Max Payne 3 - Game balance and DLC

At the time of writing this article Max Payne 3 has 1135 players currently using the online matchmaking service, which considering halo 3 currently has 18133, is somewhat pathetic for a multiplayer game wants to push its paid DLC upon consumers, especially with Halo 3’s age.

I personally think that the reason behind this abysmal player count is that absolutely horrendous multiplayer balancing, they completely buggered up in multiple aspects of the balance that combine together to make this even less balanced than MW2 on launch, a feat that is by no means easy.

First up is the peculiar take on the class system they took, not only on levelling up do you unlock new guns, gear, and bursts but you also occasionally unlock a higher carrying capacity for these things, changing how much you can carry before being classified into light, medium and heavy. These groupings determine your health and stamina regeneration, meaning that higher ranked people can carry the exact same as a lower ranker but be able to run faster, and survive longer, or in a lot of cases it means that they can just straight up carry more firepower without any sort detrimental effect to them, which completely screws the balance in itself, but that’s not all that’s broken.

Copyright Rockstar Games

The guns themselves. The guns unlock for purchase at level milestones like 10, 20 and 40 where a load of guns become available for purchase, meaning that between these levels apart from weapon attachments you will receive no significant firepower increase, unlike other games where you unlock things gradually, this lack of firepower means that someone at level 19 will be significantly less powerful than somebody at level 20, this is not helped at all by the complete lack of the weapon balance between these landmark levels. The weapons in the next unlockable tier are practically direct upgrades of the previous ones, and not small upgrades like other games, the upgrades are huge, especially in the gap between 10 and 20. You could argue that they are not upgrades because they weigh more, but the weight system completely destroys any potential balance here.

This coupled with the weight imbalance means that scenarios can and will arise where an extremely powerful semi-automatic sniper can one hit kill low levelled players because they simply cannot wear armour as well as carry semi decent weaponry and retain a bearable running speed and health regen rate, causing many one sided stomps to occur.

This then causes new players to leave the multiplayer aspect of the game to stagnate while they play better balanced games instead, with this kind of small playerbase making DLC that costs real money is pointless, the amount of users that would be interested in purchasing it is low enough as it is, and many of them may have noticed that the userbase is dying, and that the DLC would be a waste of money for them, it appears that rockstar are aware of this problem by changing the upcoming DLC from paid to free to coax players back in to the game, but sadly the balance is screwed so badly that it’s pretty much unsalvageable without a complete rework of the system which just isn’t feasible. Rockstar should quit after these planned DLC packs and reassign the employees to something not so pointless, I would say they should just quit now but that’s the problem they get into when they offer a “Season Pass” style offer.

Map Packs are cancerous anyway

Dark Souls - Why the storytelling is a step forward

Dark Souls,  a game which in my opinion is possibly one of the best games In recent years and one that me and no doubt many other people have spent far too many hours playing. One thing that stood out in particular to me though was the storytelling techniques that From Software decided to employ.

Instead of being fed the story in the form of cutscenes or excessively long explanatory dialogue like most modern titles Dark Souls instead keeps this to a minimum. In total a single playthrough of dark souls has two cutscenes that contribute to the story, one at the beginning and one at the end, this of course doesn’t include the cutscenes that don’t contribute in any way to the storytelling, like for example at the beginning of a boss battle, or transitioning between areas. Instead the story is told mainly through minimalistic dialogue, the environment, and item descriptions. This results in the player having to go out of their way to investigate and fully experience the story, resulting in immersion and making the storytelling elements far more interactive than any other game around right now.

The environment could even be compared to some classic movies (albeit a longer and significantly harder movie) where a lot of important information is contained within the subtext, never stated nor denied, forcing the player to observe the surroundings and speculate themselves about the implications of what they are seeing, this is why there is still discussion about the subtext of classic movies, and also why there is a lot of debate and discussion online about the dark souls story

This non-intrusive method also does wonders for the replay value of the game, one of my main gripes with Max Payne 3 and many other games is that the practically unskippable cutscenes make replaying the game a complete pain in the ass and only serves to distract from the gameplay.

However this approach to storytelling does cause some problems, modern gamers are so used to stories being spoonfed to them that a radical approach like this can leave some people with the impression that there isn’t a story and that the game sucks because of it, which is simply not the case.

Overall I think that this way of doing things has a lot of potential and just needs a little tweaking and experimentation to be fully accepted by gaming as a whole.

Welcome to EntryNode

Welcome to EntryNode, my intention with this blog is to write reviews, insights, and comments about gaming and the culture it has spawned. I want them to be as thought out and well written as possible, but criticism is always welcomed.

After all if I refuse to improve I'll be just as bad as Kotaku or IGN