• socsa@piefed.social
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    1 day ago

    It’s been proven that the hit rates shown in XCOM are basically bullshit. There’s a bunch of hidden modifiers which determine the true hit probability.

    • bountygiver [any]@lemmy.ml
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      1 day ago

      And all of those favors the player

      you get secret bonus to hit if you miss unless you are on the highest difficulty (and even then there’s a bug that makes aliens cap out at 95% shot chance so they can miss a 100% shot against you).

    • slazer2au@lemmy.worldOP
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      1 day ago

      3 times… How… Advent is standing right there, one tile away and you have a shotgun…

          • slazer2au@lemmy.worldOP
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            1 day ago

            Is it odd that I really like Morrowind, XCOM, and the STALKER games but not Souls games?

            Should I be concerned… Should me wife be?

            • ZombiFrancis@sh.itjust.works
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              12 hours ago

              Xcom and Morrowind have high degrees of dicerolling in the gameplay. Progression has a lot to do with controlling or improving your odds. You can have a whole lot of different outcomes based on adapting to each roll.

              Souls games usually lack that level of randomness, at least in the calculations phase of gameplay. That’s how you see speedrunners standing still and circling around all these explosions and attacks without repercussions, etc. You either know the steps or you don’t.

              Stalker games are a bit different in that they’re FPS games. I think when you can stealth headshot snipe something, the whole dynamic changes. (Which probably also flows into Elder Scrolls a fair bit.)

            • addie@feddit.uk
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              20 hours ago

              Well, that’s three different genres of game.

              XCOM balances strategy and turn-based tactics in a way that’s a bit unusual. Games like Civ or Crusader Kings let you do the strategy, but you’ve not much influence in battles. Something like Hard West or Invisible Inc. let you do the turn-based tactics, but are fairly light on the strategic choices.

              The STALKER games are survivalist FPS; although you combine looting and shooting, they aren’t looter-shooters. As Strelok, your role-playing choices are quite limited - you can ‘get out of here, stalker’ if you wish - and you’ve no stats. I wouldn’t have described the world as particularly reactive - the ‘bad ending’ in the first one depends on what you’ve been doing.

              Morrowind and the Souls games are both Western RPGs; you fight enemies with weapons and magic, it’s not obvious what’s going on, certainly at first; and the world changes as a result of your decisions. DS doesn’t generally let you know when you’re making a decision, which makes it quite tough to progress some storylines. But as to how the fighting plays out, they’re about as different as can be.

              So I wouldn’t worry about it. Wish there were more XCOM-like games, tho, since I love the mix.

                • dubyakay@lemmy.ca
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                  12 hours ago

                  Not to mention that Morrowind has bullshit rpg chance to hit calculation running on every strike. Meanwhile Souls like are skill based and hitbox/invuln frames.

          • Magiilaro@feddit.org
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            1 day ago

            That normally only happens when a weapon without a proper weapon skill is used, especially when combined with low stamina. Someone who tries to fight with a empty stamina bar using an hammer and a blunt weapon still of 5 will get his ass whipped hard.

            • Asetru@feddit.org
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              16 hours ago

              Should we blame the government?

              Or blame society?

              Or blame the images on TV?

              No! Blame stamina

              Blame stamina

              With all their empty little bars

              And flailing hands so full of flaws

              Blame stamina, Blame stamina

        • morto@piefed.social
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          1 day ago

          We lose the notion of how many shots we fire in the game, so very unlikely events like that are very likely to happen at least once in a playthrough, but they still feel absurd. Our minds simply aren’t made for statistics

          • slazer2au@lemmy.worldOP
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            1 day ago

            I can’t remember where I heard it but I remember someone saying for every 90% shot you miss, how many 10% did you hit and not call unfair.

            • ryathal@sh.itjust.works
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              1 day ago

              None, I’d never attempt a 10% shot. 50-60 is the most desperate I’ve gotten. Anything less and you might as well overwatch.

  • 𝕱𝖎𝖗𝖊𝖜𝖎𝖙𝖈𝖍@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    The hit percentages in XCOM are a complete lie. I remember one time my sniper up on a rooftop missed a ~95% chance shot on a mook, who then turned around and crit the same sniper with a pistol aimed through two box trucks and cover. I think that’s when I quit.

    • Strider@lemmy.world
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      17 hours ago

      Yes, they are. But posting this without context is misleading completely in the wrong direction.

      I remember reading an article about how they tuned all of that way into the players favor because the subjective impression of the mathematical probability was far too negative and punishing.

  • ArgentRaven@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    The newer XCOM games actively remember and give you the same result if you reload. To discourage save scumming. I would get stuck in one where I’d miss a 90%, reload, and still miss. Because the next shot was always going to miss. So I’d take a different shot with someone else that wouldn’t matter, come back, and suddenly I’d make that 90%.

    The original 90’s games, you could just save scum. But you’d still miss that 90 sometimes.

    • PrivateNoob@sopuli.xyz
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      1 day ago

      This can be easily solved by just going to a different tile and bumm, new possibilities. (I save scum)

  • 🇰 🌀 🇱 🇦 🇳 🇦 🇰 🇮 @pawb.social
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    1 day ago

    Two things:

    1. It wasn’t missing on a 90% that was an issue; you could miss shots that showed 100% because it was actually a 99.5% chance and the display number got rounded up.

    2. It still doesn’t use real probability. They literally programmed it so anything over 50% was actually a much higher percentage behind the scenes to make you feel like you were doing better (and because computers can’t do truely random numbers). This is actually a super common thing in all video games that use percentages or dice rolls. And becsuse it’s a computer, if you opened up the code to see the starting seed and all the math applied to it, you could accurately predict everything in the sequence.

    • Cocodapuf@lemmy.world
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      22 hours ago

      (and because computers can’t do truly random numbers)

      Ok, well… there are good cryptographic ways of getting psudo-random numbers that are essentially just good as true random numbers.

      Also, Intel chips actually do have hardware that uses quantum effects to generate actual random numbers. I’m not sure if AMD is doing the same these days, but I wouldn’t be surprised.

      • The_Decryptor@aussie.zone
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        18 hours ago

        AMD’s supported it since 2015, but it’s not something a normal app would use anyway (They’d just ask the OS for it).

        More likely for the app to get it wrong though, generating unpredictable random numbers (Which is all you realistically need) is pretty easy, not screwing up and making them more predictable is hard.

        • Cocodapuf@lemmy.world
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          12 hours ago

          Nice, yeah that’s basically what I thought.

          And yeah, I agree, what you do with those instructions is the tricky part.

  • TheFriendlyDickhead@feddit.org
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    1 day ago

    I understand that it’s just bad luck, but I was still so fucking pissed off every time someone missed while litterally standing infront of someone and dying because of that.

  • DaddleDew@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    The “modern” XCOM games cheaped out on their game mechanic budget.

    The game Phoenix Point made by a much smaller studio with fewer resources came up with a vastly superior way to tackle hit probability. In that game you can free aim using a reticle made of two concentric circles. The outer circle represents where your shot(s) have a 100% chance falling inside of. The inner circle represents where 50% of your shots have a chance of being inside. The more accurate weapons have smaller circles. Then when you shoot the game simulates the path of your shots and any character or environmental object that gets in the way will be taken into account. If you fire a burst or shoot a shotgun, you’re not bound to only 100% hitting or 100% missing. You can have a partial number of rounds or pellets hit the target, while others might miss, be blocked, or even hit another enemy or ally if they were sharing that cone of probability.

    This makes the whole thing feel far more real than the shitty dice roll system XCOM relies on that just feels cheap and simplistic in comparison especially for a game of that price. Too bad that overall Phoenix Point had difficulty curve issues and the story was not every interesting to me at least.

    If they ever make a new XCOM game I really hope they make that mechanic more like Phoenix Point’s. And also lose the arbitrary turn limits that they’ve introduced in XCOM2 because they force a reckless game style that I absolutely hate in those types of games.

    • Weirdfish@lemmy.world
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      20 hours ago

      I really like Phoenix Point, but I don’t start a game on a low enough level to be successful, and then quit part way through in frustration and play something else.

      I need to accept that it’s hard, I’m learning, and play on the easiest setting.

  • LurkingLuddite@piefed.social
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    1 day ago

    xcom percentages are also not how probability works. When you need 95%+ just to have an effective 50/50 outcome, something is royally fucked.

  • TheHotze@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    I don’t remember why it worked, but I remember that it didn’t like it when you only took high accuracy shots, and if you missed a lot first, your 90%s usually hit.