It has only one setting somewhat similar to HP visibility, and that’s “danger zone” (the area which is in the enemy’s FoV-cone), and it’s hidden only until you see the source (guard/turret/etc.), and the mechanic which deals with this is in the game and used even with this toggle off (peak around a corner without exposing yourself), and this brings me back to my opening post, how to balance tech-progression with toggle on/off. (There are good settings there, f.e. one which changes the behavior of the AI [guards’ pathing] or limits your actions [no melee-attack when targeted by firearms], but they don’t change during a playthrough, unlike HP visibility/danger zone.)
They “balanced” the game around a few difficulty settings, and allowed the player to make the game even harder/easier. But Invisible has almost no “combat”-RNG in it and is more similar to Into the Breach than XCOM (you can tag/check a guard’s predicted movement in exchange of some resource [PWR or AP], and he will do exactly that), so I’m not sure that PP would really be a lot more fun by exposing every little balancing thing (including XP multiplier, resource [money]-multiplier, etc.), which could be changed in theory with mods too for those who want them changed.
Imagine a more involved encounter where there are multiple enemy units, though. If you really want to be in the position of having to zoom in to see what particular bits of various enemies are bleeding every time you want to prioritize a target or see how many bleeds they have on them etc, well more power to you, but in no way is that good gameplay.
I love the free aiming (it is available for every class). This way it will always be clear if an enemy is wounded or bleeding, because it practically fills the whole screen.
What would be the point of those amazing creature designs with additional blood textures and even particle systems for bleeding, if I would just look at those UI/HUD icons most of the time. It is much more immersive to spot those things “in” the game-world…
I know that some people want to play fast and on a more “abstract” level and will therefore like those icons, but there should a least be the option to disable hp, body-part and bleed icons AND those text boxes like “Turn ended” or “Deploy shield” above soldiers and enemies: This seems one of the biggest immersion breakers for me:
I kinda disagree with this point. I mean, it is true if we assume a crabman will always have 5HP, and his shield will always have 3 armor, but I find that very unlikely. Aliens will always progress and the same type of alien might have different HP and different armor at different stages in the game making the whole idea of researching them for knowing their HP and armor useful even in subsequent runs.
I honestly think hiding HP and armor behind research fits really well with the narrative, won’t be so much of an issue first when you fight less complex enemies facilitating the learning curve to new players, and I completely oppose the idea of making it a toggle second wave option because that would make it impossible to balance. Now I do believe it could be disabled on lower difficulties so more casual players can enjoy the game without finding it too frustrating.
I’d just like to ask you what makes you the arbitrator of what is and is not good gameplay?
Seriously, that is presumptious and arrogant, especialy when it comes to something each person perceives individualy. What you consider good gameplay may be to me or someone else hand-holding intelligence insulting pandering to the lowest common denominator. Get off the high horse.
Now on to the topic at hand: I have to say I absolutely love the ideea of conveying the information through visual and audio ques rather than clinical over-expansive UI that gives you perfect information each and every time. I take story quality and immersion over perfect feedback every single time, but especially so in a single player game.
It also opens up the option of making the soldiers have more personality, something firaxcom did not achieve despite extensive customization. They never contribute anything of worth with their quips in missions, in fact they could all be renamed captain obvious for that is exactly their role, and they do not have any form of personality. Meanwhile PP could use those quips as another potential feedback system that gives imperfect but accurate information while making you actually listen to your soldiers. So instead of the eternal no duh lines of “tagged him” or “YEAH!” or “enemy hit”, your soldiers could say smart useful things like “Crap, shots bounced off the carapace” or “That blew his plates of” or “is that … blood?” or other such things.
Working off the fallacy that all progress is good progress is not that good of an idea in general, but beyond that: legions of strategy games that were NOT xcom, nor tried to be xcom or achieve even remotely similar goals of providing a simulation of a fight against an unknown ever evolving enemy. Crap, I’m willing to wager the vast majority of that legion of strategy games were not even turn based strategy games to begin with. Nevermind how I could go into how the strategy genre has “evolved” not towards strategic simulation, but towards perfect information fast-paced arcade puzzles made for quick digestible bite-sized matches to be streamed in an e-sports scene, and towards the hybridization with RPG elements in the MOBA genre, and that my friend is not progress as far as I’m concerned. The ONLY games in those past years that could even be considered to try to evolve on the xcom ideea are the xcom-clones like xenonauts or firaxcom, which I disagree made the battlescape better, it made it bland, restrictive, small scale, hand-holding and intelligence insulting to the extreme. Seriously xcom? You need to show me big kindergarten icons to tell me a giant tall vertical concrete block is better cover than a small wooden box? and thanks for removing the need to ever have situational awareness by coloring it bright red if the position is flanked, thus negating the need for me to play smart and scout out my moves ahead of time. To give just one tiny example of why I think nu-Xcom is all flash and no meat.
In this regard I find that while I am excited as hell for the theme of PP and for some of the elements presented, the UI, placeholder as it may be in the alpha, is already a gigantic turn-off. Too much information. Far too much. And perfect information too, something that you should never have to in any form of strategy game but the very simplistic and obvious chess OR competitive multyplayer affairs where information is expected to make a match fair. Though I can make the argument even here that perfect information reduces the opportunity for mind games which to me are more exciting to watch than clinical “oh this units has the least HP, I will focus it down” affairs.
Bottom line: “information is ammunition” (props to people who know where the quote is from). The more you give the player the more powerful you make him and the more you simplify and depersonalize the strategy by turning it into a spreadsheet simulator. PP wants to sell itself on a lovecraftian, horror from beyond the stars and beyond comprehension atmosphere, that much is clear from watching one screenshot or reading one of the fantastic tales in the archives, but right now? I absolutely fails to deliver on that by making the player have perfect information at all times about the threat he faces at a glance. And no, hiding enemies on the map does not alleviate the problem in any way if as soon as I spot them I instantly know everything that is important to know about them including the fact that “hey look, this new carapace it grew gives it 3 armor”, when it is perfectly serviceable and more rewarding to show me the model and let me deduce that “those look like armored plates, so he’s probably tankier to damage on those segments now”.
So other people’s opinions are presumptuous and arrogant… but then you launch into your own misspelled manifesto which clearly couldn’t be. Come on, friendo. There’s no need to be so aggressive.
I maintain that having to zoom in to see a detailed view of damage inflicted is not great from a gameplay point of view - even through the free aim system, which although I think it’s a pretty cool idea on the surface still just puts in a step of busywork between you and your next action. I truly think that having target info on a toggle is the best and fairest compromise here. If you don’t want to see that info; great! Just flip the toggle. Done.
Actually, the more I think about it, the more I think having enemy stats locked behind research is not all that great. I’ll agree that it adds mystery and a bit of fear-of-the-unknown excitement to your first time playing through, but why (as a player) wouldn’t you just make a note of that info on your trusty notepad, and then never bother with that research in subsequent games? (Unless further research is locked behind it of course, but that’s another discussion.)
As a further bit of a thought, look at the players’ absolutely fantastic reaction when that monstrous boss pops up from the backfield in that Yogscast vid. Sorry for posting it again; I just love the giggle and exclamation the player gives when he sees how many hitpoints it has. If the hitpoints weren’t there, you wouldn’t get that, and I think that would be a bit of a shame.
Game design isn’t just pulling ideas out of a hat.There are rules, do’s and don’t that developers have (or should have) learnt over time. It’s good to experiment in some areas, but some paths have been beaten to death and all outcomes are known.
In this specific instance, one has to wonder if Snapshot is aiming for replayability? If so, the game should put emphasis on streamlining the turn process and focus on how to provide players with new puzzles and situations. cycling through enemies in first person aim to find the least injured one will get old when you have to do it for the 200th time. Some degree of streamlining isn’t optional if you want someone to play your game for more than one playthrough, and repetitive tasks that don’t force the player to make a choice but only to passively repeat a sequence of commands aren’t desirable.
To some extent, “creative” voiceovers create the same issue. “target hit” is neutral and unlikely to get on most player’s nerve, but “Is that … blood” gets old really fast. If you doubt this, spend some time watching XCOM 1’s let’s plays and see how many youtubers comment on lines such as “hey, what’s that noise” with “it’s a sectoid you dumbass, you’ve heard it a hundred times and I’ve heard it a thousand times”. Unless you have hundreds of coherent voiceovers sets, having a few different lines won’t do squat to create personalities, and I’d argue that in this specific case, actions definitely speak louder than words. I remember some of my XCOM soldiers for “acts of bravery”, epic fails, or other notable in game move, not because they have somewhat wittier lines. The introduction of soldier bonds and even the silly photo booth from War of the Chosen provided a stronger base for head canon than any voiceover.
One of the reasons action cams and some of the more intrusive visuals have been cut down between the first iteration of Firaxcom and its final release is that these fancy gimmicks lose their appeal reasonably fast. Seeing your trooper vault through a window isn’t as exciting after 200 hours as it was during the tutorial, and having your screen and speakers saturated by cover fire only looks nice during a demo. In game, it will litterally end up giving your players headaches!
There are ways around this, you could introduce some variance in enemy HPs, which means that until you have studied them, it’s harder to know if you’ll need two shots or three to kill one. I don’t want extreme randomization, but by being smart about weapon values and enemy HPs and maximizing situations where your firepower is right on the threshold, you can force player into more dangerou situations until they have actually studied the enemy.
In simple terms, the chance of getting a killshot would be a function of you chance to hit, your weapon’s damage range, and the enemy’s HP variance, whereas after studying the damn crab, you acquire one piece of info and can take out one unknown out of the equation.
This is tricky to balance though, as you don’t want the “unresearched” scenario to be too random.
It would be even more satisfying to have them shout “look how big this thing is” and have them fight it and wonder when the hell is it gonna die
That’s one of the first things I thought of when I decided I didn’t really like the idea of gating much of the enemy HUD info behind research. I didn’t want to get into it because it seemed a bit more of a “what if x?” argument than some of the other problems I could foresee, but since you’ve brought it up…
I expect at least some of the possible mutations to have an effect on how many hitpoints/armor a creature (or one of your soldiers) ends up having. For example; the shielded crabmen we’ve already seen. So, that variability is probably already there, at least in some form.
So, yeah, you could still make it that you have to research the alien for its info, but where would it stop? Keeping with the crabman, you research the ‘basic’ one you run into on your first mission and that’s fine, and it gives you the info in the HUD for crabman-mooks from there on (I mean, surely you’re going to be researching each enemy archetype) but then would you have to research the shield before you get the HUD display for crab-mook-with-shield? Then the crabman-with-extended-carapace (both with and without shield) you meet in Mission 5? The super-sporto scuttling legs from Mission 29? That would be inelegant, imo.
I’m actually looking forward to seeing how the devs tackle what is researched and what is not in the full game partly for this reason.
And then you do this with every enemy type and mutation you encounter in your game, in which (and I think I remember Julian saying in an interview) you may not come across a particular ‘basic’ enemy type since the AI may have already applied mutations to it before you face it in combat. That’s a lot of research busywork to my mind. YMMV of course
Shouldn’t the enemies design (and this one is an enormous monstrosity) trigger those reactions? Why all the production values, if (from a gameplay view) some people are satisfied with spreadsheet like info?
Another point: At the end the exact HP info has the opposite effect: “The crab queen has just 6hp left, is bleeding 7hp per turn - I don’t have to care about it any more…”
I think exact hp info changes the way tactical decisions are made in a negative, artificial way - the player should not have all this exact info. For me all simulations/games with interessting, authentic combat mechanics don’t show you exact hp/armor info about the enemy…
I think that particular boss design already does convey a sense of how hard it will be to take it down. You can see both of the players are shocked when she pops up, then again when they get a sense of where it is, its size and how far it can move and then again when they finally realise how many hitpoints and armor the bloody thing has. I know I went through a similar process when I first saw how badass that monster was from the Fig page or wherever it was.
I agree with your 6HP:7 bleed therefore ignore point, but that’s always going to pop up at some stage; even without the HUD showing. And further, you can tell - on a big monster like that, at least - when the legs are disabled because of the dark, glossy gore effect they acquire. So really, once all the legs get that effect, you know, regardless of HUD visibility, total hitpoints remaining or whatever, that the boss is out of the picture… unless you walk right up into melee range and try and hand her a ciggy, I guess.
Having the HUD visible isn’t going to make that any more or less of a problem (if indeed you even view it as a problem; personally I do not), but I think it is still “exact info”, yes? I don’t think it detracts from the game or that it makes me want to play Let’s Read A Spreadsheet.
I would really like to see 3. implemented (at least as an option). Why? The moment the player has exact info on enemy HP, it changes the way tactical decisions are made in a negative, unnatural way. There are already enough visual clues implemented to get a rough impression of an enemies condition (blood textures, bleeding, damaged weapons etc.).
Give the player exact HP info and tactical combat will become “puzzle-like” respectively “board game-like”. And even if the player gets exact HP info after research the problem is the same:
Why should the player know exactly how much HP an enemy currently has, after it was, for example, hit 5 times: 2 hits on armored parts (with normal, non-penetrating ammunition), 1 hit on an armored part (with armor piercing ammunition) and 2 hits on non-armored parts. You should see some kind of “damage” or “wounds” on the creature or the damage will be shown with UI symbols. But why should you know exactly how much HP the creature has? Why all the realistic stuff: ballistics, penetration, body parts and then this magical, totally unrealistic absolute info about the creatures current condition? Research should maybe give you info about the max. HP of an creature but no actual HP info (after a creature was hit by bullets or explosions in combat)
Btw. The original X-Com used 3. and is still regarded as one of the best games of all time. (There was a special item in X-Com, to be able to scan a single enemy and see its condition, but this is something entirely different)
It become too long to completely reading, but i think it (tj HPs) could be binded to knowledge of about the beast, and possibly when it mutate again you see a ‘?’ near HPs unless you study partially again the beast
Need I emphasize more why I reacted the way I did? That’s not how an opinion is phrased in the least but whateves. And bravo, you can spot the spelling errors of a non-native english speaker, gold start . My post was partly about arguing the merits of having imperfect information feedback systems as a benefit to the player’s immersion in the game, and partly about trying to at least invite some people who seem focused on non-arguments to try a little bit harder to explain their point. Your choice how you want to interpret that. I want to present my position and make arguments to support not dictate what is and is not good game design.
Oh. So a clinical set of red pips elicits more of a reaction in your mind than a gigantic crab monster with disturbingly human features grafted on, and you’re now projecting that onto others. Man all those horror movies of the past that sold like hot cakes were just garbage, clearly they needed a giant set of red pips to inform me of the HP stat of the monster so I knew I had to be afraid it. By this logic, the monsters could just be a featureless red rectangle with a HP bar attach and you should be afraid of how much HP it has. Well at least I’m glad I wasn’t the first one to point out how silly this argument is.
I’ll have to respectfully disagree here, even if you can tell the legs are damaged, that doesn’t automatically mean the boss is dead or incapable of reaching you or performing any other actions. Boss phases are a thing in games for a reason, and even with all legs gone the giant crab lady still could move a respectable distance. One small error in estimating that distance and that’s a soldier lost because you decided to not deliver the killing blow on time. Besides, enemies are supposed to mutate and adapt in this game, especially bosses as they try to escape. A dynamic mutation system giving the boss one emergency mutation to facilitate it’s escape or revenge during a fight would be fun to have. Or even better, that particular monster is identified as the crab-queen right? What if when she gets banged up enough and you think she’s no longer a threat she just lets out a shriek that summons a bunch of new crab-men to her defense, forcing you to engage new targets while she either closes in or runs away? Imperfect information means no decision is certain and something may always surprise you in ways you did not expect. Perfect information like exact current HP value and expected DoT per turn means you can know with 100% certainty the threat is eliminated. And that is as sure-fire way to make the player aware that he is in fact playing a game, removing him from the experience. Some people like that, I won’t contest it, but to me good gameplay involves immersion that isn’t broken.
The argument of streamlining to me always sounded like people arguing between having multiple short playthroughs or one long one. I tend to fall of the side of the later though I see the merit in both approaches. I just prefer my games deep and complex over shallow but fast… To this end I am willing to embrace a certain degree of repetitive actions as a standard (though an argument can be made ALL games are nothing but a repetition of the same actions until win screen). Scanning the battlefield and assessing the state of hurt the enemy units are is to me a fun action in and of itself, because it makes me feel like I am acting upon the game, rather than reacting to spoon-fed information that makes the correct course of action obvious. Besides, it’s a TBS, fast paced this will never be unless you go for the TBS/RTS hybrid of planned turns executed at the same time. And while having to be aware of visual and audio ques to determine how wounded an enemy is as opposed to seeing it in the UI may take longer, it has the quality of not being perfect, thus necessitating that I, as a player, develop a new a set of skills to maintain awareness of these ques and accurately interpret them before using this information I derived to form a strategy, as opposed to reacted in an optimal way to perfect feedback systems. It’s an inherently higher skill prerequisite, and that appeals to me and is more likely to make me spend time playing and repeating the game, over something that can be grasped fast and demands no special skill or attention to details to implement
As for the voice-line argument: I don’t need to watch let’s plays of firaxcom 1, I have at least a hundred hours in the base game and a lot LOT more in Long War. Ditto for xcom 2 minus war of the chosen as that is the definition of a cheap gimmick expansion to me. And yes I got tired of the generic neutral lines like every other sane person and started tuning them out. I think you missed my point with the voice lines. To me those neutral lines are a wasted opportunity and like you illustrated in that example serve to make even one of your elected hero soldiers for his actions (though his actions is a misnomer considering they do not act in any way except what you order them to) look like complete chimps devoid of a brain or personality. Now what if the voice lines are integrated into the imperfect feedback system and those soldiers instead of “what’s that”, retort with “sounds like a sectoid is near”. You’ve immediately made the player aware of the threat like the original line, yes, but you’ve also made him aware that he is commanding actual soldiers, not braindead monkeys. Yes, it’s a concession of the TBS genre that soldiers can’t display initiative in a direct sense by reacting to something outside your specific orders for them. So why not get creative with the tools of gameplay and atmosphere and give the indirect methods of conveying personality and expertise through pertinent voice lines to the situation? Yes, something like this will need extensive voice and sound-work (not as extensive as you imply IMO), but it’s a new avenue for player feedback and immersion I have yet to see a game try to exploit, outside maybe the sound propagation engine of the old Thief games.
Neutral lines may not get on people’s nerves, but I would argue they have the effect of simply disconnecting the player from his units. You equate what I gave as an example of a specific line meant to convey specific but imperfect information with what firaxis introduced as a generic neutral line meant to convey no information due to the game’s UI pelting you over the head with soundwave graphics showing the exact direction the enemy is in. That line I would argue made people angry became of A) how pointless it was and B) how it made soldiers look like puppets with no brain of their own. Now the line of “is that … blood?” and variations on the theme would not exist in a game with the perfect interface of firaxcom and the current build of PP because they serve no purpose. The UI tells me in flashy giant text that yes, the enemy is bleeding at a rate of precisely 3 HP/turn. Now remove that information. You do not know the enemy’s HP. You do not even know how tough he is, and you can only deduce it’s armored segments by looking at the model and seeing the carapace plates. That line now has weight behind it. It’s your soldier giving you pertinent and USEFUL feedback that your choice of attack has resulted in severe damage to the enemy and lasting wounds that will keep eating at him until he falls over or somehow heals. That is not an example of words, that is what you described as an example of action: the soldier did something useful to me without me prompting them to. That’s why I dispute people who tell me they got attached to soldier Y in their campaign after he killed 3 muttons with 1 grenade. The soldier did nothing. YOU DID. Without you to force actions upon them, they don’t even have the capacity to provide pertinent verbal feedback to you. based on their situation. At best, the soldier does EXACTLY what you ordered them to do in firaxcom. At worst, they fail in executing your simple commands. Ok that got a bit ranty there but … idk. I just never felt attached to any soldier in nuXcom and I’m trying to articulate why.
One last point I wish to make is that I agree with you, intrusive gimmicks get old fast. Which is why I specifically argue not for gimmicks but for creating a new innovative player feedback system that does not take player control away but it does force him to pay attention to his soldiers and thus become closer to them in the process. The gimmicks you pointed out there take player control away, the voice-based feedback system I argued for is a method of giving player control through information and immersion.
As a side note, the original Queen was summoning little hatchlings (almost every turn) until you destroyed her stomach (or was that another part?), I believe it was just taken out of the demo due to the lack of polish on the little ones. I would expect to have something similar (both melee and “ranged” attack) on all more dangerous enemies (aka bosses/mini-bosses), even if it’s specialized in one.
I think there’s actually two separate discussion going on - How much info to show in relation to HPs. And then, how much info to show via first person/action cam or whatever it’s called.
I’m in favour of 3 - I’m playing Xenonauts at the moment, and 5 or 6 missions in I really don’t need to see HPs to get a handle on how much damage I need to inflict on a given enemy in order to take it out of action. All that HPs would be doing at this point is reducing the amount of suspense within the game.
I also don’t need to look at each enemy in a first person view (not that Xenonauts gives the option) in order to be able to tell how damaged each alien is. Instead I’m using a tried an tested technique of remembering what I’ve hit, and roughly how much damage its taken. - I think the only use of a first person view in PP for me would be when I want to see which specific limb has taken damage, I think that’s something I’d use infrequently; maybe just for my sniper and for fighting bosses.
Option 2 above could combine with 3, in that completing research on a given creature type could give you the approximate HP range for that type of creature as a Xenopedia entry, but even in that case, I still don’t think that the actual HP for a specific enemy needs to be shown on the map. (And I’d have that research lead down different research paths so that there’s still a reason to complete it on replays).
I’ve been trying to think of a way that everyone could be served here. I’d still like to have HUD options on a toggle, which (I’d hope) would take care of groups 1 and 3. Maybe researching a species, instead of giving you the option to have it show up on the HUD, could have the effect of giving your soldiers a small bonus against those enemies; for example a 1% chance per shot fired of x effect, like ignoring a point of armor or inflicting slightly more damage - “aim for the brain-stem and put it down for good, like the doc said”.
With research operating that way for each species, then you could have each mutation you encounter on that species its own subject of research and (hopefully) not affect the info that you choose to have displayed on the HUD, if any, while also making species research be a useful avenue to pursue in campaigns you undertake after your first.
As a LW player yourself, do you find the “correct course of action obvious” when shit hits the fan in harder difficulties? You normally have to click on aliens to see which ones have really nasty skill that need to be prioritize, and I’m ok with that.
However, that is achieved by clicking on alien and hitting F1 to get relevant info (you get more info if you’ve autopsied the alien species beforehand). Clicking F1 to get this info falls into the “acceptable repetitiveness” for me. I would argue that going the extra step of selecting the one soldier that has visibility on the target, entering first person and getting that info is taking it a step too far, as it becomes needlessly annoying when different soldiers have different lines of sight.
I need my tactical game fix and can be happy whether I get a game that is simulationist where perfect info is lacking and has to be inferred, or a perfect information based game where puzzles are complex enough (for the record, unmodded firaXcom is NOT complex enough for that purpose)
I’m not super happy with information only available by looking at the enemy model, but would be fine with a “scan with F1” option that provides a silhouette of the target with wounded limbs being different shades of red and a general target status a la Neverwinter nights (unharmed, lightly injured, gravely wounded, almost dead). This info screen would also be the perfect opportunity to provide info gained from autopsies (acid blood, can regenerate …)
It may really boil down to the usual constraint : money
“Enemy spotted” is a single string to write, record, localize, have checked through QA and loc/QA, with a specific cost associated to the process. If you want to have a specific line for every available enemy, you’ll multiply all these costs by the number of enemies in your game. It may sound trivial but the costs can pile up, especially if you’re outsourcing some of these tasks. I’ve worked in loc and loc/QA in the past and I know the weird shit you may have to deal with on occasion, and I’ve seen devs. actively trying to limit the number of strings to QA to reduce costs, so this is definitely a thing in the industry.
I’m all for more pertinent voiceovers, but I’m not convinced that it would :
Improve the soldier’s personality (but I agree it would improve the information feed)
Be the best way to spend money (but that’s merely an educated guess, I don’t work at Snapshot)
I’ve read the rest of your reply, but quoting it would mean an unnecessary block of text, so here are my thoughts on the matter :
More pertinent lines could have a positive impact, but probably wouldn’t help to “connect” to your units. you’ve nailed it when you pointed out that, no matter what, soldiers only ever do exactly what you asked of them and are no more than drones. If you don’t get attached to private “clutch” McRookie because he managed a crucial shot on an enemy after the entire team missed 96% shots, I’m not sure you’d get more attached to him because he told you the exact name of the enemy. I don’t buy the “without prompting them too”, since you also put him where he is with the expected outcome that he’d warn you about stuff happening.
Overall, I see the appeal of more meaningful audio cues/soldier lines and agree that most games neglect that medium to some extent. I heard Marc “Tryndamere” Merrill say one day that it’s baffling that when reviewers rate games, sound accounts for 20% of the final score, while dev. teams routinely under staff departments that focus on all forms of sound. That was five years ago and it’s the only thing I remember from that speech; it says something
One last point though, I’d take better audio cues as a supplementary system, but there should be redundancies in case you can’t hear it. Taking it a step further; Imagine you have to save your game, quit and come back to the action the next day. You may not remember what was said by your guys, but you should have a way to get access to most of the information so that you’re not screwed becaus you don’t remember what was said. There will always be loss of info if you interrupt your gameplay (if anything, you may not remember how many bad guys ran away into the fog of war) but efforts should be made to limit this to reasonable levels.[/quote]
Come on, friendo. There’s no need to be so aggressive.
If the hitpoints weren’t there, you wouldn’t get that, and I think that would be a bit of a shame.
