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Cliches you can't stand

Triggerhappy said:
SAO's initial 10,000 players can also be explained in universe as a 'soft opening' since it was the first fully open world full sensory VRMMO.
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I imagine that those peripherals also aren't cheap. A Valve Index (which is currently the only VR headset on the market that has controls for every individual finger of your hands, as far as I'm aware) goes for like a thousand dollars just by itself, and then you don't even have a computer to actually run those VR games on yet. Makes sense that the turnout wouldn't be that great on launch day. There are really a lot of ways to justify it, so whatever conceptual issues there may be with SAO's story premise, that's really the least of them.
 
Arden said:
There are really a lot of ways to justify it, so whatever conceptual issues there may be with SAO's story premise, that's really the least of them.
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I'm generally of the opinion that, while SAO is flawed, people were way too eager to jump on the hate bandwagon during the heyday of its popularity and basically shit on every aspect because they could. Rather than accepting the limitations of literary fiction.

It's like the height of the 'shot traps' critique on spacebattles.

On that note . . .

Do hate commentary youtubers count as a cliche?
 
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Giblets said:
3) Ready Player 1, the oasis would have been sued into oblivion day 1, as we've actually seen several vr chat creators get DMCA'ed for straying slightly too close to copywriten material.
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In general, if this is a game with a very strong creative vision, then it would be more logical to make a regular video game with a clearly defined story and world, and which has a specific ending.

But the bigger problem is that the entire plot premise does not make sense, because the system administrators saw the entire code of the game and there was no way it could have hidden the "Easter Egg". So yes - it is a stupid "power fantasy", with a cargo cult around geek culture in an era when American culture was decently stagnant.
 
Arden said:
Yeah, that seemed a bit... much. Anyway, I do agree that at least part of it is of course that they're telling a story and in the end, the needs of the story come before any considerations of realism or depicting things like game mechanics accurately. It's just that often enough, they're so very, very far from it that it makes you wonder if the writer has ever played a video game in their entire life. It makes the whole conceit feel kind of pointless, like, I don't know, writing a story about a magical, dragon-slaying sword and then only ever using it to slice bread. If you're going to do that, why even have it in the story at all?
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Eh, it gets worse.

The game design is often just as bad when the games are side notes that, while they're part of the story, are not load-bearing or plot-critical..

(Also, 'things your readers know about work in ways your readers know they shouldn't because the plot needs them to' is not a great writing technique.)
Giblets said:
I forgot it's name at the time so I didn't include it, but "Bofuri" was what I was thinking of when I listed treating min-maxing as a new discovery. Like no one in the fictional dev studio or supposedly massive playerbase of jrpg fans thought to ask "What happens if ssomeone dumps all of their stat points in one place?" Until some random girl shown to barely know how to use a computer tried it.
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She dumped all her stats not just in one place, but in one place that had no applications except not getting hurt. And started out by getting a somewhat broken achievement by letting a starter monster just bounce off her for ages.

Like, there's a lot of nonsense about her build, and it definitely isn't what I'd call plausible. But it doesn't seem too weird for nobody to have actually tested that exact brand of nonsense.
 
Comrade Future said:
the system administrators saw the entire code of the game and there was no way it could have hidden the "Easter Egg".
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Eh, you might think so, but depending on how much content a game has and how the database is structured, it isn't necessarily as easy as it sounds. I have a hobby of tinkering with open-source (and sometimes decompilable closed-source) games for fun and you'd be surprised how difficult it can be to actually find what exactly controls a certain in-game mechanic or feature and in which of possibly thousands of different source code files it is buried.

Off the top of my head, I can think of like two or three different ways to sneakily include an easter egg in a game that would make it an immense pain to find even for someone with full access to the content database and the actual source code. Normal spaghetti code is already hard to parse without exhaustive comments. Intentionally obfuscated spaghetti code? You could spend years trying to decipher that and barely get anywhere with it.
 
Giblets said:
2) Overlord, a game with an absolute dumpster full of incredibly unique races and classes that somehow wasn't an unbalanced mess but locked players into a single character and class, limited respawn areas and removed levels as a death punishment. All the games that actually tried that either went under in less than a year or are somehow scraping by with a dedicated community of baby seal clubbers.
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I mean, that was basically issue with in-universe and why the game lost it's playerbase eventually. Groups that got ahead got so ahead that nobody else even bothered. So that was kinda acknowledged in universe.
 
Arden said:
Is it? I thought it rather made sense. What's easier: reading the brainwave patterns that correspond to the physical movement of your limbs, or trying to mentally control an interface by basically thinking really hard about moving muscles that you don't actually have? The latter can be learned, we already have research being made in that direction today, but it's not easy and it's not quick. Who would want to play a game that requires months of learning how to use a novel kind of mind-machine interface to command a video game interface with your thoughts first?

I mean, a external helmet that basically hijacks the impulses that would otherwise control your body and feeds you sense data is one thing, but outright reading your mind to let you use menu commands just by thinking about them is quite another.
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Everything in the game is a response to thoughts, that is how the game works.
To make the UI respond to hand movements you are not even aware of, instead of making your intent of moving your hand by the impetus, adds an extra layer to the UI for no reason other than introducing a security flaw.

Having the UI be hand operated for the most part, is not really a bad idea (except the part where the UI itself is terrible), the bad part is that the user does not need to be even conscious for it to be activated.
 
Arden said:
A Valve Index (which is currently the only VR headset on the market that has controls for every individual finger of your hands, as far as I'm aware) goes for like a thousand dollars just by itself, and then you don't even have a computer to actually run those VR games on yet.
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Thing is, "control every finger" is more or less gimmick. I can think no game that actually uses that functionality. Meanwhile, Meta Quest 2/3 cost around 350-400 bucks and have enough detection to detect your index and thumb.
 
Valmond said:
Everything in the game is a response to thoughts, that is how the game works.
To make the UI respond to hand movements you are not even aware of, instead of making your intent of moving your hand by the impetus, adds an extra layer to the UI for no reason other than introducing a security flaw.

Having the UI be hand operated for the most part, is not really a bad idea (except the part where the UI itself is terrible), the bad part is that the user does not need to be even conscious for it to be activated.
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But as far as the developers outside of Kayaba knew, at no point would people still be logged in while unconscious, so the flaw would never have been an issue.
 
Mandemon said:
Thing is, "control every finger" is more or less gimmick. I can think no game that actually uses that functionality. Meanwhile, Meta Quest 2/3 cost around 350-400 bucks and have enough detection to detect your index and thumb.
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That's because VR games are mostly about being VR games.

There's lots of games that you may use every finger to control, in general - keyboards are 10-finger interfaces. I think HOTAS setups are too. Controllers may be mostly not (I think pinkies usually don't have buttons in the intended grip), but they could be.
 
Pidl said:
But as far as the developers outside of Kayaba knew, at no point would people still be logged in while unconscious, so the flaw would never have been an issue.
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Fairly sure the game has statuss effects like paralysis and sleep, so that would still be an issue.
And, as i said, having the game recognise the hand position, but not the thoughts moving the hand, when you already have to read the said thoughts, adds an unnecessary layer that has no real reason to be there and only introduces a security flaw.
The only reason the feature is in is to add to the danger and misery of the death game.
 
As far as I know it is just much much easier to read and identify neural signals telling a muscles to move than it is to indentify and accuretly read neural signals representing abstract thoughts.
 
Axslashel said:
As far as I know it is just much much easier to read and identify neural signals telling a muscles to move than it is to indentify and accuretly read neural signals representing abstract thoughts.
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Yes, and if someone picks up your arm, those neural signals are going to be different.
The neural gear effectively highjacks your sensory and muscle input/output, so any action that requires you to move your body, will need to read this signals, so having the input for UI be your intent to move your arm in specific ways is simpler than modelling the position of your arm when moved by someone else, because now you have more things to map.
 
RE: bad builds fucking you over, there was a web serial I read for a while called I think Delve where the main character decided to go 'well, what happens when I go all-in on auras and mana regeneration?' and the answer was 'you're garbage and almost entirely useless', at least as far as I'd read. IIRC there was something about his build being mostly identical to the one a specific class of slave-soldiers were forced into by one of the empires, so they could be used as basically buffbots?

I'm pretty sure there was a class for each mono-stat build, and stuff like the Constitution build was terrible becaue it just meant you had to stand there and eat attacks and suffer but sure you'd technically live. You just couldn't fight back.
 
Valmond said:
Fairly sure the game has statuss effects like paralysis and sleep, so that would still be an issue.
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It has paralysis, but I don't think it has a true sleep mechanic. Thing is, it's probably pretty simple to code an interrupt that refuses to open the menu if the player's status is 'paralyzed'. That's an easy if/then check.

But in any case I also have a hard time pissing too much on SAO for it given that Aincrad at lease is supposed to be the first large scale implementation of full dive in an MMO and much of Sword Art's story is more about the consequences of being in this not quite reality than it is about accurately simulating every set of numbers and mechanics.
 
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Valmond said:
The neural gear effectively highjacks your sensory and muscle input/output, so any action that requires you to move your body, will need to read this signals, so having the input for UI be your intent to move your arm in specific ways is simpler than modelling the position of your arm when moved by someone else, because now you have more things to map.
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Both of these are equally easy if you model UI elements as floating in-game screens that you "physically" interact with, because then the only thing that matters is the position of your fingers in relation to the position of the UI objects. Anchor the UI elements to the position of your hands and it doesn't matter why they moved, just that they did.

Mandemon said:
Thing is, "control every finger" is more or less gimmick. I can think no game that actually uses that functionality.
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Half-Life: Alyx does. Far as I'm aware, it's the only game in existence that does. Point was more, cutting-edge peripherals with new features (whether they're actually useful or not) and technology aren't cheap and to most people not worth it until there's a larger library of games that you can actually use them for, so it stands to reason they wouldn't sell like hotcakes. Early adopters are rubes.
 
Axslashel said:
As far as I know it is just much much easier to read and identify neural signals telling a muscles to move than it is to indentify and accuretly read neural signals representing abstract thoughts.
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Not to mention actually telling if you want to act on that thought.

i.e - 'Intrusive thoughts' - like putting your hand down the garbage disposal - Which serve a purpose but are not intended to be acted on.
 
Kadmus said:
RE: bad builds fucking you over, there was a web serial I read for a while called I think Delve where the main character decided to go 'well, what happens when I go all-in on auras and mana regeneration?' and the answer was 'you're garbage and almost entirely useless', at least as far as I'd read. IIRC there was something about his build being mostly identical to the one a specific class of slave-soldiers were forced into by one of the empires, so they could be used as basically buffbots?

I'm pretty sure there was a class for each mono-stat build, and stuff like the Constitution build was terrible becaue it just meant you had to stand there and eat attacks and suffer but sure you'd technically live. You just couldn't fight back.
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I'm pretty sure it's not that it's a bad build, it's that it's a bad build for an adventurer in the adventurer culture because it can't really take care of or stand up for itself, and they don't traditionally organize in a way that uplifts pure support like that.

(Of course, Rain also gets pretty deadly solo after a bit by multiplicative intensification of offensive auras into absolute death zones.)
 
Arawn_Emrys said:
Bofuri's thing is a bit more complicated. We see that it's normally stupid to do what she did. She just keeps lucking into secondary items and abilities that make up for it. The twins who put everything into strength for example were doing terrible until they started getting the by-products of her luck.
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The other thing about Bofuri is it's very much a "We are fans who made a game for fans! We'll make it everything we ever wanted, including Easter egg type power-ups that maybe, years from now, someone will unlock! Isn't that cool!"

In other words, it's very much in the setting that the designers were kinda idiots who didn't think anyone would put all their points into one stat, or fall asleep while being attacked for hours, or eat a dragon....
 
RoseEmbolism said:
The other thing about Bofuri is it's very much a "We are fans who made a game for fans! We'll make it everything we ever wanted, including Easter egg type power-ups that maybe, years from now, someone will unlock! Isn't that cool!"

In other words, it's very much in the setting that the designers were kinda idiots who didn't think anyone would put all their points into one stat, or fall asleep while being attacked for hours, or eat a dragon....
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On top of that, they are very clearly artists rather than businesspeople.

.hack is a similar situation where the game is literally just cover for a mad genius' attempt to incubate and then socialize his AI daughter.
 
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