Extra Punctuation: Weapon-Crafting That Works

[matrix guardian]

I refer you to that Banjo Kazooie game on the 360 whose name I don't quite care enough about to look up before I stop typing this sentence. Its gimmick was that the player constructed their own vehicles from small base components.

if they can do it with entire vehicles in that Banjo Kazooie game whose full title I still haven't summoned the energy to look up. Weapons in a brawler are exactly as important as vehicles in a racer (or whatever genre that game was)

Did he just mention Nuts and Bolts, the Banjo-Kazooie game that everyone keeps bashing on for stupid reasons, as an example of a crafting system and without bashing that game in the process?

There is a god.

Without bashing the game in the process? I disagree. Maybe bash is too strong a word, but at the very least he insults the game. In multiple sections he mentions not caring enough to look up the exact name of the game. Multiple times. That means that he spent more time talking about how little he cared about the game's actual name, than it would take to actually look it up. Google "banjo kazooie on 360" and done. So it seems an intentional insult that he put the effort into describing how "not worth the effort" it was.

 

[matrix guardian]

If you don't know what Yahtzee means about James-with-the-Great-Knife, it's basically a blunt, rusted blade that is as tall as a man and twice as heavy. He has to drag it everywhere and the basic movements are him struggling to keep it up. The overhead swing, of course, is immensely deadly but immensely slow and it seems to take a lot of effort to do.

Now one could imagine there would be situations where you'd LIKE a crushing weapon like that, especially if you were simultaneously building the character that would wield it.

That sentence made me think of the character Guts from the anime Berserk. He is a character that was "built" around wielding such a huge weapon. He was taught how to swordfight when he was about 10 years old, but he learned using an adult sized sword. So he grew up using a sword bigger than he is. So when he grew up into an adult, the sword he used grew as he did, keeping the same scale with his body size. So he wields a giant, heavy sword that can mow down groups of soldiers, cleaving them in half. Anyway, just a fun fact. That's what came to mind when you said that.

 

[Grant Delmore]

Give it a shot yahtzee, make your system, sell your game and see if the million people who bought your game all like your weapon customizing.
There's no one system that's gonna work, yeah dead island was a little tedious at times searching through trash cans, but if you were playing the game as it was ment to be played then you minght not have seen all that stuff as "vendor trash" and more as useful bits for your friends.
Not to mention you can outright skip most of the trash hunting considering the shops sell most of the critical components for weapons.
Knowing you, if there was no "vendor trash" you'd probably complain that their isn't enough variety.

I get the feeling like Yahtzee died with all his weapons and had no items or money to make new ones with because he found the collection part so boring. So yahtzee was left with nothing for playing the game wrong and became frustrated.
The more you talk about dead island it makes me feel like your hating on it for the sake of it.
But hell, that is your job i guess.

 

[Mutak]

"because obviously we're assuming this is a zombie game, what the hell else would it be"

A survival/brawler game along the lines of Suzanne Collins' "The Hunger Games".
Some other dystopian crumbling world where scavenging for raw materials is important.

 

[Ninjat_126]

This sounds awesome. No lie. It's every nerds fantasy to duct tape four katanas together and go bat-shit loony on a crowd of the recently deceased.

I was thinking of the exact same thing. Now I can't talk about it, because everyone will think I stole the idea from you.

Anyway, I would play the crap out of any game that had such a crafting system.

Fuck. Yeah. I would buy a game that featured that kind of thing in a heartbeat. Shit, I'd sell my soul for it.

This... Is what I always wanted. I could just never really put any coherence behind it. Yahtzee: you, sir, are a god. Do you accept goat sacrifices?

Seriously though, wonderful article. Very insightful, yet again.

These. The physics might need a good rig to run if you're going to model every object's properties though.

 

[vidatu]

Just gonna say, in the last week I have spent maybe 15 hours gaming. I have also spent somewhere around 40 mucking around in a 3D CAD program making all kinds of weapons to throw into Skyrim when the mod kit gets released. Nothing gets more irritating to me in a weapon/loot focused game than always using the same weapons and having no variety in the loot. I made more than 200 custom models for Oblivion, Fallout 3, and New Vegas. I learned five different programs to make my own models, textures, sounds, and animations. I'm sure that I spent as much time dicking around putting stuff in the games, as some of the developers. Other people have put in much more effort than me.

Listen up, developers; there are lots of people who really would enjoy a robust, fully featured weapon creation/customization system in a game. People like creating their own content. Give us wheat we want.

 

[Kiwiphoenix]

This has a lot of potential.
Even since the days of DOS, we've had customisable vehicle design, usually with spaceships or airships.
And nowadays it seems that every game and its grandmother features environmental physics and impact damage.

The only trick might be modelling the unwieldliness that would result from welding a boquet of handguns to a cane or suchlike. It's hard to get the awkward flail down just right...
Applying physics to melee could also allow character strength to play a greater role than ever before, affecting swing speed, striking force, and especially recover time after a strike (heavy object are hard to heft after a swing).
Of course, it'd be a complete pain-in-the-ass to program... but one can dream.