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GeekNights Tuesday - Saltybet
Tonight on GeekNights, we talk about Darude's Sandstorm (real, not fake) and Saltybet. Heroquest (was a bad game) and is being re-made. River City Ransom, similarly, is also being remade. Diablo III drops is shit-tacular real money auction house. Scott is streaming things. (Rym will be soon). Video from PAX (Bad Games). All this and more... on GeekNights!
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However, I think Scrym meant that BL is a game where you really don't need much skill. It's basically hold trigger, win game. Where in the Netrunner example, you can play 24/7 and STILL never win.. Because the game has a high enough skill cap to allow better players to win much often.
But I do love me some BL. I played and finished both. Beats using Skype any day ;-)
That stateful bullshit has no place in a multiplayer game.
It's not really bullshit.. It's just how the game is supposed to be played isn't it?
I wouldn't expect to walk in on a game of RISK Legacy half way though... I don't see why Borderlands or pretty much any multiplayer game should be faulted for that.
Edit: I know nothing about Burning Wheel. Replace it with RPG of choice, for arguments sake, if that analogy does not work.
Any pen and paper RPG can handle it just fine, because you are free to set your character's stats to whatever they need to be in order to meaningfully participate in the game.
On the other hand, Borderlands doesn't let you choose what level to be.
Ninjaed by loc
Borderlands is a game that I play very specifically. I have a single-player character, and then me and my friends have characters that we only use together. I maxed out one character alone when the game came out, and have one character that progresses with my roommate exclusively. I have sunk over a hundred hours into the game and will sink many more.
But that's how it's SUPPOSED to be played. Doesn't make it bullshit. It makes it a co-op start to finish game. Nothing wrong with that.
There is literally no reason to not let you choose your level or make a character from scratch with arbitrary equipment/level/stats. By arbitrarily preventing you from doing that, the game requires a grind for any group play that doesn't begin at level 1 or happen to be extremely lucky.
You can grind out Skag Gulch if that's what gets your penis hard, but the utility grind is a bullshit aspect of any game that employs it, and it drags Borderlands down from being a "great" game to just being an average one.
Besides, your "SUPPOSED to be played" argument is bullshit on multiple levels. Most people don't start over at level 1 every time they want to play the game with someone: they grind out to the appropriate level. And, in most other co-op games, you can have a new players take the place of one who isn't available: something that is basically impossible in Borderlands (again, unless you grind it out).
Not allowing players to customize characters limits the game's playability for zero reason. Anyone who wants your "pure" experience of playing with a single, dedicated set of players from beginning to end could do that regardless of if levels were customizeable or not.
The game is about the loot. That is the mechanic you are playing Borderlands for. Not shooting, loot. Are there difficult bosses in the endgame? Yes. Beating them relies less on shooting strategy and more on combination of loot strategies.
The problem here is differing utility. Your utility in playing a game like Borderlands is experiencing a shooter with some choices and customization. Lots of other player's utility is enjoying the experience of getting new loot that does different stuff.
The game is designed with the second utility in mind. Without that, it will accomplish nothing unique, in my opinion. Therefore, to allow for you to just arbitrarily pick a level and receive good items for that level means you lose the purpose of the game, which is to move through the game and acquire loot and experience/enjoy the RNG and the drop system.
This only works for people who can enjoy grinding. If you can't enjoy grinding of any kind, then the game is not for you.
Complaining that you want a way to let you choose to skip that will destroy the other half of the game. Even if you can choose to just play the game normally, if the game lets me skip, I'm just gonna do that with a bunch of characters so I can fight through the last areas over and over again to get the loot that I want. Yes, I do care about the story and whatnot (In Borderlands 2 I do, at least), but I only need to experience that once. It destroys the game's replay value if I can skip in the way you you speak.
The game would have MORE replay value, not less, if I could run through an arbitrary area with an arbitrary group of friends without being REQUIRED to go back to Skag Gulch.
But seriously, your argument is that you would use the feature if it were in the game, ruining your personal self-conceived notion of what the game should be, and therefore that feature shouldn't exist?
That's really your argument?
I played "ironman mode" back in Super Dodgeball. I didn't need the game developers to enforce it for me, and it didn't matter what other people did in their own games.
Fable 3 was a very crap game, but it did try something new, which I thought was a cool idea. With your weapon, the more you used it, it changed over time. If you constantly used a weapon to kill innocent people, it would start to look 'evil'. Also it would earn the bonus to make it easier to kill that way earning you more xp. So it sort of a way to support your type of character and also ad style to your character to automatically matches.
So your player, clothes and weapons change in reflection to your play style. Instead of waiting for a legendary weapon drop, by playing you a becoming the legend.
If you wanted you could sell that legendary weapon, and start fresh. Trade in your evil ways, for a new play style, a new look.
If this was implemented in a real MMO, it would be hard to hide that you were evil/ good. Which I think is cool. Not only that, because the style changes apply to certain niche skills. Like being able to kill a certain type of enemy.
This hasn't been tried out enough I think.
Mortal Online doesn't have instancing and there aren't weapon drops, just resource drops. You need certain skills to use certain items. Meaning classes actually matter. You have to craft everything. So every item is valuable in some way. It just lacks customisation.
I never said grinding was fun or even enjoyable. The experience of getting the loot is. If you're someone who is willing to grind, then you can enjoy the experience of getting loot as you grind and enjoy the spectacle of silly writing and good art and whatnot (Again, applies more to Borderlands 2, which I find superior to the first game by a lot).
I disagree that it has no replay value. It has no replay value *for you* because you don't care that much about the loot. Again, that is not your utility when you're playing the game. If you care about the loot, playing on a different character who uses different loot is fun. Suddenly I'm looking at weapons and shields and relics and class mods that meant nothing to me in my previous game. I'm experiencing different abilities and having fun with doing something differently. Yes, I have to go through the old area again. But I'm just enjoying the varying loot drops I get along the way.
Again, the game's intention would be weakened if you could just go to arbitrary areas in multiplayer and be auto-leveled and equipped for it. Then you could just grind loot much more quickly and the game becomes less valuable in cost/time perspective.
It also raises lots of design questions. What happens to items they give you if you bounce up a level? When you go back to your character's normal level, do you keep them and have to use up bank space storing them? Do you stay at that level? If so, again, the problems above raise. Why don't I just play level 50 to begin with if my goal is to get loot? Have they effectively eliminated the utility of this game for the people who actually like it?
Because you don't care about item drops or half of what Borderlands is about, you want to change it to suit your needs, and that's fine and totally expected. But don't say that it is the optimal way to design a game like Borderlands. Borderlands is designed with something very specific in mind, and it accomplishes that perfectly. What it accomplishes is something you have no interest in. That I completely understand and even respect. However, it is not bad or using archaic design simply for the sake of using that design. It has purpose behind everything that it is. It's just that purpose makes it unappealing to you.
TL;DR: The game is a skinner box. I accept this. I enjoy it as a skinner box. It provides pleasure when certain things happen. It is exactly a skinner box. Does that make it a lower form of game compared to others? Sure. But it's design is completely intentional.
"Please lock me in a Skinner box."
In other words, the input isn't just 'push this button only this button', it's 'which button should I push in this situation?'.
You want the game to prevent you from more readily getting the loot, and would skip the grind if the game let you, thereby "ruining" the game for yourself.
That's a little fucked up.
Does the existence of cheat codes in Doom II RUIN the skill side of beating the game? Why doesn't everyone just skip to the end with god mode and kill John Romero? Because they are human beings with agency and nominal free will.
Sometimes, I'd use cheat codes and skip to a particularly fun level of Doom II. Sometimes, I'd use no cheat codes and play all the way through. Sometimes this was co-op, sometimes it was not.
The ability to skip parts of an effectively single player game has ZERO impact on your ability to enjoy the game without skipping them.
Though, to be fair, it should also be noted - There are some strong critiques, I'm told, about using skinner boxes when talking about games. Some of which I've heard are 1)That either most games are, or very, very few, depending on how you apply the definition beyond "Games I don't personally like", 2)That it displays a very poor understanding of evolutionary psychology, and 3)That the vast, vast majority of the time, the term is so grossly misapplied as to be meaningless.
I guess really, it raises the following questions:
- Is an operant conditioning chamber actually comparable to a (generally) vastly more complex video game?
- When the correct definition of "Skinner box" is used, do enough games fall both inside and outside of the definition to make it a useful term?
- Is there another better-suited term or terms?
And on a personal note:
- Is it ever going to stop sounding SUPER wanky and pretentious for people to pooh-pooh or dismiss games by accusing them of being skinner boxes? Even when I agree with what's being said, it's getting to the point where the words "Skinner Box" are almost giving me a Pavlovian reaction in the form of cringing whenever it's mentioned.
You would have that choice ONLY IF the game let you choose levels for characters.
What if all these 'RPG' type games just let you have all the skills, but you had to 'street fighter' the execution of those skills.
If Borderlands allowed me to acquire loot quickly, why not choose that way? Yes, I could just choose to play through the early levels to get to the later levels where better loot drops. But if I have the option to do otherwise, why not choose it if what I want is the loot? I really want an E-Tech Maliwan SMG in Borderlands 2. In over a hundred hours I have yet to personally find one for myself on either of my two pretty heavily played characters. This means that when I feel like it, I can throw some time in to get it. If I could just skip to level 50 from the start of the game, one or more of my characters would've done that and fought the final boss of that game over and over again, as he sprays loot out like it's a joke (it kind of is). This would've increased my chances of getting said loot. Instead, I had to work my way to that point.
That is the purpose of the game. Teaching me to do a repetitive task over and over again to get what I want (Why I used the Skinner box as a comparison). There are two things that make me okay with this.
1. No microtransactions to get items. The only other way to get items is to hack the game.
2. No monthly fee. Unlike WoW, which I enjoy for similar reasons, once I own Borderlands, I can play it at my leisure. If I decide the skinner box bores me, I can switch over to a completely different game without feeling like I'm wasting the game hours I just bought. Subscription-based games are in that way, a locked skinner box as Scott mentions.
Yes, I could add choice to the game. But at that point, we now have to decide what choice is optimal and what choice is not. Because as a rational human being, I have to do that. I will always choose your option, Rym, and then the game will feel short and pointless to me. I have self-control, but if the game puts in an option that allows me to bypass, well, the game, to get what I want, then I will most likely do that, now won't I?