14 replies to this topic

[ROplayer]

just a few ideas that are easy to encode but should make the game more enjoyable

add % to alien stats. if you have hard, normal and easy, then easy would be -10% to stats, normal would be normal while hard would add 30%. You get the idea.

make maps larger as difficulty progresses. maybe double maps. they are pain in the donkey

Introduce alien autoguards (bots?) on harder difficulty levels. To make them simple, cannot stun them, they blow up big upon death (only if no aliens near, otherwise just disintegrate). Maybe some bots mine land and air (invisimines?)


Inabilty to research alien technology until..... this way at advanced levels you dont get to research the best weapon after the first mission.

at high difficulty, aliens can resurrect after certain time.

Random events, maintenance problems, weather anomalies, aliens breaking out of the containment, money loss/grants, these things should come with antiloader protection though.

Antiloader protection, so people dont play by reloading. basically game calculates certain events (random events? some aspects of battle?) a few turns/minutes ahead. So when you save, you save with those strategic calculations

some graphics, texts saved in easily editable files. if this was a commercial product i'd say have a customizing tool for graphics, text, sound in the expansion upgrade.

Product placement. get sponsors, or if you desire to promote your own companies place names on battlescenes. Just dont overdo it.

Aliens, technology, ray guns and space ships are important. But so is sex. maybe add something of that sort to the game

[The Master Maniac]

Uh, you don't mean the "sex sells" kind of sex, or were you going for something else. I'd rather not see X-Corps chicks walking around in skin-tight leather and spouting ridiculous one-liners, thanks. Quick, run to the mall!

No offense, but the only things I agree with from that particular list are changes in weather--seeing cloud movements in the Geoscape actually affect battles would be undescribably awesome...and predictably difficult to code. Maybe after V1? Please?

[Snakeman]

Think about it. Your in a situation that probably doesn't grant you any R&R away from base. That only leaves the bathroom, and we really don't want to upset the Golden Toilet do we? Might scar it for life to do anything untoward in its presence.

Seriously, I liked the random events and weather stuff. I'd be happy though if the weather stuff was more cosmetic at first if coding in battlescape effects to units because of it would be time intensive. There is obviously a cool appeal to it working though, units slipping around in mud, tracked vehicles having trouble, all units (that don't fly/hover already) having trouble with elevated terrain navigating etc.

Random events, maintenance problems, weather anomalies, aliens breaking out of the containment, money loss/grants

I'm not sure what you mean by antiloading stuff at the end of that, but as far as I can see, if the event is random, it shouldn't really matter if a game was saved prior to one outcome or other. If done right, each event would be different anyway. The best random event I like is the aliens busting out of containment, although I think I'd rather like to hunt down the jail birds. It'd be a shame to leave everything here up to a random occurance you couldn't do anything about.

Incidentally, I noticed this topic was started at the help desk, probably should be moved

[Breunor]

I know it's a pain for the average person to do, but all these ideas have been discussed to various degrees before, just take a look through the labs and you'll see that a good deal of discussion is already out there, which you can build on.

[54x]

His reference to antiloader protection is a design flaw that popped up in UFO- mainly, that if you save the game before something random occurs, you get a different outcome when the game loads- think like researching medics. You could save just before the research finished, and then keep on loading until you got an autopsy that you wanted, or whatever. He wanted these decisions to be made in advance when you saved the game. So whenever you save, it resolves the random decision into your savegame file, preventing you loading to game the random generator.

[The Master Maniac]

Uh, you don't mean the "sex sells" kind of sex, or were you going for something else. I'd rather not see X-Corps chicks walking around in skin-tight leather and spouting ridiculous one-liners.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

You sure?

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Well, unless that particular chick happens to be Bloodrayne. Erm, you know...? Okay--sorry, then!

Back to topic--I like Snakeman's ideas about the weather (I wanted it to be a purely cosmetic battlescape thing). The idea of rain actually making the ground slippery sounds absolutely awesome. Just think of how interesting snow would make things!

Also, I don't like the idea of "antiloader protection." Sure, we don't want any medic weirdness, but you don't want the game too unforgiving or you'll turn a lot of people off. Let's face it, we've all done it before; sometimes we reload once or twice to save a certain soldier (sometimes!), or what have you. You can make it a challenge to yourself never to reload, but it would be a bit of a kick in the teeth to newer X-Com fans, you know? It's a tough decision, I suppose. Maybe, on the higher difficulties, reloading in such situations could be disabled, or something?

Edited by The Master Maniac, 11 October 2004 - 11:35 AM.

[Snakeman]

I don't know, I mean, I think you've answered pretty well maniac. We've all been in situations as you've described when we'd wish to reload, not to mention simply being able to come back to it later if you got busy all of a sudden. I think by leaving it open ended as the first game did, we can construct our own challenges as we see fit, imposing limitations on ourselves etc. as you said.

I rarely ever liked too many games that put too many constraints in for me. And as you say, it could turn off newcomers to these types of games so there's probably something to be said for not fiddling with contraints like this, although I'm not opposed to the end game having some put in for example, but I'd have to know more about that to be sure.

[The Master Maniac]

Well, I know what you guys mean, though--but still, the idea of a game is to enjoy it and have fun. And, of course, to have a challenging experience. By letting the degree of difficulty moderated by the player, it'd be hard to come out of a game unamused. Setting personal challenges feels a bit more rewarding sometimes than running through loops, but, as it was said here, the creators of the game themselves have to add a good degree of difficulty to the game, of course. Take Perfect Dark for example--to me, that was one of the most difficult games I've ever played, and once I struggled through Perfect Agent mode, I felt, for the lack of a better word, proud. The thing was, though the game wasn't afraid to shoot you down when it felt like it, you were always free to go back to the beginning of the mission and give it another go (ain't like real life, but hey). However, that didn't stop me from setting my own personal challenge afterwards, like, say, going for nonlethal takedowns all the time, or what have you. X-Com's greatest point was its relatively forgiving gameplay structure which allowed you to play the way you like, without cramming an idea down your throat (I think TFTD's horrid tech tree is best left alone, though). If you wanted to accept your losses and work your way around them, feel free to. If you've been cheated by a glitch or something (darned grenades that explode instantaneously!), you can go right back to a saved state before it happened. I think the difficulty structure of the game shouldn't be messed with, myself.

Edited by The Master Maniac, 11 October 2004 - 09:01 PM.

[fux0r666]

re: sexual content

My two bits:

I've seen many-o-game with various degrees of sexual and violent content. In all of these cases one blaring truth shines straight through every eye-grabber and gimmick: If the game is not good enough to play without extreme content, it's not good enough, period. In some instances extreme content detracts from the gaming experience (*cough* Postal 2 *cough*). In these cases, it seems that time spent adjusting that content would have been better spent on gameplay or some other feature.

Although it would be great to be a notable addition to the world of free-software, and of video-games in general, I would rather garner attention by being notorious. Games with extreme content that don't give the content the respect it deserves often come of as juvenile and soulless. This is not the direction I want the project to take, and it's certainly not the project I've been working on thus far. If we were to add any feature for the sole purpose of catching attention, I think that there would need to be serious discussion about the impact of any such feature- this, in my opinion, is especially true for sexual content (ie. the portrayal of women in objectifying or dehumanizing ways).

Edited by fux0r666, 12 October 2004 - 12:57 AM.

[Snakeman]

Well said fux0r.

In a similar view I have on this subject, but with regard to things like movies in particular...I've always felt older movies did better in implying the sexual stuff rather than going all out to show us like more modern pictures. We're intelligent, we know what's going down and we don't need to see it quite frankly. But I digress heh.

Maniac: Yes I totally agree with you. I don't want to see the difficulty settings be affected, but my take above had more to do with loading. So long as its not handled to such an extent it requires you redo the entire scenario or sets one back too far, I suspect it'll be all good. We've all played games where its loading feature sent one back too far, for instance any game requiring you reach a "checkpoint" so that every new load would occur there. However some games that utilized this spread those things out awefully far. A challenge? Perhaps for some people, but I believe you'd turn off quite a few casual gamers.

Not a problem I reckon for most of us who post here. I suspect most of us are of the harder core X-COM fanatics

Still, I think you can still plausibly separate the level of difficulty with loading. When where and how one can load doesn't change the challenge you face with a harder unit whether you know where he's planted or not (well, one would hope hehe )

Edited by Snakeman, 12 October 2004 - 07:28 PM.

[x0563511]

His reference to antiloader protection is a design flaw that popped up in UFO- mainly, that if you save the game before something random occurs, you get a different outcome when the game loads- think like researching medics. You could save just before the research finished, and then keep on loading until you got an autopsy that you wanted, or whatever. He wanted these decisions to be made in advance when you saved the game. So whenever you save, it resolves the random decision into your savegame file, preventing you loading to game the random generator.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

A simple solution ive seen used in a few games is this:

Keep a buffer of entropy data (data that is used to randomise the 'random' data the CPU gives) and save it with the savegames. That way, your save/load would only work if you knew something was going to happen in 10 min of gametime or so... You could also be mean and use it as part of a public key (or even a simple XOR) to cypher the save so you couldn't easily hack into it and set the entropy to something predictable...

You can generate entropy from all kinds of things... mouse movements, memory delta (in total) ect...


Anyways... i didn't even read the whole thread, so ignore me if this was already pointed out.

[Smichal]

The things I'd like to see in Xenocide: weather, hand to hand attacks and weapons (at least a few...i hope the stun rod (thermal tazer) will be more effective than in X-Com, sometimes I stunned an alien 3 times and he was still standing, what kind of joke is that???) and lastly better movement freedom (climbing, grappling hook or something like that...)

Oh I almost forgot, ther ABSOLUTELY has to be a training centre for the soldiers (train physical attributes, learn how to use high explosives and so on...)

Edited by Smichal, 04 December 2004 - 05:14 AM.