VERDICT DAY and other Giant Robo

[CaptHawkeye]

I <3 From Software's naming and labeling guys. I mean VERDICT DAY is a boss name for a game and so was FOR ANSWER.

So Armored Core V: Verdict Day is on the way which i'm gushing about. The game is supposed to bring back a few more of Chromehounds' ideas like a multiplayer driven campaign world and weapon arms from ACFA will also be back. So nerds terrified of playing a game about giant robots with hands might be more willing to show up this time. The AC games these days are totally the successors to that abortive Mechwarrior style giant robit game From made years ago. While I still hold out hope of seeing a (functional) Chromehounds 2 their ain't nothin wrong with Armored Core V either. Well mostly nothing wrong.

If ACV had any problem it's that the player mass for the multi component simply wasn't there. Their were bots and single player-ish stuff but they weren't very good. From seems to be utterly convinced giant robot games (especially their giant robot game) are more popular than they really are. So they keep designing highly elaborate and ambitious multi components into them either totally oblivious or totally uncaring of the fact that a few months after the game is released the player population will stabilize at a very small number. Cool if you're going for a coops game by design, not so good for competitive multi though.

Let's all pretend MWO is fun I guess.

[Stark]

So long as they ditch the shit controls and throwbacks to the iterative hackjob mechanical evolution, cool. ACV was fun, but the woeful progression, huge variety but lack of meaning in that variety, and stupid shit like 'hover forever lol' meant it had no legs. It was easily the best AC, but it was still too primitive mechanically and too limited in scope.

Which is a shame, because most robit games don't even come out here, and people are stuck with dogshit like MWO.

[CaptHawkeye]

How I wish Veef was still around.

Shit controls are a hallmark of the AC series. I'm not sure how they could go about doing everything they have in those games while simultaneously lowering the player's workload. Chromehounds had easy controls, but then that game suffered from some pretty boring, ponderous pacing at times.

ACV still wanted to be AC, so boosting was the prominent mobility mechanic though their was scope for immobile sniping or heavy weapons as well. The in between IE just walking needs to be more relevant yeah. I was thinking how cool it would be if the game actually modeled things like crashing or poor stability on rough surfaces. Meaning boosting is more something you do in open areas while urban areas, forests, etc are for walking. I doubt Verdict Day will do anything like that though. It seems to be ACV:2 in design mostly.

MWO is horrid. I tried real hard to get into that game but it's just so god damn boring. Who's really surprised about that though? These guys are stuck catering to fans who want to play a shooter with mechanics and rules based on a tabletop RPG. Battletech fans are the ultimate brandslaves though, because after 30 years of their shitty game MW is still more popular than AC even with the long hiatus in development of anything MW.

Must find out if Hawken is any good...

[Stark]

Probably by doing the shit they do like reaction jets and directional boost using those funny stick things AC basically never adjusted to having. Plenty of games do agility-based flying super combat with a controller way better than AC, and I think it's because they waste so many buttons/button combos on the six tiers of super boost and the nine subtly different kinds of dash. I'm sure the fans love it, but there aren't really very many of those, are there?

VD doesn't actually appear to be significantly different to ACV at all; its still a game with cutscenes that show what cool and exciting robit battles look like, and a game that does not allow or reward such play because LEGACY MECHANICS.

And really, I don't think any western robit game can ever be good. Do your robits walk slowly on the ground and fire their 50 different guns? Then the game is shit boring. Hawken MIGHT be good (although this isn't likely given the development time) but its certainly not slow clunky bullshit with roll 50 dice to do damage.

[CaptHawkeye]

They'll never be any good if they keep trying to make detailed games that are only "detailed" in the sense that they have 100 useless parts and not detailed as in variety of enemies and mission design.

I mean games like Chromehounds and MW would 100x more sense if the developers, who are clearly interested in making games about tanks with legs, actually read up on the jobs armored vehicles usually have. A little abstraction goes a long way after that but guess what happens when the only statistic that matters is DPS?

MWO. That's what happens. :V

[Vendetta]

And really, I don't think any western robit game can ever be good. Do your robits walk slowly on the ground and fire their 50 different guns? Then the game is shit boring. Hawken MIGHT be good (although this isn't likely given the development time) but its certainly not slow clunky bullshit with roll 50 dice to do damage.

Core controls in Hawken seems to be OK, it's not too slow and clumpy, you stomp around, you have a dash move, and you can hunker fdown for self repair, but its robits are deliberately smaller, but I haven't really played it much and the one time I did try and get into a game it was too late at night and the EU servers were dead.

I should fire it up at peak times and investigate what real matches are like and see if I can grok how its f2p bars fill in.

[Stark]

Oh man, its a F2P grindfest?

Interest = zero.

[Vendetta]

Was last I looked.

At least at first it was horrifically imbalanced towards people who had done the grind or paid to win as well.

But I've basically installed it and done the tutorial and then not played it since, and its grindybar structure isn't immediately intuitive, so I don't know how long it will take to get competitive and interesting gubbins to build your robit out of.

[Stark]

Has a game ever done 'build a robot' in a good way with actual decisions, or has it just always been hopelessly broken?

[Vendetta]

Well, in Chromehounds you could have the totally broken guided missile stacks and kill robits or the totally broken melee piledrivers and kill a building that couldn't fight back. So that's a sort of decision, and outside of the clearly broken builds there was all sorts of interesting build refinement around what weapons you used and where you mounted them on the robit because they all had different recoil properties based on how far they were from the pivot of the robit and what kind of gun they were.

Of course, at least 50% of the guns were totally worthless.

I don't think I've ever seen build-a-robit be balanced, or even interestingly unbalanced, because there's always been a clearly better than all the others build.

[Vendetta]

I have given Hawken a more proper test run, and its grindybarness is actually fairly small. The progression awards are such that in your first couple of games you'll earn some badges that give you a decent chunk of monies, and my earnings from two matches was enough that I could buy any mech in the game (though it slows down after that because you got all the easy badges designed to let you do that).

All the bar filling is within robits, each robit has a level which gives it a few passives as that level increases and lets it equip new weapons in its main slot (you can't change what's in the second slot), but those main slot weapons aren't a linear progression of betterness (for instance, the starting robit has the balanced assault rifle at level 1 and the chaingun at level 25, but the other robit I bought has the chaingun at level 4 and the assault rifle the basic robit gets at level 25).

There are also modules which tweak the performance, but they all have penalties that go along with their bonus, for instance you can load AP ammo which gives you +5% damage, but also gives you -3.5% armour yourself, or you can have heatsinks that reduce the rate your weapons heat up but make them do less damage.

I've played 4 matches so far, and in the fourth I managed to come out top of the leaderboard in the basic starting robit at level 4 (though the starter robit actually gets some beginner modules that make it better than it would otherwise be, but which reduce in effectiveness as you level it up). So, y'know, don't be scared of the grind because there basically isn't one, you're competitive straight away.

In games, the mechs handle pretty well, the default movement is slow (walking pace in most fps), but dashing is pretty quick, and you have a 180 degree snap turn because your turn rate is slow otherwise. Time to kill is long enough that sticking together in groups is highly rewarded as well because a group can focus down an enemy before it kills one of the group, and cover each other whilst they repair, it's not a game where you'll run into something and get instantly headshotted on a regular basis.

It does have a good robit feel, partly coming out of the time to kill, you feel like you're in a thing that can take a few hits but you're not actually super slow.

[CaptHawkeye]

Well, in Chromehounds you could have the totally broken guided missile stacks and kill robits or the totally broken melee piledrivers and kill a building that couldn't fight back. So that's a sort of decision, and outside of the clearly broken builds there was all sorts of interesting build refinement around what weapons you used and where you mounted them on the robit because they all had different recoil properties based on how far they were from the pivot of the robit and what kind of gun they were.

I feel like all of Chromehounds' problems could have been fixed with better balancing though. Or at least minor changes to the mechanics. Western robot games like to pretend they harken towards "realism" yet they seem to use surprisingly little.

Missile stacks would have been fine if they held a lot less ammo and worked like missile pods on choppers. With all weapons stacking them should increase ammo consumption penalties. For some reason CH much like MW just gives every weapon a stand alone ammo pool and it begs to wonder where exactly this ammo was coming from or being stored.

A solution for this would have been a common ammo locker or storebox that all weapons draw their type-ammo from. As ammunition is used up all weapons could reload slower. Stack enough weapons and you drastically increase the chances of a lock up or misfeed due to loading system complexity. You need to stop and shut down (abstracting that you're working out the jam) for X seconds or whatever to clear out the jam. Maybe you could even have a QTE associated to keep the player active.

As for pilers killing defenseless buildings fast. That's if they didn't make it to the objective before the team's heavy gunner used his memorized, pre-planned firing position to annihilate the enemy base in the first minute of the game. Campaign mode ruined. From does 2 patches with minor fixes, pulls plug on online component taking 90% of the game's content with it. So ends their one, half assed attempt at a better Mechwarrior.

I'm really sort of sad Chromehounds ended up being such a mess. Buried somewhere deep within its fuck ups is the greatest giant robot game I never played. :V

[Stark]

Would it have been worth it? You'd still have had a slow, boring game based around bad ideas that you just brutalised the most obvious balance problems out of.

And sorry dude the way you fix the build robit shit is to take it out. If you have weapons you can mount weapons on, Chromehounds stupid designs are inevitable without band aids. As a bonus you can then have robits that don't look like shopping trolleys or helicopters,

I mean imagine if robot games were about pilot skill in position and combat and not looking up the cheese builds on the Internet! The impossible dream.

[CaptHawkeye]

I'd thrown around ideas for redesigned "build a bot" games that essentially cut down the customization from "8 different models of torso" to "3 different models of highly customizable torso". The major performance of each part is clearly defined, but some of the minor details of performance can still be adjusted by detail freaks.

Also it would clearly kill giant robot games to feature thermal vision and enhanced optics. MWO actually had both, (it's coolest feature) but Battletech nerds complained that you could spend a whole map fighting from those vision modes (JUST LIKE TANKS ACTUALLY DO) and they were nerfed into uselessness. Actually playing Chromehounds last night made me realize just how stupid it is that these super advanced robots don't even have range scales on their blatently stupid FPS sights. Even something like an intentionally broken range scale would be interesting for balance if were contrasted against a far superior sight.

Good ideas? Not in this genre.

[Stark]

Yeah its a bit sad that super future robots of science fictionals are now more primitive gamewise than tanks in Battlefield.

[CaptHawkeye]

I mean 20 years ago Mechwarrior had the excuse of technical limitations keeping aiming and shit to a few dots on the screen. Now that's no excuse. These super advanced giant future robots aren't even as well equipped as a Sherman Tank.

Now I know I keep making all these comparisons to real-life armored vehicles with my giant robot comparisons. That's not out of some desire to make the giant robots more like tanks with legs. What i'm trying to do is paint the picture of how armored vehicles do combat. Because if a developer were to grasp those basics they could then abstract those basics into interesting fictionalized concepts for a "western" giant robot game.

But this is like the problem with Master Cheif's suit having a flashlight.

[Stark]

Its ironic because tank games would ALSO benefit from this sort of thing; having more factors than 'conefire' and 'dps' might actually make them interesting.

I think if that Kinect game had been good, it would have introduced a lot of cool ideas (like having to actually do things in an armoured vehicle game instead of just 'use third person camera to put dot on enemy driver vision block and left click' play). Sadly it was terrible.

[CaptHawkeye]

I also sort of threw around ideas last night of how Kinect could be used for things like off-side control panels and such. I never went anywhere near Steel Battalion but I heard many of the problems came down to the Kinect's wonky movement detection in the game. Other games seem to control with Kinect just fine though so I bet it had more to do with shit programming on From's part.

The idea from a control perspective should be non-essential preferences and adjustments set over to the motion controls, while quick-reaction and time sensitive controls remain tied to the controller. This sort of mutually-supporting interface would open up a host of control possibilities in a game without the need for hilarious keyboard charts of "PRESS SHIFT AND G" nonsense.

You know what occurs to me now? Giant robot games and milsims could learn a lot from sports games. Sports games manage to cram gigantic loads of statistics and variations into the game in sensible manners. Decade upon decade of incremental improvements to UI and mechanics have made current sports games flexible and easy to grasp despite looking very cumbersome.

[Stark]

Plenty of Kinect games do what they wanted to do; they just made really, really bad choices with regard to available options. There were to many situations where similar actions were required, when they could easily have designed the interface so that this was never the case and people in combat would never have had to worry about leaning the exact right way. I mean shit, selecting AP/HE was a pair of buttons instead of a toggle, and the game was happy to let you 'push' the currently selected button instead of being designed to treat any local press as toggling ammo. It sucked because of bad interface design, which is a shame because STAND UP to look out the hatch and the like were really good.

And man, in a sport game players are happy to steer a man around a field and maybe hit a catch button; in robit games people are obsessed with simulationist ideas like separate throttles or setting speeds and manual directional boosts and the like. All that fake sim shit from Mechwarrior 2 never went away, so there are a lot of obstacles between the player and what happens in game.

[Havok]

Man, I have always wanted to play a giant robot game on console that had infinite dress up UPGRADES and I could fly into space.

[Stark]

Demand for robit Afterburner sadly outstripped by robit radar simulator and robit bulldozer driving simulator.

[Havok]

Demand for robit Afterburner sadly outstripped by robit radar simulator and robit bulldozer driving simulator.

Fucking FattyNerdsTM.

[Stark]

I'm told there are a bunch of distant third-person Japanese robot jet fighter games, but apparently none of them are very good and (bizarrely) they don't have a lot of dress up. You'd have to own a PS3 or a Vita, and yknow, some prices are too high.

[Vendetta]

I'm fairly sure if you can't release a panties DLC for it the Japanese aren't interested in dressing it up.

[Stark]

But I mean SDGO has 10000000000 slightly different ROBITS and going to automodelista style like AC but for cosmetic items should be trivial.

To be honest I just don't think anyone except me knows how to make a decent robit game. :v