Re: The Ranting/Debate Thread
(...)I get the feeling a lot of your rant was taken from GTA =P True? Not true? (...)
Actually, no, I stopped following/playing GTA after vice city(The other seem to all be the same, in different places), the only real fun there was to just go around killing people with cheats on, which can be done a whole lot better with games that actually focus on that.
Besides that, one-shot kills are fine when used right, I like the Touhou series, and you only need to be hit once, by anything, to lose a life. But it's good and balanced, you can dodge it, evade it, shoot most normal enemies before they can shoot, and the bosses are good.
What is not good is when they do a stun attack, and then a one-hit kill. Especially if said stun attack can not be dodged unless you're at long range(When you can only attack at meelee, I'm looking at a certain side-boss from Titan's quest now)
Besides that, I agree that lightning is very important, and for this, I point to L4D, come on Valve, there are games/even mods of your own games out there with the system requirements of tetris that give players flashlights that light up on eachother's screen, and you take that out of L4D because 'It hits the performance'? Seriously?
And agreed on fallout 3's pipboy light, it's useless, turn up the brightness on your monitor or get a bed, and sleep for that well-rested bonus.
On to something else that sucks, the AI.
Oh damn no, don't give me an escort mission, I do not want to escort something that thinks its a good idea to try to punch that swordsman in the distance. I do not want to dodge behind cover when being shot at by a machine gun only to have my escort stand out in the open, looking at me(Presumably while drooling), getting shot and making -me- fail the mission.
So, quiz time, say, you're a soldier tasked to defend an expensive piece of equipment, you have a rocket launcher, and a rifle. The equipment is bulletproof. A single, lone zombie walks up to the equipment and starts scratching it, doing an amazing 0.01% each hit.
You:
A. Shoot it with the rifle, easily taking it out without damage to the equipment.
B. Shoot it with the rocket launcher, doing more damage to the equipment then it could ever have done.
Guess what the AI picks..Every. Single. Time. And no, don't bother taking cover when under fire, it's not like there are bullets being shot at you, just stand right there in the open. What's the worst that could happen, right? Oh, you got shot, I guess you should know on your 5th respawn not to stand out there in the open when the sniper is aiming for you, but noooo, just keep walking there, it's just painting a huge bullseye on your head. Completely basic skills are missing from most/all artificial "Inteligence", but to be honest, a lot of players lack those same skills as well..Especially in MMORPG's.
Story time for the example
So, playing an mmo where you actually lose your stuff by getting killed(Which can easily be dodged, 9/10 times when I played, now more like 99/100 times), me and a small group of friends come across a guy with a really expensive shiny thing we want. Now, we know if we defeat the guy, the thing we wanted would explode and be lost(Only leaving a few bits behind, and he could probably have won if he was moderately ok with the thing), but we engaged anyway. Turns out that the idiot can not only fail to find the "Shoot enemy" button, or even the "Raise shields" button, and before he lost, he drops -all- his stuff, and just leaves. We take his stuff, put it somewhere safe, and laugh, he then returns in something even more expensive, still fails to use any kind of weapon, and again, leaves his stuff as it's about to explode, letting us save it and put it somewhere else. This goes on for 5-6 times, after that he messaged us we were "Evil", "Lame", "Thieves", that we "Took all his stuff", and claimed he didn't even have any equipment at all left. He then logged out, and about a day later one of my friends links me an ebay page where the guy we beat tried to sell his account.
-And this is also why in an MMO, losing your stuff on death is a must for real gaming, it gets rid of the idiots, adds rewards, makes people try to not go on suicides, and in general helps the game economy by keeping demand for new equipment high.