CLANG - sword fencing controller for more than "quick attack" and "strong attack" - by Beleg Cúthalion
DDL on 14/6/2012 at 11:49
It's not the same as that at all.
A flight sim using a joystick is comparable to perhaps...a sword sim using a thumbstick/mouse to control angle of attack (die by the sword style). It takes the essence of the experience and pares it down so it's playable.
This this clang idea is more akin to a flight sim that has a full cockpit, and that crashes your sorry ass right into the fucking ground if you didn't go through five hours of preflight checks and fill out your log book correctly. Also, you need to be above a certain height and with 20/20 vision or you can't play.
It a nutshell, trying to make sword fighting hyper-realistic is a questionable approach because sword fighting is fucking hard. It also installs a physical ability threshold, which may alienate some people (you can't fight well if you're a 500lb lardass).
Oh, and of course: people are destroying enough shit by accident just playing wii bowling. Swordfighting is going to add a whole new dimension to that.
...having said all that, I would be really interested to see this actually working. I just don't think it'll be a commercial success.
Beleg Cúthalion on 14/6/2012 at 12:45
You'll find so many compromises mentioned on their site even at this early stage that I think it'll hardly be as bad as you describe (or at least in the way you describe). Making it simpler, even if only at lower difficulty levels, always works one way or another.
And people break things with Wii controllers? Haha. :p
Stitch on 14/6/2012 at 15:32
I think what most of the naysayers in this thread are missing is the fact that these guys are attempting to make a game that does swordfighting right, and not a hyper-realistic swordfighting sim. There will inevitably be compromises if these guys want their game to even work, let alone be financially successful.
The closest parallel I can think of is Guitar Hero--it's a game with a unique peripheral device designed to mimic the real thing, but it's still a game. By playing the game you get better at manipulating the peripheral device, but at no point are you expected to suddenly wield a real guitar with finger-blister-creating intensity.
Having said all that, this game hold borderline zero personal appeal--clicking a button to swing a sword works just fine for this guy.
EvaUnit02 on 14/6/2012 at 19:59
A novelist designing something which isn't a RPG, Adventure title or visual novel? Fucking Christ, this will probably be about as successful as most Hollywood actors' attempts at launching singing careers.
Yakoob on 14/6/2012 at 20:28
While I do really love the idea and hope for the best, I do agree that, without proper real-life feedback, this probably won't work all that well. But then again, that is why they are spending all this time and money
researching. Yes Wii/Move/Kinect games failed miserably with that, but it doesn't seem like they nearly tried as much as Neal Stephenson seems to be claiming in the pitch.
In either case, I am glad they're giving this more thought and effort then just settling for "swing stick sideways, do TurboPower Attack #3: Kagi no Sooru" or some dumb down stuff that could have been more easily achieved by a press of a button.
Also, this thread finally pushed me to download Mount and Blade to see how the combat is there. I remember also playing this free torque-based swordfighting game where your characters could fly (TOTALLY LIKE DBZ MAAN) where your sword was directly tied to mouse movement. While I always wanted a game that gives you that level of control, that one was just flat out hilarious bad, with terrible hit detection, arms bending in unnatural fashion, and the actual combat boiling down to two guys madly flailing their swords like retards until one of them died :laff:
Quote Posted by Sg3
The only proper solution is an expensive one: a powered exoskeleton "reversed." So when your virtual arm is stopped by punching the wall or hitting his sword, your real arm is stopped by the powered exoskeleton.
... at which point you might as well just get two brooms and knock it out with a buddy; probably more fun too. :p
Pyrian on 14/6/2012 at 22:08
Quote Posted by Yakoob
...the actual combat boiling down to two guys madly flailing their swords like retards... :laff:
So, a lot like most padded "sword" fights? :p
june gloom on 14/6/2012 at 23:45
Quote Posted by EvaUnit02
A novelist designing something which isn't a RPG, Adventure title or visual novel? Fucking Christ, this will probably be about as successful as most Hollywood actors' attempts at launching singing careers.
A shitty novelist at that.
henke on 15/6/2012 at 05:58
Quote Posted by Yakoob
I remember also playing this free torque-based swordfighting game where your characters could fly
Oh yes, that one was pretty horrible. I forget the name of it but oddly enough it was by the same guys who went on to make the absolutely fantastic Frozen Synapse.
faetal on 15/6/2012 at 10:23
Quote Posted by dethtoll
A shitty novelist at that.
Novelist you don't enjoy != shitty novelist.
I suppose the fact that I have read and enjoyed his books means that I have shitty taste.
Solipsism much?
june gloom on 15/6/2012 at 10:54
Objectively shitty novelist. His books are about 7-8 times longer than they have to be and full of useless information that somehow is connected to the plot but is utterly extraneous otherwise. His characters are flat and often little more than archetypes. There is little narrative flow or tension. It's a lot like Planescape Torment, actually -- dumping the reader with about 900 pages in the hopes they'll confuse density for depth. But once you shovel away the endless mounds of Wikipedia text dumps, what you have left really isn't very good. Snow Crash was almost okay if we took it as an intentional parody of cyberpunk, but then he fucking infodumps the reader with a bunch of bullshit about ancient Sumeria that doesn't mean anything or further the plot. And that's him at his most restrained -- when he became popular with about 40,000 neckbeards he pretty much disappeared into his own asshole, and now every goddamn book of his is a million pages of beemban (beemban: noun, predating the age of Shitquarius, meaning qoakhie, which in turn means tsetsetsetow'd after carrying the two if we use non-Faulknerian math THIS IS EXACTLY THE SORT OF STUPID BULLSHIT ALL HIS BOOKS FUCKING DO AND YES YOUR TASTE IS SUSPECT IF YOU LIKE THIS LITERARY TRAIN WRECK AND HIS STUPID BEARD
I'M GOING TO FUCKING BED
