I love the mines, but they can really mess up a team if you put them in a bad spot and no one knows they’re there. 😅
Pinging it probably helps, but I haven’t tried it to see if the ping shows up properly.
Inukii
A few things I love about this game that highlights some general trending problems in the game industry as a whole. It’s all to do with convenience, and how the game industry generally thinks that convenient is better.
1) Weapons aren’t just strapped to your screen. There’s a lag as you move your weapon around. You can’t just swivel 180 and have the cursor point dead center. This means that weapons feel weighted.
There’s more that could be done here to make weapons feel different from each other but in general when I hear people talk about “how X game has weapons that all feel different”. It’s feels so very wrong because the only thing that is different is the stats. This weapon fires faster but does less damage. This weapon has more recoil than that one. But all that just feels like stats.
As I say. There’s more Helldivers could do. It’s just somewhat highlighting something that’s kinda boring about the rest of game developers in the world treat shooting as a whole.
Bipods for example would be great if we could
2) Reload
A simple thing but a really important example to highlight the industries trend with over-convenience leading to a lesser experience.. You can’t just press the fire button again to reload automatically if you are out. You actually have to press reload yourself.
Unfortunately the game bluescreens to death for me so I can’t confirm something that I’m sure it doesn’t have. But if you run out of ammo and you press the fire button. It doesn’t make that “unsatisfying” click sound where you are empty. Thus indicating you need to reload.
This is something that doesn’t exist in other shooting games because if you try to fire whilst you have no bullets left. It just reloads.
What this means is. You can’t have that moment where enemies are swarming you and you run out of ammo and you hear that “click click click” sound. That’s cinematic. That happens in movies.
But you can’t create that experience in a game if it automatically reloads. By taking away the possibility of the player failing, by removing that level of control, we create a lesser experience. Not a greater one.
3) Team weapons
I don’t think Helldivers 2 does this astonishing well but so very few other games have it. The Railgun, the Spear, these weapons that have a friendly load up the weapon or help in some way. Beautifully animated.
It makes it feel like a co-op game where you interact with other players. Where as most other co-op games of a similar nature the other players are just “there”. They are copy/pastes of you plonked into the same world. You don’t truly interact with one another.
I always refer to Resident Evil Outbreak on this one. Where there are wonderfully crafted animations for helping other players in various scenarious. Player holding on to the ledge and at risk of falling from a great height? Normally in games we have Player A be a motivational cheer squad whilst Player B pulls themselves up. Resident Evil Outbreak however has an animation for literally pulling the other person up. It does this in a bunch of places. You can even lean on a friends shoulder when you are wounded and have them pull you around. Because it’s faster than you limping around. Hell you can even push yourself up against a door and try to stop the zombies on the otherside from breaking through the door.
So anyway. At least Helldivers has some level of nicely animated interaction with other players that are meaningful.
4) Friendly Fire
Friendly fire seems to have more popularly disappeared or you end up with some reduced friendly fire.
Without friendly fire you just have people run around like lunatics. With friendly fire though. You re-introduce some cinematic feelings as players don’t want to end up caught in a crossfire. They have to think about their positioning.
And before we say “People don’t play like that though”.
They don’t play like that because the game industry decided that they don’t have to. Part of the problem with the game industries evolution is misrepresenting what leads to success.
World of Warcraft for example was very succesful in 2004 and although people say that Lich King was the peak of WoW’s success because that’s when it had the most subscribers. It had the most subscribers then because of it’s previous iterations. Not because of its current. 6 million people didn’t suddenly jump into Lich King saying “I’m only playing this because Lich King is good”. They were playing it because Burning Crusade was good. And why were people playing Burning Crusade? They were playing because Vanilla WoW was good and got people talking, got people trying, at a time where gaming was considered nerdy.
Cataclysm arrives and subscribers go down. Not because Cataclysm was bad. The game went in the same direction as Burning Crusade and Lich King. It’s just that by the time we hit Cataclysm the problems start showing. Well…even to this day people don’t truly know what some of the problems were.
Take for example the marking system. Introduced in the final patch of Vanilla WoW. Before people had to say “attack the giant” or a hunter would mark it with their ability and indicate to all the damag dealers on what to attack. The damage dealers had to look out for calls or make their own judgement.
When you introduce the marking system. Damage dealers no longer thought. They attacke the skull then attacked the X. This lead to raids dying at times because the mark wasn’t always the correct target and people wouldn’t stop doing damage to a certain target when instructed. Because they lost their ability to think or listen or communicate. A convenience reduced the experience.
4 Comments
Friendly fire, isn’t.
How is the game play? graphics looks good.
I love the mines, but they can really mess up a team if you put them in a bad spot and no one knows they’re there. 😅
Pinging it probably helps, but I haven’t tried it to see if the ping shows up properly.
A few things I love about this game that highlights some general trending problems in the game industry as a whole. It’s all to do with convenience, and how the game industry generally thinks that convenient is better.
1) Weapons aren’t just strapped to your screen. There’s a lag as you move your weapon around. You can’t just swivel 180 and have the cursor point dead center. This means that weapons feel weighted.
There’s more that could be done here to make weapons feel different from each other but in general when I hear people talk about “how X game has weapons that all feel different”. It’s feels so very wrong because the only thing that is different is the stats. This weapon fires faster but does less damage. This weapon has more recoil than that one. But all that just feels like stats.
As I say. There’s more Helldivers could do. It’s just somewhat highlighting something that’s kinda boring about the rest of game developers in the world treat shooting as a whole.
Bipods for example would be great if we could
2) Reload
A simple thing but a really important example to highlight the industries trend with over-convenience leading to a lesser experience.. You can’t just press the fire button again to reload automatically if you are out. You actually have to press reload yourself.
Unfortunately the game bluescreens to death for me so I can’t confirm something that I’m sure it doesn’t have. But if you run out of ammo and you press the fire button. It doesn’t make that “unsatisfying” click sound where you are empty. Thus indicating you need to reload.
This is something that doesn’t exist in other shooting games because if you try to fire whilst you have no bullets left. It just reloads.
What this means is. You can’t have that moment where enemies are swarming you and you run out of ammo and you hear that “click click click” sound. That’s cinematic. That happens in movies.
But you can’t create that experience in a game if it automatically reloads. By taking away the possibility of the player failing, by removing that level of control, we create a lesser experience. Not a greater one.
3) Team weapons
I don’t think Helldivers 2 does this astonishing well but so very few other games have it. The Railgun, the Spear, these weapons that have a friendly load up the weapon or help in some way. Beautifully animated.
It makes it feel like a co-op game where you interact with other players. Where as most other co-op games of a similar nature the other players are just “there”. They are copy/pastes of you plonked into the same world. You don’t truly interact with one another.
I always refer to Resident Evil Outbreak on this one. Where there are wonderfully crafted animations for helping other players in various scenarious. Player holding on to the ledge and at risk of falling from a great height? Normally in games we have Player A be a motivational cheer squad whilst Player B pulls themselves up. Resident Evil Outbreak however has an animation for literally pulling the other person up. It does this in a bunch of places. You can even lean on a friends shoulder when you are wounded and have them pull you around. Because it’s faster than you limping around. Hell you can even push yourself up against a door and try to stop the zombies on the otherside from breaking through the door.
So anyway. At least Helldivers has some level of nicely animated interaction with other players that are meaningful.
4) Friendly Fire
Friendly fire seems to have more popularly disappeared or you end up with some reduced friendly fire.
Without friendly fire you just have people run around like lunatics. With friendly fire though. You re-introduce some cinematic feelings as players don’t want to end up caught in a crossfire. They have to think about their positioning.
And before we say “People don’t play like that though”.
They don’t play like that because the game industry decided that they don’t have to. Part of the problem with the game industries evolution is misrepresenting what leads to success.
World of Warcraft for example was very succesful in 2004 and although people say that Lich King was the peak of WoW’s success because that’s when it had the most subscribers. It had the most subscribers then because of it’s previous iterations. Not because of its current. 6 million people didn’t suddenly jump into Lich King saying “I’m only playing this because Lich King is good”. They were playing it because Burning Crusade was good. And why were people playing Burning Crusade? They were playing because Vanilla WoW was good and got people talking, got people trying, at a time where gaming was considered nerdy.
Cataclysm arrives and subscribers go down. Not because Cataclysm was bad. The game went in the same direction as Burning Crusade and Lich King. It’s just that by the time we hit Cataclysm the problems start showing. Well…even to this day people don’t truly know what some of the problems were.
Take for example the marking system. Introduced in the final patch of Vanilla WoW. Before people had to say “attack the giant” or a hunter would mark it with their ability and indicate to all the damag dealers on what to attack. The damage dealers had to look out for calls or make their own judgement.
When you introduce the marking system. Damage dealers no longer thought. They attacke the skull then attacked the X. This lead to raids dying at times because the mark wasn’t always the correct target and people wouldn’t stop doing damage to a certain target when instructed. Because they lost their ability to think or listen or communicate. A convenience reduced the experience.
—
Anyway. Unecessary long procrastination post.