The very many questions-not-worth-their-own-thread question thread XXV
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Farm Boy
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Thank you Hobbs! That's exactly what I was thinking about where the narrative is changed, I'm just not sure that about actual gameplay features being changed, I'm still kinda stumped on that one. Any others? I had thought of the censoring of the panties from the remake of Double Dragon, but that's not quite the same thing again.
hobbsyoyo
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Well they changed the color of blood in the SNES version of Mortal Kombat to green (but kept decapitations/spinal ripping lolwtf). But that's still not really gameplay as you say. I can't think of any off the top of my head where the actual gameplay itself was changed on-the-fly as a reaction to gamers complaints.
Farm Boy
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I'm thinking it has to be in there somewhere, like League of Legends included the following due to player feedback A(ll)R(andom)A(ll)M(iddle) as a game mode as well as the champions Volibear(armored bear) and Elise(spider queen) and the Girl's Generation(Popstar Ahri) skin at player request, but was just more looking for a single player game where something actually was designed/redesigned(rather than the everpresent tweaking of MUDs/MMOs/MOBAs).
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Farmboy, does "Elemental: Fallen Enchantress" count
?
I think there was also somewhere a shooter, where they added female soldiers due to fan protest, but I really can't figure it out anymore.
Farmboy, does "Elemental: Fallen Enchantress" count
?I think there was also somewhere a shooter, where they added female soldiers due to fan protest, but I really can't figure it out anymore.
Farm Boy
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Do tell about this Fallen Enchantress thing?
Edit: ah ok, simply scrapping and remaking the product entire is something, but do you know the games well enough to pick out key differences between the two that the fans would have demanded?
Edit: ah ok, simply scrapping and remaking the product entire is something, but do you know the games well enough to pick out key differences between the two that the fans would have demanded?
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but I think they had more player feedback for FE too.
Oh, another thing. In Modern Warfare 2 they didn't have dedicated servers, even after a freakin' big fan protest.
Apparently they again had them in Modern Warfare 3.
Not sure though if that's again what you're looking for.
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but I think they had more player feedback for FE too.Oh, another thing. In Modern Warfare 2 they didn't have dedicated servers, even after a freakin' big fan protest.
Apparently they again had them in Modern Warfare 3.
Not sure though if that's again what you're looking for.
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This sort of thing is rife in MMOs and competitive games. Game "balance" for WoW or LoL probably creates more drama than the rest of the topics related to those games combined, even microtransactions. SWTOR didn't ship with homosexual relationships between the player character and NPCs, spawning considerable weeping and gnashing of teeth, so one of the first new planets included such romance subplots (albeit skimpy ones that weren't very good and didn't do a good job of fobbing off complainers). That sort of thing.
But here's another Mass Effect example:
In the first game, gunplay centered around weapons that could be fired automatically until one's heat sinks reached capacity, at which point the gun would be unusable until heat was discharged. One could delay reaching maximum heat by firing in bursts. This system sounded innovative on the face of things, but in practice turned combat into something slow and clunky with minimal amounts of movement and finesse. Spray and pray, run around aimlessly, and don't worry about running out of ammo because you just have to wait until the heat buildup dissipates. Certain builds could even fire endlessly with no heat buildup, especially if certain mods were employed. No explanation for this obvious violation of the laws of thermodynamics was forthcoming.
Intelligently, the design team abandoned this system for Mass Effect 2, switching to a "thermal clip"-based set of weapons. There was a lore explanation for this, but it functionally meant that weapons once again relied on ammo, reloading, and finding ammo pickups throughout the levels. Although this was met with general approval from people with more than three brain cells who understood anything about gameplay and lore, there was a hard core of dissenters who protested against this decision, for the following bizarre reasons:
1. They didn't like the "feel". Infinite ammo and heat discharge seemed more futuristic.
2. Ammo reminded them of Call of Duty games, which are prima facie bad or something.
3. They thought the lore explanation of the thermal clips was lacking, although apparently the lore explanation of endlessly firing weapons was perfectly fine.
There was also these reason, which mostly went unstated but implied:
4. They sucked at playing the game and kept running out of
5. They were overcome with lolstalgia and found themselves incapable of recognizing the first game's many, many flaws.1
These people mostly would've been obnoxious irrelevant idiots who just needed to L2P if not for the makeup of online gaming forums and the Internet silent majority syndrome. So for several months after release of ME2, when the game was receiving virtually universal praise from every major media outlet and reviewer, BioWare's message boards were swarming with threads complaining about thermal clips.
To their great credit, BioWare's devs elected not to mess with the second game's mostly-excellent gameplay as they were designing the third game. Thermal clips stayed in, along with the way powers worked and pretty much everything good about the ME2 UI. However, this did not mean that a bone could not be thrown to the thermal-clip whiners. Two separate assault rifles made appearances in Mass Effect 3, both in downloadable-content missions, and neither of these two, unlike the vast majority of the weapons in the game, used thermal clips. Instead, they both relied on the old overheat mechanism from the first game. BioWare included the old system after all, purely on request.
Amusingly, neither the Prothean Particle Rifle nor the M7 Lancer assault rifle gained much currency in ME3's new multiplayer mode. Neither weapon required DLC to access in multiplayer, so anyone could get it if she got lucky with her mission reward packs. But when stacked up against the thermal-clip weapons in a setting where efficiency really mattered, the overheat-based ones fell short. Which is exactly what BioWare and a few intrepid
mischief forum warriors had been telling the unwashed anti-thermal-clip masses for years, but whatever. ---
A more minor example is how planet scanning was deemphasized from Mass Effect 2 to Mass Effect 3. The planet scanning minigame in ME2 was in no way necessary; it was a way to get resources to acquire upgrades for your weapons and armor. You could skip it quite easily and still beat the game on the highest difficulty level with any story results that you wanted.
Nevertheless, some people felt compelled to scan ALL THE THINGS and then had the temerity to complain about how they were "forced" to waste their time collecting vast stockpiles of resources for which they had no actual use. In effect, these lunatics were blaming BioWare because they wanted to be completionists (and completionists to a ridiculous degree, since they were scanning just to say they had scanned out all the resources, not confining their efforts to only those resources that they actually needed for upgrades) but also wanted completionism to be easy. Idiots.
In this case, however, BioWare did fully acquiesce to requests. Mass Effect 3's planet scanning was stripped down almost completely. There were no resources for upgrades; instead, planet scanning was based on objectives for missions with a pointer included to make each scan quick and painless. Ten seconds tops. A victory for the little guy.
Of course, the joke was on them (us?), because the thing that replaced planet scanning was arguably worse. The new scan minigame took place on the galaxy map and pitted the player against the Reapers; too many scans and a few dreadnoughts would be on your tail, with auto-death the price of failing to flee the system quickly enough. It also became drastically more difficult to actually locate the things you were trying to scan. Nice job breaking it, whiners.
1 - In my experience, BioWare's customers are the absolute worst about this. You'll have people moaning about how previous games were the best with any franchise, but for whatever reason, the people who think that the best Mass Effect game was the first one (and the best KotOR game, and the best Dragon Age game, etc.) seem to have a disproportionate presence in online fora. You won't find many people claiming that about the first CoD game, or the first GTA game, or the first WarCraft game, or whatever. I am at a loss to explain the phenomenon.
Mise
isle of lucy
Could it be that Mass Effect's demographic are juuuust at the age where they form their strongest opinions and emotions? E.g. similar to how there's no real reason that the music I listened to when I was 14 should be the music that defines my musical taste well into adulthood -- but it does, because that's the age that you become so deeply invested in things emotionally. So if there's a bunch of 14 year olds playing a game that is especially emotionally rending anyway you might find a disproportionate amount of nostalgia towards the first in the franchise.
Farm Boy
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Thank you Dachs. That was really fun to read. I'm mostly blind to shooters/semi-shooters any more these days, so between yourself and Hobbs you are filling in a blind spot of mine.
As for your note, man alive should you read through the feces-show that is any MechWarrior online gameplay forum. The divides between tabletop/electronic and "that's not how tanks work"/"the physics in this universe are cotton candy anyways" are really surprisingly... bitter.
As for your note, man alive should you read through the feces-show that is any MechWarrior online gameplay forum. The divides between tabletop/electronic and "that's not how tanks work"/"the physics in this universe are cotton candy anyways" are really surprisingly... bitter.
Moderator Action: Discussion relating to depression deleted. Civfanatics and its members aren't qualified to provide mental health advice. If you are qualified, Civfanatics isn't the correct forum for this advice. If you are seeking mental health advice, please consult a mental health professional.
hobbsyoyo
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You can't reference green, red or blue text methink. Or so says my infraction history in any case. 
Can't really tell you when/why they use which one though.
_____________
Question:
Does any one else get a raging boner when dachs talks about Mass Effect in detail? It's sooo good.
Can't really tell you when/why they use which one though.
_____________
Question:
Does any one else get a raging boner when dachs talks about Mass Effect in detail? It's sooo good.
Symphony D.
Deity
To be fair, the lore explanation for infinite ammo was "a substantive block of metal we use really tiny fractions of per shot" while the lore explanation for thermal clips was "it allows higher sustained ROF over time/DPS," which didn't actually make any sense when it was trivially easy to assemble a high-end gun that could literally shoot forever. You cannot have a more sustained firing rate than firing constantly forever, which almost everyone opted for in ME1. It was a strange explanation, particularly given you were an elite super-soldier with cutting edge equipment, all of which mysteriously disappeared. Having guns that fired forever also would've made far more sense in a guerrilla war of attrition against the Reapers with supply lines being cut, but you know, whatever, gameplay always trumps story in games.
I beat ME2 on Insanity (as Infiltrator). Thermal clip acquisition was a severe problem at that difficulty level depending on build given enemy damage-soaking abilities (especially vs. Praetorians where you had to move and the various bosses; I plinked the Babby Reaper to death with a Carnifex) and frankly the Widow lost its utility vs. Viper + taking ARs for the Mattock (Mattock owned ME2) because missing shots was just too-punishing ammo wise (and you needed headshots to be effective).
It was, overall, a superior system, but it was a bad retcon and it wasn't well-balanced to difficulty. ME3 did much better in balancing ammo acquisition, sure. But claiming the Lancer and Particle Rifle to be "proof" the overheating system was always inferior is incredibly specious; by ME1 standards they were both crap starter guns. When you compare the worst of one game to the best of another, it's not surprising when you get an obvious outcome.
The issue is not nearly so one-sided and "lol fans are terrible." Which isn't to say they aren't (they are; e.g., Talimancers, constant nerfing of ME3 multiplayer gear, etc.), but BioWare was also routinely terrible (e.g., hiring Chris Priestly, misleading expectations, the ending, ME4 leadup, etc.) so I would say the company and fanbase were made for one another.
PlutonianEmpire
King of the Plutonian Empire
I know that terraforming places such Mars is a common trope of science fiction, but how feasible is it, really? On a related note, what about the possibility of terraforming something much closer to home? Not the moon, but rather, our own deserts, here on Earth itself? Would it or could it be considered a sort of trial run prior to actually attempting the larger-scale efforts needed for Mars terraforming?
What terraforming means in any context depends on what you start with. Mars has very little atmosphere. and not enough gravity to hold onto one thick enough for human use. So one would have to be created, and then continually refreshed. That would probably mean the ability to go out to the Ort cloud and grab millions of comets and send them to Mars, and somehow purify the composition of those comets to what we wanted to use. Or maybe some sort of scoop ships to scoop the air of Jupiter, and separate out what we want, and transfer that to Mars. Which is to say, with a Star Trek level of tech, it'd be a massive job. With tech much below that, it would be a staggeringly huge job. Too big to really contemplate.
As for the deserts, that would not be terraforming, because they are already on Terra. We are using deserts on Earth all the time. They just lack sufficient water to live in them and farm them without getting more water from somewhere else. And the transportation of water is very expensive. We have plenty of land for nearly any use without the deserts.
As for terraforming some alien planet around another star, how much work that would be would depend on what it started as. Assuming it had air and water, we would have to add plants and animals, for example.
As for the deserts, that would not be terraforming, because they are already on Terra. We are using deserts on Earth all the time. They just lack sufficient water to live in them and farm them without getting more water from somewhere else. And the transportation of water is very expensive. We have plenty of land for nearly any use without the deserts.
As for terraforming some alien planet around another star, how much work that would be would depend on what it started as. Assuming it had air and water, we would have to add plants and animals, for example.
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