get into that because I am utterly fascinated with things like Cherbobyl and other grim deserted places, but the combat was absolutely weak and the game was a mess. I could have happily gone on an invincible tour around the landscapes. Come to think of it that's exactly what I ended up doing

What JC said about stalker. I tried very hard to love it, as it was so novel. Harder than I do with most games. It was just exactly that, though - a mess.

Well in fairness that is what it was sadly. An unfinished mess. THQ got onboard the company who were making it (can't remember now..) and started cracking the whip. To be fair to THQ it would have never, ever been done other wise, but it was like playing an early beta.

Text doesn't fit boxes and overlaps on widescreen resolutions and there were LOADS of things removed from the game but put backable if you hack it.

As an example there was supposed to be a red cloud part where every now and then a radioactive cloud would blow over you and you had to immediately find cover or die. They took that out, but you can mod/hack it back in. There were supposed to be drivable cars (see those Ladas?) but they couldn't get it right in time, so again disabled it but you can mod/hack it back in. And so on. I have seen about thirty feature mods that basically go into the game code and re-enable things.

One of which makes you a better shot. Sadly it also makes your enemies a better shot and the combat is totally unbalanced.

I wouldn't go so far as calling it a playable rolling demo as that would be uber harsh. But it was far, FAR from being a complete polished product and it's all of that that seemed to generate all of the complaints. Apparently though one of the game's producers made a statement saying they could have spent forever on it and never gotten it done. I can believe that.

Who cares about the labels? FO3 isn't also an RPG for loads of people. Borderlands is supposed to be pure mindless fun. It's more like Diablo meets Painkiller. The story isn't important. When i load a game like Borderlands i'm not in the mood for reading lots of text.

And about FO3, even if the setting was good, it could benefit from a much better combat system. It seems like Bethesda just put VATS there for 2 reasons: to show hardcore rpg'ers that FO3 wasn't Oblivion with guns and to diguise the fact that the game had dire combat. VATS didn't add anything, not any tactical choices. It was just a glorified cheat. I'd rather have the game without vats but with good FPS combat, like in the first FEAR or Painkiller.

Aren't you talking about STALKER:Clear Sky?

I didn't found 1 single bug in Shadow of Chernobyl.

Well yes, you could easily change the name to Clear Sky and you would have the same thing. But alas, no, I'm talking about the original too.

Some wouldn't have noticed the glaring faults due to luck etc, but I got the game late in it's life and I had already read about them.

What was so bad about it? Personally I thought it was great. I like the way they did the shooting, I thought they AI was very intelligent, moreso than most other FPS games, it had a fantastic atmosphere -- creeping around the labs was a very scary thing. Other than a bit of bad dialogue and a clichéd story (oh, so I have amnesia do I? ) I can't see what was wrong with it. I don't see the tedium at all -- there was enough change in baddies and weapon choice to keep the shooting from going stale and you had to think quite hard about what to carry to keep yourself deadly and what to spare to keep yourself light and nimble.

Plus, you could LEAN.




HEARTY AGREEANCE.





I don't see what about the game was a mess? That not all of the dialog was spoken? Infact I can't see the combat as being weak - it's much more preferable in my opinion than a lot of other games I've played. The AI was genuinly smart, and often I'd be shooting at guys infront of me, who are hiding behind cover and that, only to see that 2 of them had snuck round the side on my left and had a perfect firing position. Most games the enemies just stand there or run back and forth, or run between cover at the most inopportune moments. The AI in STALKER tried to do it whilst you weren't shooting at them, at least.



disclaimer: I only bought&played it a month ago, so maybe I had all the bugs removed, but I saw none of this.



So what? Is this even a valid point? You don't like the game because one of their original ideas didn't make it into the final product? There's a metric fuckton of half-implemented ideas in virtually every major game out there. They're either removed due to time constraints or becasue they don't fit the game in the end. Remember hot-coffee, as a famour example? Did you say GTA4 was a crap game because you couldn't play it, even though it was there in the code? OR perhaps TF2 is a shit game because it's gone through 4 or so different prototypes?



So a third-party mode which unbalances the game is a fault of the original developers?



I don't see what was unfinished about it. I did practically every quest in the game and went to all parts of it and saw no bugs. Sure, you could pick up a "bread" item that was unusable, and a guitar that was unplayable, but what the hell does that matter?!



Neither did I.



It seems Coffey didn't either but only read about them.

a) The main "editors" are terrible writers. ESPECIALLY Jim Sterling.
b) Jim Sterling isn't funny.
c) The 'cblogs' are no better than the main writers.
d) Everyone with an account on there appears to have the sensabilities of a 14 year old and they just spam the comments with arselicking comments like "LOL GO <author of post>"
e) 60% of their content is copy and pasted off places like kotaku and reworded which they justify by sticking "VIA KOTAKU" at the bottom of the post etc. Very rarely is this rewording adding any real content. The remaining 40% is poorly writen opinion pieces or craptastic reviews.
f) The word "meta".
g) THAT FUCKING FONT ON EVERY FUCKING PICTURE.
It's not even a funny comment on the picture as well. It's there simply because.

@Pod: I don't read anywhere enough Destructoid to hold any opinion on any part of that, but that article still amused me.

Well the first thing I noticed was that some of the text did not fit the boxes and spilled over. I hadn't read about that part. Nor did I expect every single enemy to be an absolute crack shot. It's all well and good looking at movies of one dude with a handgun take on an entire army but in the real world it doesn't work like that. There isn't enough ammo for a start, and it seemed that there was no way of avoiding a conflict even when you weren't in the mood. So what would end up happening is I would be stuck behind a ruined bus or something with no ammo being shot and left and right. Try to run away? get shot in the back of the head by the Russian gold medal winning marksmen who never EVER missed. Now. On that point I found that to be incredibly irritating about Fallout 3. EVERY SINGLE bullet fired at you nearly always hit you from three miles away. Yet, even at top level of XP (30 after BS IIRC) some of yours would still miss. Which made weapons like the 4 beam laser gun a waste of ammo because unless all 4 beams focused it was less effective than the single beam.

Each on their own are small niggles. Add it all together? it quickly gets really annoying. Fallout 3 had some issues I did not like. Thankfully the combat wasn't the largest part of it and it didn't try to be a FPS. STALKER was pretty much a FPS and suffered with all of the annoying issues that bug FPS. You are entering into a virtual world and thus the AI needs to be coded to produce virtual settings. One man cannot take on a team of crack shot commandos (STALKER) with a rusty old rifle.

Just to add a bit to that. Your enemies had endless ammo. Where the fuck they got it all from? Mystery to me ! So that would leave you two options. Try and run the half mile to where they are and die in the face with a rambo knife, or try to run away and die in the back. Fucking stupid.

The AI needed work. Maybe I am just hyper sensitive to such things? but basically when the AI is out you end up with a frustrating mess. Your comment about how awesome the enemy AI is? yup, very true. Too good to make it an enjoyable experience. Frustration soon sets in and you start to realise you are being faced with stupid impossible tasks.




It wasn't so much bugs, but unfinished game code.




It wasn't because original ideas didn't make the final product. It was because they were removed for the sole reason of getting an unfinished project up for sale to bring in the dollars. Hot Coffee, FYI was in early versions of the 360 game. It was only when companies like the one I worked for (Blockbuster video) refused to sell it to *any one* (they don't sell porn in any shape or form) that R* removed it . We then stocked it but had a policy to card any one (and take a photocopy of that ID) under 21.

That would have hurt their sales. Because the first thing Americans do is camp themselves outside stores like that to buy it.

GTA4 was poorly coded and due to which ran poorly. See also : Crysis. Was talking to a friend about this earlier. There are certain sections in Crysis that are terribly buggy. Due to which you can be getting 60 fps one minute and then 5 the next. And, it doesn't matter how beastly your hardware is because it isn't about that. It's about a poorly coded game. Thankfully with Crysis there are only a few levels that suffer with that and the rest kind of outweighs it. Warhead runs so much better becuase they have pulled out the numbers of enemies, lowered down certain things and with a very careful eye you can see how it actually doesn't look as good as the original. Going back to Crysis? it's been around for aaages now, and even with SLI 295 still suffers some lag and problems due to bad code. And, I would imagine that GTA4 will end up the same.




It's already unbalanced. Activating a third party mode makes you a better shot, but it makes them even better than they already were, which IMO and lots of others was already fucking stupid. I don't like hard games. This is very true. However, I don't like stupidly unfair games that are frustrating to the point of actually not being any fun. After all, they are games.



If you enjoyed it? (and you wouldn't be alone) then great. I noticed too many things in the end and coupled with the terrible "you're fucked out here alone" AI became annoyed and frustrated at it. A lot of those reasons I have forgotten now, but hey, I might even reinstall it later and remind myself.




I played it for about a week solid. Desperately trying to enjoy it. Final summary? I didn't like it. At all. It was one of those games that ticked every box but when I played it left me extremely dissapointed. And when I looked in magazines and saw people pointing out all of the reasons why they didn't like it it suddenly became clear.

It was because it was a partially finished mess of a game.

My memory is starting to work. Another example.

I had to go to a train yard or something to rescue some dude. I ended up fuckin bogged down behind a bus with about 200 pissed off Russians shooting at me. By the time I had even managed to move forward more than ten feet the person I was going to rescue was dead.

So, I wound back my save game and tried running around. But there were fences.

So I wound back my save game and tried going another way. I became a target for about 10 well positioned snipers. Each time the guy I was supposed to get to in time died. After about twenty attempts at trying it every way I could think of (including the YEE STEAM YEE playground tactic, where I died very fucking quickly) he still died.

So out of interest I decided to turn on god mode and try again. In the end I think I rescued him, but I would have died about a million times over.

So as I keep saying, it was a mess. A complete mess.

I don't necessarily agree that there was all that much wrong with the game as such, it just wasn't for me. As JC says above, the opponents were all utter crack shots, whereas no I seemed unable to hit a damned thing at anything over 20 yards. There was nowhere near enough ammo to make up for the amount you ended up having to use to get stuff done. I never understood the wibbly bits that were just randomly scattered around, with occasional brown nuggets of something that is meaningless to me in the middle of them.

It just didn't draw me in at all.

That's just poor design, of course, not bugs.

Indeed. But that's before I even get started on the bugs. Of which there were many.

Hence one word (for me I add, if people enjoyed it then YAY) sums it up. Mess.

Going back to the hot coffee thing.

I actually got it slightly wrong. So apologies for that.

What happened was this. It was still very well in the game. A cheat came out about two days after release to activate it. As soon as word got out it was all over the news and Blockbuster, Hometown Video and endless other video stores (Hollywood to name another) all pulled it from the shelves and sent it back.

Even game stores had terrible trouble selling it, there were petitions by millions of parents etc.

Apparently Rockstar had not divulged that there was any pornographic material in the game and they ended up in deep shit. Now I can't remember if later versions of the game had it removed completely?

Time for Wikipedia

Yes, here we go...

Eh? I have a Borderlands trailer that I'm positive predates any announcement of Bethesda's FO3 by a very, very long time. And it's of Helena Pierce telling you to not waste your time looking for the vault.

Yes but it didn't predate the Fallout series.

BTW out of Curiosity (no, not the one here, he can't have babies cue Monty Python style sketch ) Has any one actually finished STALKER? Does it even have an end?

Anything that uses a 'vault' is ripping off Fallout? Including banks? What about this thing?

I got very very close to it, but like i said, it's the only fault i can find in the game, since the part in the sarcophagus is almost impossible. And fuckin creepy also. But there are even multiple endings, as you can see on youtube.

But i really don't understand how people can say STALKER had bad combat really. Amazing AI and ballistics. It's all very realistic, there's no recharging shields or cheap cover systems. And did anyone mentioned the graphics? For me it's still the best looking game this side of Crysis. The lighting is superb, it can really create a believable environment and doesn't have that bloom shit that every game nowadays have, neither has all the characters smeared in vaseline like Bioshock (and lots of others). And i also think it's the scariest game i've ever played, even more than System Shock 2.

Maybe because...



Just a guess, based on not having played it.

How to kill people in Stalker:

1) Spend forty-five minutes creeping up behind a lone sentry

2) Choose your most silent, most accurate weapon

3) stand seven inches from your target, aiming for several seconds at his stationary head.

3) Fire

4) Fire

5) Fire

6) Fire

7) Fire

8) Fire

9) Fire

10) Fire

11) Fire

12) Fire

13) Fire

14) Fire

15) Fire

16) Reload and/or run away, pursued by twenty soldiers/bandits, one of whom is slightly injured, possibly.

17) Wait in a corner with a shotgun and shoot everyone who comes in at point blank range

18) Limp away.

19) Come back in five minutes and repeat, with slight slowdown due to the still-present corpses from the last time, only rubbing in how cheap the respawning and infinite missions are.

I think it had bad combat because bullets didn't hit the people you were shooting at.

That is pretty realistic though. (If someone were to give you a gun)

Wait, are you saying it's simulating the average gamer's real life marksmanship? Is there a way of telling the game you used to be a Royal Marines sharpshooter?

I'm sure most soldiers can't spin on a sixpence while bunnyhopping around, yet still manage five headshots in as many seconds.

Are soldiers actually trained to go for the head, anyway?

Centre of mass, I think, unless there's a good reason not to (strapped with bombs, etc).

Only if the shaft is unavailable.

myp is right, colleague who used to be in the army says go for the body as it's the biggest target and therefore you are most likely to hit it.

EDIT: just came over to add 'Also because it will likely incapacitate and not kill... and a wounded soldier is worse for his buddies than a dead one.'

My point was, doesn't it make console FPSing more realistic than its PC brethren?

I came to prefer the more thoughtful 'fire from the hip and get lucky, or stand still and take aim' of Goldeneye compared to the twitchy PC stuff.

This is true (and is why grenades and many other explosives are designed to wound rather than kill), however in Stalker, if you shoot anything other than the head, it will take at least an entire clip of ammunition to kill someone, and they won't slow down until they're dead. And if you fire an entire clip, even shot by shot, you will hit perhaps a quarter of the time at short range. Making sneaking up and point-blanking the only way that will kill quickly even half the time. The knife is hopeless as well.

You make Stalker sound considerably less than excellent.

So by that reasoning its more realistic to play with one eye closed and only 3 fingers on each hand.

I'm sure you have a point. However, I haven't a damn clue what it is?

That's the thing though, games are not supposed to be that realistic. They're supposed to be fun or offer you a complete advantage like hollywood movies.

For example, ammo and 1 vs 100. If you don't have enough ammo to kill everything in front of you how else can you? And how can one man take on a trained force of marksmen with a rifle?

Even in real life that wouldn't happen. Because in real life the poor sod would be dead. Just like wrestling vs MMA. In MMA it's usually all over within 5 minutes. In wrestling they appear to be super human, because it's all fake (not dissing their athletic prowess, though, it's still very impressive !).

Samo Hung summed it up best for me. They interviewed him once about growing up and he said something along the lines of...

Of course movie fighting is totally different to real fighting. In a real fight it's "bam bam bam bam" (waves fists) and it's all over in seconds

So yes, STALKER may well be very real. Sadly the reality of that sort of situation is pretty impossible (even for a complete optimist).

I see games as fun, as fantasy. Bit hard living out your fantasy with a crappy rifle and poor shot.

EDIT. STALKER. When I said I was really into creepy places like that I meant in a fantasy way. Because in reality you wouldn't catch me going somewhere like that. If I could turn into Superman (or something) then I would go there. I hope that makes sense.

It's really fucking ropey, if it weren't such an underdog of a game then nobody would have persisted with it long enough to scrape any crumbs of joy from the wretched thing. And even if they had they certainly wouldn't have continued fawning over it for years.