Zeylon Rho
Subdreddit
Test Alliance Please Ignore
198
   |
Posted - 2013.05.15 22:37:00 -
[1] - Quote
trollsroyce wrote:Dust is a PC game on console. It's fair to give it a PC MMO site review (there are no MMOs on console in the first place). KBM support is bad, not only for lack of menus.
There are several MMOs on consoles, and there have been since a console generation back. Everquest OA, FF XI, Phantasy Star Online, and FF XIV (to ps3 I think?) at some point. Those are the ones I can think of anyhow.
MMO?
Dust isn't much of an MMO or an RPG though. That's not meant to be an insult necessarily, I'm just thinking that outside of the chat and corp system - it's basically a game with randomized team deathmatch and poor matchmaking. There's a gear/class element, but the classes/gear remain very simple:
Race/class?
e.g. : There are four races, and 4 "classes", but only 11 of those possible combos are available right now - and only 4 of them have much definition role-wise.
Gear?
e.g. : Compared to what one might consider other MMOs (or even regular console RPGs) the weapon choice tends to be very restricted within type. Most weapons inside a given type have basically three weapons (std gun, adv gun, pro gun). Sometimes there's a variant, in which case you might add "different adv gun and different pro gun" to the mix... anything else is probably an Aurum variant of one of those.
Try to imagine if you played an RPG as a sword expert, and by game's end your choices were: Broadsword (you could use this as the start), Broadsword +1, and Broadsword +2. This is pretty accurate to Dust for specializing in a given weapon, most don't have "lots" of types like ARs do. The weapons themselves look mostly identical to prior weapons and act identically in every way but slight damage increases.
Story?
What can be called a story isn't accessible in Dust... at all. Aside from the intro movie, in what way, shape, or form does any player have any involvement in the universe (personally)? Some MMOs aren't great at this either mind you, but the extent of player engagement in the world is instant battles. The instant battles have no apparent attachment to anything. It's like if WoW or Everquest had launched only with a PvP arena, which you can level at.
The names of corporations, the roles of governments, the way players might interact or influence any of it is.... completely missing. A player has no stake in anything, and the impetus to get stronger for a new player has to come from wanting higher skills for more team deathmatches. Team deathmatches where the matchmaking is sketchy, and you can't necessarily choose your team.
The matches where you can choose your team give no apparent benefit to the player for making any sort of decision. You might as well be picking colors to support - there's no bearing on future items, no perceptible story impact, no perceptible different from instant battles. Even if you join a corporation, you can't necessarily get them all to join a fight with you (which is silly, as you imagine a faction would have a lot easier time hiring everyone from a single corp).
So, the game is completely blank here. Any story would have to be gleaned from reading websites. The universe doesn't exist outside some art design for Dust players. There are no "quests", there are no "stories", there is no "content" - there are only random team PvP matches, and starting tomorrow - what are basically arranged pvp matches between player "clans/guilds". All of it exist outside the universe - especially for a random ps3 user.
Controls?
This is a very legitimate gripe. Just about ALL of even the crappiest games ever made on PC still come with a menu where you can customize the key layout, and it's really common in console games that have competitive elements as well. They recently added "alternate" layouts for controllers, but they still aren't willing to just hand the player a list of functions and let them attach the button/key they want.
This is dead stupid. It's not a complicated feature. It's not something that requires balance. It's something managed in just about every game ever released. Dust is released. Controls you don't like shouldn't be something you just cope with. How you interface with the game itself is about as basic and fundamental to the game as things get. It's easily the first shooter I've seen with keyboard support that said basically, "use our mappings or gtfo". I still hate the controller options too, and it seems stupid that a list of functions we could assign buttons to wasn't part of the initial release.
So, yeah. If I reviewed MMOs, I'd say this game sucks too. It's like being an RPG player handed a shooter with only a head to head player mode, no single-player, etc. What else would you make of it? |
Zeylon Rho
Subdreddit
Test Alliance Please Ignore
200
|
Posted - 2013.05.16 00:24:00 -
[2] - Quote
Jaron Pollard wrote:Quote:Controls?
This is a very legitimate gripe. Just about ALL of even the crappiest games ever made on PC still come with a menu where you can customize the key layout, and it's really common in console games that have competitive elements as well. They recently added "alternate" layouts for controllers, but they still aren't willing to just hand the player a list of functions and let them attach the button/key they want.
This is dead stupid. It's not a complicated feature. It's not something that requires balance. It's something managed in just about every game ever released. Dust is released. Controls you don't like shouldn't be something you just cope with. How you interface with the game itself is about as basic and fundamental to the game as things get. It's easily the first shooter I've seen with keyboard support that said basically, "use our mappings or gtfo". I still hate the controller options too, and it seems stupid that a list of functions we could assign buttons to wasn't part of the initial release. Unless you're a coder yourself and have a simpler solution to offer to include customisable layouts in the current iteration of the engine, you can't just call it "dead stupid". Constructive criticism is one thing, calling something explicitly crap without offering an alternative and explaining the methodology is something else entirely. Now, I would agree with you actually that the lack of control customisation is a drawback to the experience on the game. I'm pretty sure it's on CCP's to do list along with a whole range of other updates and expansions to come, as I explained previously. Quote:So, yeah. If I reviewed MMOs, I'd say this game sucks too. It's like being an RPG player handed a shooter with only a head to head player mode, no single-player, etc. What else would you make of it? What would I make of it?
My point was mostly that if you're a reviewer of MMORPGs, the game is going to seem impossibly barren. It won't even seem like it belongs in the same category. I think I noted with respect to the universe that you it's not accessible to the Dust player specifically. Learning about the lore or finding about things requires supplemental reading on the internet - it's not accessible inside Dust. If you're a PS3-only player you might play this, but never even glimpse the larger universe because it would require searching online. The game for you is just a deathmatch game. What faction you fight for in the game has no impact on anything you're capable of perceiving or learning about within the game, and has no different rewards.
As for the controls... I'm not sure if you're serious, or if you want me to type out the code? In short, the user inputs have defined functions in the game, right? Like, if they wrote an "if" or "switch" function for a player pressing 'W' meaning they walk forward. Of course, they didn't use just 'W', so we know they didn't have fixed values here.
Currently, there are multiple controller schemes. That means the functions aren't tied to fixed inputs, a hypothetical shooting function can already be executed by several different buttons. There's more than a few ways to do that as well, but with fixed controller schemes the functions looking for the corresponding input scheme could be pointing to a list, since they're fixed.
The gist of writing player access to the controls is to create a list of all the "infantry" controls - just put em in a column. There aren't that many of them. Normal function would be to have the player hit "X" on any value in the column they want to change, then wait for player input. When the player presses a button, the variable storing that input value in the control scheme is replaced by whatever the player hit - and an if function for the button being elsewhere in the column leaves that other listing blank if the button was already in use (so that pressing R1 doesn't become "fire" and "jump" at the same time). When you're done, hit save or exit. The result is functionally identical to any of our existing control schemes. |