The biggest thing I find missing from this video is a discussion on user selected difficulty levels. Trying to balance the difficulty of a game for everyone can be a very difficult challenge. I would hate knowing that the game was ramping up or ramping down the difficulty as a result of my skill level. I play games because I want to feel like I'm defeating some challenge that is external to myself. If the game auto-adjusts then it feels less real. If you give users a choice, then that lets you adjust to what users want.
This is why I appreciate choosing difficulty settings. Years ago I started making it a habit to play games on the "Hard" difficulty or whatever was a step above "Normal". But I would avoid any "Extra Hard" difficulty at least on the first play through. I found I enjoyed games a lot more because of the extra challenge I got and because I'm willing to have the patience to get through a harder game. Some players don't have the patience, so let them choose a normal experience.
I remember playing StarCraft 2 for the first time on their Brutal difficulty setting and was very pleasantly surprised that they didn't just add multipliers to everything but they actually crafted slightly different experiences. On Brutal, there could be a siege tank where previously was just a regular solider before.
I tend to get irritated by games that I find too easy or too fast and that don't provide any kind of difficulty slider.
If there was something Windows was doing to contribute to lower game performance in any significant fashion, I would think they would have addressed that a long time ago. Maybe now you can game while also encoding video or running some data analysis at the same time without slowing your game down...because we all want to do that :-/.
"something that had never been done in gaming" Uhhhh, minecraft? And there are other games that have made use of procedural generated content so that wasn't a new concept.
Wow, this looks better than I was expecting. I played the original SS pretty late and well after having played SS2 a number of times (which I loved). The game was just too dated for my taste and I didn't like the constantly respawning enemies (and I'd started the game on the Hard difficulty). I just couldn't get into it so I ended up playing the game on the easiest mode which was almost a cheat mode since none of the enemies would attack you.
If this turns out as good as it appears, then maybe I will give it a try.
This is great news! I thought this game was awesome! The only negative I could give the game was that it was a bit repetitive and the zones didn't have a lot of variety in setting. But what was there was great. That's something that could be fixed with a larger budget I would think.
TazmanianD's comments