Bitching about Skyrim bugginess



  • I learned Skyrim's "Papyrus" scripting language on Sunday so I could create this mod Sunday. Today I was playing again and I came across one of the more annoying bugs-- turning in Radiant bounty quests to the Dawnstar Jarl won't remove the "collect bounty from X" message in your quest log. Even worse, they stack so in some games I had 5+ occurrences of "collect bounty from X" messages.

    Anyway, when it happened today I got fed up and I decided to dig into the Creation Kit and see if I could fix it using my new-found Papyrus knowledge. The fix took less than 15 minutes. Seriously. And 10 minutes of that was doing quests to make sure it worked right for each type of quest.

    Skyrim has had, what, 4 patches? That's pretty pathetic Bethesda.

    EDIT:
    Q) You're a Community Server developer. You're validating a post, and you come across a link whose HREF is lacking the ending quote mark. What do you do?

    1) Throw an error about the malformed link
    2) Attempt to fix the error automatically by appending a quote mark at the end of the HREF, but before the following space or > character
    3) Delete the last character in the HREF
    4) You're a Community Server developer, the only solution is committing seppuku

    Anyway, link fixed now.



  • Its always the small things that get overlooked / kept on such a low priority they never get fixed. Just look at the huge community made patches for Fallout 1 & 2, you'd never know the games were THAT broken just by playing through them. We're talking hundreds of fixes on top of the official patches.

    I can't really play Skyrim anymore :( Nevermind that the latest catalyst driver makes it screwy on some series of AMD cards (just revert to the previous driver); now that Skyrim patch 1.5 hit for some reason the game puts an incredible load on my computer, making all the fans go into overdrive. I would blame it on the machine if it didn't happen exactly after Steam updated the game and all the other heavy duty games I run don't make any kind of dent at all :/ Still going to take the opportunity to clean the gunk out of the thing just to be sure, but I have little hope :(



  • @blakeyrat said:

    EDIT:

    Q) You're a Community Server developer. You're validating a post, and you come across a link whose HREF is lacking the ending quote mark. What do you do?

    1) Throw an error about the malformed link
    2) Attempt to fix the error automatically by appending a quote mark at the end of the HREF, but before the following space or > character
    3) Delete the last character in the HREF
    4) You're a Community Server developer, the only solution is committing seppuku

    Anyway, link fixed now.

    All of them. No wait. Skip 1. The first option doesn't make sense in CS.


  • @erikal said:

    Its always the small things that get overlooked / kept on such a low priority they never get fixed. Just look at the huge community made patches for Fallout 1 & 2, you'd never know the games were THAT broken just by playing through them. We're talking hundreds of fixes on top of the official patches.

    I can't really play Skyrim anymore :( Nevermind that the latest catalyst driver makes it screwy on some series of AMD cards (just revert to the previous driver); now that Skyrim patch 1.5 hit for some reason the game puts an incredible load on my computer, making all the fans go into overdrive. I would blame it on the machine if it didn't happen exactly after Steam updated the game and all the other heavy duty games I run don't make any kind of dent at all :/ Still going to take the opportunity to clean the gunk out of the thing just to be sure, but I have little hope :(


    I'd blame ATI. ;)



  • @blakeyrat said:

    turning in Radiant bounty quests to the Dawnstar Jarl won't remove the "collect bounty from X" message in your quest lo
    You're more devoted to Skyrim than I am. I've got a bunch of crap in my mission log that never got removed, but I pretty much did all the stuff you could do in that game and stopped playing (and by extension caring). There is only so much stuff to steal/people to kill before you get sick of it all. I'm gonna wait till the DLCs start cropping up to pick it up again.

     



  • @DOA said:

    @blakeyrat said:

    turning in Radiant bounty quests to the Dawnstar Jarl won't remove the "collect bounty from X" message in your quest lo
    You're more devoted to Skyrim than I am. I've got a bunch of crap in my mission log that never got removed, but I pretty much did all the stuff you could do in that game and stopped playing (and by extension caring). There is only so much stuff to steal/people to kill before you get sick of it all. I'm gonna wait till the DLCs start cropping up to pick it up again.
    I am with you I have lost interest in the game, I am ready for some DLC.  No matter how deep games are like this they eventually come down to simple things like killing and stealing which get boring rather fast.  It does not matter whether it is a dragon or a dog if you are able to kill it in 1 or 2 hits, it will quickly get boring.  Unfortunately these types of games have a tendicy of not providing insanely difficult creatures to kill for the insane players, thus maintaining interest.  One game that I loved that did an excellent job with the difficulty curve was Monster Hunters Tri.  After all the normal quests are done and you beat the game, there is an upper teir mode where all the monsters are far more powerful.  SWTOR has this concept present for lv 50 characters too to keep those who level cap intrested in the game.  This concept is even present in the real world, going from senior in high school to freshman in college.  Yes you might be older and have more privileges but you are now a noob freshman.



  • @Anketam said:

    Unfortunately these types of games have a tendicy of not providing insanely difficult creatures to kill for the insane players, thus maintaining interest for the insane player.

    CTFY

    I like to focus more on the history telling but to each its own.  I though there was some scaling and some monsters only appeared after a certain level of sort.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    I learned Skyrim's "Papyrus" scripting language on Sunday so I could create this mod Sunday. Today I was playing again and I came across one of the more annoying bugs-- turning in Radiant bounty quests to the Dawnstar Jarl won't remove the "collect bounty from X" message in your quest log. Even worse, they stack so in some games I had 5+ occurrences of "collect bounty from X" messages.

    Anyway, when it happened today I got fed up and I decided to dig into the Creation Kit and see if I could fix it using my new-found Papyrus knowledge. The fix took less than 15 minutes. Seriously. And 10 minutes of that was doing quests to make sure it worked right for each type of quest.

    Skyrim has had, what, 4 patches? That's pretty pathetic Bethesda.

    To be fair, checking the Patch Notes, they're mostly crash fixes rather than quest fixes. I can't imagine trying to QA a game like Skyrim; it would be like trying to clean up a major flood with a pack of paper towel.

    The Oblivion fan patches had, like, thousands of fixes in them, and I don't expect that the inevitable Skyrim fan patches will be any different.

    @blakeyrat said:

    EDIT:

    Q) You're a Community Server developer. You're validating a post, and you come across a link whose HREF is lacking the ending quote mark. What do you do?

    1) Throw an error about the malformed link
    2) Attempt to fix the error automatically by appending a quote mark at the end of the HREF, but before the following space or > character
    3) Delete the last character in the HREF
    4) You're a Community Server developer, the only solution is committing seppuku

    Anyway, link fixed now.

    5) All of the above, and then corrupt a completely unrelated document elsewhere on the client's system.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    EDIT:

    Q) You're a Community Server developer. You're validating a post, and you come across a link whose HREF is lacking the ending quote mark. What do you do?

    1) Throw an error about the malformed link
    2) Attempt to fix the error automatically by appending a quote mark at the end of the HREF, but before the following space or > character
    3) Delete the last character in the HREF
    4) You're a Community Server developer, the only solution is committing seppuku

    Anyway, link fixed now.

     

    1.  Trying to have a parser automatically fix invalid input instead of getting a human being to do it is always a bad idea.  (See: JavaScript semicolon insertion)

     



  • @blakeyrat said:

    Q) You're a Community Server developer. You're validating a post, and you come across a link whose HREF is lacking the ending quote mark. What do you do?
    Use a regex. Now you have three problems.



  • @Mason Wheeler said:

    1.  Trying to have a parser automatically fix invalid input instead of getting a human being to do it is always a bad idea.  (See: JavaScript semicolon insertion)

    I generally agree, but adding a missing trailing quote should be pretty simple, though.



  • @pkmnfrk said:

    To be fair, checking the Patch Notes, they're mostly crash fixes rather than quest fixes. I can't imagine trying to QA a game like Skyrim; it would be like trying to clean up a major flood with a pack of paper towel.

    Yeah but Bethesda didn't even TRY. There's no automated QA tools. None. No unit testing (for the in-game scripting). No fuzz testing. No meta-data fields required to make tools like unit testing or fuzz testing work.

    The only QA tool they made use of was "interns". And it's obvious, based on the remaining bugs, that most of the testing was done via cheating in the console, not by playing actual games in actual real-world scenarios.





  • Why would you link me to a .rar file? Do you not know me, after years of posting to this forum? Do you not know my opinion of file compression formats other than .zip? Did you honestly think I would go way out of my way to find a .rar file utility just so I can gawk at some badly-written script?

    Son I am disappoint.



  • It's ok, you're probably better off NOT flicking through a codebase that has variables that exist purely to make puns.



  • @nexekho said:

    Filed under: And race conditions in a scripting language with no threading support

    How is that even possible?



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    @nexekho said:
    Filed under: And race conditions in a scripting language with no threading support
    How is that even possible?

    Now I actually want to take a look so I can see how they did it.



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    @nexekho said:
    Filed under: And race conditions in a scripting language with no threading support

    How is that even possible?

    Skyrim seems able to pull that one off, too. I'm not sure if it technically counts as a "race condition", but same end-effect.



  • UScript is single threaded from the instant code is executed to the moment it stops. However, it does have an "event" system (all events are actually just normal functions and the function/event keywords are totally interchangeable with no effect) and certain parts of the codebase expect events to fire in a certain order (which they might not depending upon what order objects were spawned/placed) or lock up if you aren't very careful with them like the particle system - using activatesystem() or deactivatesystem() twice in two frames sometimes causes an emitter to get stuck on, get stuck off, or freeze altogether. There is a bug somewhere in the stock weapons firing code whereby certain click patterns can lock the weapons up until you switch them/die and in earlier versions of UTGame the timers that control weapons' reload/charging up/etc. weren't always cleared when changing weapons slot meaning if you held the fire button with say the rocket launcher when you let go after switching to the Enforcer it'd let off a rocket even though you're holding a pistol.



  • @Steam User Wally said:

    It actually wasn't a dev oversight; the quest objective is set to 101 if the steward doesn't exist (it points to collecting the bounty from the Jarl). So, at stage 100, it sets the necessary objective to either 100 or 101. The problem is that stage 200 only sets objective 100 as completed, and not 101. Simply add "setObjectiveCompleted(101)" to stage 200 for each of the 4 quests and that's it :)

    Ok, which one of you dumbshits is "wally"?



  • I always found the use of stage ID numbers a bit odd. It wouldn't be a huge leap in complexity to at least allow you to label each stage ID with a string. There's got to be a lot of small obscure bugs caused by quest IDs being changed without updating scripts, etc. It probably makes sense with very simple linear quests but few "good" quests with lots of choices, differences depending upon your play style for replay value, etc. are anything near linear.



  • On a related note: I just experienced Horse Physics in AssCreed:Brotherhood. I took a printscreen, but my screencapper wasn't running and I forgot to paste. :\

    Ezio had just counterkilled this dude, but the back-to-normal-posture animation somehow bugged out with the dead man's body, and suddenly Ezio was relaxedly hanging back at a 45° angle. But the head was still in the correct orientation, so in the end he was all like GRAVITY? ZERO FUCKS GIVEN.

    I suppose the surprise made it at least  200% funnier than it actually was.

    It was far funnier than super bouncy ragdoll physics, in any case.



  • @dhromed said:

    On a related note: I just experienced Horse Physics in AssCreed:Brotherhood. I took a printscreen, but my screencapper wasn't running and I forgot to paste. :\

    Ezio had just counterkilled this dude, but the back-to-normal-posture animation somehow bugged out with the dead man's body, and suddenly Ezio was relaxedly hanging back at a 45° angle. But the head was still in the correct orientation, so in the end he was all like GRAVITY? ZERO FUCKS GIVEN.

    I suppose the surprise made it at least  200% funnier than it actually was.

    It was far funnier than super bouncy ragdoll physics, in any case.

     

    I had something similar when playing Far Cry 2 (not as bad as people say it is). I met up with a companion in one of the hide outs but his facial animation bugged out, making him open his mouth really wide and passing off some demonic gaze. Actually spooked me a great deal when I first noticed it, I wasn't expecting to see something that unnatural. Too bad you can't use your gun inside or I'd have blasted him as a gut reflex!

    That is something that pisses me off by the way - games that limit your options when you are in a safe zone, even in single player. How dare you take away the possibility for me to use a weapon, if I want to shoot my quest givers than I'll do that! Lazy programming is what it is, if you disallow it you don't have to code anything that deals with the consequences. Having "important" NPCs magically respawn is already a whole lot better than taking away basic freedom - its still a game after all.

     



  • @dhromed said:

    On a related note: I just experienced Horse Physics in AssCreed:Brotherhood. I took a printscreen, but my screencapper wasn't running and I forgot to paste. :\

    Ezio had just counterkilled this dude, but the back-to-normal-posture animation somehow bugged out with the dead man's body, and suddenly Ezio was relaxedly hanging back at a 45° angle. But the head was still in the correct orientation, so in the end he was all like GRAVITY? ZERO FUCKS GIVEN.

    I suppose the surprise made it at least  200% funnier than it actually was.

    It was far funnier than super bouncy ragdoll physics, in any case.

    This happens quite frequently in SWTOR.  You kill a guy, and their corpse will be at a 45° angle leaning on nothing but air.  But since it occurs frequently it has no surprise factor or funny factor.



  • I love how in Quake 3 derived games like Urban Terror, the death animation is exactly that - an animation of collapsing to a flat plane - which is rotated to match the nearest surface even if that's a wall or a doorway top.

    I'm rarely quick enough on the F11 key to catch it, but here's one example I found in my screenshots folder.



  • @DOA said:

    There is only so much stuff to steal/people to kill before you get sick of it all.

    After some 15 years of playing FPS games (GTA included), and 15 years of other kinds of games before that, I have to disagree: there's no upper limit to the number of people to kill (or steal their cars) before I get sick of it all. Espeically taking off in an attack helicopter and shooting at innocent civilians is remarkably relaxing after a rough day at the office.

     



  • I love the training simulator mode in AssBro. I am sad that they removed it in Rev.

    Infinite dudes to killstreak!


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @nexekho said:

    UScript is single threaded from the instant code is executed to the moment it stops. However, it does have an "event" system

    Ahh.  Kinda like how Node.js is cancer.

     

    mod: how did you even manage to mess up the href like that —dh



  • @erikal said:

    I had something similar when playing Far Cry 2 (not as bad as people say it is).

    Really? Because it's the worst open-world game I've played in... ever. Unless you count Sonic 2006 as open world.

    @erikal said:

    I met up with a companion in one of the hide outs but his facial animation bugged out, making him open his mouth really wide and passing off some demonic gaze.

    If you stand in the right place in Skyrim, you can shove your camera right through some guy's skull and see his lips move from the back side. Like so:

    BTW, speaking of embarrassing bugs, look at this left-in debugging message:

    I put a lot of these in my Steam gallery. Including my favorite:


    The Mythical Skyrim Horse's Ass!


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @FrostCat said:

    mod: how did you even manage to mess up the href like that —dh

     Probably the same way  Blakey did; I just typed the text in, highlighted it, clicked the link button, filled in the fields and clicked the insert button, then saved the post.  What was wrong with it?  I never looked at it after I posted.



  • @FrostCat said:

    Ahh.  Kinda like how Node.js is cancer.

    Indeed. Given that the creator cites Java as an inspiration and uses both Java curly brace and VB word-based syntax in the same files and the limitations of the language (ergo their thinking) I'm inclined to believe that they were both designed by the same person but by the very nature of their event manager only one could be developed at a time.

    If you stand in the right place in Skyrim, you can shove your camera right through some guy's skull and see his lips move from the back side. Like so:
    I've played a game before that not only did this in short corridors when spectating but had backfaces on the eyeballs. Scary shit


  • @nexekho said:

    Indeed. Given that the creator cites Java as an inspiration and uses both Java curly brace and VB word-based syntax in the same files and the limitations of the language (ergo their thinking) I'm inclined to believe that they were both designed by the same person but by the very nature of their event manager only one could be developed at a time.

    I do think JS needs more respect as a language, but node.js is definitely not the way to earn it. It's much better suited for, well, things it was designed for: scripting in Flash, for example. Hell, I'd have done a fist-bump if the Gamebryo guys had decided to use JS instead of their made-up VB-esque shit language!

    @nexekho said:

    I've played a game before that not only did this in short corridors when spectating but had backfaces on the eyeballs. Scary shit

    If you use the wrong "race change" console command in Skyrim, you can end up in a situation where your character has no head, but only hovering eyeballs and jaws.

    You can also end up in a situation where your character has, say, a Nord face, but Khajiit eyeballs and jaws... in that case the eyes work (mostly) but the jaws stick out at a funky angle, like some kind of deep sea horror-fish.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    @erikal said:
    I had something similar when playing Far Cry 2 (not as bad as people say it is).

    Really? Because it's the worst open-world game I've played in... ever.

     

    I wonder how many games there are on your "worst I've ever played" list!

    I'm not going to sugarcoat it: the game ain't great because it has almost zero backing story and it has terrible loading times. "Go find and kill this bloke who is hiding out somewhere in this fictive part of Africa, have a nice day". Its hard to immerse yourself into a game when the main character already has almost no reason to be there other than not being able to get out.

    But it has great amosphere, plays really smoothly and unlike some other FPS games I won't name it actually has a decent gun & hit model, so again it is good enough for me. Kept me busy for a good 2 weeks; when you pay only 5 euros for it that is not bad ;) I'll probably replay it at some point in time just to be able to cruise through what looks like Africa again, the world design is quite breathtaking I must say.

     



  • @Severity One said:

    @DOA said:

    There is only so much stuff to steal/people to kill before you get sick of it all.

    After some 15 years of playing FPS games (GTA included), and 15 years of other kinds of games before that, I have to disagree: there's no upper limit to the number of people to kill (or steal their cars) before I get sick of it all. Espeically taking off in an attack helicopter and shooting at innocent civilians is remarkably relaxing after a rough day at the office.

     

    Along these lines, I'm super pumped for Prototype 2.



  • @erikal said:

    I'm not going to sugarcoat it: the game ain't great because it has almost zero backing story and it has terrible loading times. "Go find and kill this bloke who is hiding out somewhere in this fictive part of Africa, have a nice day". Its hard to immerse yourself into a game when the main character already has almost no reason to be there other than not being able to get out.

    THOSE are the reasons you think people hate it? Sheesh.

    @erikal said:

    decent gun & hit model

    Except the guns invariably break after like 5 shots. Which is simultaneously a baffling realism feature and a baffling gameplay feature. See STALKER for a tutorial on how to do gun wear-and-tear correctly.

    Oh, and since the checkpoints respawn in seconds you'll wear-out a lot of guns shooting the same 6 guys over and over and over and over and over again. And over again. And again. And again.

    The graphics were decent, though, I'll give you that.



  • @FrostCat said:

    Ahh.  Kinda like how Node.js is cancer.

    Hmm.. I kind of like Ted Dziuba but that post is bullshit. Node.js isn't the magic scaling solution so many people think it is, but doing large, CPU-bound computations in an event-driven system is always going to cause problems. And the performance of Node in that Fibonacci test is actually quite admirable for a dynamic language. Then again, most applications aren't doing heavy number-crunching so it seems irrelevant.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    @erikal said:
    decent gun & hit model

    Except the guns invariably break after like 5 shots. Which is simultaneously a baffling realism feature and a baffling gameplay feature. See STALKER for a tutorial on how to do gun wear-and-tear correctly.

    Bull. Guns "rust" too quickly for realism I agree, but it is hardly as terrible as you say. And I actually thought it was a decent addition to the game to add some challenge, you're constantly on the look out for a better gun. A bit of scavenging if you will. Just rolling with it provides more fun.


    Oh, and since the checkpoints respawn in seconds you'll wear-out a lot of guns shooting the same 6 guys over and over and over and over and over again. And over again. And again. And again.

     

    Yep. Its a shooter, the targets were provided... and people moan about it. The other way around would be to drive to the jungle unchallenged for minutes on end, I prefer having something to blast at in a SHOOTER. I roll with it, more fun for me.

     



  • @erikal said:

    Yep. Its a shooter, the targets were provided... and people moan about it.

    Considering it's a game I wasn't enjoying, my goal was to complete the plot objectives as quickly as possible. Unfortunately, between each objective is 3 checkpoints, and the checkpoint guards respawn EVERY TIME, and it's hard to just bust through when your car without getting too shot-up. So you have to stop EACH TIME and spend 5 minutes shooting up guys you've already killed 5 times previously.

    Look, maybe on a higher difficulty level, or with a checkbox in the options, checkpoints could respawn. For me it was just a pain in the ass preventing me from doing the few things I *wanted* to do in that shitty-ass game. When your game is so awful it's basically screaming people to give up and stop playing it, the LAST thing you should do is put pointless obstacles in the way of those people.

    BTW, constantly replacing guns that, in real life, would be able to fire for another WEEK without jamming? Yet Another Obstacle put in place.

    Needless to say, I didn't finish the game's story, I just couldn't build up enough "care" to overwhelm the "pain in the ass" the game was giving me.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    BTW, constantly replacing guns that, in real life, would be able to fire for another WEEK without jamming? Yet Another Obstacle put in place.

    Exactly as I explained it. Its not realistic, but it does add an element of scavenging to the game which adds challenge. I found it a decent addition, but you need the right attitude to be able to accept that. Perhaps because I'm used to the relentlessly difficult games of the Commodore Amiga that I accept more than the average gamer; where people find annoyance I find challenge. Can you believe that 20 years ago I was stuck in a game, without being able to progress at all, for about a full month? I still played it daily, replaying again and again until the point I got stuck (because most games didn't have a save function then) and then rechecked everything to find the thing I missed. I eventually did crack the secret. A MONTH. And we're here complaining about weapons that rust after a few dozen shots? Games of the 21st century are for weaklings!

     


    Needless to say, I didn't finish the game's story, I just couldn't build up enough "care" to overwhelm the "pain in the ass" the game was giving me.

     

    Some games are for a niche crowd only. I'd like to see you try the Etrian Odyssey line of games on the Nintendo DS, I predict games + handheld flying out the window and you going to the doctor to have your ass checked out for sores ;)

    HA! These threads get the blood pumping. I believe we've chewed out FC2 enough now, what other game can we disagree on?

     



  • @erikal said:

    Exactly as I explained it. Its not realistic, but it does add an element of scavenging to the game which adds challenge. I found it a decent addition, but you need the right attitude to be able to accept that. Perhaps because I'm used to the relentlessly difficult games of the Commodore Amiga that I accept more than the average gamer; where people find annoyance I find challenge.

    Oh yeah. People as awesome as you can appreciate it, but lamers like me can't. Because I'm not awesome enough. BTW, I beat fucking Parallax. And Mission: Thunderbolt. So shove your "hard Amiga games" right up your fucking ass.

    No, my biggest problem with Far Cry 2 is that I played STALKER-- a truly excellent open-world game with the same premise-- before I played Far Cry 2. In fact, STALKER came out a year before Far Cry 2, which makes the latter game's flaws even more unforgivable. It also doesn't help that it has literally zero to do with the original Far Cry. Which wasn't a great game, but eh.

    The complaint has nothing to do with "challenge", it has to do with "tedium". Killing 5 guys at a checkpoint once is a challenge, doing it 47 times in a row is tedium.



  • @erikal said:

    Exactly as I explained it. Its not realistic, but it does add an element of scavenging to the game which adds challenge. I found it a decent addition, but you need the right attitude to be able to accept that. Perhaps because I'm used to the relentlessly difficult games of the Commodore Amiga that I accept more than the average gamer; where people find annoyance I find challenge. Can you believe that 20 years ago I was stuck in a game, without being able to progress at all, for about a full month? I still played it daily, replaying again and again until the point I got stuck (because most games didn't have a save function then) and then rechecked everything to find the thing I missed. I eventually did crack the secret. A MONTH. And we're here complaining about weapons that rust after a few dozen shots? Games of the 21st century are for weaklings!

    ...

    I really do not like games that are like that.  Only reason why I kept playing them back in the day was because I thought that, that was how it was supposed to be, and the only way I can put up with it now is because I can look stuff up on the Internet.  I remember my first video game was Legend of Zelda: Links Awakening.  Not the DX version which they added a ton of hints explaining how to do things, but the original (Came with the gameboy brick).  I was far too young to be playing it, and it took me close to a year to beat it, since I would get stuck frequently in that game taking weeks to figure out what the heck I was supposed to do next.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    Oh yeah. People as awesome as you can appreciate it, but lamers like me can't. Because I'm not awesome enough. BTW, I beat fucking Parallax. And Mission: Thunderbolt. So shove your "hard Amiga games" right up your fucking ass.

    Perhaps later, if the mood is right. You better wine and dine me first though, your accolades don't impress me enough!


    No, my biggest problem with Far Cry 2 is that I played STALKER-- a truly excellent open-world game with the same premise-- before I played Far Cry 2. In fact, STALKER came out a year before Far Cry 2, which makes the latter game's flaws even more unforgivable. It also doesn't help that it has literally zero to do with the original Far Cry. Which wasn't a great game, but eh.

    I guess we won't ever bitch about that game - STALKER was and still is brilliant (the original, don't care much for the "good enough" standalone expansions); together with Thief 2 and Daggerfall I'll probably never put another game in my "top 3 favorite PC games of all time". But just because I played it doesn't mean I'm going to greatly hinder the ability for me to have fun by comparing all other games I play to it. If you do that then yes, Far Cry 2 pales in comparison. But I don't do it. Different games, different setting, woefully different style of playing the game. Far Cry 2 is run and gun, STALKER is more of a survival type game where you don't run guns blazing but rather sneak, hide and flank. A more sophisticated style of play if you will.


    The complaint has nothing to do with "challenge", it has to do with "tedium". Killing 5 guys at a checkpoint once is a challenge, doing it 47 times in a row is tedium.

     

    All games are tedious then, because they are all just repetitions of the same tricks over and over again with no exceptions that I can think of :/ Including the brilliant STALKER. Walk from point A to point B, kill some dudes (optionally while trying to keep other people alive), perhaps pick something up, bring back. Along the way keep a lookout for artifacts or other crap to sell. Rince and repeat until the game ends. Sure the quests you get vary a bit in nature, but in the end it all boils down to the same thing. It isn't the repetition that brings tedium. If that were true then half this planet wouldn't be covered with utter morons that do nothing but grind for gear.

    Honest question: I wonder what does cause challenge to flip over into tedium? Might it be lack of a decent reward for example? FC2 most certainly fails miserably in that department.

     



  • @erikal said:

    ...

    Honest question: I wonder what does cause challenge to flip over into tedium? Might it be lack of a decent reward for example? FC2 most certainly fails miserably in that department.

    Repetition with no added value.  As a game progresses you get benefit of new plot, new areas, new ugly enemies to kill, new items and more.  If all areas in the game look identical, you start out with the same gun, and have no plot it is no longer a challenge.  This is why I dont like the new pokemon games.  Might have new pokemon, but it is still the same plot, same type of enemies, same items, and much more.  The first few generations were a challenge, but now the games are just tedium, since it is repeating the same thing over and over again.



  • @erikal said:

    I wonder what does cause challenge to flip over into tedium?
     

    Performing a set of n indistinguishable tasks within a short time span. "Short" and "n" are subjective, obviously. It gets worse when you want to perform distinguishable tasks but can't because of the tedious shit you need to do.

    Is that quantified enough for you? I don't suppose I need to mention that any game X gets tedious of you just play it, because then the "distinguishable tasks" are other new games or other things you can do besides playing game X. You can use that slippery slope argument all you want, but it doesn't invalidate any claims to tedium.

    But within the scope of one game, Blakey's account of the quickly respawning dudes sounds pretty much like tedium. I don't really understand why you call that "challenge". But maybe playing the game for myself will answer that.

    If AssCreed was just a flat plane that constantly threw dudes at you, it would become pretty tedious really fast.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @Anketam said:

    This is why I dont like the new pokemon games.  Might have new pokemon, but it is still the same plot, same type of enemies, same items, and much more.  The first few generations were a challenge, but now the games are just tedium, since it is repeating the same thing over and over again.

    Successful entertainment aimed at children tends to have that repetitive quality. There are always new customers coming along, so why change a winning formula? And frankly, they prefer repetitiveness over newness anyways.



  • @boomzilla said:

    @Anketam said:
    This is why I dont like the new pokemon games.  Might have new pokemon, but it is still the same plot, same type of enemies, same items, and much more.  The first few generations were a challenge, but now the games are just tedium, since it is repeating the same thing over and over again.

    Successful entertainment aimed at children tends to have that repetitive quality. There are always new customers coming along, so why change a winning formula? And frankly, they prefer repetitiveness over newness anyways.

    You are correct.  New kids means they have not played any of the previous generations so it is new to them and thus a challenge for them.  So we now have a set of games which to me are tedius but to the correct target audiance (little kids) is an "amazing" game.  So it really is in the eye of the beholder (which was a tedius D&D game).

     

    Addendum:  By this logic, does this make erikal a little kid?



  • @dhromed said:

    Performing a set of n indistinguishable tasks within a short time span. "Short" and "n" are subjective, obviously. It gets worse when you want to perform distinguishable tasks but can't because of the tedious shit you need to do.

    Is that quantified enough for you?

    Yep, that seems perfectly reasonable to me.

     

    @dhromed said:

    If AssCreed was just a flat plane that constantly threw dudes at you, it would become pretty tedious really fast.

    (well the last real mission certainly seems to be like that).

     

    Putting "challenge" between quotes is the right thing to do by the way, I've been abusing the word. Repeatedly killing the same dude isn't a challenge or challenging, its a free roaming game's way of putting up a challenge, or attempting to do so anyway. Its an FPS after all, it needs to throw dudes at you that want to shoot you. To get back to an earlier point: FC2 would have been less tedious if it were more rewarding to kill people. As it is, the only reward there is, is the chance that you might die in the attempt. The "challenge" is to not die, which means killing the guys before they kill you, which means applying some skill by shooting straight and not doing dumb shit like running out into the open. Nice and simple and I do believe the main ploy of most FPS games. 

    So yeah, whats the problem with (quickly) respawning enemies? More cannon fodder. At least thats my attitude, I don't care what slippery slope arguments I have to vomit out, I'm sticking with it dammit. You ain't taking away the one little bit of pleasure I still get from all the dumbed down games in this day and age!

     

    Addendum:  By this logic, does this make erikal a little kid?

    I am and will always be a little kid - 12 years seems like a nice age. So I'm 12 with about 18 years of experience. And I'm also already balding at 12, which sucks :(



  • @erikal said:

    STALKER was and still is brilliant (the original, don't care much for the "good enough" standalone expansions); together with Thief 2 and Daggerfall I'll probably never put another game in my "top 3 favorite PC games of all time".

    1. STALKER: Call of Pripyat was better than the original Shadow of Chernobyl, IMO. Which is correct. As all my opinions are.

    2) You're nostalgia-ing over Daggerfall. Daggerfall was a great game (it was an Elder Scrolls game after all) so buried in bugs that it was literally impossible to complete without cheat codes, even AFTER the official patches. And the world was only "big" because it was built from about 5 legos that repeated over and over again.

    @erikal said:

    All games are tedious then, because they are all just repetitions of the same tricks over and over again with no exceptions that I can think of :/ Including the brilliant STALKER.

    Bullshit. STALKER had figuring out the anomaly traps, collecting anomalies from crazy places, fighting mutants, getting the shit scared out of you in dark labs, etc.

    Hell, I spent STALKER throwing bolts on the ground and holding my scanner-- I wasn't even holding a gun half the time.

    @erikal said:

    Honest question: I wonder what does cause challenge to flip over into tedium? Might it be lack of a decent reward for example? FC2 most certainly fails miserably in that department.

    Yes, that is because it's a terrible game. That I spent money on.



  • @erikal said:

    Putting "challenge" between quotes is the right thing to do by the way, I've been abusing the word. Repeatedly killing the same dude isn't a challenge or challenging, its a free roaming game's way of putting up a challenge, or attempting to do so anyway. Its an FPS after all, it needs to throw dudes at you that want to shoot you. To get back to an earlier point: FC2 would have been less tedious if it were more rewarding to kill people.

    The most fun part of Far Cry 2, by far, was getting in a jeep and tooling around in the beautiful Africa-esque world. I'd have enjoyed just driving from point A to point B significantly more if my jeep didn't keep getting shot-up. Far Cry 2 actually could have had great emergent gameplay, if they hadn't fucking destroyed it by adding too much pointless filler.

    You know, sometimes I just start up Skyrim and walk around for a bit. I kept my Bioshock 2 save games around for ages so I could re-experience the beautiful levels where you walk on the floor of the ocean. That's a perfectly fine and valid way to enjoy a video game.

    The really funny thing about Far Cry 2 is that every aspect of the game was pretty good except the design of it. And it's not like the design was bad because it was way too ambitious (see: everything Peter Molyneux ever made ever), it was bad because it was... just bad! If you took their engine, graphics, AI, level design, and gave them to, say, David Jones and Billy Thomson, you would have ended up with an amazing game.

    And after they played STALKER, they should have done exactly that. "Ok, guys, keep the assets, throw away our design docs, and let's hire someone competent to finish-up this game. Sure it'll take another 6 months, but we'll end up with something we can actually be proud of shipping."

    @erikal said:

    You ain't taking away the one little bit of pleasure I still get from all the dumbed down games in this day and age!

    Everybody who uses the term "dumbed down", no matter what topic they're talking about, is full of shit.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    Far Cry 2 actually could have had great emergent gameplay
     

    Whoa, can you elaborate a little? You're referring to the physics that I think may have been far too awesome for a plain shooter?

    @blakeyrat said:

    You know, sometimes I just start up Skyrim and walk around for a bit.

    Okay, I thought you never liked eyecandy just for the sake of eyecandy.

    I do the same with the AssCreeds.

     


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