SCP Beta 2 Issue Reporting

[674039098327aZylonBane]

And then the first screenshot.. Thats in one of the Ops crew areas.. Is that a mistake or a joke ?

If something incongruous hanging on a wall confuses you, I'm guessing you've never been in a dorm room in your entire life.

[67403909834cdDa9L]

Just got through the game.. Great work you guys, it was a pleasant experience. Great improvements, i especially enjoyed Rick Pod 2, that area really needed your facelifts. Also the Body of the Many got some nice improvements here and there (that must have been a nightmare to fiddle with).

Now this is a longshot, but when you play on impossible isnt there supposed to be less loot all around? Its been a long time since i played through the game, so im uncertain about that. Its just that i think i had way too many bullets, med kits etc. 21 med kits, 25 med hypos, and over 200 anti-personel bullets, with almost as many of the other bullet/shell types just before i got to the many.

I'm not saying this has anything at all to do with SCP, but i just don't remember having that much loot on my last playthrough, and the only mods i have that could've changed this is SCP.. Am i just remembering wrong?

[6740390983633ZylonBane]

You are remembering wrong. You had that much stuff left over because you've played it so many times.

[6740390983a64RocketMan]

Yes, buuut... there ARE way too many bullets (among other things) in the game.  Something ripe for a balance mod to address.

[6740390983b7dZylonBane]

...which SCP is absolutely not.

And there are only too many bullets if you know where to find them all and how to properly conserve ammo, which most people do not. That's why SS2 still has a reputation as a really hard game.

[6740390983c61RocketMan]

Indeed, although I would say that "mileage may vary" and a little exploring yields quite a lot.

[6740390983d32System Shocked]

Please ignore, an incorrect post.

[6740390983e0eSystem Shocked]

Again, please ignore. The forum interlinking is corrupt.

[6740390983f16Da9L]

Alright then im just remembering wrong.. And yes, then this is not something SCP should be dealing with at all, but maybe another mod to remove lots of loot from the levels.

Again thanks for your work guys, it was a neat playthrough!

[6740390984088voodoo47]

this is an old problem actually - veterans seem to swim in resources when reaching botm, while newbies are completely starved, sometimes so much that they are not able to continue (that's why the hazard suit has been added on easy and normal). not much can be done.

[67403909842b6RocketMan]

Honestly I'd like to take a closer look at these supposed "newbies" who can't finish the game.  I'm not saying there's something wrong with them per se but I have a strong suspicion that this game is something they may have just picked up on a whim with no forethought and started playing the same way they play every other FPS, with a sort of ADD kind of attitude about it (fine for some games).  If you know anything about System Shock or even stealth/adventure/strategy games, you wouldn't just piss away all your ammo in 2 seconds after it took you 15 minutes to acquire your first clip of 6 bullets.  A light bulb should go off at some point in medsci, telling you that this isn't going to be a very good strategy.

Older video games do not apologize nearly as much as today's video games, for catering to a specific audience, which was a good thing then.  Better to do a specific thing well, than try to do everything poorly.  System Shock is for the kind of people who come here every day to talk about it because they're passionate about what makes the game different than the rest.  It's not for the run and gun crowd.  It's not for people who get bored one day and want to screw around just so they can fire all the weapons and see all the enemy types.  Having an overbearing "equality for the people" approach is the wrong way to go in my opinion.  That's what screwed up Bioshock.  System Shock 2 isn't "hard" if you have the correct game genre in your mindset from the get go.  So for those who don't have that mindset, I say, this game isn't for you.  For those who do have that mindset, what is their reward for all the effort and patience they bring to the game?  Boredom because they can run through the last few levels with their AR on auto?  We could make a poll to get the real deal but I would guess that a good majority of people who play SS2 could still play it quite comfortably with 25% fewer bullets easily but ideally you'd want to remove just enough to make such a player "nervous".

[67403909848adOlfred]

Better to do a specific thing well, than try to do everything poorly.

That's really one thing many people get wrong. Not just nowadays, even back then.

About difficulty, todays "normal" is yesterdays "easy".
There are hardly any tough games nowadays, and back then many games were just ridiculously hard to beat because they were ported from arcade machines. They were made that hard so people would put in coin after coin. Yes, there are direct to console games which are also hard, but the arcade difficutly set the bar.

Once you have played a game a number of times, you just know how to beat it, and from that point onwards it's just easy no matter the difficulty.
A newer example, the Dark Souls games. Feared by many as impossible unfair super hard game, once you know the mechanics of the enemies it doesn't matter anymore if you die with 5 hits or 1, if you never get hit anyway.

So yeah, you could make a new difficulty, call it "sadistic" and remove a big chunk of the loot. There would still be people who could just wrench-away the whole game without the need of that much loot.

[6740390984b0eRocketMan]

Of course but I am going to make an assumption that people who wrench their entire way through the game don't do so because they feel constrained by a sparsity of loot.  It may just be their preference or a way of challenging themselves.  If you were to do a proper marine/navy run however, try as you might to visit all the "known" loot locations, you would never be able to recover more than X bullets or Y prisms or Z worms (unless you resort to some sort of ridiculous nanite farming/buying from respawning enemies).  Best case scenario, this forces you to diversify your choice of weapon and thinking more about damage types and monster types... something the game encourages you to do.  Worst case scenario, you complete the game just as you would before but instead of having 100 extra bullets you never needed to use, you have maybe 30.  No difference.  For an experienced (but not adept) player such as myself, I'd end the game with 0 bullets and be like "oh shit that was close".  For a noob, they'd run out of bullets and have to rely on other weapons or find creative ways to win the game like hacking turrets or whatever.  This non-linearity is to the game's credit, not its detriment.

I think the best possible outcome that benefits the most people would be to consistently provide a bit of a challenge for experienced players, if possible and a more substantial challenge for new players BUT one that could easily be overcome by enthusiasm for the game genre and therefore diligence and curiosity.  As a last resort, reducing the difficulty level would at least give the player enough buffs that they would survive long enough to sense the game's tempo and adapt to it.  If you can't get 3/4 through the game on easy without running out of resources and getting stuck, that sucks but oh well.  Can't appeal to everyone.

[6740390984c37Da9L]

Btw. is there anything i can do to help with the further development of SCP ? I know how to use Shocked, and want to "give something again" to the community, but my latest attempt, which was a fan mission, was simply too big of a task for me. So if theres anything i can do to help here, i will gladly. Is there a todo list somewhere for the next SCP ?

[6740390985081ZylonBane]

So yeah, you could make a new difficulty, call it "sadistic" and remove a big chunk of the loot.

That would be technically trivial to do via DML. That way it would work with vanilla, SCP, gamesys mods, etc.

Btw. is there anything i can do to help with the further development of SCP?

We maybe could have used another DromEd'er a couple years ago, but at this point the polishing is down to the 1000-grit level. The hardest part now is just identifying what to fix.

[6740390985465voodoo47]

that does't mean you can't load the levels up into Shocked and see what you can find and/or fix - if you are interested, go ahead and poke around things, and see what comes out.

That would be technically trivial to do via DML. That way it would work with vanilla, SCP, gamesys mods, etc.

indeed - pasting an example of a dml mod that slashes all stacks of bullet and shotgun ammo found in the game levels to just 2.

Code: [Select]

DML1


//lets set all already placed bullet ammo stacks count to 2
+Receptron -35 "CharmStim"
{
Min 0
Max None
Target Me
Agent -35

Effect "add_prop"
{
"Prop Name" StackCount
}
}
//and fire up the stim upon startup
+ObjProp -35 "Scripts"
{
"Script 0" NVRelayTrap
"Script 1" ""
"Script 2" ""
"Script 3" ""
}
+ObjProp -35 "ObjList"
{
"" NVRelayTrapOn="BeginScript"; NVRelayTrapTDest="[Me]"; NVRelayTrapOnDelay=100; NVRelayTrapTOn="[1.0]CharmStim"; NVRelayTrapTCount=1;
}
//lets set all already placed shotgun ammo stacks count to 2
+Receptron -45 "CharmStim"
{
Min 0
Max None
Target Me
Agent -45

Effect "add_prop"
{
"Prop Name" StackCount
}
}
//and fire up the stim upon startup
+ObjProp -45 "Scripts"
{
"Script 0" NVRelayTrap
"Script 1" ""
"Script 2" ""
"Script 3" ""
}
+ObjProp -45 "ObjList"
{
"" NVRelayTrapOn="BeginScript"; NVRelayTrapTDest="[Me]"; NVRelayTrapOnDelay=100; NVRelayTrapTOn="[1.0]CharmStim"; NVRelayTrapTCount=1;
}
//set up the stack counts in the gamesys
+ObjProp -35 "StackCount"
{
"" 2
}
+ObjProp -45 "StackCount"
{
"" 2
}

you can either continue and clone the setup for each ammo type, or go brutal and set it for the ammo archetype (-30), that will set ALL ammo stacks to 2.

you could continue by changing timewarp values to make creatures faster, their hp values to make them tougher etc.

[6740390985569ZylonBane]

Well, I was thinking the simpler approach of just deleting some of the loot objects, not actually changing the stack counts.

[6740390985681voodoo47]

that would require messing around with concrete objects, which can be time consuming. anyway, agree that there's more than one way to peel a banana.

[6740390985785Da9L]

Another way, although pretty time consuming, would be to move all objects to new locations. That way experienced players would not know where everything is anymore. I thought about doing that a while back, but never got to it.

[6740390985c1eMarvin]

So yeah, you could make a new difficulty, call it "sadistic" and remove a big chunk of the loot. There would still be people who could just wrench-away the whole game without the need of that much loot.

I don't think something like that is really needed. Impossible is already tedious due to the very low number of hitpoints and rather hard when it comes do distributing your modules. Resource management is the only thing that's trivial on any difficulty level.

[6740390985e3dZylonBane]

Another way, although pretty time consuming, would be to move all objects to new locations.

There's already an incomplete mod similar to that that randomizes object locations.

[674039098603eDa9L]

There's already an incomplete mod similar to that that randomizes object locations.

Oh nice. Remember what it is called?

[6740390986179voodoo47]

Zygoptera's Randomiser and Rainalkar's Alyamod have randomisation. its level and functionality may vary.

[6740390986346JML]

Just found a bug in BOTM on/in a security crate. Difficulty when hacking is 85%. When installing an empty Expertech Implant in either of the 2 Implant slots (Cybernetically Enhanced) the difficulty drops down to 75%. I'm attaching the save, and the modlist. What else do you need?
Edit 12.4.16: File and Modlist will expire in 6 months. I'm pretty sure you guys don't need a save to replicate this, and propably have fixed it by now.
[save_0.7z expired]
[modlist20160109.png expired]