Reality Factory

I really miss the difficulty of the old games. Most games nowadays give no challenge whatsoever, while a few rare games give a little too much challenge.

Back then it was about skill and experience, not about who has the patience to quicksave-quickload his/her way through every situation. I remember starting a thread about the difficulty settings in shooters some years ago. My point was (and still is) that you shouldn't make games harder by giving the enemies more health and making them deal more damage. A good example of this is Far Cry: I enjoyed the first half with the hardest difficulty. I truly did. The enemies died with one headshot, but even a couple could kill you easily if you let them get behind you. They were pretty smart after all, always trying to flank you. Anyway, then the mutants appeared and the whole thing fell apart. Enemies that could take several direct hits from a rocket launcher? No thanks. That's just frustrating and plain stupid. I managed to finish the game with the hardest difficulty but there's no way anyone can make me do that again.

On the other hand, there are games with some real challenge too. S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Shadow of Chernobyl, for example. With the hardest difficulty it is ridiculously hard, yet somehow it has managed not to be frustrating. A couple of bullets can kill you and believe me, the enemies are DEADLY. But after playing a while you see that they make mistakes too and you can outsmart them. Even in the toughest places there's a way to take the enemies down with ease. No doubt this game is one of the games I've enjoyed the most in my life when it comes to difficulty.

well said
Metroid Prime 3 was terrible in difficulty.
Normal = Enemies have normal health and deal normal damage
Veteran = Enemies have High health and normal damage
Hypermode = Enemies have INSANE health and hits make instant kills. It's like the simplest enemies are boss fights. Enemies that were one hit kills and deal one damage deal 80 damage and take like ten hits to kill!! a very frustrating game.

Yeah its interesting about the AI having more health to make games harder. I was reading an article on aigamedev.com about Bungie and the AI for the Halo series. They said instead of making enemies smarter they found in some type of study that players thought AI was smarter by how long they lived. So they found the players to think that enemy is still alive, it must be smarter than the other AI to have lived this long. Personally I found this fact frightening as game developers would ever find such a correlation. I know AI isn't smart when it charges me and it takes a massive number of rounds to take them down. I have no idea where they could have gotten such a correlation. Maybe if the enemies dodged and rolled, but even that you could see through it when you watch all your ammo drain only to have the enemies still stay alive.

It is point 2) in this article: http://aigamedev.com/reviews/halo-ai

they could cover it up by making the enemies eat your bullets, swallow your rockets whole, and chow down your grenades when theyre about to explode. then they burp explosions and fire and kill you.

what if they actually did that?

Anyone played Turok?


Classic Example of this:

Juutis wrote:I really miss the difficulty of the old games. Most games nowadays give no challenge whatsoever, while a few rare games give a little too much challenge.

I played it at a friends house here the other day. Looks beautiful, and yes I have to agree that is a classic example. Its not too hard but it definitely is a major challenge when compared to other games.

darksmaster923 wrote:they could cover it up by making the enemies eat your bullets, swallow your rockets whole, and chow down your grenades when theyre about to explode. then they burp explosions and fire and kill you.

what if they actually did that?

Actually I think that would be a pretty cool thing to watch an enemy do. If there were a class of enemies to do that in a game they would be the most feared thats for sure. Not to mention I think the AI would have to have some smarts to do that . At least then they aren't just absorbing the weapon fire .

Yes its sad, I miss the days when a head shot was enough to defeat any character. Back when you were challenged by skill tests and not high powered enemies that can take 10x more damage than you.

I have some time to kill so I figured i would contribute.

I was going to write about how eventually the industry would return to making a difficult game by making a legitimate challenge for the player but i thought better of it. The only way for that to happen is for a large portion of the customer base to become fed up and move on to something provided by an indie dev.

The best example for the fake difficulty is in halo. the first one would just change the weapon stats to make you at a disadvantage while increasing the number of enemies. Now i dont mind more enemies but making the stats change is just a lame shortcut.

Now maybe im just thinking of when i was younger and i had patterns to memorize or just out think from the old platformers. as far as i know the old doom games would just give you more enemies to kill as the difficulty increased.

The point is there really is no substitute for decent ai (some shortcuts are fine as long as i cant tell the difference) and i find the constant use of graphical appeal appalling. I dont care if the game looks super shiny if i cant enjoy playing the game. I tried playing crysis (demo) and i got bored after a few minutes. Sure it looked nice but i just didnt care for it and im sure there are others who feel the same way (aside from those who tried it and voiced their opinions here) but then there are those who praise it. as long as there is profit in making games this way the big devs wont stop making clones that just look better.

Yes it is true, Crysis failed on multiple levels in my opinion. I would like to play a game that can first of all not require a $2000 pc to play it on when it launches. I know Crytek has been making pc's that have been $500 or $900 to prove it but the fact is that over half of the budget for that pc was a graphics card. There is no way I will ever spend that much on a graphics card to play any number of games. Thats ridiculous. I thought paying $150 for my 8600GT was very expensive and only justified it because I got a free game with it and I needed a good graphics card that would be able to play games for a while.

The second thing that they failed on was the "free roaming" they said they had. The single player demo was nothing more than a very large open area that kept you right where the developers wanted you to go. No deviation, everything prescripted. The last problem i found was the enemies were incredibly overpowered on NORMAL mode. It took around I think 10 shots to the chest to kill them with my "high tech standard gun" as I will call it. And I am referring to the assault rifle that you get before you leave the plane, not the AK47 variant the enemies have. They only have standard bullet proof vests on. It shouldn't take me a 2 and a half clips to kill an enemy in a standard bullet proof vest. This also leads to the last flaw I found. It took so much ammo to kill them but a few well placed shots from the enemy could make my million dollar super suit worthless. You can't even fall 15 feet without taking serious damage. What a game breaker when you realize that the reality created is backwards. I should be able to take 2.5 clips of ammo with only adequate damage, not die in 6 shots. They should die in a few shots and not take 15+ shots in the chest and live to kill me by landing 5 shots. That really broke the games feel for me.

Now to finish this post off I would like to talk about hardware.
The GeForce 9600GT released earlier this month and is 2x as powerful as the 8600GT and is almost on par with the 8800GTX and costs less than it. I hope developers don't cater to these high-end cards forcing upgrade on systems that could have had a large number of games look great on it. There will be a 1GB 9600GT. Its memory is virtually useless today and I think by the time it will be able to use it the hardware wont be able to handle all the other aspects like polygon counts and shader versions. So a question I would like answered is where are the practical hardware pieces? PC gamers today have systems far superior to consoles(excluding the power of the PS3), and developers make games look and sometimes even play amazing on them, so why cant we have those quality games? Why is it that all the pc games I have played have lacked the depth and solid feeling I get when I play my console games? Why cant developers make a system requirement be make the game look like a Wii or 360 game? I don't like the way the one crytek developer stated the graphics setting for crysis. He said that it is made so that it will look even better on future hardware as to keep it as one of the best experiences for years to come. I don't want to wait years for my game to give me the best experience. I want a game to give me the best it has the first time I play through it, not a few years later when its uninstalled and on a DVD in a drawer because I have had all the fun I could find in it.

Ok, I am done ranting now .

I think pc games will not look as nice console games for two main reasons. The first is that making the game look better takes more time and money then developers think is required. They may feel that spending less time on a game will mean more revenue from the sales since they either pump out more games or they spend less by not including better looking assets. Second (and this is theory) pc games are fairly easy to pirate. Sure there are special cases like steam but most companies dont get money from games they dont sell. Now most of these games suck but the fact remains that why pay for something when you can get it for free. Consoles require hardware and software circumvention to play copies so it is more difficult for the standard consumer (this will change as online modding services and friends doing mods for other friends becomes more mainstream then it currently is, unless it is mainstream already) so the quick no cd key download is a quicker alternative.

It seems as though the console market is more competitive then the pc market. $ony and M$ want your money so they will want devs to make shiny games to trick you into buying them. Like the test for an ai being considered intelligent for having more health im sure there was one for if a game looks nice then it must be good.

Its nice that i can try and make something i would enjoy (others might as well and thats all the better) but it wouldnt be bad for a well known company to make something i would enjoy. Its easy to pay 50 dollars for a game then to spend 70+hours working on my own. That and some of their ideas are so good that it hurts when they get something wrong (in my opinion).

As for Crysis, you hit the nail on the head. The damage values are all messed up in their attempt at making a game harder that shouldn't be (was normal the lowest setting? i want to say i tried it on easy to just get through the demo and even then i couldnt make it very far without running out of ammo). And for the crytek dev's statement I would argue that games should be made for now when they are being enjoyed the most and when you paid for them. If i get the game in 20 years I wont care that it still looks good compared to more current games im going to be thankful i waited 20 years to play a game that would have cost more when it was released and that i saved some money by waiting to see how bad it is.

yall can mod it to have higher damage?

You are right darkmaster, pc games are easy to pirate, however, I still think that developers should care about the kind of games they are pushing out. I don't remember 10 years ago people making games just for a quick buck aside from a few. Most of the games on retired consoles always seemed to be a company putting their best foot forward. Game companies will spend large amounts of money to churn out a poor game, when they should invest it in software engineers to write better copy protection systems. Steam has definitely been the most effective, but I know there is still a better way to copy protect games yet to be developed.

Oh an interesting thing is that Steam(SteamWorks) is now a "free" service for game developers! http://www.steampowered.com/steamworks/

I think the lowest setting in the Crysis demo was easy. I also forgot to mention that even on my 8600GT(Factory overclocked too, I forgot to mention that as well) I could not play Crysis at a playable frame rate with all settings on low and using the lowest possible resolution. Part of it was the graphics driver as a new version bumped my FPS up a little but my framerate had to be around 20-25 frames per second as smooth animation was very rare and the animations and screen lags were about the same as RF with 20 Frames per second. Those are purely speculated numbers though. I also have a 2.13Ghz Core 2 duo and 2GB of ram. Crysis was a huge let down.

Wolfang was also a major resource hog.

Dunno why....


Crysis....Hm....I still dont have a clear opinion.

MakerOfGames wrote:Yeah its interesting about the AI having more health to make games harder. I was reading an article on aigamedev.com about Bungie and the AI for the Halo series. They said instead of making enemies smarter they found in some type of study that players thought AI was smarter by how long they lived. So they found the players to think that enemy is still alive, it must be smarter than the other AI to have lived this long. Personally I found this fact frightening as game developers would ever find such a correlation. I know AI isn't smart when it charges me and it takes a massive number of rounds to take them down. I have no idea where they could have gotten such a correlation. Maybe if the enemies dodged and rolled, but even that you could see through it when you watch all your ammo drain only to have the enemies still stay alive.

It is point 2) in this article: http://aigamedev.com/reviews/halo-ai

Many of my favorite FPS games were like that, they ducked and dodged.
The dumb enemies just run at you and try to clobber you, so you just unload a clip into their head or pull out a sniper rifle and get it over with, or land a grenade in it's lap. How I see smart AI is when they'll be like "Enemy Grenade!" when you throw a grenade at them and then try to get out of the way. I like games that make the AI smarter like that. Make them duck, dodge, roll, seek cover, etc. Enemies that actually hide and just shoot you from cover. I hate the games where they're just a big blubbering idiot with a million HP.

one step ahead of you there , this is one of the more important aspects of my project and to see the full extent of this the game will have to be played severel times, though even on the first time it should be noticable, just making it more so the next time you play adding to the experience and giving a reason to want to play through again, games get praised noticed and rememberd because they have good replay ability, or a hyped game that just burned out.