- I bet they are only doing this to stop the Ninjas, it wont work, Ninjas just time travel back to the future and make copies of future DRM free version and then play that.

Ninjas? Pirates?

We Jedi care not of these things.

Eating healthy is only one part of being healthy, too; people need to understand that if you don't want to get fat, or if you're already fat and you want to lose weight, you need to exercise. Simply changing your diet to something slightly more healthy without any portion control isn't going to do a thing.

Of course there are plenty of factors to consider when planning a healthy lifestyle, but it's time for everyone to get it through their heads that the complicated formula of "Calories In < Calories Burned" is the only thing that's going to shed those pounds, not switching from two bags of potato chips a day to two bags of "fat free" potato chips.

I gave up soda and spent an hour a day, six days a week playing DDR. Ten months later, two hundred pounds were gone. Exercise works.

More Painkiller can't be anything but a good.

Okay, so Overdose wasn't good, but this isn't a bought-up low-quality fan-made mod, so I'm cautiously optimistic. Painkiller and Battle out of Hell kept it simple and entertaining with backdrops that stayed interesting, if this is more of that with added co-op, I'll take it.

That Activision quote about how they want to do away with IPs that aren't "yearly exploitable" is one of the worst lines I've ever heard. How they avoid a total PR meltdown with things like that and ol' Bobby's blather about pricepoints is beyond me.

I wouldn't pay even then. Lack of dedicated servers not withstanding, the handful of console titles that have multiplayer I care about all have a PS3 version and all have very little problem on the PSN. I don't know if it's actually more efficient than Live, but it certainly works better on my end. Dedicated servers would be nice, sure, but if what's in place works fine, that's good enough for me.

Wait, so you're actually admitting to basing your argument around assumptions of how leaning is implemented in games, rather than actual experience using those implementations? This doesn't help your argument.

Except it does, and I've said this more than once now, so I don't know why it's surprising. Again, design philosophy follows predictable trends, especially in the current generation with the attitude towards risk-aversion in the industry right now. I do not need to have played every game ever made to draw basic conclusions about them.

Incorrect. My claim is that immersion and reality are intrinsically linked.

And it's wrong.

That's not my assertion at all.

It's been your assertion for this entire argument.

I'm saying that realism and immersion are directly correlated.

And you're wrong. This is proven by the fact that the hacking in Bloodlines can be more immersive without being DOS itself.

Oh brother. I was referring to simulations, not The Sims. You know, racing sims, submarine sims, flight sims, etc. The appeal of these games is how realistic they are. The less realistic they are, the less immersive they are to the players.

Proves my point. Notice how small the market for the simulation genre is? Know why? Because while a certain amount of people will always be predisposed to enjoy work the same way most people enjoy non-productive hobbies, and some of those people do things (fly planes, race cars, etc) that have representations in the simulation genre, the vast majority of people do not have by doing things that closely, moderately or even come more than just a little close to work while they're trying to have fun. This is why things that are part of daily life are stripped down in videogames and other mediums as well. This is why the hacking system in Bloodlines is like DOS, but not DOS; because even if you enjoy mucking around with DOS and want to do it in your free time, you probably don't fire up a videogame thinking "I hope this game entertains me by making me muck around in DOS."

This isn't just about mock OSs in games, this is everywhere. HAWX got a lot of flak for being too arcade-ish, when most of the players leveling those complaints have never talked to a real combat pilot. If they had, they'd know that in reality, most fights between fighter jets begin outside of visual distance, end outside of visual distance, and that it's near impossible to actually dodge an AMRAAM because they turn faster then every plane in existance and explode in proximity, not on contact.

This does not make for what nearly everyone would think of as a playable game. It's not just about fun, reality has to be mis-represented for it to even be presentable. If more players thought of this as fun, the simulation genre would probably be a whole lot bigger.

Sorry, that argument is flawed. When it comes to immersing the player in a game's world, first-person is the optimal perspective. It's the one that makes you feel most like you're actually in the game.

Again, that is not objective fact. Some players will invariably find the extra presence of mind afforded by third-person to be more important to immersion than a first-person viewpoint.

Too much effort? Seriously? Holding down a key is too much effort? I think holding down Q or E is well worth the benefits leaning provides. Here are the benefits I've experienced from the games I've played:

I said this a long time ago. Leaning does not offer enough of an advantage over moving partially around a corner to be worth the effort extra keystrokes for the same effect.

While we're on the subject, we might as well cover the fact that the implemention of leaning is, near universally, very poor and unrealistic in itself. You can't switch what shoulder you're pressing the stock of your gun to in nearly every game ever, which is something real soldiers do when they lean from one direction to another. I actually can't think of any you can do it in aside from Metal Gear Solid 4, which isn't even an FPS. The fact that hitscan attacks don't usually come from where it looks like the barrel of the gun is from the first-person perspective should make this irrelevant, but all it does is add an extra psychological factor. The mechanic itself is a case where more realism would actually help it.

Of course, devs never do this because it would require more user input to switch shoulders, and I'd be willing to bet the reason why they don't think it's a viable design desicion is that the problems with leaning listed above, plus the fact that a lean function instead of a cover mechanic forces you to make a guess on exactly where your body will end up, is simply the lesser of two evils compared to the extra effort a more realistic implementation would cause.

q{You've made many claims, including a claim that enemies have ridiculously high accuracy in games.
At no point did I say this is true of every game. It is, however, a bad design decision that exists.

Your whole argument seems to be based on semantics and the flagrant misuse of the word "facsimile."

Somewhat embarrassing, but, honestly, I don't feel very broken up about having a misconception for a word in the English language. At least not when everyone abuses "irony" all the time.

This comment was edited on Oct 10, 2009, 07:45.

And that analysis is based on the games you've played, unless you're making assumptions about how leaning works in games you haven't played. In either case, you haven't provided a single example of an actual game to support your position.

That's actually exactly what I'm doing, as I've said more than once. Design philosophy is not magical, there are inherent trends in any generation of game development, and facets of design become very predictable.

What does this have to do with videogames? Dialog tends to be written in a melodramatic matter because that's generally more interesting. It has nothing to do with trying to be more immersive.

It doesn't have anything to do with videogames, it has to do with your claim that immersion requires a presentation that adheres as closely as possible to actual reality. Dialog is simple proof that you're wrong, because it's a clear and universal part of reality that is, by necessity, warped into something else for its presentation in fiction.

There is nothing else to say about this; you are wrong. Your assertion that fiction does not and/or does not need to make acceptable breaks from reality to be both decent fiction and to be immersive is incorrect.

Further reading:

Realistic Diction is Unrealistic, because, no, it's not written to be melodramatic, it's written to be legible.
Acceptable Breaks from Reality, including the extremely long list of them. Note that all of them have some level of presence in videogames.

I suggest you spend some time browsing this wiki, at least by plugging in the names of various works you're a fan of into the search bar. You appear to have gargantuan misconceptions about the creative process.

You sure? I seem to recall typing in commands for basic navigation too. It's like using DOS.

I checked, you're right. The difference is negligible, though. The point still stands, because, again, it's not DOS. You can't say "I know how DOS works, so I will apply those exact rules to this, and things will happen as I want them to." It's a fictional presentation of an OS that uses a facsimile of DOS. It makes you think, as you just said, "It's like using DOS." It's not making you feel that way by being DOS.

Sim fans would greatly disagree.

Again, this is just proving my point. When someone playing the Sims has their sim do something that equates to work in reality, does the player actually do that work? Does the sim actually do that work, or do you watch a highly stylized, compressed, comical representation of what that work is?

In any case, you've conveniently failed to address the matter of perspectives. First-person is the most immersive of all perspectives. I think everyone can agree on that. Why is it the most immersive? Because it most closely resembles how we actually view reality. This is NOT to say it's a perfect simulation. However, it's far more realistic than isometric, topdown or side perspectives.

This is hardly objective fact. The argument exists, and I seem to recall an article about it linked on this very website recently, that third-person games are just as immersive as first-person games because, in sacrificing the more realistic viewpoint, they give you an awareness of what's going on around your character much closer to what you have in reality. If you're making an equal trade like this, then it's a matter of preference. My original argument is that leaning does not fall under this, because it provides too little benefit (due to overall design philosophy) compared to too much effort. I even suggested a way to balance it out better.

If so could SOMEBODY PLEASE tell me how to play the original campaign? When I start the game all I get is the Soviet Campaign, no option to start the original game!

Soviet Assault is actually an addition to the original campaign, not a direct expansion, that gives you the Soviet perspective from the same time vanilla WiC takes place. The soviet missions slot into the original campaign where they chronologically fit, it just so happens that the first one takes place before the invasion of Seattle that kicks off the American side of things.

Whoops, that's what I get for not reading the whole thread.

Yeah, I had the exact same issue. That was definitely a fucked up decision by the devs...

I don't think the mechanic itself was a bad idea, it adds some good stuff to an already-compelling narrative. I particularly liked how Malashenko seems to be Captain Bannon's polar opposite, but this also accounts for how Bannon turned himself around, thus Malashenko becoming much worse. I think the real problem is that there's just no indication that this is how it works, you only know for sure if you've browsed around the Internet, perhaps seeing someone else ask the question before you needed to.

This comment was edited on Oct 8, 2009, 05:35.

You realize that your entire argument is based on your personal experience

No, my entire argument was based on analysis of how videogames often work. At no point did I say "in the games I've played," because my bias is no different. It is reasonable to say "some games work like this, others work like that." The only assumption I've made is in how often "this" happens compared to "that" (in this case, how often leaning provides any meaningful gain) and this is, again, based on general design philosophy as practiced by developers. You have presented no evidence to prove that this assumption is incorrect.

I disagree.

And you're flat-out wrong. Again, dialog is the go-to example for why hard realism is deliberately ignored in fiction. Spoken lines in fiction and in dramatizations of real events are never, ever written realistically unless the writer is consciously thinking about experimenting with going against the grain (mocumentaries deliberately put effort into subverting this, for example.) Most aspects of reality are simply obtrusive in a fictional context, and adapting these things into facsimiles is an integral part of content creation in any medium.

However, leaning makes the game more immersive. You can say it's a useless feature (based on your anecdotal evidence) but even if that were true, utility has very little to do with immersion. For example, in Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines, you have to actually type in commands when hacking. Is this a useful feature? Not really. Just clicking on stuff would be more efficient. However, actually typing commands is what hackers do in real life. Performing the same act in a game makes it more immersive as a result.

You've just completely proved my point. Look more closely at Bloodlines; the only time you type in a command is when you've found the password somewhere else and you're typing in the exact password. Other tactile input amounts to using the arrow keys to select from simple menu lists. This is a facsimile of reality; the game lets you provide specific inputs into the computer, but it's nothing like actually operating a computer.

The hacking function in Bloodlines consists of pressing two keys so you can watch random characters scroll in the password prompt until it either magically finds the password, or, if your hack skill is too low, turning out garbletrash. In either case, it searches for every character in the password at the same time, finds them in a different order than it should be entered, and it somehow magically knows how many characters there are in the password, too, without any indication that the user is running any kind of software to assist his/her attempt at hacking (and this is not how brute force attacks work anyway.) It's like at the end of Wargames when the WOPR is trying to hack the launch codes. It's not at all more realistic than the hacking in Fallout 3, which is just clicking on stuff, but it's more immersive because the facade is more convincing. Let's not forget that because we're dealing with fiction, we also have free reign to handwave things like this. For example, Deus Ex has hacking via progress-bar, but we know he's using a program to do it because the progress bar is dolled up as such. This fits the context of the game's setting, and therefore, at best, enhances immersion, and at worst, has no effect on immersion whatsoever.

Let's also not forget the primary reason for why fiction modifies reality like this: reality is boring. Real hacking is not something you want to do when you're trying to enjoy a videogame, because it involves a lot of concentrated effort. Flying a plane is much more complicated and involves a lot more work than in any non-sim air combat game, and even some, if not most of the sims don't make you go through the exhaustive checklists any real pilot goes through before they take off.

So no, leaning is not immersive just because it's realistic. Immersion in videogames will run into problems if you're sacrificing functional use for presentation, and you've said nothing to prove that leaning, more often than not, has a functional use. And before you say "Yes it does, it exposes less of you to enemy fire" again, I did address that when I discussed current game design philosophy and mechanics.

And following "that" with "I had this experience" is, again, opinion. Anecdotal evidence is not evidence. The plural of "anecdote" is not "data." You're not making any technical arguments against my points about game mechanic and how a game environment intrinsically effects certain things differently than in real-life. Your personal experience is not inarguable fact because I can't trust that how you perceive something isn't causing inaccuracy.

In fact, I'll add some more. You say that leaning isn't required for an immersive experience but it really is. In real-life, people lean. Why? To reduce the exposure of their bodies to enemy fire and also make them less conspicuous. A guy poking half of his head around a corner is far less obvious than a guy standing there with half his body exposed. If I'm playing a shooter that's supposed to be somewhat realistic, I expect to be able to lean. It's only natural.

Oh god, no. Immersion and realism are not irrevocably connected. This is arguably more important in video games than in non-interactive fiction. If you can't be immersed without realism, how has any game ever been immersive for you when no spoken dialog in any medium is ever written based on how people actually talk in reality?

A facsimile of realism is far more important to immersion, and leaning is not integral to that.

This comment was edited on Oct 8, 2009, 02:57.

If you don't like the default key assignments for leaning, that's fine

I'm not sure what this has to do with anything. I never said I cared about key assignments, since, you know, I can change them. I said the feature is useless because the act of pressing an additional key, no matter which key it is, is too much effort for too little payoff. I added a mapping option that, as far as I can tell, does not exist that would greatly fix this problem if it were implemented. This has nothing to do with default key mappings.

If you're not actually going to read what I write, that's fine, but just respond with "tl;dr" instead of "here's more of my opinion instead of actual counter-arguments."

Considering nVidia's response is "absolutely not true" instead of "No comment! Everything is fine, nothing is ruined! There is no war in Ba Sing Se! NO COMMENT!" I'm inclined to disbelieve.

How is leaning useless? It lets you take shots around corners with minimal exposure.

Except not. It's functionally the same as edging around the corner, especially in first-person shooters where your weapon's position in the first-person perspective isn't necessarily relevant to whether or not the wall will block the shot, so long as it's not blocking the crosshair. Depending on the game, it may or may not provide less exposed collision boxes, but even then, the difference is negligible and not worth having to press another button for it. It's an attempt at realism that, because of the way videogames tend to work, becomes laughable. Especially in single-player games where the enemy has unrealistic accuracy at ludicrous distances and leaning doesn't even help anyway. Bonus points to Dragon Rising for averting that BS. On top of all of this, because you can never have control over how much to the side you're leaning, it may be necessary to adjust your position via strafing tiny amounts anyway, just like slowly moving around the corner without leaning to begin with.

Point for fixing this; let me map leaning to my mouse wheel's left/right tilt, and the minimal effort involved will go a long way to making me care about it. Are there any games that let you do this?

I've said it before, I'll say it again; leaning is not a hallmark of PC gaming absolutely required by any game wanting to call itself "deep" or "immersive." I'm not the only one who's pointedly ignored it when it shows up in the config menu for the last fifteen years. The amount of complaining done about the lack of this feature is like what I would expect if a game's mapping menu didn't allow you to map anything to just fire your gun.

As for how Dragon Rising compares to Arma 2, rather than rehash all the back-and-fourth, I'll actually add something; there's no goddamn Microsoft Sam in Dragon Rising. Winner by default.

This comment was edited on Oct 8, 2009, 01:56.

Wow, that was depressing to read. I guess I'll go back to praying that the male gay option in Mass Effect 2 is sane and pragmatic without neon signs everywhere screaming "NOT THAT THERE'S ANYTHING WRONG WITH THAT."

Assuming, of course, the target NPC for it is human. Game is a no-buy for me if it'd one of the aliens. Fucking Xenos need to GTFO my planet.

This comment was edited on Oct 7, 2009, 15:09.

Sigh....I was really looking forward to having this soon. Ah well, here's another vote for hoping they'll keep spending time on it right up to release.

KotOR2 is always a mixed bag when I think about it. Sure, it would've been nice to have gotten the real ending, or for that matter, an ending, and it would've been great fun to push Atris into becoming Darth Traya (then again, I'm apparently the only one who played the game that liked Kreia,) but in the entirety of the original ending, everyone dies.

Did you hit the crouch key and forget to press the spacebar to stand up?

I've only played for about two hours and I've done this more times than I should admit. Much as I like the game so far, a couple of little nagging things keep annoying me; if crouch is going to be a toggle, why can't I toggle it off by pressing the crouch button again? Also, for god's sake, turn off the radial menu once I give an order, don't make me press the key again. After I've forgotten I need to and have hit various directionals no less than four times.

I am, however, ecstatic that there is no leaning. The Arma fanboys/realism junkies/PC-is-dying doomsayers can whine all they want, the more games stop wasting my buttons on that useless tacticool maneuver, the better. Someone think of us arrow key players, we have less keys next to our fingers.

Ahem, people??? How does this compare to the original OPF??? I cant believe that no one mentioned that, is it freeform? Do you navigate by compass and map? Are there multiple enemy patrols, tanks, choppers? Can you go everywhere? Is the enemy AI @ Crysis level or is it good?

Pretty much all of that and not at all like Modern Warfare. Less frustrating than the original so far, too. If you're worried that it's dumbed down for consoles, just put it on hardcore; doesn't matter how dumbed down the HUD is if you don't have it.

This got me pretty psyched. This trailer works well at spiking interest because CoD has always had a certain grounding of reality in its presentation, you don't expect to hose down Hitler's head with gunfire in the WWII games ala Inglorious Bastards, and all the way through Modern Warfare there was always a sense that most of the stuff wouldn't be very surprising if it showed up on the evening news. That they would go from that to something this insane is pretty striking.

Of course, this also means that if they mess it up, the level of suckage will be magnified exponentially.

I wonder if this is because so much of the first game took place playing as the SAS. Maybe they figure it's time to let the Yanks have a little limelight after the Marines' screentime in the original consisted of a severe nuclear error, and hey, what's more limelighty than turning DC into the Capital Wasteland?

This comment was edited on Oct 6, 2009, 00:00.

I just hope that the MW2 servers aren't all nade/airstrike fests like MW is now.

Considering that trailer about customizable kill streak rewards awhile back, I imagine they'll be Spooky fests.

It never ceases to amaze me that no one expects things like this to happen all the time. Welcome to Capitalism, folks; if someone at nVidia thinks that locking ATI card owners out of PhysX will get more ATI users to jump ship to nVidia than it will cause outraged nVidia users to jump ship to ATI, it's exactly what they're going to do. They don't care if it's morally correct, they care if it's legal.

And considering how, as has been noted, nVidia cards have been spanking ATI in performance for a long while, this assumption is likely to be correct.

I'll take repetitive sex over no sex any day.