Do you think scrabble is a multiplayer game?
All board games are multiplayer in that what I do on my turn has a direct bearing on what you do on your turn.
Conversely, the way I play a contract has absolutely no bearing on how you play the same contract.
To say that the creation of the contract is the multiplayer part to is the same as saying that a crossword puzzle is multiplayer.
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But it does. Exactly how the devs said in the video. If i make a contract and send it to 3 friends to see who is the best assassin. Then scores and time have a direct bearing on how the other players will play. All of these options are built into the game and suggested as a way of playing.
You guys are trying to convince people that playing a multiplayer mode as a single player mode makes it exclusively single player. Its like saying playing scrabble with yourself makes it a single player game. Then ignoring everyone else’s experience.
Let me just say this then and I’ll leave it at that. If you create a contract, and send it to me and someone else, their scores and time will have no bearing on how I play that contract. That may simply be my refusal to play competitively, but that’s my experience. How you, or anyone else, plays that game is all you.
Yeah I mean you’re taking a multiplayer mode and choosing the play single player there’s nothing wrong with that.
But you’re also not taking the full advantage of the friends list of sharing contracts of going looking back to leaderboard of comparing and playing against other people on your friends list.
I agree we should just leave it at this. But If we can’t agree that the developers made this mode to be multiplayer focused then it’s actually going to hinder conversations around balance
Well, to be honest, if I showed you a screenshot of my friends list, it would just be an empty box. I honestly don’t even know where to find it.
In other words, somebody made up a term to justify calling something multiplayer when it did not meet any definition or standard for multiplayer before they made up the term. Not surprising, but it still does not disprove the point that this is a single player game.
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As I mentioned above, they have rebalanced weapons between games, and sedative got a rework in H2, they don’t remove stuff; in fact, the E-phone is the only removed weapon in WOA. Everything else that people used frequently got nerfed or buffed.
It is a single player game. The game is predominantly balanced around the main levels, and while I think Contracts Mode is taken into consideration when balancing items, I don’t think that’s what causes the most issues. Game balance between single and multiplayer games are remarkably similar, they both use the same paradigm of risk-reward. The key difference is that you’re against the AI, not players, which does change the motivations of what gets changed.
If I recall, the main argument for the E-phone to be removed was because of how easy it was to use anywhere, not because it was broken in Contracts Mode specifically (which i’m sure it was).
The Molotov is illegal to hold in any low-tier disguise, and even in a guard outfit, it’s not exactly a safe thing to throw around. It’s AOE is also misleading and people can AND WILL get caught in the crossfire. That’s assuming it grants an accident kill, which seems to be completely random from my testing, making it feel inconsistent to use, and much harder for all skill levels of players to use; in a game cantered around consistent mechanics.
It’s only OP stat is wallbanging, which is also a give-and-take, as people stand near walls all the time. That could be beneficial, but it also happens when killing targets who stand near walls where other people stand near too from the other side (Don Yates in the lawyer room for example). And I don’t think that’s even intentional, given how buggy it looks.
When my video releases on the molotov, you’ll see me go around killing every target in mainline WOA, and you’ll see what I mean when I say it feels inconsistent.
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I believe we should focus less on “balance” and more on the ultimate point: Player Fun
Hypothetically an item called the “I Win Button” that instantly cleared the level with all objectives complete would be very “imbalanced”, but what we really care about is the fact that it isn’t fun to use because it trivializes and supplants all the other game mechanics that challenge the player.
To a smaller degree, the electrocution phone did this. No longer were accident/poison kills highly contextual, but their advantage of not counting as found bodies could be exploited just about anywhere. Basically any target was vulnerable to this item.
A lot of people say “Just don’t use the phone bro” (or the I Win button) but I disagree. Players can and will optimise the fun out of a game by doing the stupidest, most banal nonsense you can imagine. They’ll spam cast a spell for four hours straight in the Elder Scrolls to level up. They play to win, only to actually win and wonder why it wasn’t fun. The trick as a game developer is to make playing to win actually fun and engaging in its own right seamlessly and remove silly elements like these.
Some have argued silenced pistols are the most versatile and powerful item in the game, and I don’t even disagree really. But the saving grace of the pistols is that they’re at least skill-expressive. They can distract and panic NPCs but it’s up to the player to capitalise on that. They can kill in a single headshot quickly and quietly, but it’s up to the player to land those shots and body shots don’t do much damage.
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You’ve defeated your own argument in the very first sentence. You say that the most important aspect should be player fun but then go on to say that players can’t be trusted to create their own fun and must be forced to have “fun” the way that the developer wants them to.
There are some players that would find an “I win” button to be fun. There are others that wouldn’t. Saying that “players do the stupidest, most banal nonsense you can imagine” is immaterial as long as they are enjoying that experience. If the “ultimate point” is to let the player have fun, then logically the best way to provide that is to give that player as many items as possible and let them sort out what they want to use and what they don’t.
Any other outcome is you telling a player that you know better than they do what is and isn’t fun, which defeats your “ultimate point” from go.
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Before I start, I want it on record I stumbled on this post again because HMF recommended it to me on the below-bar thing.
No, they haven’t. Stop trying to kneecap an argument you dislike. What they’re describing is inherent balance, there’s no point giving the player items that are too powerful because that breaks the games’ logic and trivialises the gameplay. This is bad as it makes the game stale over time without changes, and kept unchecked, the game forms a bad meta. This is exactly what happened with the E-phone, as it was the safest weapon in Hitman 2, and Youtube only made it’s notoriety for being easy to use and abuse worse.
Think back to when ETA released. The only consistent meta for SA was to use emetic weaponry, which became a stale meta very fecking quickly as players didn;t really have a choice to get the perfect score but to use those kinds of weapons. In (a very long time to make) response to this, IOI rebalanced ETA so complications were mostly optional so other metas could grow, as in the main game.
Even if you wanted to discount ETA, this is still a stealth-puzzle game, emphasis on the puzzle there. Puzzle games tend not to be fun if you can just cheese them forever with one item, even if it’s “fun” for you personally. I like explosions as much as the next person, but even i’ll admit the reason the ICA Explosive Phone doesn’t grant accident kills is because of it’s chance of being abused. There’s always more than one way to do things.
Right, back to the video’s section, I only came on here to post the Hardware Unboxed video.
Yes, they have. It’s not an “argument I don’t like”, it’s a bad argument. The only argument in the post I responded to was that items like the electrocution phone weren’t “fun”. That is not an argument because it’s entirely subjective. What you find fun isn’t necessarily what I find fun.
I don’t care what players think are powerful, useless or overused. So what if some player only ever uses the emetic briefcase to cheese elusive targets? Nothing you said detracts from the main point that if you don’t want to use an item, you don’t have to and it does not matter what some other player chooses to do. The existence of an overpowered item in a game has nothing to do with how you choose to play it.
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i don’t think they’re mutually exclusive.
Of course they aren’t. If a game isn’t fun to play, no one would bother with it. The game should be both challenging and fun, but that doesn’t mean that every player must play it exactly the same way either.
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i didn’t say they should?
No, you didn’t. That was just what the former discussion was about.
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I know this may bristle against some people, but as a developer you probably should know better than most players what they want. You should have a pretty good idea of what experience you’re intending to create and be ready to revise, add, and yes even remove features to curate that experience. They make mistakes of course like anyone else, but yes.
In Hitman’s case you have options, but those options are within a more or less developer-approved range. Different options emphasize different skills, have more or less spectacle, take more or less time, and may or may not impact rating or challenges, and players can care to varying degrees about all those things but it’s within the “range”. For whatever reason the electrocution phone was deemed outside of that range and they sincerely believed players would have more fun if they consider alternative approaches.
Fact is, we often don’t know what we want until we get it. There’s a Henry Ford quote (supposedly, he might not have said it) about how If he asked people what they wanted they would have asked for faster horses instead of automobiles. I had no idea I would enjoy sneaking around Paris visibly armed with a battle axe until I played the Kotti Paradigm, but I really did.
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And that is a much better argument than just “the phone isn’t fun and therefore it’s bad”.
I’ve been a developer, off and on, for 20 years and I am often absolutely stunned by what the end user does. Sometimes giving the user what they want is the worst thing you can do.
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Not a game dev (obvs) nor english is my main language, but the best I can tell you as a gamer with english as his secondary language, balancing a game is probably one of the most important aspects of game developing (imo):
What would you feel like if Colorado would be the 2nd map in H2016 and not the 5th?
What would you feel like if you had a legal dart gun firing lethal darts?
What would you feel like if certain NPCs wouldn’t be able to be distracted (as if they just don’t care to check the distraction)?
Balance isn’t hard or easy, it’s about consistency, a game/level can’t go from hard to easy to hard to easy, it needs balance, maybe starting a lil bit easy and consistently rising the difficulty, or just going completely easy (Spiderman PS4) or completely hard (FromSoftware) all the way, the game is still balanced, just a bit easier/harder.
How does it relate to the hitman unbalanced items? It’s because in a game all about creativity and crafting your own method, having free accident kills is unbalancing some of the most important aspects of the game.
I hope it sums it up greatly
I absolutely hate the term “free accident kill”. Is pushing Dahlia off the balcony onto Novikov a “free accident kill”? Most would argue no because you have to do something to get her to that balcony but you have to do something to get the phone into the hands of the target too. That conversation has already happened though and I’m not going to rehash it further.
I normally don’t care about accidents or non-accidents when I play. I have never managed to explode someone accidentally and I don’t even try anymore. If I see a contract that requires an explosion kill, it’s the micro explosive and that’s that. Target will get blown up and it will NOT be an accident in any way shape or form. For me, the explosive phone is exactly as good as the electrocution phone. They’re the same item as far as I’m concerned but I don’t care about ranks or stars or accidents.
My only perspective on whether any individual item should or shouldn’t be in the game is whether it’s fun for me personally to use. From that perspective, removing items like the electrocution phone or making the molotov work differently don’t make sense because it makes those items less fun to use. I don’t care whether someone else gets an “easy silent assassin” because it has absolutely no impact whatsoever on my enjoyment of the game.
Now I could easily accept the argument that those items should never have been put into the game in the first place, but once they were there, they should have stayed there. I like that I can still load up Hitman 2 and play with the electrocution phone.
Edit: I know I’m firmly in the minority on this and most (maybe all?) other players do so with completely different motivations and goals than I do. It’s Ok and I not only understand that I am the one who is playing the game wrong, I gladly accept that fact.
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