This week we’ve been playing Left 4 Dead 2. Will Tim like it with his new found affection for console shooters? Or will the zombie horde defeat us?
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7 comments
Mike says:
July 23, 2010 at 2:02 pm (UTC 0 )
Listing to show and had thoughts on raiding some time ago (in an old blog post)
http://www.mikejl.com/mikeblog/index.php?/archives/26-Patch-2.4-mosh-pit.html
In my post I has ideas:
Why would a boss only stand in one room all the time? I like to see a more dynamic dungeon settings. example:
- Boss & guards all roam around from time to time.
- Some humanoid mobs may be sleeping or even having a boss (or mini boss) beating them around.
- Boss is out? No boss to fight .. however there may be a chest with lesser loot open and unguarded?
- Not one path .. but a dungeon with several rooms and ways to get to an end.
- Changing landscape? Maybe the bad guys are adding an addition (extra torture chamber as business is good), or hole knocked in a wall to open a new path, or connects to hall on the other side. Doors suddenly sealed shut, there will never be a typical path to the end. And who knows when you will run into the boss and his minions.
Great show.
Mike
Telke says:
July 23, 2010 at 3:19 pm (UTC 0 )
Valve games don’t have ironsights at all, valve just doesn’t like them.
With L4D2, the director more accurately tries to track your stress level, etc – if you’re steamrolling the infected (they are infected, not actually ‘undead’) it ramps infected spawns up. do terribly, and it tones it down.
wait, hang on – are you SURE you weren’t playing Realism mode? because if you were in Realism, your experience is correct.
the difficulty levels don’t change how many infected spawn – it only changes the damage infected / friendly fire does, giving you a different experience. If you were wiping on easy, that’s definitely a bug, because easy difficulty means they SHOULD be doing about 2-4 damage a hit – and shoving in melee keeps whole crowds off you.
no one likes Rochelle, the girl…on the PC at least – mostly because the character is terrible compared to the L4D1 female character.
Zoso says:
July 24, 2010 at 7:26 pm (UTC 0 )
CoH is definitely the one that springs to mind in MMOG terms, and that’s dynamic in both map generation and adjusting for team size, which L4D doesn’t have to worry about, as well as difficulty. I could see a director-style update there, making things a bit more dynamic as you’re going around the levels, rather than fixed spawns at mission start.
Akely says:
July 24, 2010 at 9:50 pm (UTC 0 )
L4D sounds much like a Wii game. Something you and your mates pick up for a short stint while slacking and drinking beer. Valve seems to be turning into a novelty game company. Portal was a game like that to. Not that I mind, Portal is one of the games I really like.
I tried the first one, on the XBOX, and found just like VH that it was a pain being effective. In my case it probably comes down to my ineptitude with the controllers.
Tauren Warlock says:
July 25, 2010 at 3:52 am (UTC 0 )
A few random thoughts:
This is L4D1 experience talking but it is much more enjoyable with the director and difficulty level working properly. The AI director is supposed to give you breaks between waves, particularly if it was a wave where you took a lot of damage/knock downs. Also the difficulty levels did work for me and it was a lot of fun to see my little static group of 4 work our way from struggling on medium, to breezing through medium, to struggling with hard, to doing pretty well on hard. If they ever get it working right you should give it another go.
On the subject of un-winable random fights I will acknowledge that it is frustrating to be blindsided and overwhelmed, but it is an amazing feeling when you get hit with something big and manage to just barely scrape by with your fingernails. It’s the difficulty and the failure that makes the success remarkable and memorable, at least for me. Tim just might be a different type of gamer than me.
As far as applying this to MMO’s my favorite WoW raid boss of all time is still Moroes from the burning crusade expansion. He appeared with 4 named minions drawn from a possible pool of 6. The minions had significantly different powers that each other, so the necessary strategy was also different. It lead to something that has never happened before or since in WoW. My raid group would actually stop and strategize on how our group of 10 would tank, crowd control and/or burn down this group of 5. Nobody recited canned strategies, asked why the noobs hadn’t watched the fight on YouTube, or spammed gogogogogo in chat. It was a rare and shinning moment in the history of the game made possible by a measly two extra NPCs that didn’t appear and 15 possible combinations for the fight. To my knowledge Blizzard hasn’t done anything like that since.
xbevisx says:
July 26, 2010 at 11:32 am (UTC 0 )
Ahh Moroes. I have good memories of fighting him. Occasionally it would get rather hectic, but it was usually great fun, and possibly the most interesting boss in Karazhan.
Trinnet says:
July 29, 2010 at 5:10 pm (UTC 0 )
It’s a couple of years since I last played, but I was listening to the podcast thinking "I’m sure WoW does that to an extent" – there’re instances where the trash mobs vary, instances where the sneaky mobs can appear at different places, in addition to Moroes, Karazhan had the Opera event, where the curtain raised on one of three possible bosses, and there were group instances where the boss had companions randomly selected from a group of possibilities. I haven’t really played WotLK, but I imagine they continued the trend.
There’re two dangers with going too far down that route – the first is that all the bosses become more samey, since if the bosses are random it’s far harder to do the fun, memorable, clever fights without completely wrong-footing the players.
And secondly, there’s enormous satisfaction to be had in finally beating that boss which your little group has been struggling with for weeks. That sense of achievement was what I did it for, but if the bosses are random it’s far harder to come by.