Dead Rising 2
- Thread starter Yahtzee Croshaw
- Start date
I must have amazing taste in games if the only game I decide to be excited about all year was praised by Yhatzee.
While I've played neither of the Dead Rising titles, I've seen plenty of games in which exploration and discovery were both keys to victory, to the point that if I find myself depending too much on my tactical skills (and am not playing an expressed tactical simulator), I'll take a step back and look around for elements I've missed.
I would list Thief: The Dark Project and Freedom Fighter as two good ones, in which there was almost always a way around guards and goons whose defensive position seemed impenetrable. Indeed, both games were rife with back-alley routs that allowed such pinches to be flanked or circumvented entirely.
But the idea of mixing and matching items to create superior weapons or better healing brews does make DR worth a look. I'm not sure DR1 will ever make it to the PC but DR2 already has, and I will certainly play it at some point.
When developing a fantasy game some time ago, I remember wanting to create a ro-sham-bo [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ro-Sham-Bo] system that compared opposing weapons and maneuvers, giving one side an advantage over the other. Part of the play was in discovering which maneuvers beat what, and which weapon was best suited to a personal fighting style. The maneuver tree would be generated at the beginning of the adventure, requiring the discovery process to be repeated each time the adventure was begun.
This was a common device used in early Sid Meier designs for adventure games (the 2004 remake of Pirates! [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sid_Meier's_Pirates!_(2004_video_game)] is probably the most recent example), since games during the early '90s were often built for replayability. In Pirates!, nuances such as relations between nations, the availability of maritable daughters, the locations of treasures and so on were generated with each iteration.
(This was also attempted in Escape From Monkey Island with the Monkey Combat finale, but it was poorly executed, requiring too intricate a charting system for too little good effect.)
There is the advantage of, as Yahtzee called it, water cooler conversation where a sizably extravagant model is used instead of a generated one, which makes it consistent between games. This allows players to share their discoveries in fora and catalogue them in FAQs and Wikis. A happy medium might be one in which the end results are generated, but the paths to discovering are consistent and fodder for sharing vectors.
Still, the mainstream game industry seems, with few exceptions, to shy away from replayability, since a good game that entertains well for many hours might deny a market for other games of a similar ilk.
U.
I would list Thief: The Dark Project and Freedom Fighter as two good ones, in which there was almost always a way around guards and goons whose defensive position seemed impenetrable. Indeed, both games were rife with back-alley routs that allowed such pinches to be flanked or circumvented entirely.
But the idea of mixing and matching items to create superior weapons or better healing brews does make DR worth a look. I'm not sure DR1 will ever make it to the PC but DR2 already has, and I will certainly play it at some point.
When developing a fantasy game some time ago, I remember wanting to create a ro-sham-bo [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ro-Sham-Bo] system that compared opposing weapons and maneuvers, giving one side an advantage over the other. Part of the play was in discovering which maneuvers beat what, and which weapon was best suited to a personal fighting style. The maneuver tree would be generated at the beginning of the adventure, requiring the discovery process to be repeated each time the adventure was begun.
This was a common device used in early Sid Meier designs for adventure games (the 2004 remake of Pirates! [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sid_Meier's_Pirates!_(2004_video_game)] is probably the most recent example), since games during the early '90s were often built for replayability. In Pirates!, nuances such as relations between nations, the availability of maritable daughters, the locations of treasures and so on were generated with each iteration.
(This was also attempted in Escape From Monkey Island with the Monkey Combat finale, but it was poorly executed, requiring too intricate a charting system for too little good effect.)
There is the advantage of, as Yahtzee called it, water cooler conversation where a sizably extravagant model is used instead of a generated one, which makes it consistent between games. This allows players to share their discoveries in fora and catalogue them in FAQs and Wikis. A happy medium might be one in which the end results are generated, but the paths to discovering are consistent and fodder for sharing vectors.
Still, the mainstream game industry seems, with few exceptions, to shy away from replayability, since a good game that entertains well for many hours might deny a market for other games of a similar ilk.
U.
So, in reply to the topic; if you could take an entire vessel with 100 slots which could be filled by 100 options of 1000 components and then remove and respec, then you could always make a new combination and keep the activity fresh - continual discovery. And I?m not talking axe + hammer combinations where you could change the axe for a sword or something. More strategic, rather than just effect.
My idea here is concerning RPG characters which could be set with any e.g. 100 of 1000 skills which could then be combined to form unique tactical character setups.
DR2 is limited to melee offensive, but if you could combine self transformation (physical), force spells (magic) and a jet pack (jet powered bear with telekinesis, lol) in equal measures (33% Physical, Magical and Technological) and then remove those skills and choose something else then it would be far more inventive and dynamic in its possibilities for experimentation comparative to static class RPG's. Add just 1 more skill and you can then make 1000 new combinations.
Granted that example is a gross extension from DR2 but you get my point; the future of nextgen gameplay is in recombination of base components to form variable whole entities, which is displayed by DR2's item recombination, even if it's imbalanced, as the man states in the extra punctuation.
The issue, asides from the imbalance, with DR2 is its static gameworld; once you have worked out what works, because the game doesn?t change, you can win and that ends the replay, less your masochistic enough to play it with lesser weapons for self-inflicted difficulty, also as the man says.
Yeah.
My idea here is concerning RPG characters which could be set with any e.g. 100 of 1000 skills which could then be combined to form unique tactical character setups.
DR2 is limited to melee offensive, but if you could combine self transformation (physical), force spells (magic) and a jet pack (jet powered bear with telekinesis, lol) in equal measures (33% Physical, Magical and Technological) and then remove those skills and choose something else then it would be far more inventive and dynamic in its possibilities for experimentation comparative to static class RPG's. Add just 1 more skill and you can then make 1000 new combinations.
Granted that example is a gross extension from DR2 but you get my point; the future of nextgen gameplay is in recombination of base components to form variable whole entities, which is displayed by DR2's item recombination, even if it's imbalanced, as the man states in the extra punctuation.
The issue, asides from the imbalance, with DR2 is its static gameworld; once you have worked out what works, because the game doesn?t change, you can win and that ends the replay, less your masochistic enough to play it with lesser weapons for self-inflicted difficulty, also as the man says.
Yeah.
...Didn't he complain about Brutal Legend not telling you anything? I'm not that attached to Brutal Legend and I've never played DR2 but just, you know, consistency.
I wonder if Yatzee has been playing any of the games he said he would/does come back to. He has admitted a couple of times to playing Minecraft Survival/Hardcore over the past year.
Given that Just Cause 2 is a blast to play, he might still be playing that. I sure have been playing it to the point where it may be my most-played Xbox 360 game.
Given that Just Cause 2 is a blast to play, he might still be playing that. I sure have been playing it to the point where it may be my most-played Xbox 360 game.