Another kick thread...

[C'jais]

Was DooM 2 really a sequel?

[the weiner dog!]

Look guy straight up, this whole "code difference" debate is pointless.

 

I'm also going to apologize to you for losing my temper, regardless of why.

 

So if we can start clean and civil, let me try to be more precise in where I am coming from.

 

 

I base my knowledge of this game on my ability to play it.

 

The number of people who were better with force and a saber in Jedi Outcast than me (in 1v1 play) can be counted on a single hand and still have a few fingers to spare.

 

No one denies that claim, and those who have quickly changed their opinions after playing me.

 

 

 

I'm really not bragging (although it seems like it) but I want you to understand just how much more I know about this stuff than the average Joe.

 

And as I stated, I base my comments on my game play experience, not a line of code.

 

If I can (and have) beat the living crap out of people in Jedi Academy after only playing it for maybe 2 hours *total in the entire duration of this past week that should tell you something.

 

I'm transferring the exact same knowledge I have of game play over from Jedi Outcast because things are nearly identical in the way they work.

 

I have to make a few changes in my style because of things like the force special penalties and the lack of double tap kicks and the grip line of sight penalty but the overwhelming majority of my game remains the same.

 

And the overwhelming result remains the same, I win and it's not even difficult unless I'm playing another skilled player from my clan or a rival clan.

 

Now looking at my time playing Jedi Outcast, I had to make massive changes in my game when 1.03 came out and even bigger ones when 1.04 came out.

 

My total style was trashed from patch to patch and I had to develop a new game plan each time but this did *not bother me because I knew so many new possibilities were there.

 

The problem we have now is all the stuff that was ported over from Outcast we *have mastered.

 

We know the force powers in and out.

 

We know the single saber style in and out.

 

Now you look at the new content, the two stances and here lies a problem.

 

The staff does decent damage but it's not enough to combat a drain whore.

 

Now the Katas in all stances fall in the same category, they simply can not get the job done.

 

The double sabers.. heh yeah right, sorry but they really suck. The specials are a joke as well.

 

The one new good move that has potential is the rolling stab, problem is the other nerfs really screw it's potential up.

 

The force cost for specials is one major reason why our game type is screwed all to hell; in full force saber only force is more important than health, no joke.

 

If I'm going to deplete my pool on moves, I sure as hell better see some serious damage.

 

But I don't, I just waste it on low damage moves that get dodged by thinking human opponents and even if I do land one it gets drained right back and I'm in a worse position than I was before I tried it.

 

 

The grip line of sight restriction, the special penalty are two major things we need "unlocked" if serious complex combos are ever going to be developed.

 

And the kicks are essential too.

 

A lot of people think "that’s all we could do to get kills" but could not be more wrong.

 

They were a tool for CTF people to stop that 90 mph guy in his tracks and they were the link in a chain of complex high damage combos for the ff dueler.

 

Imagine this:

 

Saber throw at waist + kick + grip in mid air on flip rebound + kick as you land +release into a rolling stab.

 

Sounds killer right?

 

Bet you 90% of the people reading this could never pull that off.

 

Well, substitute the rolling stab for a light stance lunge and that was a combo I used many a time.

 

Now what can I do in terms of that complexity?

 

umm

 

ummm, not a hell of a lot.

 

I mean I have a few but they are pretty simple.

 

We don’t need anything taken out, we need the game "unlocked" and "un nerfed" so we CAN develop new stuff.

 

Right now there simply is not enough new content to work with and being we know all the old in and out combined with all of the restrictions on the things we *could work with (like specials and grip) we are just out of options.

 

I’m not joking when I say I see a ton of new combos just waiting be developed in Academy; problem is we have too many nerfs in the exact wrong places to pull them off.

[the weiner dog!]

Originally posted by C'jais

Was DooM 2 really a sequel?

 

 

Sure it was, as is Academy.

 

But it was the overwhelming same game content was it not?

 

 

You yourself even admitted (I can find the exact quote if you like) "there is no point in denying that" when one of us said it is pretty much the exact same thing as Outcast in another thread (or maybe this one, hell if I remember).

[Gabrobot]

Hmmm...jk2mp.exe is 1.10 mb in size...jamp.exe is 1.45 mb in size. If JA MP is just JK2 MP with some tweaks than why is it bigger? Shouldn't it be about the same size?

 

The original Jedi Knight was developed by Lucasarts, Jedi Knight 2 and Jedi Academy were developed by Raven. Jedi Knight 2 was a good starting place for Jedi Academy since they had the main part of the engine and weapons. Why should they redesign the weapons? What would they redesign them to do? By redesigning them, it would tack on, at least, an extra year or more...not very smart if they already have a great starting point. (Even John Carmack started with the Quake III engine as a basis and basically rewrote the renderer to make the Doom 3 engine...no need reinventing the wheel if the structure already works.)

 

Raven used that basis to (in multiplayer) mostly focused on Siege because it's the only really different game type...FFA, Team FFA, CTF have been in games for years...not much to change there. (Also note that while there is FFA and Team FFA, there is only CTF. No Saber Only CTF. The option to play without guns is just that...an option. You can also play without guns and without any force powers (including jump). I'm sure you'd find that boring in JKII as well.

My point here is that Raven doesn't guarantee that playing without guns is going to be fun or will be balanced since CTF as it is with guns as JA CTF balance was designed to be played with both guns and sabers. I am not telling you how to play CTF without guns...that's the whole point. If you want to play without guns, that's your choice and you shouldn't demanding that Raven "fix" something which was never broken. JA CTF without guns, according to you, when played by the most skilled players of this type (I'll have to take your word on that), ends up in a stalemate. Well, JA is not JKII so the balancing isn't necessarily going to be exactly the same.) So, besides gameplay tweaks to better balance everything, Raven focused its MP designing on Siege...last time I looked, JKII didn't have anything like Siege...hell, if there were half a dozen more Siege levels, it could've been released as a game in itself! (Like Battlefield 1942)

[the weiner dog!]

speaking of that...

 

anyone else see only a few, (and most that are empty most of the time) siege servers?

 

I mean for something new that we all were excited about it seems to be the CTY or Holocron/Jedi Master mode of this game (the one with little following).

[FurionStormrage]

Originally posted by C'jais

Was DooM 2 really a sequel?

 

Yes. The game engine was specifically designed to allow objects to be truly above something in the 3D world. Aesthetically it was a minor update. From a .wad POV it was a minor update. From a game engine standpoint it was a significant update.

[Gabrobot]

Originally posted by the weiner dog!

[snip]

 

Hmmm...Raven didn't have a few extremely experienced players in mind when they made JA. It's your own loss if you're so experienced that you're bored with the gameplay...I've played JA FFA with both guns and saber (as I've said before) and I haven't had any problems with people spamming things. In fact the most annoying thing is the (approximately) half a second lag time between when I press the button to fire a gun and when it actually fires. Or when saber hits are delayed (this is the worst IMO) where I can't easily swing my saber at someone because swinging where I'd hit them doesn't always hit them because of the lag, and I sometimes get hit with swings which I couldn't avoid since the saber didn't actually hit where I saw it...it's just the lag, and it's not as bad as JKII since it's GHOUL 2 and it's no longer using a bounding box (this made it even easier to be hit without being hit, since you could be hit without being even without lag).

 

Anyway, my point is that even though I haven't spent obscene amounts of time learning every little part of the game (something I don't see how could have done with JA considering it's only been in stores a week), and even though I have a laggy 56k connection, I could still play and have fun (and win). Most people are like this, and so things that may be a problem with the few of you, are not problems for the thousands of other gamers who play mp.

 

Also, hopefully there will be more Siege servers, although I came across one (hosted by multiplay.co.uk) that didn't have any players in it. It's too bad that most of the multiplay.co.uk servers don't seem to have any players except for their FFA #1 server which is usually filled completely up. I think that no one else knows of the other servers...

[traj]

Originally posted by FurionStormrage

Did you pay money for the patch? Did you no longer need the original JO CD for the patches to work? No? Then they're not sequels.

 

...wow

 

nice posts weiner, well thought out.

[lllKyNeSlll]

watch these 2 demos of ff sabers. its self explanatory

without kick there is no mechanism of killing

demos show a much better explanation than long winded essays

 

http://www.geocities.com/lllkyneslll/ffsabers1v1.zip

 

for those of you with lack of bandwidth try this site

http://www.geocities.com/andrew_xtra/ffsabers1v1.zip

you have to right click and save i think

on one of those demos i purposely attack with saber and play newby. but on another i fully use drain so that it shows how futile it is to fight without kick the only chance of a kill is a spinning grip (to avoid pull/push) and red downslash after the stun and finish with lightning

 

drain is dominant. sure i can kill newbs, but vers anyone as smart as me or as experienced in drain warring, it will never end. The only reason why i died at all cuz i went in and sabered sometimes and was just messing around in general.

[SD_ReBoRN__]

or maybe the game already has kick...

[lllKyNeSlll]

reborn get the game and watch this demo . till then u have no right to speak

[Sam Fisher]

Or maybe its just that you need more skill to play JA...

[lllKyNeSlll]

have u watched the demos? if u see what i mean you should realize that there is no killing mechanism vs a good player. or just even a smart one. think about it, none of those guys could out run me because they can't strafe jump. Second, they waste force so they can't outdrain me third if i repeatedly drain they can't kill me

[Kurgan]

You're out of bandwidth.. I'll check it out when it comes back, and give you my comments.

[Sithrandir]

I think what the game needs more than kick (although it would be nice) would be saber duels in which actually USING A SABER AND FIGHTING is a viable option to KILL your opponent instead of having endless drain wars.

[Kurgan]

This is my cynical side talking... but I think this is the "real" reason that people are so upset about kicks not being present in this NEW GAME.

 

It's because the illegal beta included them, just like JK2.

 

Now of course, this leaked beta was NEVER meant to be viewed by the public, so it had all kinds of things in it (according to sources) that weren't the same as the final game.

 

Some impatient fans of JK2 played the illegal beta and got their impressions of the game set in stone.

 

Then they played the warez version of the game, which was closer to the real thing, and they were outraged that Kicks were gone.

 

Then they got it into their heads that the game had been "nerfed" and was no longer fun, because they had been expecting kicks to be there all this time.

 

It didn't help matters of course that they relied on a style of play that had become wholly dependant on kicking...

 

Now they hope that by complaining loudly enough Raven will have no choice but to release a "patch" to add this feature back in that they've been expecting ever since the illegal beta, so that they can play exactly the same as they did in JK2.

 

So honestly I see no one to blame but themselves. They trained themselves to be reliant on kick, set themselves up to believe that kick was in the game (through illegal means) and now they are disappointed because the kicks are not there.

 

Raven never said anything about kicks being there or not. Kicks could be turned on in the (SP only) demo. So there was no idication there, but they shouldn't have assumed Jedi Academy was going to be JK2 1.05, when it's been marketed as a sequel all along.

[Quin]

While a radical change.. something I've wanted sence JO is for drain to fill up force insted of life... but I wont beat a dead horse on that one.

 

I do think saber damage should be raised, I like using g_saberdamagescale 2 or 3 when I play, it seems to work well, though because its a cvar it dosent get used very often. Id really like to see a lot of the cvars put in to the gui so less skilled server admins would use them.

[boinga1]

Yes Kurgan, you are indeed a cynic. That makes two of us.

 

While you may correct to a certain extent, I HOPE that not all of these players d/led the beta. Although I will admit- formulating a playing atyle that is entirely dependent on kick (a feature which is not actually mentioned in any lega review or site existing before the game) is not a good idea.

 

 

C'mon, you guys are creative, you MUST be able to think of SOME way to kill a flagger!

[Kurgan]

The other thing is, why should people who had no such expectation and didn't play any illegal versions have to suffer through gameplay changing patches (not to mention making Raven waste their time with this rather than fixing other bugs or adding other features) when they actually paid good money for the game (whereas the other guys obviously didn't)?

 

I'm not saying everbody who wants kicks is a pirate, or that adding kicks (as a toggleable option, like g_debugmelee 2 or something) will ruin the game, I just don't think that their demands really hold that much water.

 

This kind of reminds me of the time that John Carmack removed Rocket Jumping from Quake3. The mudslide of whining and moaning was so loud, he finally caved in and put it back.

 

I mean, okay sure, but can't a game developer make the game they want rather than just what some whiners demand? If you don't like the game, can't you mod it or just buy a different game?

 

And if the pirates really did see that kicks were gone when they played the warez, then surely they were fools to buy the full version, knowing their key buying feature was gone?

 

Okay, that's enough for now. Back to your regularly scheduled thread...

[SD_ReBoRN__]

Kynes, there was no mechanism in JO either. You could drain at will. Do you think anyone could have stopped a skilled player from doing that in JO? No?

[darkangel_vnv]

With JO we used to run at saberdamagescale 3, but, we tried that out with JA, and it seemed a bit too much. Running on normal damage and seems to go well, but before I end up going completely off topic. This is to everyone who wants kick back. You don't need it. You -do- -not- -need- it. What kick in JO ended up being was everyone spamming it, instead of using their saber. And, if a kick is so important to you, use the Dual Bladed Saber. Sure, it's not the same kick but, did you ever wonder why that is? Simple. It made the game too easy for most people. As far as you running around staying alive using drain all the time. Great. That's good. But, what would you do if you were on a server that didn't have drain? Or, that didn't have weapons? What was that? Use your saber? Really? Good idea!

 

Raven stated they wanted to work on the -saber- combat of the game. They did just that by removing kick. Quit whining about not having your kick and learn to use your saber. That's what it's there for. Personally, I think Raven did the right thing by trashing kick. It's finally more about the saber fighting, and not who can spam kicks the quickest.

 

If they do bring back kick, I hope they make it so it can be enabled, or disabled using a cvar. That way everyone is happy, but for now. Learn to use a saber. Might be helpful when you've got no other choice.

[g//anarki]

Originally posted by DarkangelFOG

With JO we used to run at saberdamagescale 3, but, we tried that out with JA, and it seemed a bit too much. Running on normal damage and seems to go well, but before I end up going completely off topic. This is to everyone who wants kick back. You don't need it. You -do- -not- -need- it. What kick in JO ended up being was everyone spamming it, instead of using their saber. And, if a kick is so important to you, use the Dual Bladed Saber. Sure, it's not the same kick but, did you ever wonder why that is? Simple. It made the game too easy for most people. As far as you running around staying alive using drain all the time. Great. That's good. But, what would you do if you were on a server that didn't have drain? Or, that didn't have weapons? What was that? Use your saber? Really? Good idea!

 

Raven stated they wanted to work on the -saber- combat of the game. They did just that by removing kick. Quit whining about not having your kick and learn to use your saber. That's what it's there for. Personally, I think Raven did the right thing by trashing kick. It's finally more about the saber fighting, and not who can spam kicks the quickest.

 

You telling him to play without force doesn't solve anything. He prefers force, as many jo/ja players do. Telling him to "use your saber" will not guarantee him wins either, especially if all the other players are using force. FF and NF have two different kinds of game mechanics and playing styles. He prefers a more complicated style of playing.

 

In JK2 when you played full force, your saber was mainly used to defend and throw while force and kicking was used to attack. Many people loved this style of gameplay. People who didn't went to play NF style.

[Jello123]

Originally posted by ap.havok

Kynes, there was no mechanism in JO either. You could drain at will. Do you think anyone could have stopped a skilled player from doing that in JO? No?

 

Yes anyone could.

 

All you had to do was kill him. gg

[g//anarki]

Originally posted by ap.havok

Kynes, there was no mechanism in JO either. You could drain at will. Do you think anyone could have stopped a skilled player from doing that in JO? No?

 

Ah yes but in JK2 the rate of healing was less than the damage taken. Basically in JK2, you could drain all you want but that wasn't going to make up for all the damage you're taking from someone kicking you while you drain.

 

In JA, it's totally different. If someone was to attack me, I could drain all that health taken away in an instant because the rate of healing is a lot higher than the damage taken.

[lllKyNeSlll]

Originally posted by DarkangelFOG

If they do bring back kick, I hope they make it so it can be enabled, or disabled using a cvar. That way everyone is happy, but for now. Learn to use a saber. Might be helpful when you've got no other choice.

 

^^ i'll say that is very true and i agree whole heartedly

 

but about not needing kick or atleast not needing grip hide, you are fairly wrong for 1v1. Yes you might kill but its highly unlikely. Think if u play someone fast moving and draining constantly. All he has to do is consistently run and keep out of your saber range and drain. Say you play light with absorb. He only needs to stay out of range until you run out of absorb and use a combination of lightning and drain to finish you

 

 

 

for those of you with lack of bandwidth try this site

http://www.geocities.com/andrew_xtra/ffsabers1v1.zip

you have to right click and save i think

on one of those demos i purposely attack with saber and play newby. but on another i fully use drain so that it shows how futile it is to fight without kick the only chance of a kill is a spinning grip (to avoid pull/push) and red downslash after the stun and finish with lightning