There's no way that this isn't going to sound mean, Believe it or not, that's not the intent.. So there is a debate argument, and then there is a logical argument... Both have to follow a certain amount of logic, one very specifically does not delve deeply into counter point that might hollow out the framework of the argument because the objective goal is winning.. this is pretty much a series of that... And it's.. honestly it's very.. very Reddit.. It's like a fanboys argument for damage numbers, except who, why? That's the confusing part.. and it's not treated with that ideological polarization.. and yet.. for every door opened on the ideal pathway of supporting statements.. any sort of redirect or gaping hole in the floor is just subconsciously navigated like it wasn't even there.. You know what's also a universal language... Somebody's skull getting popped open.. did I shoot him in the foot.. did it look like I shot him in the foot? I don't know I can't see it.. there were too many damage numbers in the way. Sure, rather than using modern technology and having any sort of environmental impact that has any sort of comparative standing against the fact that we modeled the cavities in the guy's teeth.. but... I mean the thought never occurred to us, half of us still play Counter-Strike at 4x3 stretched out to 16x9.. we're working on impulses here buddy! Light flash satisfaction! And 9 out of 10 casinos think this works... and it does! Just ask any MMO player! And only ask them.. Also, something to note... yes, you are correct... the thought did never occur to us that environmental deformation might be a immersive feature but it's okay because the damage numbers would cover that up anyways lol.. silly! You could stop hitting the interact key there.. we didn't want things like the environment to be too distracting or inconsistent when trying to minmax, no you can't pick anything up here lol... static meshes baby! If certain things didn't lead to other things, and these weird isolated pockets within game development that can form a completely different picture what things are and what's a priority within even some of the same branches... I'd probably be less irritated about the resurgence of the numbers in the time that we have all of the capabilities to actually not have to show any of them and still convey the same information... But that's not even a brain fart anymore in a lot of studios developers and theprogramthe worse it gets.. we're not striving for better anymore we're not trying to outdo ourselves anymore we're trying to delve back into the past at this point.. and they don't know any better cuz they don't understand the forward momentum that we lost, and honestly at 29... that might be you. But.. I'm more worried about The fact that everything is quotable no matter how completely BS it is when you think about it for half a second.. and how many times I've heard people explain why things are the way they are, because of marketing team was throwing some spin on something.. And it's just bad form, and I'm sure this isn't great either.. but you're in that position where you've got to actually try and hold a higher standard when conveying information no matter how Entertainment focused.. The genuinely doesn't change anything, especially with commentary. Such a silly thing to damage number or stat number or not to stat number on the screen, to be throwing all those words up there at.. but but if you got this far then you should know, problem isn't The subject matter or whether you do four or whether against.. The problem is presenting an argument like it's a marketing pitch where you just skip over everything that doesn't fit, no matter how blaringly it may or may not exist... A debate or a discussion I guess to differentiate the two from the start.. and I'm certain to really absolutely loathe debates.. that being said, there's a point where the standard for actually using actual facts or thoughts or things will be treated as an exceptional high note to the norm, as opposed to only using specific ones being a negative.. because when The tipping point of uncoiling spaghetti from one's ass is the general sign of a knowledgeable individual.. yeah.. One of those is less egregious and somewhat exponentially.. but one leads to the other.. and it's amazing how little thought we're training ourselves and the next generation to put into jumping on any visual artifact that construed as a train... Hyperbolic at all? Maybe... But.. in 5 years maybe not... But if I'm right but then making that kind of connection isn't even going to be on the program... Much less the title page.
It would be cool if you could include the names of the games somewhere. Maybe in the description, transcript, subtitles, or on screen. I couldn't find anywhere what game is shown at 8:24
Everyone over 25 thinks they are old, and everyone older than them has a petit crisis about it when they hear it. It seems to me there is a pretty simple solution to this.
7:15 "Those who are not as math inclined. You know, English majors." It was an English major in college who once told me "Math is not an exact science". To no one's surprise, he was failing math that semester.
Was he really wrong, though? Is math an exact science? Science relies on empirical evidence, math strictly speaking does not. We're not trying to find the exact value of Pi by drawing figures with different ratios between circumference and area and testing if they are a circle. We have logically deduced that all figures that are circles must have that relationship described as Pi or they would not be a circle. I suspect a decent argument could be made that while math is invaluable to science, math is not in and of itself a science.
@@monochromaticspider Are you trying to imply that mathematics doesn't require empirical evidence? I think you're arguing from a place of deep ignorance because that is a wild claim.
@@monochromaticspiderto be an exact science is not to be based on empirical evidence. An exact science basically means that every question has one right answer; an objectively right answer.
🎵Heartache #1 was playing Borderlands alone. I thought that I would get by, but was never thrown a bone. Heartache #2 was when I did the Outrider's craze, But all of us could see the quickly falling numbered days.🎵
🎵Heartache #3 was killing time with Remnant 2... Bullshit bosses made me count again With hopeful heart I minmaxed tryn'a optimize my shots Done and then ran out of time to play 🎵
@@dreamedoutdoll that strikes on the perfect vibe of Cold Take, it's like settling down into your favorite barstool and letting your old drinking buddy talk you ear off except I'm actually listening
@@dreamedoutdoll The aesthetic fits perfectly. Bugetin- I mean creativity manifests in many forms and they're doing a great job. Not that theres any place for cynicism in this space or anything...
"Can't attach a stiff drink to an email" love it. side note, I just had a conversation about how math is literally everything, and then this video dropped. Love this series!
I used to cosplay, and the most difficult piece of clothing I ever made (Dr. Cid's coat from FF XII) I ended up using a ludicrous amount of math on to the point that at the time I probably wasn't far away from being able to draw the entire coat via formulas.
I love Warframe’s way of keeping the numbers useful. Small damage is white and hard to see. Shield damage is blue and slightly bigger. Crit damage starts yellow but goes up to red. They also recently added an option to remove and modify how you see damage on your screen. But I still love seeing big red crit numbers fill my screen.
And it only took them 10 years to get it right! I'm only kind of kidding. Melee numbers flying off screen as you follow-through your swing had been a problem for years, fixed barely two months ago. This shit is hard to do well. And even in the updated system, they weight how long the numbers stay on screen so that you get an inaccurate intuitive feel for how many crits you are doing as the little white numbers fade away faster, if they appear at all. Luckily, there are settings to tweak that behaviour.
also its not a simple "numbers go up" game, weapons have fixed damage, and its up to you to make them as broken as you can. its a looter shooter without linear progression.
I appreciate that they’ve now added the option to round the visual number clutter, though I need to see how big of a difference hiding the numbers fully would make.
As an RPG enjoyer, I was initially excited when games started to trend towards including RPG elements, and numbers as a result. That excitement quickly faded when it became clear how shallow those numbers were and were going to remain. I really hope games trend away from this soon and do anything else for visual feedback.
I'm reminded of how the old 90s Doom showed the damage you dealt and received with nothing but blood and screams. Monster bleeds and screams, you did damage. You avatar is bleeding and groaning, you're hurt. It communicated exactly the same as health bars and floating damage numbers in a far more elegant and integrated way.
The problem is, in RPG you can usually actively do thing that affects the numbers. In a lot of genre they're like "hey have some numbers" but you can't really do anything to make the numbers bigger except find the next piece that's a 5% upgrade on all your stats, so there's no feeling of "hey I used X with Y coupled with Z spell and so on and so forth and now I made numbers bigger"
@@LadyDoomsinger I remember wincing when I got caught in five exploding barrels or some other massive damage, and the screen taking several seconds to go back from deeply red-tinted to normal (usually to find out I'd just died). It was amazingly effective.
@@paulgibbon5991 It's obviously not the right way for *every* game - but I think for a fast paced action game, that involves violence as it's core gameplay loop, it is a far more interesting way of doing it.
@@LadyDoomsinger Er... what? I'm fairly certain Doom's HUD always told you precisely how much health and armour you had as numerical values on either side of the avatar you mentioned.
The whole "numbers are visual clutter" thing is something I definitely felt in Vampire Survivors. I literally do not care how much damage my weapons are doing as it's not information that actually helps me. The much more useful visual information is seeing that my enemies got hit in the first place so I know if they get knocked back, or seeing them go through their death animation.
Yeah, the damage numbers absolutely are meaningless in that game and it certainly doesn't help that a few minutes into the round there are so many numbers that you can't even distinguish them any more. That said, and I'm playing devil's advocate here, I think it's easily argued that the damage numbers in that game are more about adding to the visual chaos that's meant to represent your (increasing) power. In that sense, I think they're more akin to particle effects than actual damage numbers.
@@WPPatriot Indeed, the numbers there are pointedly to tickle the lizard brain (or rat brain as was called here); the whole game's progression and leveling are geared towards drip feeding dopamine through numbers and a casino's flashiness. Equating them to particle effects is a good take I hadn't considered.
0:53 I think that's where most of the issue comes from the reference point for said numbers moving. The division is a good example of this. The enemies level up with you. So it feels like your not changing.
Like if I'm level 50 and my super special revolver can kill someone in the same amount of time as my starting pistol when I was at level 2, I don't feel like the numbers matter
@@Dannyjake32 The worst part is - the numbers do matter. It's the progression that doesn't matter. Because if you were to switch back to that starting pistol you would be doing considerably less damage. The result is that you're not upgrading your gear to get stronger, you're upgrading your gear to avoid getting weaker. Which means that the best you can hope for is stagnation.
@@Former_Halo_Fan A good system will have equipment do more interesting things at higher levels beyond just doing more damage or having the player take less damage. I may have just had really bad luck with loot drops but I ended up quitting BL2 a few hours into NG+ because I was finding I was going a few levels between finding anything better than what I had which made combat rather a slog (heck at one point I celebrated hitting lvl 35 by buying common vendor trash that was several levels better than what I had at the time and was an upgrade to my existing equipment). In the Borderlands series the only thing that actually feels more powerful at higher levels is the player's skills.
I know this is a weirdly specific take - but the new intro means so much to me I love the noir style Frost used for his videos, but as a recovering alcoholic, the drink pouring at the start of the old era was always difficult for me. I still watched, but it always tripped something in me. Love Frost, his tone, his insight, his style. I’m so much more comfortable every time these new ones pop up.
Something about the thought of feeling a felt tip or marker pen draw roughly onto napkins makes my skin crawl and my lips draw in. Great video as always!
The whole time I found myself staring, waiting for the ink to oversaturate the napkin and start tearing. Somehow it made the video way more stressful than I expected.
"The numbers were meaningless." Perfectly describes my entire scholarship relationship with Maths. I was mega bad at Maths but pretty decent and sometimes good in Physics and even better in Engineering. Same equations, but with context, giving them meaning. Now, back to the episode!
Pure maths is an art. Utility isn't the point. Number theory is thousands of years old and was almost entirely useless until the 1970s when it became the backbone of encryption algorithms. People do maths because they delight in the beauty of its structures, not because it's useful. See Paul Lockhart's 'A Mathematicians Lament.'
Exactly! It's useful to know how much damage you're doing when you're attacking occasionally, but I don't want my screen filled with numbers if I'm attacking frequently. There's a reason they change the value of the number, when you do multiple hits in quick succession in Elden Ring, rather than add new numbers.
How much damage you do could easily be communicated with violent blood spatters and screams of agony, you know... The numbers were just a sanitized, kid-friendly way of relaying the same information to players... And probably cheaper to code and animate as well.
@@LadyDoomsinger Numbers communicate what and how well the player is doing far faster and easier than blood splatters and screams. Lets put two enemies side by side, a regulars sized guy and a really big guy. You hit em the same way and the same number will pop up, you did the same damage. How would blood splatters and screams do that? Would the big guy bleed the same amount as the normal guy? Less? More? Does he shout the same? What if you have a little guy in armor and a big guy without? What if you're fighting alot of guys? What if there's more then 10 types of guy who interact with your weaponry differently? Do you make a scream and blood splatter for every possible combination and situation? How do you make them distinct enough to give the information the player is looking for without overwhelming them? What if the player uses a grenaid and they all blood splatter and scream in agony at once? Blood splatters and screams work well in video games, but not in every videogame nor in most ones about fighting things. Otherwise why do actual fighting games use health bars instead of blood splatters and screams? Sure asset numbers come in, you can only make so many assets related to taking damage and sure using solely numbers is moire kid friendly then lopping off arms, but that's nowhere near to the only or even main reason they use em. Different games have different amounts of information to convey and different allowances for how they can convey it. So for a bunch of games, numbers are the best choice, for some, sounds, for some colours, for some bars, for some spreadsheets, for some blood splatters and screams and for some nothing at all. Its reductive to say all games can easily convey this information via only one way.
Bartender: "Had this one PI come in, guy was loco, ravin about some shmuck "Nick" and how he turned the numbers off his waifu, guy paid his tab and left a graph on a napkin"
Life bars have always been suitable to my purposes. You can quickly see if you are dealing and receiving the right amount of damage or if you are in over your head and need to level. It's like a debug tool they forgot to turn off.
I just realized it's Pokémon's main way of showing damage, despite being a RPG. The only number on screen all the time is your HP. Numbers are surprisingly absent. You know if it's effective or not, but not how much it did. You can see Move's Base Power and Accuracy, and that's pretty much the obly significant numbers you get in battle. There's a lot of thing to say about Pokémon, but that battle UI is honestly pretty cool and effective, and we really take this for granted
@@shytendeakatamanoir9740 Another detail that I liked about older gen Pokémon was that the rate the HP bar goes up/down was constant. So the more damage you got, the longer the HP bar's animation took. There's that added tension of staring at your HP bar, waiting for it to stop going down (or hoping the bar keeps going down if it's the enemy's.) Only downside was it made turns much longer, on top of the unskippable walls of text between commands.
@@scrittle yeah, I really miss the old behavior. "Making the combat faster" wouldn't be a good excuse for the change, considering the walls of unskippable text and animations consistently took longer, and those stayed for many more gens. It only makes sense to me for raid battles. Since the turns are somewhat asynchronous, you'd want a more consistent timing for every player. But those came out recently, and had their own timing issues.
Well... That can be accomplished with excessive blood spatters, screams of agony, and general visceral ultra violence... I kinda suspect that the numbers were just a kid-friendly way of communicating the same thing. Or it's cheaper to code and animate.
@@LadyDoomsinger Contextual clues can work, but you lose a lot of granularity that way. You can have a couple different tiers of explosion or screen shake, which is perfectly fine for games with more limited progression options, but if you've got a broader selection of different attacks or upgrade options or places you can hit, you pretty quickly run out of non-numeric ways to compare them to each other. That's not ideal, as much as overloading players with damage numbers also isn't ideal.
The best implementation of damage numbers I've seen (although somewhat immersion-breaking) is the "shots to kill" number in Valkyria Chronicles. It tells you exactly what you need to know without forcing you to pause the game and pull out a calculator to check how many times you need to attack to kill the enemy.
It's great abstraction for games that have mostly fixed damage or games with very short time-to-kill. It makes decision-making feel more relevant/impactful without needing a calculator. e.g. in Starcraft, most pros don't know/care how much damage a unit deals, or how much HP it has; what matters is how many times it needs to attack to kill a certain enemy, or how many attacks a unit can survive. Fewer numbers to worry about, and much easier to visualize.
It's when decimals get involved with numbers going up that really grinds my gears cause then it's completely negligible. Ah, you're weapon hit's .03% harder now, woooo!
Business idea: Google Jack, a service that automatically purchases a bottle of jack daniel's online to be delivered it to the recipient of a gmail message when a subscribed user hits send.
Tim Cain did a video relatively recently on this very topic. Damaged numbers can serve a purpose, but not by themselves: expressing the kind and magnitude in some other way (i.e., font size, how the numbers move, colour) is just as important if not moreso. 26 damage lands differently depending on the mob, their resistances, and overall health, after all.
You should be able to do the same with simple shapes, sizes, and colours. The actual number isn't the information that is getting communicated most of the time.
Frost is a stats guy? That makes so much sense, and I appreciate this representation so much. A man who understands numbers is a man after my own heart.
6:32 I've been working on a roguelike project, and one of my mandates for it is SHOW EVERYTHING. Even if it's in some sort of in-game encyclopedia, mastery of the mechanics is everything to this game, so there _must_ be some way for players to look into the specifics for optimizing.
Or you can do like slay the spire: Make a system that is so simple that you can show the player all the numbers, and trust me the numbers are everything, I've had many times that I was less than 20 HP away from beating a boss with 800 HP.
There are alternative ways to do visual ques as well, for those who don't like exact numbers. Just some ideas that I've seen: - Sound design can be used to indicate a critical hit, a good hit, or a deflection/ineffective hit. If the sounds are rewarding, it won't take long for players to work out which is which. This can be accompanied with obvious VFX indicators of a damaging hit or a failure to damage. - The enemy can be shown getting progressively damaged. Humanoid characters can loose armor/appear bloodied, or vehicles/robots can start to smoke or look like they're catching fire. - A large enough hit can stagger the enemy, knock them down, or stun them. - For less realistic games, damaged enemies can take on overglows of red or something similar when they're very damaged. - There's also the option of doing numbers without having "numbers". For example, a enemy could have 5 dots about their head, which indicates that they can take 5 attack damage. The fewer dots that are displayed, the fewer attacks they can take.
The first game I remember playing with damage numbers was the original borderlands. I did exactly what frost described. Shot different parts of the enemies bodies and saw the difference it made. My mind was blown. I knew headshots were better in any FPS, but I'd never seen it literally spelled out in front of me. I loved it. I would spent ages trying out different stat combinations to see what resulted in the highest numbers. Generally, the higher base damage, the better was about as complicated as it got, but with some guns that had certain buffs it got pretty interesting. And I've loved damage numbers ever since. There definitely is a time and place for them. Not all games should have them. They look very out of place in a lot of games. But when they work, it's great.
A great example of balancing between conveyance and clarity is Dodonpachi. It's a bullet hell game where the main scoring mechanic is a single combo counter on the top right of your screen, which increases when you kill an enemy and resets when you go a few seconds without hitting anything. Anyone can pick up on it and intuitively understand that they need to chain as many enemies together as possible, and they might even start working out strategies just from playing the game, without consulting outside information or guides. Devil may cry's combo meter works much the same way. That can't be said for a lot of games, even many good ones, even ones that give more information up front. another big point is that numbers shouldn't be treated as a replacement for actual feedback. Explosions, hitstun, or just general reactions can also go a long way in eliminating guesswork. If shooting your enemies in the foot makes them stop for a second, but shooting them in the head sends them staggering back, you've just accomplished the same thing as damage numbers. It's just that damage numbers are easier to implement.
I loved Sifu. It's one of my favourite games ever. There were no RPG elements at all. You won't "level up" by increasing numbers on a stats screen. But you do "level up" by learning enemy patterns, learning new combos, and learning the timing in attack and defence.
"Doomguy only does two things: Rip and tear. Neither of those are math." I dunno; tearing could be considered subtraction, as in tearing that demon's head off of his total mass.
There is some design rationale behind fostering intended behaviours through damage numbers (whether it is applied well or not, depends on the designer). For small to mid sized number ranges for hitpoints and damage (single to double digit ranges) that are comprehensible, they tend to promote slower paced and more tactical play, able to do quick calculations in your head and the values are easy to identify and have high readability. In a turn based tabletop RPG or card game where potentially every hitpoint matters, it is easy to see that taking 3 damage when you have 12 HP is about a quarter of your HP, and so you can assess whether you want to engage certain encounters based on this knowledge, so the player's thought process is more thoughtful, and their actions deliberate, which is what those games are about. For faster paced real-time games with hitpoints and damage values in the thousands coming in and going out every second, they emphasise getting players to not focus on the specific values and just enjoy the moment-to-moment gameplay and immediate experience without worrying about doing mundane math, so the numbers just turn into noise and get zoned out by the player and the focus becomes more on just having fun firing a machine gun at something or hacking away at it with a sword, and demonstrating more reflex based skill, which is entirely the point. The argument can be made that at this point they could even just be hidden, like in some of the examples in this video. Often just a preference of the designer.
I agree that in the second scenario, they should be hidden, but something has to take their place. Simply turning them off takes away hit indication too much without some other sort of replacement.
Love the video and totally cool with it being a secret advertisement for Frog Fractions. Anyone who hasn't played it should give it a shot, it's more fun than it looks.
one thing that gets on my nerves numbers wise his health systems. if i have 150 hp , but i can still get two shot, then just give me a 3 hit system. (looking at the progression of the ratchet and clank series for this one.) went from simple here's 4 hits. if you get hit 4 times. you die upgradeable to a maximum of 8. then it went onto the sequel which went, a bit like the legend of zelda, just a round version of the hearts.maximum of 20 which could divide into 80 maximum if only taking 1 point of damage at a time. then the rest of the series, just had a boring blank/100 (once upgraded) but some harder hitting enemies could kills you in very few hits, in which case... just take me back to the first health system.
@@Kenionatus it should, otherwise what's the point of the armour upgrades? but the second health system is probably my preffered system. but to each their own.
This segways nicely into something I've been thinking about a lot recently (also the fact we both turn 29 this year is the oddest coincidence to wake up to this day) Damage is all relative. Ive played plenty of games where damage was up in the millions cause enemies had billions of health. At what point does such numbers have no meaning? 1 damage to something with a million health is barely a scratch. 1 damage in something where the health is in the single or low double digets only is like the loss of a limb! A mobile game I once played underwent a numbers flattening just before shutting down. They also did a lot of other controversial changes I don't really understand it was all stat stuff and ability changes. It wasn't to bad. I hated no longer seeing the big numbers but things were dying basically just as quickly so it didn't really matter. Maybe a lil slower but that was fine. However. They WAY over did it on the healing. My best healer could now only target 1 person when before she could target 2. And her healing spell didn't even move the health bar. Sure hero health got flattened but the healing got flattened way harder. I watched the numbers the next time she healed. I don't remember what it said but it was LOW and my characters had taken a few hundred or thousand damage. It was pitifully low. Low enough that healing was pointless and time would be better spent having 4 damage dealers to speed through encounters and just hope they tank everything.
I love this segment, the whole noir vibe and music, dialogue and writing, and more. It keeps me glued to hear what’s next. It’s the opposite approach from fully ramblomatic (and times past), yet Yahtzee has the fedora. I feel deep down all of second wind is an underground detective agency working as a gaming journalism front company (hey maybe Yahtzee’s next book? :) 😂
Borderlands 2 is the perfect example of a fun and useful number system that becomes irrelevent in the end game, its intended to be played through multiple times to reach max level. It starts off with simple numbers anyone can quickly identify with like you explained in your video but then as you get more and more powerful the numbers have to reflect that. At some point you transition to numbers in the tens of thousands and above and the numbers no longer mean anything because theyre too big to decipher, also they take up so much more of the screen and become an eye sore and distraction
Honestly, whenever i'm playing a game with numbers, i'm too busy trying to make sure my shots actually land to get a chance to read any of them, let alone interpret what they really mean, meaning that unless i find some target dummies to go practice on, they're *always* obnoxious clutter to me. If I take the time to read those numbers, boom, i'm dead.
Numbers also increase exponentially per level, so you go from equipment being useful for multiple levels to becoming obsolete immediately upon leveling up. It's part of the reason why I've never really touched anything past TVM. I'll just restart with a fresh character instead of going into UVM
A perfect example of why I actually hate Borderlands. If you're going to make a looter shooter RPG you better actually make it feel good to get to a high level, but every Borderlands game I've played makes it feel worse.
@@lhfirex I think the problem with Borderlands is the guns don't really change as the player levels up and so it's only really the player's skills that noticeably increase the player's power. In the original Borderlands I actually had a lot of fun playing at max level but that might partially be because with ammo regeneration there is no reason not to use the big guns that chew through ammo (I also think them continually adding more variables and combinations to weapons and equipment means it's more difficult to get drops that are actually useful).
@@jcohasset23that's why I use the gibbed editor to upgrade the gear to my current level. Yah I shouldn't have to use a save editor to enjoy the game properly but gear leveling is not really an issue until you're level 65+ for BL2 which at that point is the extreme end game. I enjoy the core game loop enough but also am realistic enough to understand that needing to farm for the perfect gear every level is a ridiculous ask of the player.
Your bit about roguelikes hiding numbers reminds me of what Dead by Daylight had for ages - the item descriptions would say things like "slightly increases healing rate" or "moderately reduces charge time" (with the 'x-ly increase/decreases' in bold for extra emphasis!). The numbers were there, they just had to be datamined by tech-savvy members of the community. An attempt at simplicity? Maybe, but it just ended up making things unclear as for one item 'slightly' might mean 10% where for another it would be 25%. Eventually the developers did cave and just put the numbers on, but they held out for a baffling amount of time.
I'd say being obtuse would make sense in that case, given that DBD is ostensibly a horror game. Putting hard numbers on everything would remove a degree of uncertainty (and thus tension).
The DbD devs are notoriously bullheaded and refuse to do the simplest of changes unless their backs are to a wall. I mean they only recently added in an FoV slider into the game despite it being requested since launch...Which was 8 years ago.
@@Warcrafter4 Can't forget them dragging their feet on accessibility too. When someone requested colourblind options, one of their head people said as close to "Who cares? Fuck colourblind people" as you can get in corporate speak.
Sounds like they didn't actually have a clear reason for doing it that way in the first place. If they didn't want the descriptions to be filled with numbers then they could have standardized the words to number associations. Like GW1's touch range, adjacent, nearby, in the area, hearing range. Another option is show word description by default but have a hotkey to display the numbers under the hood.
4:16 That's a damn good question for a dev / team to ask! Really liking the Cold Take series (hard for me to try new content, mental lock-ups). Nice, chill tone and really interesting, good faith conversations about video game shit in depth. Super enjoyable format, video edits are nicely done to my pleb viewer eyes. Merci for the content / effort. One day I will make some kind of donation to Second Wind, I have to. You guys have given me so much as a viewer (= ~a random canadian viewer
Willingness / desire to do something but brain doesn't let me. I do things I don't like and am able to accomplish things I wouldn't want to but sometimes for certain things I just get locked up and unable to do em (positive things usually) @@KWBR1123
If my numbers increase at the same rate as my enemy's numbers, why should I bother caring? The numbers can't be compared with each other and there's no more "ground truth" to identify if "75" is good. This is more a knock against level scaling I suppose - why bother upgrading if the enemies upgrade as well? Feels like I'm not even upgraded.
I do distinctly remember getting burned by excessive math before, and that game was The Ruined King Runeterra RPG that released a few years back. Turns out when you combine a complicated stat system where different items prioritize different stats, sometimes to dramatic effect, with an incremental upgrade system where you expect to get a constant stream of slightly better stuff, you can easily find yourself spending a lot of time trying to figure out which piece of gear you want to fit into each slot. This was already somewhat of a problem in something like Borderlands, but it's so much worse in Ruined King where you have 6 different characters with 4 or 5 equipment slots each. I found myself spending more time on the equipment tab than I did actually playing the game because you're just getting a *constant* stream of new stuff and my RPG instinct is constantly going "ooh, new thing! Better see if it's better than my current equipment so that I don't fall behind". Having an overly complex stat system can really bog down a game if it's paired with rapid progression.
You should have the blowback when Nintendo first unveiled Wind Waker in ~2002. After the dark and edgy Majora's Mask, seeing a "kiddy" cell-shaded Link drove some people up a wall. Now it's one of the best remembered Zeldas of all time.
Neckbeards have been flip flopping on the art style since its inception. Some people like cool looking games, and i guess other people dont enjoy cool aesthetics. Simple as that really
@@Pazuzu4All no thats more because the announcement teaser was completely different than the end product. The reveal had a much more edgy look to it like twilight princess. It was a totally different game than what we got. Thats why people initially complained, but i bet kids on the playground missed the nuance and repeated the simplest and hardest point to argue against since its subjective
Because it's flat and simplistic, and it has all of the artifacting of 3D with none of the artistic control of 2D. Aliasing and shimmering, inconsistent line weights, uncanny valley movement, lighting makes no sense... And Borderlands in particular is just fucking ugly by design
6:31 honestly this point is why noita sits at the top of the roguelike pyramid for me. it lets you do whatever you want immediately, but the environment pushes you to better yourself or just be crushed. then it gives you immaculate, diegetic tools for doing so and it gives you the numbers - but figuring out what they truly mean is the real challenge. and not killing yourself with what you've made. it's an amazing dance of knowledge fighting mystery, somehow managing to live up to being a game about magic and alchemy.
I feel like we're all glossing over a very big point that we all need to remember when we rag on Suicide Squad: the devs themselves aren't the bad guys. They were the helpless martyrs forcibly sent out to die by the disconnected CEOs and boardroom executives that don't care about anything other than themselves.
Yes and no. There were definitely devs crying about Elden Ring, BG3, and Palworld. There's a lot of devs that have found big success in mediocrity, and their egos crumble, when actually good games arrive and blow up, that contradict what they know.
Strikingly, I see a similar dichotomy play itself out all the time in tabletop RPGs. Some DMs/GMs/Refs will toss out game-mechanical numbers like it's nothing, and others are super coy about keeping all numbers (and sometimes even all dice) hidden from the players at all times. I'm firmly in the former camp, because I like to give players actionable information, and because I want them to know for a fact that I'm never fudging numbers or rolls behind the screen. But sometimes, the way I referee a game of D&D will crash headlong into the differing expectations of a player who has only ever played with coy, info-hiding DMs. If I ever say something like, "the knight has plate and a shield, so roll to hit AC 2," or "trolls have 6+ hit dice, so that's three attacks at THAC0 13 coming your way," or almighty Flying Spaghetti Monster forbid, "You land a crushing blow on the dragon for 9 damage! It's got 23 hp left, who's next?" … some players are just super put off by that. For most of them, after the initial shock of experiencing a different approach wears off, they just accept it, or they even get properly into it; but a few don't like it at all. They *want* the information to be hidden from them. Even if I point out that their characters are *there* and can see the enemies' armor and movements and wounds, these players will still argue that their knowing the numbers is a bad for their immersion. The attitude does baffle me a little bit. I suppose I can sympathize a little, with players who want their tabletop gaming to be more of a pure "improv theater" experience. But I don't actually see how knowing the numbers gets in the way of it; and none of them can ever explain to me why that might be.
I and my players like hiding numbers. It's part of the suspense and as a result, it reinforces the unspoken contract that I have to 1 : be truthful, and 2 : be precise in my descriptions.
i suppose because numbers are very concrete and direct, which is like the opposite of immersive. hard to be immersive if you can see the cogs in the machine. theres also presumably other aspects to it, like how, while sure you could see wounds and armour on an enemy, you'd have to estimate how well they are fairing or how effective something is. there is an element of deception and obfuscation to many settings and numbers do the opposite. you cant exactly pretend to be weak or hurt to lower someones guard if your real stats are right on display. its very hard to make numbers diagetic, it's even harder if you're being as blunt about it as you describe it, so i understand how that could be immensly immersion breaking ofcourse numbers can be useful and can make things fairer if you know exactly whats going on, but thats also kind of the problem isnt it? knowing too much, more than you should
@@Sopsy_Hallowalready said what I had I mind, but to add to it; I guess moreso than immersion, it helps with roleplaying? If the players are role-playing characters who are not numbers inclined, suddenly having access to the exact parameters of the universe could border TMI at times, when often you could get by with just having a 'feel' for the scene. I guess one analogy I'd use is imagine you're watching an NBA game and the announcer goes "there goes! he shoots outside the 3-point line! but his bicep's strength are off by 2 parameters, and the the shot is off-angle by 12 degrees, the ball soars in the air and it misses the ring by 7.3 inches" or something like that. I'd imagine people will think the announcer went nuts.
Wouldn't be able to live without damage numbers in TF2. Looking at the few examples of them in this video makes me appreciate the way they're made in that game even more. The health numbers are consistent among classes, so you don't have to do much mental math to calculate how much health your opponent has, the amount of damage done can be indicated by the pitch of the hit sound as well as the text itself, the font is small and non-intrusive, even if you're playing using rapid fire weapons. Gotta appreciate the little things.
tbf the game didn't launch with those, valve was up their own about how you didnt need them because you could gauge health based on blood fx and voice lines (peak dev-brain), but after a bit they conceded to the quake players low pitch hitsounds on high damage shots is so good though, pure dopamine
I remember the first time i came in contact with algebra in my school. Up to that point i liked math. But then they added letters to the math problems and it just messed things up for me. Too me letters were limited to the alphabet and numbers to math. And all of a sudden they decided to mix things up.
Okay, I've been talking about "numbers" a lot recently, because I think it's the key factor in how much like an RPG a given game does or doesn't feel. Every time the debate about what counts as an RPG comes up I come back to this same point. When FFXVI was nominated for best RPG last year, there was a lot of debate about whether it should really count as one. It's part of a long-running franchise that started as RPGs and, as far as mainline entries go, have always been considered to be RPGs, but this one departed the most from the formula by most peoples' metrics, mine included. I personally think that "RPG" has nothing to do with "role playing" in our day and age. What does that even mean? You play a role in *every* videogame. In Baldur's Gate 3, you get to pick who and what you are and what role you'll play in the events of the game. In Legend of Zelda games you play as Link, and Link is only ever the silent protagonist who embodies the courageous adventurer fighting against evil. One *gives* the player a role to perform, and the other *asks* the player what role they'd like to play. They are both ultimately having you *play* a role, however. So if RPGs have nothing to do with roles, then what's the deal? I think it has everything to do with pencils and paper vs computers. Before the idea of a videogame was popular or even possible, Dungeons and Dragons was done with pencils and paper, and in order to get any level of detail that would elevate it above merely an elaborate board game or card game, you needed to represent everything with a number. This allows a dungeonmaster to be the human processor of the game and assign and change numbers as needed. That stuff is only there as busywork in order to create visual and thus graspable representations of an alternate universe with its own laws. A make believe game is not far off, but having numbers allows everyone to agree on what's going on in everyone's imagination because you've now brought the mental into the physical. Now enters computing. A computer takes the processing requirements away from a human and increases its speed by impossible levels, so now the original Legend of Zelda, while we may think of it as an adventure game, is actually just Dungeons and Dragons with most of the numbers hidden. We might quibble about the fact that Zelda has far less player agency than Dungeons and Dragons, and in the early stages of gaming, RPG did indeed have more of the meaning of "I choose my role." But nowadays, just look at anything that's considered an RPG or has "RPG elements" and let's seen what that actually means. It's almost always indicating a gradual and dynamic power increase represented by numbers. Levels, exp, skill trees, damage numbers, gear score, these almost always garner the term "RPG elements" from news outlets and reviewers, and in the most all-encompassing situations garner the title "RPG." I think people have simply formed a permanent connection between the idea of having numbers displayed and something being an RPG because the most famous RPG back in the day was all about numbers. This was only a consideration due to technological restraints, but now even without those same constraints, people are still attached to the *aesthetic* of numeric representation and I think that's why it is such a large contributor to peoples' willingness to call something an RPG or not. In conclusion, I feel like the way that people nowadays decide how and where the term RPG gets applied is a calculus that involves how many background processes of a game are represented directly to the player as a number and secondarily how much control the player has in manipulating said numbers. It's not merely about whether or not you have player agency.
I think you really hit it. RPG in video games nowadays as I like to say means roll play and not role-play. Role-play being putting yourself in the role of a character, which most games feature from uncharted to baldurs gate to skyrim. Roll play being a pun on dice rolls referring to the mathematical system the game runs on like stats and how it effects damage calculations. Modern marketing has made the terms RPG or RPG elements refer to the ability to have some customization in your characters progression be it stat allocation, ability assignment or skill tree. Personal pet peeve is the entirely linear skill trees some games have, just make them unlock at a certain point int he story if your skill tree is a straight line. You can take this lack of proper definition even further to the other subgenres of RPGs. Like JRPG means Japanese RPG, though most people(myself included) no longer really equate JRPG from being from Japan but rather the way it handles combat. Taking the old Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest style of combat; turn based on not reliant on position/not played on a grid. I think many people would consider Sea of Stars a JRPG though it was made in Canada. And if I asked you what was the best selling JRPG of 2022, I doubt many peoples first thought would be Elden Ring, though it is an RPG and From Software is a Japanese company. Don't even get me started on CRPGs, which are generally defined as the isometric, party based RPGs like Baldurs gate or Pillars of Eternity being turn-based or RTwP with positional combat. Even though the C in CRPG literally just means computer, so every single RPG video game is a CRPG. ARPG can range from anything like diablo-style isometric dungeon crawlers to the 1st/3rd person games like skyrim. Genres become a mess real fast as the adapt and evolve.
Numbers are also a convenient way to compare things. Imagine playing an ARPG and you have to pick up every sword then try to find consistent enemies to compare them with.
Hitmarkers exist so no point in displaying numbers. Hitmarker can be also colored, white - body, red - headshot or kill. You can even add a sound indicator to differentiate between these
Fun fact about numbers i learned literally the other day: when they ported No One Lives Forever to consoles - they replaced the PC UI showing HP/ammo as numbers to now be exclusively in bars (yes, even ammo). Because, i assume, they didn't want to scare the more ""casual"" audience of consoles with scary math. So maybe there is something to that whole number hatred among certain audiences, and why the rest of us don't mind of even welcome such clear feedback. Except for the Suicide Squad - i've seen bukkake doujins with less stuff flying on into your face
Re roguelikes and concealing information: This is a very old tradition. Rogue did this. NetHack did this (and still does, their last update was about a year ago). The idea, in theory, is that you're supposed to figure things out the hard way. The NetHack community even refers to the wiki and other external sources of information as "spoilers." The catch is, there are no reported instances of a person beating NetHack without reading spoilers. Relatively few people have even attempted such a feat. So the whole thing's a bit silly, if you ask me.
Oh, the doom guy most certainly does math. He ADDS bullets to the bodies of his foes in order to SUBTRACT the number of enemies in his way. His bombs and missiles MULTIPLY the number of chunks flying through the air while his chainsaw efficiently DIVIDES monsters in twain.
This was interesting. I’m playing Wo Long at the moment. At the start of your video I thought “oh yeah, I’d turn those numbers off if I could, I’ll try that”, but within 5 minutes you’d given them value
Remember when games used to have enemies visibly flinch when you shot them? Nowadays, they just make a number appear and nothing else. Which in turn makes all of the weapons feel like BB guns, since the enemies literally do not react to them. As an example, compare shooting an enemy in TimeSplitters to Borderlands. Numbers are just a lazy and "gamey" way to show that you're doing something. Which I find funny, since people consider older games like Doom to be a time when games were more "gamey", but enemies in Doom actually react to being shot, instead of just showing a number.
Damage numbers in games are usually tied to level scaling too, an arbitrary "progression" system that attempts to up the ante continuously while never really changing the actual interactions (the enemies you encounter scale with your character's level after all, so you might as well play through the entire thing on level 1, in the case of elder scrolls games), and the only difference between a draugr wight and a draugr overlord is the arbitrary numbers assinged to them, it's the exact same model and moveset otherwise. You still press the same buttons you did when you had the level 1 stick, that level 50 shiny sword of shiny swordiness fulfills the same function as the stick, it, at best, entertains the most lizard-brained appeals, giving a sense of progression where nothing actually changes except the numbers, or the appeal of big numbers which are just big because they lack a comparison to anything real. Damage number systems may have made sense as an approximate model for character health during a time of serious technological limitations - but that time ended more than 10 years ago, and realistic physics-based damage models have long been established as a possibility, doubling down on item tiers and level scaling is just psychological trickery, and not a serious approach to game design. What's the point of clinging to a cultural artifact that stopped being a consequence of the limitations of the medium, when more accurate models are possible, or you could take a completely different approach that doesnt even need such mathematical scaling models?
Ok, my theory is that First, there were tabletop wargames and RPGs, where numbers were there to represent rules and constraints beset upon players, so that players don't just make shit up, and instead have some tangible and observable indicators of what they can and cannot do. As a side effect, it turned out that optimizing those numbers turned out to be quite fun Then came video games (and, uh, teletype games) - roguelikes, early RPGs, MUDs and more, imitating those tabletop experiences, where players couldn't have been given as much agency, because playsessions were orchestrated by well-defined and restrictive algorithms which couldn't really rely on anything but numbers to drive the gameplay. They basically doubled down on the numbers aspect of the tabletops to provide fun, and fun, it was. Though numbers were still means to an end, i.e. they were there to represent gameplay mechanics and things that you would do in tabletops Years later came Hack-n-Slash RPGs, which pushed further into the numbers game. Optimizing the numbers was the main appeal and selling point of Hack-n-Slash RPGs, all the while other RPG elements were stripped down. This is when numbers became the end goal, and it proven to be fun and addictive Then came MMORPGs, which had pragmatic reasons to delve deeper into numbers. In those, you want your players to play the game for a long time, since they will be paying for subscription for as long as they play. The bigger the number ranges are, the more opportunities the developers have at controlling the player progression. You can drip feed gradual number increases so to keep your players hooked, all the while indefinitely adding bigger numeric goals to work towards, without the need to introduce new game progression elements. You're supposed to take your time playing MMORPGs, so it is only so natural that mobs have numeric healthbars you would hack away at the way you would chop down a tree - gradually, swing by swing. Beefy numeric healthbars is a game design concession, somewhat purposefully making the game less fun, but with the goal of making you get your dopamine hit whenever your numbers get bigger. And then it kinda looped back to genres where numbers were not necessary. Action games have more direct ways of providing player agency, it's just that numbers have proven to be addictive enough to become a substitute for more tangible ways of representing the player's impact on the game world.
Idk, maybe it's ADHD, but watching "numbers go up" gives me a certain joy I can't really explain. Too many effects on them is a little overstimulating though. Having an open to turn them off or move them around is definitely a good thing, as not everyone has the same preferences.
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I will, because from one VO to another your work is impressive.
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There's no way that this isn't going to sound mean, Believe it or not, that's not the intent..
So there is a debate argument, and then there is a logical argument... Both have to follow a certain amount of logic, one very specifically does not delve deeply into counter point that might hollow out the framework of the argument because the objective goal is winning.. this is pretty much a series of that... And it's.. honestly it's very.. very Reddit..
It's like a fanboys argument for damage numbers, except who, why? That's the confusing part.. and it's not treated with that ideological polarization.. and yet.. for every door opened on the ideal pathway of supporting statements.. any sort of redirect or gaping hole in the floor is just subconsciously navigated like it wasn't even there..
You know what's also a universal language... Somebody's skull getting popped open.. did I shoot him in the foot.. did it look like I shot him in the foot? I don't know I can't see it.. there were too many damage numbers in the way.
Sure, rather than using modern technology and having any sort of environmental impact that has any sort of comparative standing against the fact that we modeled the cavities in the guy's teeth.. but... I mean the thought never occurred to us, half of us still play Counter-Strike at 4x3 stretched out to 16x9.. we're working on impulses here buddy! Light flash satisfaction! And 9 out of 10 casinos think this works... and it does! Just ask any MMO player! And only ask them..
Also, something to note... yes, you are correct... the thought did never occur to us that environmental deformation might be a immersive feature but it's okay because the damage numbers would cover that up anyways lol.. silly!
You could stop hitting the interact key there.. we didn't want things like the environment to be too distracting or inconsistent when trying to minmax, no you can't pick anything up here lol... static meshes baby!
If certain things didn't lead to other things, and these weird isolated pockets within game development that can form a completely different picture what things are and what's a priority within even some of the same branches... I'd probably be less irritated about the resurgence of the numbers in the time that we have all of the capabilities to actually not have to show any of them and still convey the same information...
But that's not even a brain fart anymore in a lot of studios developers and theprogramthe worse it gets.. we're not striving for better anymore we're not trying to outdo ourselves anymore we're trying to delve back into the past at this point.. and they don't know any better cuz they don't understand the forward momentum that we lost, and honestly at 29... that might be you.
But.. I'm more worried about The fact that everything is quotable no matter how completely BS it is when you think about it for half a second.. and how many times I've heard people explain why things are the way they are, because of marketing team was throwing some spin on something..
And it's just bad form, and I'm sure this isn't great either.. but you're in that position where you've got to actually try and hold a higher standard when conveying information no matter how Entertainment focused.. The genuinely doesn't change anything, especially with commentary.
Such a silly thing to damage number or stat number or not to stat number on the screen, to be throwing all those words up there at.. but but if you got this far then you should know, problem isn't The subject matter or whether you do four or whether against.. The problem is presenting an argument like it's a marketing pitch where you just skip over everything that doesn't fit, no matter how blaringly it may or may not exist...
A debate or a discussion I guess to differentiate the two from the start.. and I'm certain to really absolutely loathe debates.. that being said, there's a point where the standard for actually using actual facts or thoughts or things will be treated as an exceptional high note to the norm, as opposed to only using specific ones being a negative.. because when The tipping point of uncoiling spaghetti from one's ass is the general sign of a knowledgeable individual.. yeah.. One of those is less egregious and somewhat exponentially.. but one leads to the other.. and it's amazing how little thought we're training ourselves and the next generation to put into jumping on any visual artifact that construed as a train...
Hyperbolic at all? Maybe... But.. in 5 years maybe not... But if I'm right but then making that kind of connection isn't even going to be on the program... Much less the title page.
It would be cool if you could include the names of the games somewhere. Maybe in the description, transcript, subtitles, or on screen. I couldn't find anywhere what game is shown at 8:24
The fact a 29 year old called himself a “geriatric” of any kind made me crumble into dust.
Everyone over 25 thinks they are old, and everyone older than them has a petit crisis about it when they hear it. It seems to me there is a pretty simple solution to this.
As an elderly 26 year old, I feel you when teens call themselves old
I thought he was closer to my age, lol. I'll be 36 this year, so I guess I'm positively ancient now.
@@rorysimpson8716 Is it Logan's Run?
I'm almost 38 now and have been blasting things in the first person since Wolf 3D... I feel like I should be in a retirement home.
“I’m 29 this year”
He’s younger than me? Wow
That’s the number that shook me this episode
@@Spirited_skiing same
Just remember.. the numbers are meaningless
@@RowdyTheHitman haha. Fair point
@@RowdyTheHitman Do keep in mind that some numbers should be sufficiently large
7:15 "Those who are not as math inclined. You know, English majors."
It was an English major in college who once told me "Math is not an exact science".
To no one's surprise, he was failing math that semester.
xkcd #675 feels somewhat relevant.
Was he really wrong, though? Is math an exact science? Science relies on empirical evidence, math strictly speaking does not. We're not trying to find the exact value of Pi by drawing figures with different ratios between circumference and area and testing if they are a circle. We have logically deduced that all figures that are circles must have that relationship described as Pi or they would not be a circle. I suspect a decent argument could be made that while math is invaluable to science, math is not in and of itself a science.
@@monochromaticspider Are you trying to imply that mathematics doesn't require empirical evidence? I think you're arguing from a place of deep ignorance because that is a wild claim.
I'm more of a language/humanities type but i would argue that math is the most exact science of them all.
@@monochromaticspiderto be an exact science is not to be based on empirical evidence.
An exact science basically means that every question has one right answer; an objectively right answer.
“You can differentiate the numbers using colors”
Nick, you forgot to take the noir filter off, it’s all grey
🎵Oh, I've got heartache by the numbers, troubles by the score... Every day you give me loot and and it's become a chore 🎵
🎵Yes I've got heartaches by the number, a war that I can't win, but the day that I stop counting that's the day my war will end🎵
new vegas reinstall incoming
🎵Heartache #1 was playing Borderlands alone. I thought that I would get by, but was never thrown a bone.
Heartache #2 was when I did the Outrider's craze, But all of us could see the quickly falling numbered days.🎵
"When I got this gamepass, i was hoping for less grinding"
🎵Heartache #3 was killing time with Remnant 2... Bullshit bosses made me count again
With hopeful heart I minmaxed tryn'a optimize my shots
Done and then ran out of time to play 🎵
"Doom Guy does two things: ripping and tearing. Neither of which are math."
I love this line, haha!!
Frosts voice coupled with the napkin art is great budget- i mean juxtaposition
Chattin at the bar over a drink and the dude only has cocktail napkins to explain himself and he just gotta explain himself, i dig it.
@@dreamedoutdoll that strikes on the perfect vibe of Cold Take, it's like settling down into your favorite barstool and letting your old drinking buddy talk you ear off except I'm actually listening
can't have a bottle episode without a bottle :V
@@dreamedoutdoll The aesthetic fits perfectly. Bugetin- I mean creativity manifests in many forms and they're doing a great job. Not that theres any place for cynicism in this space or anything...
"Can't attach a stiff drink to an email" love it.
side note, I just had a conversation about how math is literally everything, and then this video dropped. Love this series!
I used to cosplay, and the most difficult piece of clothing I ever made (Dr. Cid's coat from FF XII) I ended up using a ludicrous amount of math on to the point that at the time I probably wasn't far away from being able to draw the entire coat via formulas.
The person who_does_ invent a way to attach stiff drinks to emails is going to use benjamins like tissues.
I love Warframe’s way of keeping the numbers useful. Small damage is white and hard to see. Shield damage is blue and slightly bigger. Crit damage starts yellow but goes up to red. They also recently added an option to remove and modify how you see damage on your screen. But I still love seeing big red crit numbers fill my screen.
And it only took them 10 years to get it right!
I'm only kind of kidding. Melee numbers flying off screen as you follow-through your swing had been a problem for years, fixed barely two months ago.
This shit is hard to do well. And even in the updated system, they weight how long the numbers stay on screen so that you get an inaccurate intuitive feel for how many crits you are doing as the little white numbers fade away faster, if they appear at all.
Luckily, there are settings to tweak that behaviour.
Also, damage dealt by abilities is purple if it's not to shields or a crit.
also its not a simple "numbers go up" game, weapons have fixed damage, and its up to you to make them as broken as you can. its a looter shooter without linear progression.
I absolutely agree. It's one of the few games where I enjoy the damage numbers, when I see 1 mil red crit damage my brain gets massive dopamine hit
I appreciate that they’ve now added the option to round the visual number clutter, though I need to see how big of a difference hiding the numbers fully would make.
As an RPG enjoyer, I was initially excited when games started to trend towards including RPG elements, and numbers as a result. That excitement quickly faded when it became clear how shallow those numbers were and were going to remain. I really hope games trend away from this soon and do anything else for visual feedback.
I'm reminded of how the old 90s Doom showed the damage you dealt and received with nothing but blood and screams. Monster bleeds and screams, you did damage. You avatar is bleeding and groaning, you're hurt. It communicated exactly the same as health bars and floating damage numbers in a far more elegant and integrated way.
The problem is, in RPG you can usually actively do thing that affects the numbers. In a lot of genre they're like "hey have some numbers" but you can't really do anything to make the numbers bigger except find the next piece that's a 5% upgrade on all your stats, so there's no feeling of "hey I used X with Y coupled with Z spell and so on and so forth and now I made numbers bigger"
@@LadyDoomsinger I remember wincing when I got caught in five exploding barrels or some other massive damage, and the screen taking several seconds to go back from deeply red-tinted to normal (usually to find out I'd just died). It was amazingly effective.
@@paulgibbon5991 It's obviously not the right way for *every* game - but I think for a fast paced action game, that involves violence as it's core gameplay loop, it is a far more interesting way of doing it.
@@LadyDoomsinger Er... what? I'm fairly certain Doom's HUD always told you precisely how much health and armour you had as numerical values on either side of the avatar you mentioned.
The whole "numbers are visual clutter" thing is something I definitely felt in Vampire Survivors. I literally do not care how much damage my weapons are doing as it's not information that actually helps me. The much more useful visual information is seeing that my enemies got hit in the first place so I know if they get knocked back, or seeing them go through their death animation.
Yeah, the damage numbers absolutely are meaningless in that game and it certainly doesn't help that a few minutes into the round there are so many numbers that you can't even distinguish them any more. That said, and I'm playing devil's advocate here, I think it's easily argued that the damage numbers in that game are more about adding to the visual chaos that's meant to represent your (increasing) power. In that sense, I think they're more akin to particle effects than actual damage numbers.
@@WPPatriot Indeed, the numbers there are pointedly to tickle the lizard brain (or rat brain as was called here); the whole game's progression and leveling are geared towards drip feeding dopamine through numbers and a casino's flashiness. Equating them to particle effects is a good take I hadn't considered.
0:53 I think that's where most of the issue comes from the reference point for said numbers moving. The division is a good example of this. The enemies level up with you. So it feels like your not changing.
Like if I'm level 50 and my super special revolver can kill someone in the same amount of time as my starting pistol when I was at level 2, I don't feel like the numbers matter
@@Dannyjake32 The worst part is - the numbers do matter. It's the progression that doesn't matter. Because if you were to switch back to that starting pistol you would be doing considerably less damage. The result is that you're not upgrading your gear to get stronger, you're upgrading your gear to avoid getting weaker. Which means that the best you can hope for is stagnation.
@@Former_Halo_Fan A good system will have equipment do more interesting things at higher levels beyond just doing more damage or having the player take less damage. I may have just had really bad luck with loot drops but I ended up quitting BL2 a few hours into NG+ because I was finding I was going a few levels between finding anything better than what I had which made combat rather a slog (heck at one point I celebrated hitting lvl 35 by buying common vendor trash that was several levels better than what I had at the time and was an upgrade to my existing equipment). In the Borderlands series the only thing that actually feels more powerful at higher levels is the player's skills.
I know this is a weirdly specific take - but the new intro means so much to me I love the noir style Frost used for his videos, but as a recovering alcoholic, the drink pouring at the start of the old era was always difficult for me. I still watched, but it always tripped something in me. Love Frost, his tone, his insight, his style. I’m so much more comfortable every time these new ones pop up.
Normally when you see someone frantically scribbling on napkins they're either having an invention montage or a mental breakdown.
Or both?
Something about the thought of feeling a felt tip or marker pen draw roughly onto napkins makes my skin crawl and my lips draw in. Great video as always!
I literally had to tab out and just stare at my desktop lol
Yeah, you're not alone. Got the goosebumps all along my skin seeing that.
The whole time I found myself staring, waiting for the ink to oversaturate the napkin and start tearing.
Somehow it made the video way more stressful than I expected.
That's ASMR, baby.
Yeah I hate that shit too lol
"The numbers were meaningless."
Perfectly describes my entire scholarship relationship with Maths.
I was mega bad at Maths but pretty decent and sometimes good in Physics and even better in Engineering.
Same equations, but with context, giving them meaning.
Now, back to the episode!
Pure maths is an art. Utility isn't the point. Number theory is thousands of years old and was almost entirely useless until the 1970s when it became the backbone of encryption algorithms. People do maths because they delight in the beauty of its structures, not because it's useful.
See Paul Lockhart's 'A Mathematicians Lament.'
@@smoothinvestigator I can understand there's beauty in pure maths. I respect it, I'm just unable to see it.
Same
Exactly! It's useful to know how much damage you're doing when you're attacking occasionally, but I don't want my screen filled with numbers if I'm attacking frequently.
There's a reason they change the value of the number, when you do multiple hits in quick succession in Elden Ring, rather than add new numbers.
How much damage you do could easily be communicated with violent blood spatters and screams of agony, you know... The numbers were just a sanitized, kid-friendly way of relaying the same information to players... And probably cheaper to code and animate as well.
@@LadyDoomsinger Numbers communicate what and how well the player is doing far faster and easier than blood splatters and screams. Lets put two enemies side by side, a regulars sized guy and a really big guy. You hit em the same way and the same number will pop up, you did the same damage. How would blood splatters and screams do that?
Would the big guy bleed the same amount as the normal guy? Less? More? Does he shout the same? What if you have a little guy in armor and a big guy without?
What if you're fighting alot of guys? What if there's more then 10 types of guy who interact with your weaponry differently? Do you make a scream and blood splatter for every possible combination and situation? How do you make them distinct enough to give the information the player is looking for without overwhelming them?
What if the player uses a grenaid and they all blood splatter and scream in agony at once?
Blood splatters and screams work well in video games, but not in every videogame nor in most ones about fighting things. Otherwise why do actual fighting games use health bars instead of blood splatters and screams?
Sure asset numbers come in, you can only make so many assets related to taking damage and sure using solely numbers is moire kid friendly then lopping off arms, but that's nowhere near to the only or even main reason they use em. Different games have different amounts of information to convey and different allowances for how they can convey it.
So for a bunch of games, numbers are the best choice, for some, sounds, for some colours, for some bars, for some spreadsheets, for some blood splatters and screams and for some nothing at all. Its reductive to say all games can easily convey this information via only one way.
@@ACEYGAMES I didn't say all games should do it - only that it could be done.
@@LadyDoomsinger You said it could be done "easily". They provided reasons why that is not the case.
@@thegrouchization 🙄 "Easy" is subjective.
Bartender: "Had this one PI come in, guy was loco, ravin about some shmuck "Nick" and how he turned the numbers off his waifu, guy paid his tab and left a graph on a napkin"
@@SageWon-1aussie Some say he's still at the bar to this day, racking up the mother of all tabs.
Life bars have always been suitable to my purposes. You can quickly see if you are dealing and receiving the right amount of damage or if you are in over your head and need to level. It's like a debug tool they forgot to turn off.
I just realized it's Pokémon's main way of showing damage, despite being a RPG. The only number on screen all the time is your HP. Numbers are surprisingly absent.
You know if it's effective or not, but not how much it did.
You can see Move's Base Power and Accuracy, and that's pretty much the obly significant numbers you get in battle.
There's a lot of thing to say about Pokémon, but that battle UI is honestly pretty cool and effective, and we really take this for granted
@@shytendeakatamanoir9740
Another detail that I liked about older gen Pokémon was that the rate the HP bar goes up/down was constant. So the more damage you got, the longer the HP bar's animation took. There's that added tension of staring at your HP bar, waiting for it to stop going down (or hoping the bar keeps going down if it's the enemy's.)
Only downside was it made turns much longer, on top of the unskippable walls of text between commands.
@@scrittle yeah, I really miss the old behavior. "Making the combat faster" wouldn't be a good excuse for the change, considering the walls of unskippable text and animations consistently took longer, and those stayed for many more gens.
It only makes sense to me for raid battles. Since the turns are somewhat asynchronous, you'd want a more consistent timing for every player. But those came out recently, and had their own timing issues.
"I'm 29 this year... a first person shooting geriatric"
Begrudingly sips coffee at 33
*wheezingly sips Ensure through a straw at 43*
1:59 I too like how numbers make clear that I hit thing and how good I hit it.
Teaching via "Want Big Number".
Well... That can be accomplished with excessive blood spatters, screams of agony, and general visceral ultra violence...
I kinda suspect that the numbers were just a kid-friendly way of communicating the same thing. Or it's cheaper to code and animate.
@@LadyDoomsinger Contextual clues can work, but you lose a lot of granularity that way. You can have a couple different tiers of explosion or screen shake, which is perfectly fine for games with more limited progression options, but if you've got a broader selection of different attacks or upgrade options or places you can hit, you pretty quickly run out of non-numeric ways to compare them to each other. That's not ideal, as much as overloading players with damage numbers also isn't ideal.
@@dudeguy2330 I suppose it depends on the type of game and the type of player.
My Warframe mindset right here
@@LadyDoomsingerExactly. I like numbers in Warframe but not Hunt Showdown. Hunt does an incredible job with its hitmarkers and sound effects.
The best implementation of damage numbers I've seen (although somewhat immersion-breaking) is the "shots to kill" number in Valkyria Chronicles. It tells you exactly what you need to know without forcing you to pause the game and pull out a calculator to check how many times you need to attack to kill the enemy.
It's great abstraction for games that have mostly fixed damage or games with very short time-to-kill. It makes decision-making feel more relevant/impactful without needing a calculator.
e.g. in Starcraft, most pros don't know/care how much damage a unit deals, or how much HP it has; what matters is how many times it needs to attack to kill a certain enemy, or how many attacks a unit can survive. Fewer numbers to worry about, and much easier to visualize.
"There is no knowledge that is not power."
-Mortal Kombat
Based.
It's when decimals get involved with numbers going up that really grinds my gears cause then it's completely negligible.
Ah, you're weapon hit's .03% harder now, woooo!
I'll give you .25x multipliers; but maybe that's just the Stepmania/DDR in me talking
“You can’t attach a stiff drink to an email” True but there has been many many times I wish I could😅. Another great Cold Take.
Business idea: Google Jack, a service that automatically purchases a bottle of jack daniel's online to be delivered it to the recipient of a gmail message when a subscribed user hits send.
Tim Cain did a video relatively recently on this very topic. Damaged numbers can serve a purpose, but not by themselves: expressing the kind and magnitude in some other way (i.e., font size, how the numbers move, colour) is just as important if not moreso. 26 damage lands differently depending on the mob, their resistances, and overall health, after all.
Hi Tim, it's us, everyone.
You should be able to do the same with simple shapes, sizes, and colours. The actual number isn't the information that is getting communicated most of the time.
as i slouch toward 40, it blows me away that Frost is 29
wow he is only 3 years older then me lol
Frost is a stats guy? That makes so much sense, and I appreciate this representation so much.
A man who understands numbers is a man after my own heart.
Appreciate the shout outs for frog fractions, the more people who try it the better. And the kick of nostalgia was pretty nice too
6:32 I've been working on a roguelike project, and one of my mandates for it is SHOW EVERYTHING. Even if it's in some sort of in-game encyclopedia, mastery of the mechanics is everything to this game, so there _must_ be some way for players to look into the specifics for optimizing.
Or you can do like slay the spire: Make a system that is so simple that you can show the player all the numbers, and trust me the numbers are everything, I've had many times that I was less than 20 HP away from beating a boss with 800 HP.
There are alternative ways to do visual ques as well, for those who don't like exact numbers. Just some ideas that I've seen:
- Sound design can be used to indicate a critical hit, a good hit, or a deflection/ineffective hit. If the sounds are rewarding, it won't take long for players to work out which is which. This can be accompanied with obvious VFX indicators of a damaging hit or a failure to damage.
- The enemy can be shown getting progressively damaged. Humanoid characters can loose armor/appear bloodied, or vehicles/robots can start to smoke or look like they're catching fire.
- A large enough hit can stagger the enemy, knock them down, or stun them.
- For less realistic games, damaged enemies can take on overglows of red or something similar when they're very damaged.
- There's also the option of doing numbers without having "numbers". For example, a enemy could have 5 dots about their head, which indicates that they can take 5 attack damage. The fewer dots that are displayed, the fewer attacks they can take.
The first game I remember playing with damage numbers was the original borderlands.
I did exactly what frost described. Shot different parts of the enemies bodies and saw the difference it made. My mind was blown. I knew headshots were better in any FPS, but I'd never seen it literally spelled out in front of me.
I loved it. I would spent ages trying out different stat combinations to see what resulted in the highest numbers. Generally, the higher base damage, the better was about as complicated as it got, but with some guns that had certain buffs it got pretty interesting.
And I've loved damage numbers ever since.
There definitely is a time and place for them. Not all games should have them. They look very out of place in a lot of games. But when they work, it's great.
I didn’t think I was into guys but Frost’s voice makes me question it sometimes…
aural sex
No matter what, it s completely normal to be frostsexual
Perfectly understandable
Try everything once :D
Ain't nothin' wrong with a little bi-curiosity 😄
A great example of balancing between conveyance and clarity is Dodonpachi. It's a bullet hell game where the main scoring mechanic is a single combo counter on the top right of your screen, which increases when you kill an enemy and resets when you go a few seconds without hitting anything. Anyone can pick up on it and intuitively understand that they need to chain as many enemies together as possible, and they might even start working out strategies just from playing the game, without consulting outside information or guides. Devil may cry's combo meter works much the same way. That can't be said for a lot of games, even many good ones, even ones that give more information up front.
another big point is that numbers shouldn't be treated as a replacement for actual feedback. Explosions, hitstun, or just general reactions can also go a long way in eliminating guesswork. If shooting your enemies in the foot makes them stop for a second, but shooting them in the head sends them staggering back, you've just accomplished the same thing as damage numbers. It's just that damage numbers are easier to implement.
I loved Sifu. It's one of my favourite games ever. There were no RPG elements at all. You won't "level up" by increasing numbers on a stats screen. But you do "level up" by learning enemy patterns, learning new combos, and learning the timing in attack and defence.
I did not expect a wild Mathil to show up in one of these videos. What a strange bit of overlap!
He IS definitely good at making numbers bigger!
Didn't expect to see Mathil in a Cold Take.
My worlds are colliding and I'm all here for it
I am going to watch more of these. As a game dev it has been helpful. Thank you.
"Doomguy only does two things: Rip and tear. Neither of those are math."
I dunno; tearing could be considered subtraction, as in tearing that demon's head off of his total mass.
There is some design rationale behind fostering intended behaviours through damage numbers (whether it is applied well or not, depends on the designer).
For small to mid sized number ranges for hitpoints and damage (single to double digit ranges) that are comprehensible, they tend to promote slower paced and more tactical play, able to do quick calculations in your head and the values are easy to identify and have high readability. In a turn based tabletop RPG or card game where potentially every hitpoint matters, it is easy to see that taking 3 damage when you have 12 HP is about a quarter of your HP, and so you can assess whether you want to engage certain encounters based on this knowledge, so the player's thought process is more thoughtful, and their actions deliberate, which is what those games are about.
For faster paced real-time games with hitpoints and damage values in the thousands coming in and going out every second, they emphasise getting players to not focus on the specific values and just enjoy the moment-to-moment gameplay and immediate experience without worrying about doing mundane math, so the numbers just turn into noise and get zoned out by the player and the focus becomes more on just having fun firing a machine gun at something or hacking away at it with a sword, and demonstrating more reflex based skill, which is entirely the point. The argument can be made that at this point they could even just be hidden, like in some of the examples in this video. Often just a preference of the designer.
I agree that in the second scenario, they should be hidden, but something has to take their place. Simply turning them off takes away hit indication too much without some other sort of replacement.
Love the video and totally cool with it being a secret advertisement for Frog Fractions. Anyone who hasn't played it should give it a shot, it's more fun than it looks.
Who needs animations and graphics? NAPKINS AND CRAYONS AND SHARPIES, LET'S GO
the number of markers your burning through writing on napkins and not paper is killing me.
Love the content frost
one thing that gets on my nerves numbers wise his health systems. if i have 150 hp , but i can still get two shot, then just give me a 3 hit system. (looking at the progression of the ratchet and clank series for this one.) went from simple here's 4 hits. if you get hit 4 times. you die upgradeable to a maximum of 8. then it went onto the sequel which went, a bit like the legend of zelda, just a round version of the hearts.maximum of 20 which could divide into 80 maximum if only taking 1 point of damage at a time. then the rest of the series, just had a boring blank/100 (once upgraded) but some harder hitting enemies could kills you in very few hits, in which case... just take me back to the first health system.
There is a difference: dividing the health bar into more parts means there can be chip damage. Then again, I don't think chip damage fits R&C.
@@Kenionatus it should, otherwise what's the point of the armour upgrades? but the second health system is probably my preffered system. but to each their own.
This segways nicely into something I've been thinking about a lot recently (also the fact we both turn 29 this year is the oddest coincidence to wake up to this day)
Damage is all relative. Ive played plenty of games where damage was up in the millions cause enemies had billions of health. At what point does such numbers have no meaning? 1 damage to something with a million health is barely a scratch. 1 damage in something where the health is in the single or low double digets only is like the loss of a limb!
A mobile game I once played underwent a numbers flattening just before shutting down. They also did a lot of other controversial changes I don't really understand it was all stat stuff and ability changes. It wasn't to bad. I hated no longer seeing the big numbers but things were dying basically just as quickly so it didn't really matter. Maybe a lil slower but that was fine.
However. They WAY over did it on the healing. My best healer could now only target 1 person when before she could target 2. And her healing spell didn't even move the health bar. Sure hero health got flattened but the healing got flattened way harder. I watched the numbers the next time she healed. I don't remember what it said but it was LOW and my characters had taken a few hundred or thousand damage. It was pitifully low. Low enough that healing was pointless and time would be better spent having 4 damage dealers to speed through encounters and just hope they tank everything.
I love this segment, the whole noir vibe and music, dialogue and writing, and more. It keeps me glued to hear what’s next. It’s the opposite approach from fully ramblomatic (and times past), yet Yahtzee has the fedora. I feel deep down all of second wind is an underground detective agency working as a gaming journalism front company (hey maybe Yahtzee’s next book? :) 😂
k1llsen won the Quake World Championship in 2022, when he was 35yo. Rapha won last year and he was 34 yo.
Always a good day when Frost does a Cold Take.
Borderlands 2 is the perfect example of a fun and useful number system that becomes irrelevent in the end game, its intended to be played through multiple times to reach max level.
It starts off with simple numbers anyone can quickly identify with like you explained in your video but then as you get more and more powerful the numbers have to reflect that. At some point you transition to numbers in the tens of thousands and above and the numbers no longer mean anything because theyre too big to decipher, also they take up so much more of the screen and become an eye sore and distraction
Honestly, whenever i'm playing a game with numbers, i'm too busy trying to make sure my shots actually land to get a chance to read any of them, let alone interpret what they really mean, meaning that unless i find some target dummies to go practice on, they're *always* obnoxious clutter to me. If I take the time to read those numbers, boom, i'm dead.
Numbers also increase exponentially per level, so you go from equipment being useful for multiple levels to becoming obsolete immediately upon leveling up. It's part of the reason why I've never really touched anything past TVM. I'll just restart with a fresh character instead of going into UVM
A perfect example of why I actually hate Borderlands. If you're going to make a looter shooter RPG you better actually make it feel good to get to a high level, but every Borderlands game I've played makes it feel worse.
@@lhfirex I think the problem with Borderlands is the guns don't really change as the player levels up and so it's only really the player's skills that noticeably increase the player's power. In the original Borderlands I actually had a lot of fun playing at max level but that might partially be because with ammo regeneration there is no reason not to use the big guns that chew through ammo (I also think them continually adding more variables and combinations to weapons and equipment means it's more difficult to get drops that are actually useful).
@@jcohasset23that's why I use the gibbed editor to upgrade the gear to my current level. Yah I shouldn't have to use a save editor to enjoy the game properly but gear leveling is not really an issue until you're level 65+ for BL2 which at that point is the extreme end game. I enjoy the core game loop enough but also am realistic enough to understand that needing to farm for the perfect gear every level is a ridiculous ask of the player.
So this is the first time I tried listening to a Cold Take through headphones, can recommend... silky smooth.
Your bit about roguelikes hiding numbers reminds me of what Dead by Daylight had for ages - the item descriptions would say things like "slightly increases healing rate" or "moderately reduces charge time" (with the 'x-ly increase/decreases' in bold for extra emphasis!). The numbers were there, they just had to be datamined by tech-savvy members of the community. An attempt at simplicity? Maybe, but it just ended up making things unclear as for one item 'slightly' might mean 10% where for another it would be 25%. Eventually the developers did cave and just put the numbers on, but they held out for a baffling amount of time.
I'd say being obtuse would make sense in that case, given that DBD is ostensibly a horror game. Putting hard numbers on everything would remove a degree of uncertainty (and thus tension).
The DbD devs are notoriously bullheaded and refuse to do the simplest of changes unless their backs are to a wall.
I mean they only recently added in an FoV slider into the game despite it being requested since launch...Which was 8 years ago.
@@Warcrafter4 Can't forget them dragging their feet on accessibility too. When someone requested colourblind options, one of their head people said as close to "Who cares? Fuck colourblind people" as you can get in corporate speak.
Sounds like they didn't actually have a clear reason for doing it that way in the first place. If they didn't want the descriptions to be filled with numbers then they could have standardized the words to number associations. Like GW1's touch range, adjacent, nearby, in the area, hearing range.
Another option is show word description by default but have a hotkey to display the numbers under the hood.
4:16 That's a damn good question for a dev / team to ask! Really liking the Cold Take series (hard for me to try new content, mental lock-ups). Nice, chill tone and really interesting, good faith conversations about video game shit in depth.
Super enjoyable format, video edits are nicely done to my pleb viewer eyes.
Merci for the content / effort. One day I will make some kind of donation to Second Wind, I have to. You guys have given me so much as a viewer (=
~a random canadian viewer
Hello, if it's not too personal what is a mental lock-up
Willingness / desire to do something but brain doesn't let me. I do things I don't like and am able to accomplish things I wouldn't want to but sometimes for certain things I just get locked up and unable to do em (positive things usually) @@KWBR1123
If my numbers increase at the same rate as my enemy's numbers, why should I bother caring? The numbers can't be compared with each other and there's no more "ground truth" to identify if "75" is good. This is more a knock against level scaling I suppose - why bother upgrading if the enemies upgrade as well? Feels like I'm not even upgraded.
I do distinctly remember getting burned by excessive math before, and that game was The Ruined King Runeterra RPG that released a few years back. Turns out when you combine a complicated stat system where different items prioritize different stats, sometimes to dramatic effect, with an incremental upgrade system where you expect to get a constant stream of slightly better stuff, you can easily find yourself spending a lot of time trying to figure out which piece of gear you want to fit into each slot. This was already somewhat of a problem in something like Borderlands, but it's so much worse in Ruined King where you have 6 different characters with 4 or 5 equipment slots each. I found myself spending more time on the equipment tab than I did actually playing the game because you're just getting a *constant* stream of new stuff and my RPG instinct is constantly going "ooh, new thing! Better see if it's better than my current equipment so that I don't fall behind". Having an overly complex stat system can really bog down a game if it's paired with rapid progression.
Thoughtful and stylish as always.
WAIT WHAT, people are hating the cell shading (or known as toon shading) art style now? WHY!
You should have the blowback when Nintendo first unveiled Wind Waker in ~2002. After the dark and edgy Majora's Mask, seeing a "kiddy" cell-shaded Link drove some people up a wall. Now it's one of the best remembered Zeldas of all time.
Neckbeards have been flip flopping on the art style since its inception. Some people like cool looking games, and i guess other people dont enjoy cool aesthetics. Simple as that really
@@Pazuzu4All no thats more because the announcement teaser was completely different than the end product. The reveal had a much more edgy look to it like twilight princess. It was a totally different game than what we got. Thats why people initially complained, but i bet kids on the playground missed the nuance and repeated the simplest and hardest point to argue against since its subjective
@@Pazuzu4AllThis would make sense why Toon Shading was a flash in the pan at one point.
Because it's flat and simplistic, and it has all of the artifacting of 3D with none of the artistic control of 2D. Aliasing and shimmering, inconsistent line weights, uncanny valley movement, lighting makes no sense...
And Borderlands in particular is just fucking ugly by design
All hail the algorithm
May it feed us the comntent we prey under, amen.
Likes for the Likes God!
Comments for the Comments Throne!
great work Sebs! thank you for your time and effort
6:31 honestly this point is why noita sits at the top of the roguelike pyramid for me. it lets you do whatever you want immediately, but the environment pushes you to better yourself or just be crushed. then it gives you immaculate, diegetic tools for doing so and it gives you the numbers - but figuring out what they truly mean is the real challenge. and not killing yourself with what you've made.
it's an amazing dance of knowledge fighting mystery, somehow managing to live up to being a game about magic and alchemy.
3:28 Nice
Or maybe...on ice?
Frost is on fire with these takes.
3:29 - Nice
This is the kinda content I love from cold take =)
"THE NUMBERS!! WHAT...ARE THEY SAYING?!"
I feel like we're all glossing over a very big point that we all need to remember when we rag on Suicide Squad: the devs themselves aren't the bad guys. They were the helpless martyrs forcibly sent out to die by the disconnected CEOs and boardroom executives that don't care about anything other than themselves.
Yes and no. There were definitely devs crying about Elden Ring, BG3, and Palworld. There's a lot of devs that have found big success in mediocrity, and their egos crumble, when actually good games arrive and blow up, that contradict what they know.
Strikingly, I see a similar dichotomy play itself out all the time in tabletop RPGs. Some DMs/GMs/Refs will toss out game-mechanical numbers like it's nothing, and others are super coy about keeping all numbers (and sometimes even all dice) hidden from the players at all times. I'm firmly in the former camp, because I like to give players actionable information, and because I want them to know for a fact that I'm never fudging numbers or rolls behind the screen.
But sometimes, the way I referee a game of D&D will crash headlong into the differing expectations of a player who has only ever played with coy, info-hiding DMs. If I ever say something like, "the knight has plate and a shield, so roll to hit AC 2," or "trolls have 6+ hit dice, so that's three attacks at THAC0 13 coming your way," or almighty Flying Spaghetti Monster forbid, "You land a crushing blow on the dragon for 9 damage! It's got 23 hp left, who's next?" … some players are just super put off by that. For most of them, after the initial shock of experiencing a different approach wears off, they just accept it, or they even get properly into it; but a few don't like it at all. They *want* the information to be hidden from them. Even if I point out that their characters are *there* and can see the enemies' armor and movements and wounds, these players will still argue that their knowing the numbers is a bad for their immersion.
The attitude does baffle me a little bit. I suppose I can sympathize a little, with players who want their tabletop gaming to be more of a pure "improv theater" experience. But I don't actually see how knowing the numbers gets in the way of it; and none of them can ever explain to me why that might be.
I and my players like hiding numbers. It's part of the suspense and as a result, it reinforces the unspoken contract that I have to 1 : be truthful, and 2 : be precise in my descriptions.
i suppose because numbers are very concrete and direct, which is like the opposite of immersive. hard to be immersive if you can see the cogs in the machine. theres also presumably other aspects to it, like how, while sure you could see wounds and armour on an enemy, you'd have to estimate how well they are fairing or how effective something is. there is an element of deception and obfuscation to many settings and numbers do the opposite. you cant exactly pretend to be weak or hurt to lower someones guard if your real stats are right on display.
its very hard to make numbers diagetic, it's even harder if you're being as blunt about it as you describe it, so i understand how that could be immensly immersion breaking
ofcourse numbers can be useful and can make things fairer if you know exactly whats going on, but thats also kind of the problem isnt it? knowing too much, more than you should
@@Sopsy_Hallowalready said what I had I mind, but to add to it; I guess moreso than immersion, it helps with roleplaying?
If the players are role-playing characters who are not numbers inclined, suddenly having access to the exact parameters of the universe could border TMI at times, when often you could get by with just having a 'feel' for the scene.
I guess one analogy I'd use is imagine you're watching an NBA game and the announcer goes "there goes! he shoots outside the 3-point line! but his bicep's strength are off by 2 parameters, and the the shot is off-angle by 12 degrees, the ball soars in the air and it misses the ring by 7.3 inches" or something like that.
I'd imagine people will think the announcer went nuts.
Killer video, love the idea behind it and the execution of it.
These videos are just so good and I want more of them
Wouldn't be able to live without damage numbers in TF2.
Looking at the few examples of them in this video makes me appreciate the way they're made in that game even more.
The health numbers are consistent among classes, so you don't have to do much mental math to calculate how much health your opponent has, the amount of damage done can be indicated by the pitch of the hit sound as well as the text itself, the font is small and non-intrusive, even if you're playing using rapid fire weapons.
Gotta appreciate the little things.
tbf the game didn't launch with those, valve was up their own about how you didnt need them because you could gauge health based on blood fx and voice lines (peak dev-brain), but after a bit they conceded to the quake players
low pitch hitsounds on high damage shots is so good though, pure dopamine
@@ckorp666
All is well that ends well.
The numbers Meson
Well said. Hit all the points with precision. No notes.
Good work on the video, the "Cold Take" series very well presented and enjoyable !
I remember the first time i came in contact with algebra in my school. Up to that point i liked math. But then they added letters to the math problems and it just messed things up for me. Too me letters were limited to the alphabet and numbers to math. And all of a sudden they decided to mix things up.
Okay, I've been talking about "numbers" a lot recently, because I think it's the key factor in how much like an RPG a given game does or doesn't feel.
Every time the debate about what counts as an RPG comes up I come back to this same point. When FFXVI was nominated for best RPG last year, there was a lot of debate about whether it should really count as one. It's part of a long-running franchise that started as RPGs and, as far as mainline entries go, have always been considered to be RPGs, but this one departed the most from the formula by most peoples' metrics, mine included.
I personally think that "RPG" has nothing to do with "role playing" in our day and age. What does that even mean? You play a role in *every* videogame. In Baldur's Gate 3, you get to pick who and what you are and what role you'll play in the events of the game. In Legend of Zelda games you play as Link, and Link is only ever the silent protagonist who embodies the courageous adventurer fighting against evil. One *gives* the player a role to perform, and the other *asks* the player what role they'd like to play. They are both ultimately having you *play* a role, however.
So if RPGs have nothing to do with roles, then what's the deal? I think it has everything to do with pencils and paper vs computers. Before the idea of a videogame was popular or even possible, Dungeons and Dragons was done with pencils and paper, and in order to get any level of detail that would elevate it above merely an elaborate board game or card game, you needed to represent everything with a number. This allows a dungeonmaster to be the human processor of the game and assign and change numbers as needed. That stuff is only there as busywork in order to create visual and thus graspable representations of an alternate universe with its own laws. A make believe game is not far off, but having numbers allows everyone to agree on what's going on in everyone's imagination because you've now brought the mental into the physical.
Now enters computing. A computer takes the processing requirements away from a human and increases its speed by impossible levels, so now the original Legend of Zelda, while we may think of it as an adventure game, is actually just Dungeons and Dragons with most of the numbers hidden. We might quibble about the fact that Zelda has far less player agency than Dungeons and Dragons, and in the early stages of gaming, RPG did indeed have more of the meaning of "I choose my role." But nowadays, just look at anything that's considered an RPG or has "RPG elements" and let's seen what that actually means. It's almost always indicating a gradual and dynamic power increase represented by numbers. Levels, exp, skill trees, damage numbers, gear score, these almost always garner the term "RPG elements" from news outlets and reviewers, and in the most all-encompassing situations garner the title "RPG." I think people have simply formed a permanent connection between the idea of having numbers displayed and something being an RPG because the most famous RPG back in the day was all about numbers. This was only a consideration due to technological restraints, but now even without those same constraints, people are still attached to the *aesthetic* of numeric representation and I think that's why it is such a large contributor to peoples' willingness to call something an RPG or not.
In conclusion, I feel like the way that people nowadays decide how and where the term RPG gets applied is a calculus that involves how many background processes of a game are represented directly to the player as a number and secondarily how much control the player has in manipulating said numbers. It's not merely about whether or not you have player agency.
I think you really hit it. RPG in video games nowadays as I like to say means roll play and not role-play.
Role-play being putting yourself in the role of a character, which most games feature from uncharted to baldurs gate to skyrim. Roll play being a pun on dice rolls referring to the mathematical system the game runs on like stats and how it effects damage calculations.
Modern marketing has made the terms RPG or RPG elements refer to the ability to have some customization in your characters progression be it stat allocation, ability assignment or skill tree. Personal pet peeve is the entirely linear skill trees some games have, just make them unlock at a certain point int he story if your skill tree is a straight line.
You can take this lack of proper definition even further to the other subgenres of RPGs. Like JRPG means Japanese RPG, though most people(myself included) no longer really equate JRPG from being from Japan but rather the way it handles combat. Taking the old Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest style of combat; turn based on not reliant on position/not played on a grid. I think many people would consider Sea of Stars a JRPG though it was made in Canada. And if I asked you what was the best selling JRPG of 2022, I doubt many peoples first thought would be Elden Ring, though it is an RPG and From Software is a Japanese company.
Don't even get me started on CRPGs, which are generally defined as the isometric, party based RPGs like Baldurs gate or Pillars of Eternity being turn-based or RTwP with positional combat. Even though the C in CRPG literally just means computer, so every single RPG video game is a CRPG.
ARPG can range from anything like diablo-style isometric dungeon crawlers to the 1st/3rd person games like skyrim.
Genres become a mess real fast as the adapt and evolve.
Numbers are also a convenient way to compare things. Imagine playing an ARPG and you have to pick up every sword then try to find consistent enemies to compare them with.
Hitmarkers exist so no point in displaying numbers. Hitmarker can be also colored, white - body, red - headshot or kill. You can even add a sound indicator to differentiate between these
Never thought I'd thoroughly enjoy the explanation of game development trends through the lens of art noir, but here we are.
Fun fact about numbers i learned literally the other day: when they ported No One Lives Forever to consoles - they replaced the PC UI showing HP/ammo as numbers to now be exclusively in bars (yes, even ammo). Because, i assume, they didn't want to scare the more ""casual"" audience of consoles with scary math. So maybe there is something to that whole number hatred among certain audiences, and why the rest of us don't mind of even welcome such clear feedback. Except for the Suicide Squad - i've seen bukkake doujins with less stuff flying on into your face
Re roguelikes and concealing information: This is a very old tradition. Rogue did this. NetHack did this (and still does, their last update was about a year ago). The idea, in theory, is that you're supposed to figure things out the hard way. The NetHack community even refers to the wiki and other external sources of information as "spoilers."
The catch is, there are no reported instances of a person beating NetHack without reading spoilers. Relatively few people have even attempted such a feat. So the whole thing's a bit silly, if you ask me.
Oh hell yeah i was itching for a new cold take
Oh, the doom guy most certainly does math. He ADDS bullets to the bodies of his foes in order to SUBTRACT the number of enemies in his way. His bombs and missiles MULTIPLY the number of chunks flying through the air while his chainsaw efficiently DIVIDES monsters in twain.
Frosts napkin drawings are truly inspiring.
I have a severe distaste for things scrapping on napkins and watching you draw on them was the most anxiety inducing thing I have watched in a while
I'm predicting right now that no matter how many views and shares this gets, it is an underappreciated banger.
Great points. Love it
This was a very good one. Cheers, Frost!
I felt that opening with teaching statistics in my soul. As a tutor, I see a lot of students who are like that
This was interesting. I’m playing Wo Long at the moment. At the start of your video I thought “oh yeah, I’d turn those numbers off if I could, I’ll try that”, but within 5 minutes you’d given them value
Remember when games used to have enemies visibly flinch when you shot them?
Nowadays, they just make a number appear and nothing else. Which in turn makes all of the weapons feel like BB guns, since the enemies literally do not react to them.
As an example, compare shooting an enemy in TimeSplitters to Borderlands.
Numbers are just a lazy and "gamey" way to show that you're doing something.
Which I find funny, since people consider older games like Doom to be a time when games were more "gamey", but enemies in Doom actually react to being shot, instead of just showing a number.
Jesus CHRIST these are well written. I imagine I wouldn't even need to care about the subject matter to enjoy them.
Very interesting! Loved the maxim that all nunbers have meaning when it comes to games
Damage numbers in games are usually tied to level scaling too, an arbitrary "progression" system that attempts to up the ante continuously while never really changing the actual interactions (the enemies you encounter scale with your character's level after all, so you might as well play through the entire thing on level 1, in the case of elder scrolls games), and the only difference between a draugr wight and a draugr overlord is the arbitrary numbers assinged to them, it's the exact same model and moveset otherwise.
You still press the same buttons you did when you had the level 1 stick, that level 50 shiny sword of shiny swordiness fulfills the same function as the stick, it, at best, entertains the most lizard-brained appeals, giving a sense of progression where nothing actually changes except the numbers, or the appeal of big numbers which are just big because they lack a comparison to anything real.
Damage number systems may have made sense as an approximate model for character health during a time of serious technological limitations - but that time ended more than 10 years ago, and realistic physics-based damage models have long been established as a possibility, doubling down on item tiers and level scaling is just psychological trickery, and not a serious approach to game design.
What's the point of clinging to a cultural artifact that stopped being a consequence of the limitations of the medium, when more accurate models are possible, or you could take a completely different approach that doesnt even need such mathematical scaling models?
Second Wind, the Land of Amazing Voices.
Great. Now I want to go back and play frog fractions.
Ok, my theory is that
First, there were tabletop wargames and RPGs, where numbers were there to represent rules and constraints beset upon players, so that players don't just make shit up, and instead have some tangible and observable indicators of what they can and cannot do. As a side effect, it turned out that optimizing those numbers turned out to be quite fun
Then came video games (and, uh, teletype games) - roguelikes, early RPGs, MUDs and more, imitating those tabletop experiences, where players couldn't have been given as much agency, because playsessions were orchestrated by well-defined and restrictive algorithms which couldn't really rely on anything but numbers to drive the gameplay. They basically doubled down on the numbers aspect of the tabletops to provide fun, and fun, it was. Though numbers were still means to an end, i.e. they were there to represent gameplay mechanics and things that you would do in tabletops
Years later came Hack-n-Slash RPGs, which pushed further into the numbers game. Optimizing the numbers was the main appeal and selling point of Hack-n-Slash RPGs, all the while other RPG elements were stripped down. This is when numbers became the end goal, and it proven to be fun and addictive
Then came MMORPGs, which had pragmatic reasons to delve deeper into numbers. In those, you want your players to play the game for a long time, since they will be paying for subscription for as long as they play. The bigger the number ranges are, the more opportunities the developers have at controlling the player progression. You can drip feed gradual number increases so to keep your players hooked, all the while indefinitely adding bigger numeric goals to work towards, without the need to introduce new game progression elements. You're supposed to take your time playing MMORPGs, so it is only so natural that mobs have numeric healthbars you would hack away at the way you would chop down a tree - gradually, swing by swing. Beefy numeric healthbars is a game design concession, somewhat purposefully making the game less fun, but with the goal of making you get your dopamine hit whenever your numbers get bigger.
And then it kinda looped back to genres where numbers were not necessary. Action games have more direct ways of providing player agency, it's just that numbers have proven to be addictive enough to become a substitute for more tangible ways of representing the player's impact on the game world.
Idk, maybe it's ADHD, but watching "numbers go up" gives me a certain joy I can't really explain. Too many effects on them is a little overstimulating though.
Having an open to turn them off or move them around is definitely a good thing, as not everyone has the same preferences.
Another banger ty Frost!
god this shit is so good, frost these videos are a blessing 🙌
What an excellent and thoughtful video. Game analysis of this quality is really rare on this platform
Napkin visuals are very helpful. Love it.
this is a very good vid i wud say i hope for more good job
Second Wind