On 28/10/2012 07:38, Maavrik wrote:
I always felt that TF2 was meant to be silly. For instance, the Scout
knows he's in a video game, not very serious if you ask me
It doesn't follow that in order for the content of the game "not to be
serious" that it doesn't
matter what that content of the game is or how the mechanics of it work.
If any old crap worked because "It's not serious" then Splash Damage
could be successful PC game developers :)
As I said, I think it would be more fun had this particular update
considered what happens when you play the map, rather than them (after
finally realising that the random boxes appearing
somewhere on the map was a crap idea) having to sit and think of ways of
making this suck because otherwise their "customers" won't value the
items they've farmed.
They even make it suck if you don't have the right number of people?
Why? Why can borderlands 2 manage to work with 1 player or 4 players,
but Valve can
only write a game that needs 6 people otherwise they switch off half the
mechanics or it doesn't scale? There doesn't seem to be any shortage of
people willing to pay
for Borderlands 2. Worse are these stupid ideas now that you can't leave
a game, even if your house catches fire "Our game sucks with less than 6
players and our solution to this is
to get rid of players from our community who have to leave the server" -
err, doesn't that just make it even /less/ likely to get 6 players? Why
not just design your game to work with
however many players there are? The TF2 community manages to do that, as
the 6v6, highlander, 12v12 and 32 man servers show (well ok
the 32 man servers show you can only go so far with an idea) But why
can't I play single player MvM or 2 or 3 player Halloween maps and have
it all work?
I'm willing to pay for the 3 copies of the game (I thought I'd already
paid for 2 of the effing copies you're now telling me every year I can't
play this mode or that mode
because there aren't enough people. Evidently I didn't pay enough)
If the answer to all the questions ultimately ends with some nod to the
idea that items have to be valuable, then those answers suck and it's a huge
mistake to take your games down these gaming dead ends imo. Sure,
you'll make lots of money. I can look at how many halfwits are buying
rings on sale and
see that, but it makes the games themselves suck.
Valuing the game, especially playing it, seems to be no longer an
option. If it ever generated revenue, it doesn't
now (except, I suppose, for the ticket idea in MvM which you could argue
is about paying to play towards the objective to get items. Not
a bad idea but it's MvM where they've taken everything developers could
do with AI in 2003 and made it worse. Where's the challenge in hitting
the tank for example?
TF2 has all these wonderful game mechanics, projectile weapons - the 2
nade firing guns, for example, are fantastic and really rewarding to get
hits with (I would
argue they are the best weapons in any multiplayer game) and mechanics
like sticky and rocket jumping. All of this rich content was ignored to
instead fight a bunch of AI that just walk in straight lines - so
not only do they not use any of these mechanics but you don't need to
use any of them against them either. My grandmother would probably
struggle to miss them and she's been dead for over a decade.
Unfortunately, MvM removed all of the good work they did, since F2P, in
getting lots of vanilla servers full of people playing TF2 multiplayer.
Now I find myself
scrabbling around a bunch of badly configured 3rd party servers with
half the server trading or sitting somewhere on the map having
"meetings" where hardly anyone actually plays once again.
The irony here, of course (as we can see from the other thread with folk
noticing their quickplay servers filling instantly) as the Halloween
update brings in a ton of people to play, they are given something
that's barely worth playing
and you say "it's not supposed to be serious", but I don't want it to be
serious, I want it to be fun.
Yes, some aspects of the map are fun, like the changing health packs,
the exploding pumpkins, the pit you fall down if you miss the jump for
the health and so on, but the first of these have been used for several
years now and most of the new ideas are just content that has been taken
from roll the dice and frog mods and so on - except there is actually a
modicum of sense behind how the RTD servers implemented it.
--
Dan.
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