will people stop with the whole cover-based shooter thing alreadyKahunaburger said:It looked really cool until the protagonist pulled a gun and crouched behind a chest-high wall.
I'm guessing that it's due to the fact that non-violent AAA games are seen as risky. Heck, just listening to the general gaming population, people like to shoot stuff. I agree, the game might be cooler if the gunplay was not in there or if it was optional, like a last resort when things go to shit (like swords were in Thief games). However, in this instance I'm going to go with the "glass half full" approach and be glad that there's something interesting being done, even if there is gunplay in there. And aside from guns, I do find the premise of the game interesting. The hacking mechanics have awesome potential to open the game up. It remains to be seen if they do anything with it, but I'm giving them the benefit of the doubtKahunaburger said:Well, yeah, the real question is why there was gunplay in this game at all. We've got plenty of third-person shooters, including sandbox ones. What we don't have is a bunch of AAA sandbox games where the core mechanic is non-violent.
Personally, I like 3rd person cover-based shooting, at least more than FPS games (playing as a floating gun camera never really did it for me). However, I'd say that regenerating health is an issue. Looking at Watch Dogs, I'd say that the game would work great without regenning health, forcing you to be careful about what fights you get into. Letting the player heal up in illegal clinics (going with the theme of the game), maybe heal up to half health out of combat using first aid, it would provide incentive to avoid fights, at least open gunfights against multiple enemies.Kahunaburger said:I don't think cover-based shooting (at least the way it's implemented in 90% of its incarnations) is a good mechanic in general. It promotes an uninteresting get cover -> pop up -> shoot enemies -> pop down -> wipe jam off face -> pop up... sort of gameplay. OTOH, it's very easy to balance, so I see why developers apparently love it so much.
I had high hopes until I saw it was developed by Ubisoft and then I started thinking like you.Casual Shinji said:It looks very interesting, but it has 'convoluted conspiracy' written all over it.
It'll be Assassin's Creed all over again.
Yeah, if it had realistic health mechanics (one bullet wound = life-threatening) that would at least be an interesting twist on the formula. I think that Thief is a good analogy for how combat should work in a game like this.Jandau said:Personally, I like 3rd person cover-based shooting, at least more than FPS games (playing as a floating gun camera never really did it for me). However, I'd say that regenerating health is an issue. Looking at Watch Dogs, I'd say that the game would work great without regenning health, forcing you to be careful about what fights you get into. Letting the player heal up in illegal clinics (going with the theme of the game), maybe heal up to half health out of combat using first aid, it would provide incentive to avoid fights, at least open gunfights against multiple enemies.
Cover-based shooting as implemented in 90% of cover-based shooters is a terrible combat system, and there are more interesting ways they could have taken this than yet another assassination game.shootthebandit said:will people stop with the whole cover-based shooter thing alreadyKahunaburger said:It looked really cool until the protagonist pulled a gun and crouched behind a chest-high wall.
think about this, your character his tasked with killing this dude. you hack the traffic lights so he's involved in a collision hoping it will kill him (make it look like an accident) however you didnt take into consideration his goons are following him a few cars being. now they get out their cars and recognise you so they instantly (and rightly so) start shooting. your character has a gun, are you not going to shoot them?
Because obviously cover-based shooting can never be done well, ever, ever, ever, ever, not in a million years, and it's always boring and bland and brings down the overall quality of any game it's implemented in!theultimateend said:I've just never seen a reason why. I see tons of complaints about it everytime a new game comes out.
I'm sure there is something, like it is badly designed so rooms telegraph their intentions or something. But otherwise I just can't imagine a situation where I'd be in a gunfight and think "Time to stand like Duke Nukem and fire blindly."
I've played paintball before, I very much appreciated cover. I'm sure if the bullets were lead I'd be even more in love with my cover.
"Concrete slab I'm gonna marry you if we get out of this alive."
On a related note, I get the development reason for regenerating health, but that is the particular field I'd love to see work done on. I really have no alternative suggestion for it, but that's basically been the only thing that's ever bothered me.
Wait... so the plan is to buy games with samey mechanics to convince developers not to make samey games? I think I'll stick to my plan, where developers make whatever they think will sell and I buy games based on whether they look like they'll be any good.shrekfan246 said:OT: It looked pretty good to me. Unlike apparently a large section of the user-base of this website, I'm not going to write off a new IP just because it's using mechanics that have been done before. Because, you know, that would give publishers the impression that I just want to buy the next Call of Duty or Gears of War instead of actually getting something slightly new every now and then.
EDIT: Yeah, it could be doing a little more to make itself unique, but this is Ubisoft we're talking about. You know, five Assassin's Creed games (just for the main consoles, not even including spin-offs and things outside of video games) in as many years.
I've been trying to think of a better way to phrase what I was trying to say, but it's not actually working. My problem is with people saying things like "Cover-based shooting? Nope, not interested anymore." regardless of whatever the overall quality of the game is going to be. As if using cover-based shooting suddenly makes the entire game absolutely terrible because it's using that mechanic. Yeah, I get that if you don't like cover-based shooters then you're not going to like a game that's centered around cover-based shooting, but it frustrates me when something that might actually attempt to be new or different gets written off just because it happens to be using the same base that's been done a thousand times before.Kahunaburger said:Wait... so the plan is to buy games with samey mechanics to convince developers not to make samey games? I think I'll stick to my plan, where developers make whatever they think will sell and I buy games based on whether they look like they'll be any good.
Well, I'm not convinced that Watch Dogs is actually trying to do something new. It seems to me more like some suits had a discussion on how to best capture the markets for Human Revolution, Assassin's Creed, and GTA with the same game.shrekfan246 said:I've been trying to think of a better way to phrase what I was trying to say, but it's not actually working. My problem is with people saying things like "Cover-based shooting? Nope, not interested anymore." regardless of whatever the overall quality of the game is going to be. As if using cover-based shooting suddenly makes the entire game absolutely terrible because it's using that mechanic. Yeah, I get that if you don't like cover-based shooters then you're not going to like a game that's centered around cover-based shooting, but it frustrates me when something that might actually attempt to be new or different gets written off just because it happens to be using the same base that's been done a thousand times before.Kahunaburger said:Wait... so the plan is to buy games with samey mechanics to convince developers not to make samey games? I think I'll stick to my plan, where developers make whatever they think will sell and I buy games based on whether they look like they'll be any good.
...issues people have with aesthetic or setting.shrekfan246 said:I have the same problem with people who complain about "brown and grey" shooters and "generic fantasy" RPGs.
That's a fair enough assessment, and a reason to be skeptical that I can agree with. But how many times have those three games been combined before?Kahunaburger said:Well, I'm not convinced that Watch Dogs is actually trying to do something new. It seems to me more like some suits had a discussion on how to best capture the markets for Human Revolution, Assassin's Creed, and GTA with the same game.
I typed out a big post meant to keep this going, but I'm just going to bow out because I really don't have it in me to get into a long-winded discussion about this. You don't care for "cover-based shooters", I don't mind the mechanic nearly as much, so I'll just say I disagree and I suddenly don't mind anymore about people whoAnd I'm also not sure what's wrong about disliking a bad set of mechanics. Lots of games have shooting, lots of games have cover, but "cover-based shooter" is a term generally used to describe a specific subset of these that are basically whack-a-mole simulators.
The point that people complain about and what I hate, is that you can't just duck and move behind cover, no, we're clearly all too stupid to do that ourselves. We need to press a button that activates some sort of local gravity field from the nearest chest high object and sucks you against it, glued alongside it unless you break yourself free again.theultimateend said:I've just never seen a reason why. I see tons of complaints about it everytime a new game comes out.FelixG said:If you look at most of the firearm threads you would easily be able to see that 90% of the escapist forum goers couldnt tell a black painted stick from a gun from how much they whine about them, so they would likely run away crying from anything to do with said items much less shoot at people.theultimateend said:Am I to presume that everyone around here would stand up and shoot at people?
But yeah, I much prefer a protagonist that drops back behind cover to one who stands in the open and takes more of a pounding than the entire Nigerian army could dish out on a good day before walking away to go do something else.
I'm sure there is something, like it is badly designed so rooms telegraph their intentions or something. But otherwise I just can't imagine a situation where I'd be in a gunfight and think "Time to stand like Duke Nukem and fire blindly."
I've played paintball before, I very much appreciated cover. I'm sure if the bullets were lead I'd be even more in love with my cover.
"Concrete slab I'm gonna marry you if we get out of this alive."
On a related note, I get the development reason for regenerating health, but that is the particular field I'd love to see work done on. I really have no alternative suggestion for it, but that's basically been the only thing that's ever bothered me.