Things I'd like to see in Poker Night 3
Well, Telltale is obviously busy with Game of Minecraft Thrones of the Borderlands, but if they're likely to put out Poker Night 3 anytime soon, I want to talk about some things that I think could be improved from Poker Night 3.
- Don't Slow the Action.
Obviously, repetitive comments are going to be part of a game where you're really only required to say five words: (bet, fold, check, raise, call.), but one of the things that really threw me for a loop was Claptrap going into the "soundcard" joke. Funny only the first time you hear it, but every other time, it's extremely annoying because all of the play stops as Ash, Claptrap, and Glados go through the routine. There's no reason to do this, and you end up waiting to play.
- "Fold Now"
In a similar vein, you're dealt 7-2 offsuit but you're the big blind, and Brock (to your immediate left) raises. You have to wait for all the players to go through their animations before you can click "fold" and "move on to next hand."
- Deepstack
I think one of the MOST disappointing things, going from Poker Night 1 to Poker Night 2 was that the screenshot showed that we'd be going from $10,000 to $20,000 for the buy-in, and so I got my hopes up that we'd start with 100 big blinds, as compared to the 50 big blinds you start with in Poker Night 2. Instead, in Poker Night 2, we started with 25 big blinds! On the second blind level (5 hands!) you're now in shove-or-fold territory, there's no real "play" with poker. Additionally, the loss of just ONE hand kills your entire tournament. I get why they did this - decrease the blinds and you increase the variance - meaning you lower the skill level, but it's just less fun, you just can't use the clever, fun poker strategies. An option to play "Shortstack" or "Deepstack" (perhaps an option letting you choose $10,000 or $20,000?) would go a long way towards helping.
- Omaha
This is compounded when Telltale added Omaha, but played the very rare and almost never dealt No Limit Omaha variant instead of the much more popular Pot Limit Omaha. In either case, ANY form of omaha plays deeper-stacked than No Limit Holdem; meaning that the 25 BB stack is pretty much a shove-or-fold stack to start with. A standard preflop raise leads you to be pot committed with any action on the flop, since the equities run so similarly. I liked that Telltale added Omaha, but it just wasn't done well.
- Eliminate the Alcoholic Drink (or include better tells)
The Alcohol thing had potential but the problem was that the AI is so inept that knowing when they had a "good hand" or a bad hand that asking for more tells was pretty much worthless. The problem was while the computer could be told to understand absolute hand strength, relative hand strength was less obvious - the computer would often go all-in holding 72 on a 9 9 9 J 4 board simply because they "held three of a kind". In short, you end up with what The Meaning of Liff called "Aboyne" - playing a game of skill against a skilled player so poorly that none of his advanced strategies are of any use to him.
- Pot Odds
Similarly, the AI seems unable to determine what a big bet is, and what a small one is. A bet of $4000 into a pot of $1000 is a HUGE overbet (Ash is VERY guilty of this) while a bet of $4000 into a pot of $10000 is a small bet. Bet sizing seems to have little rhyme or reason. Additionally, the AI will often call massive bets in small pots while making the comment that "the bet's tiny" - no, a $2000 bet into a $1600 pot is HUGE. What's extremely interesting is that the AI will often overbet the pot - a move that is really quite rare in real poker play, despite it not being prohibited by the rules - because an overbet makes it difficult for your opponent to make a mistake - he calls or raises with the good hands (that would have called a smaller bet or raised) and folds his mediocre ones (which would have folded for less) When you get to about 3/4ths the size of the pot, there are very few hands (usually combo draws) that will fold to an overbet that won't fold to less.
So, that's just a few of the things I'd like to see in PN3.