I’ve been losing my mind seeing the flood of terrible events going on but I finally made it to here. I love your posts they’re one of the highlights of Lemmy, a beacon of joy, thank you as always
I completely get that. With everything going on today it’s just nice too have something like these too look at. Putting these together for an hour or so everyday provides the same relief for me
I don’t give the slightest fuck who provided the middleware for the cloth physics, stop impeding me from playing the game to show me this shit every fucking time I launch it.
Continue and New Game are often the wrong way around in the main menu. Why would you have New Game at the top/default selection position? How often would someone be clicking that as opposed to Continue?
Unskippable dialogue and cut-scenes. I’ve read devs describe cut-scenes as a reward for the player achieving a certain milestone. I see them as punishment. Especially so if I want to replay the game. It’s a game, not a movie. Leave me the fuck alone already.
It should be forbidden to sell a game on Steam that requires an account and launcher from Ubisoft or whoever. If you sell it on Steam, you use Steam, and if you wanna use your own shit then you don’t get to use the Steam storefront and must forgo all the advertising and exposure you enjoy there.
Walk-and-talks, especially when my normal walk speed is like a sprint compared to that of the NPC in question.
Narratively, my character is a saviour to a group of people who provide me with weapons and ammo to help me save them, but the cunts charge me for it?? “Hey thanks for single-handedly saving us and fighting the tyrannical evil empire, while you’re out there risking life and limb for us please use our cool weapons and bullets! That’ll be 500 credits, cheers!” Motherfucker? What are you even spending it on? WHERE are you even spending it?
Fake endings. I was playing RDR2, and thought I was coming to the end of the game, all signs pointed to an imminent ending. So I was mentally in a place where I was ready to pack up and uninstall it, just had to finish the last few quests, already wondering what I’d play next. Then there’s an entire 500-hour chapter that comes after. So I keep going, and am constantly thinking “surely it’s just another quest or two…” but it just never fucking ends. Had I known or expected all this extra shit, it would be different. But I was already halfway out they door before you called me back in for another week’s worth of the same malarkey.
Time-wasting as a core mechanic. I love No Man’s Sky, but so many of the quests in that game involve literally waiting 24 real-world hours for the next phase of the quest. Which, when completed, leads to another 24-hour wait. Who exactly does this serve?
For Stardew check your achievements and it will probably help to figure out what to do. If you made it to the island the room on the far west side has a checklist for getting “perfection” as well. When I finally got the movie theater I was also working on that checklist.
You’ll find most of Chile’s observatories are in the Atacama Desert, and that almost all of the Atacama Desert is in Chile. The high elevation, incredibly low humidity, and remote location make for dark, clear skies
Skipping straight to action instead of main menu and options is annoying.
When I started playing [game name here, atm can’t remember it, it’s from warframe people] it immediately started a plot cutscene which wasn’t available later on. I sure wanted to see that plot presented in a 720p medium settings on my large 1440p display.
Sure, in the grand scheme of things the plot in the game is irrelevant as it can be, but damn it, let me enjoy it full screen.
They have likely fixed, but holy hell, why was it like that in the first place. Abysmal new player experience.
Unless I missed it, Where Winds Meet forces you to do an entire damn boss-fight before you can invert the vertical camera! Unbelievable. I realize I’m the freak for learning “flight control” aiming where down is up, but I’ve been doing it for decades; can’t change it now! It’s unhinged to not let people access or change options until after you’ve beaten a boss…
I had to force the PS5 glyphs by creating a Game.ini file and inserting the appropriate lines to get the ps instead of Xbox button glyphs for my ds4 in Clair obscur the other day. It was definitely annoying.
Thanks to searching for a solution to that I found a mod to remove the abysmal sharpening, uncap cutscene frame rate, and remove pillar boxes on my 21:9 display though, so it all worked out.
I can’t remember specific examples (probably because I didn’t stick with any of them very long), but I’ve played several games that don’t even let you touch the options until after you’ve finished some tutorial section… which is especially annoying for players you play with inverted y axis.
Point no. 2 is why I couldn’t get through Witcher 1. There’s only so many times I can fight 3-5 sewer monsters to get enough XP to not die in chapter…4? 5?
I hate RNG so much 😂 I don’t get it. Life has too much RNG, I play video games because it’s a predominantly skill-based controlled environment.
It’s like picking up a piano and there’s a 35% chance F# is just F every time you play the damn note 😂
I guess it makes sense if you’re role playing and want your experience to mimic real life, which is why they’re mostly used in RPGs, but I also feel so immersed playing skill-based games without RNG, so I can’t assess its actual value.
The reason they’re in RPGs is the same reason they’re in any other genre. In a war game, you could be a tactical genius, but the RNG is there to simulate dumb luck, so the game is about forcing you to play the odds, because victory is almost never guaranteed. When the result is deterministic, there can often be a single 100% correct answer, and RNG throws a wrench in that. Something similar can be applied to loot games, where you’re rolling with the punches based on what you’ve found.
I mean, character action games and score chasers do tend to fall in that optimal answer bucket. You’re free to freestyle and get a lower score, but without RNG, there will be one way to play that always works. If that counts as infinitely replayable, then so does any other game you enjoy. And for fighting games, that RNG is just substituted for your opponents’ decision making.
You’re free to freestyle and get a lower score, but without RNG, there will be one way to play that always works.
Most score you on style as well, not just efficiency. And massive breadth and depth of combat interactions yield more than one way that works, not just one. Even for shmups, routing can vary depending on the player, their skill, and understanding of the game. It’s not a timid sandbox wherein only one way works.
If that counts as infinitely replayable, then so does any other game you enjoy.
Keyword is enjoy. I don’t see myself replaying DMC5 for as long as I’ve been playing some of my favorite games because I enjoy it less.
And for fighting games, that RNG is just substituted for your opponents’ decision making.
Hmm… how does that work? I hit my opponent, they take damage, no Xcom bullshit. I don’t see any RNG-like behavior in this interaction.
Most score you on style as well, not just efficiency.
Right, but the style has point values assigned to you. If they’re unchanging, there is a way that will always work best, every time. At a high level (correct me if I’m wrong, as I’m somewhat new to this genre), rewarding style is similar to rewarding variety, juggles, and getting multiple enemies in the same attack. If you go down the checklist of your arsenal, you can always hit the variety. If you know exactly how the enemies behave, you can reliably get multiple enemies in the same aerial combo that the scoring system rewards most. The same actions give you the same output, and one of those score values will be the highest out of all other possible options. One set of actions will reliably always handle the same mob if it’s deterministic.
Hmm… how does that work? I hit my opponent, they take damage, no Xcom bullshit. I don’t see any RNG-like behavior in this interaction.
That’s just damage. The rest of the fighting game is rock paper scissors. A beats B beats C beats A. At round start, what button do you press? There’s always some option that beats your option, and that’s before we’ve even calculated the resulting damage. Some of what they’re doing is responding to what you’ve been doing, but the rest of what they’re doing is trying to be unpredictable; AKA random. (And that’s before we even talk about characters like Faust.)
Keyword is enjoy. I don’t see myself replaying DMC5 for as long as I’ve been playing some of my favorite games because I enjoy it less.
That’s interesting. As I said, I’m somewhat new to this genre. The short version is that Hi-Fi Rush got me interested in checking out all of the DMC games (minus the reboot), and 5 ended up being my favorite of that series (but still not as good as Hi-Fi Rush).
In action games, scoring the highest is typically not the priority as much as getting the rank, which happens once you pass a certain threshold predefined by the game. For example, if you need to score >5000 style points to get S in style, scoring >7000 won’t change the outcome because S is the highest rank. The result is: how you score higher than >5000 style points does not really matter, it is up to you. In a good action game, there typically is multiple tools you could use to get there depending on many factors, one of them is preference. How you start a combo, how you end it, or what you do in the middle, is up to you as long as the finally tally of the battle adds up to >5000 style points, and you stay under the time and damage taken ceiling.
What you end up getting is multiple people fighting the same boss, getting an S rank, even though they have different strategies/play styles.
Even if you choose to shoot for the highest combo score, attacks are typically assigned categories, and each category is assigned a score value. Kind of like damage level in fighting games. So, in theory, you could chain together a combo with different attacks and get the same score as long as they all fall in the same category.
Now, this is one way to approach those games, which is different from what you hinted at earlier: playing to create style showcases, or “COMBO MAD”, which can also be endlessly fun because the player actively chooses to throw away the rules of the game and make up their arbitrary rules for their own enjoyment. The games typically give you the tools to play them both ways, up to you.
In shmups, where grading is literal score chasing and more deterministic, flavor is typically added through (a) ship variety, (b) exploiting the game’s scoring mechanics when planning a route, and (3) player skill. This is why scores with different ships are often listed separately because, even though you’re playing the same game, using a different ship can heavily alter routing, including how the player exploits the game’s mechanics to get higher scores. It is the main reason people are still breaking records for games that came out decades ago: if everyone is playing exactly the same way, this wouldn’t be possible.
In theory, there may be only one optimal route for every shmup out there, but we’ll never know what that route is for as long as people are still playing the games and breaking records. Same goes for action games: there may be one optimal combo for every enemy in every game, but in reality people typically only pursue this kind of knowledge when they’re playing some kind of challenge run, or looking for tips to cheese the game if they’re achievement hunting.
I see what you mean with fighting games. My issue is: I whiff a -9 attack, you’re within range, you hit me with an attack that comes out in 5 frames, I am at 25% health, and I have no meter for a Roman Cancel: not only will your attack hit and do damage every time, it will be the same damage value, given I’m playing with the same character and you’re not A.B.A. going super sayian or you have some other damage modifier on.
To approach this from another angle, I get hit in a fighting game, it’s on me. I misread a play, or did something silly like not hit-confirming a -9 attack. I find this different from “dumb luck” when I tactically maneuver myself into a superior position, I have 99% hit chance, I miss, and they get a critical hit next killing my character off. That to me is… not ideal, haha.
I leave Faust to ElvenShadow, I’m not touching that crazy man.
I like DMC5 a lot, it’s just too much of a combo simulator to make it into my list of favorites. I like weaving in and out of defense and offense like in Bayonetta, Ninja Gaiden, and God Hand. I too prefer Hi-Fi Rush to DMC5, TBH. Such an awesome game! And mechanically deeper than most action game fans think, I have found. I watched some of my favorite action game YouTubers review it (Combat Overview and TheGamingBritShow) without covering some fun mechanics like parrying shields or dodge counters. Many people seem to think it’s all about the music beat gimmick, but it has a little more going for it than that. A replayable game, for sure.
I don’t mind RNG, I mind games that rely on it over proper design. Xcom has tons of RNG, but it’s generally still possible to win most maps with proper strategy. Most roguelikes have this problem where any given run is impossible to win regardless of play.
Games that offer stealth as an option over combat, but have mandatory combat bosses.
Deus Ex: Human Revolution was a great game, but this was a serious issue. The game has a (notoriously buggy) achievement for finishing the game without killing anyone, but every boss requires a loadout of lethal weapons to take down, leaving a minimum of slots for non-lethal alternatives. Very annoying.
I started keeping a Note on my phone titled Game Diary with different sections for games I’m playing, and write down what I was doing, my train of thought and what I wanted to do next, things I had to check on our fix etc, at the time I put it down. It’s helped immensely when I come back to something after a while and encounter exactly what you’re talking about.
Biggest pet peeve of modern games is when the game repeatedly nags the player to go to the next mission or solve a puzzle. I like to explore games, to take the time to appreciate well made environments and lore, but when npcs or even the pc keep chiming in every minute with “[x] is waiting for me at the lab” or “I think I should [y]”, it starts to piss me off.
It’s like they don’t trust the player to play the game “right”. Games are more than just sprinting from one objective to another. Can’t even take the time to fully look over a puzzle before the game starts telling you what to do next.
That’s a quirk of the medium I’ve learned to accept. Some games do it well by having chunks of “on-rails” bits and others of “free-roam” based on what’s happening in the story so that it makes more sense.
I have many pet peeves when it comes to games, but the biggest that I can think of off the top of my head is the boss fights in games that don’t let you use the weapons & skills/techniques that you’d used to get to that point. It just pisses me off when they let you develop a character with particular skills and weapons only to force a particular combat style that’s contrary to what you’d used up till that point.
Deus Ex Human Revolution’s initial release was the worst about this. A bunch of people who took the skills and inventory for non-lethal/stralth/hacking gameplay found themselves at boss fights that were straight-up gunfights. If you were kitted out and skilled properly to face-tank while using explosives and big guns, you were just screwed and couldn’t progress.
In subsequent releases, they added additional options in the arenas that allowed you to kill them using stealth and hacking skills.
RPGs are absolutely terrible about giving you the ability to inflict status effects on enemies, but not giving random encounter enemies enough HP to justify inflicting statuses, and then also making the bosses immune to them.
Cyberpunk 2077 one of the quests in the expansion drops you into basically Alien: Isolation when up until that point you can beat the shit out of or hack the brains out of any other NPC you’ve come across. You go from being a cybered out demigod to basically a rat in a maze being chased by a giant metal invincible doberman.
That was mine too. I hated it. I was playing to feel like a badass in Night City, not to scamper around and hide like a rat until the invincible robot catches me and drills into my face again. I was so happy to finally get out of there. Not because i beat it, but because it was finally OVER.
Mine is similar to yours in that it’s when I come back to a game after a while. My problem is that the difficulty of the game has increased in line with where I am but I’ve forgotten the moves.
I’d be interested to see how sales of the steam deck compare. Sure, it’s a pc not a console, but the whole thing is to bring pc gaming to console gamers so I’m interested in the comparison.
EDIT: based on a quick search, 4 million as of this time last year. I did not find anything more up to date than that. Looking that up made me realize that it would be nice if this chart had a date on it since two of the consoles in the chart are still in production.
I think people think it runs way fewer games than it does. I keep updating proton, etc, and like 99% of my games work. Hell, I have all my DS and Switch games on there.
Any game that makes me hold a button for a simple interaction. Bonus points if it has some kind of “progress bar” to show just how much longer you need to hold that button down.
Why did I need to hold X/whatever just to press the thing that opens the door? Why did I have to hold that button down for a grand total of 4 seconds before you actually did your little interaction animation? Why couldn’t it just be a button press?
Part of me kinda blames Halo, as that’s the first game I can remember where it was “hold button to interact;” except in every Halo game up until 4, it was only slightly longer than a normal button press so it was still incredibly quick.
ETA: I hate the extra stuff in Mafia 3 for exactly this reason, which kind of ties into what I said above: it doesn’t respect my, the player’s, time. That stupid “lockpicking” mini game where you break into those junction boxes? Why the hell do I have to wait for the bars to line up before I can break the lock?
And then getting in and out of vehicles plays an animation that takes way too long imo. Which sucks because a lot of the other collectibles are spread out around the map in such a way that it makes it too long to go around on foot gathering them, but it’s also annoying to try to get them with a vehicle because then you need to deal with the animation and then having to run around and grab the damn thing.
Depends on the game. I play Jump Space that occasionally does this (not all buttons, but some). It is to ensure that you deal with enough enemies so they won't interrupt you while holding/charging the button. If you're interrupted, you need to start over. It ensures you don't simply sprint past everything while hitting the buttons.
Sure, sometimes it kinda makes sense from a mechanic or gameplay perspective. I’m talking about games that require you to hold buttons to interact for everything whether it makes sense or not.
I would add to this in game “cutscenes” where the game is doing exposition and the only thing you’re doing is pressing move forward because you need to follow the character who is doing the exposition dump. It’s fine and immersive the first time around but on subsequent playthroughs it gets annoying. It’s essentially a cutscene that you can’t even skip because technically you’re playing the game, but really you’re just holding down a button
Single saves. Me and husband have one computer (we’re broke?) and too many games have a single save. So we can’t play that game trading off cause there’s only one save. Like Baldur’s Gate 3? Amazing. Billion saves, hell a billion for each character even. Heaven’s Vault? Wild Bastards? One save. Guh.
Hey have you tried Steam Family or whatever it’s called? You can make a new user and they have access to all of your game library. Only one account would be able to play at a time but it would solve your save file dilemma - games files are in the common folder but save files are in the user folder
When you join a Steam Family, you automatically gain access to the shareable games that your family members own and they will also be able to access the shareable titles in your library. […]
Best of all, when you are playing a game from your family library, you will create your own saved games, earn your own Steam achievements, have access to workshop files and more.
Since they just have the one pc, they should be able to just make a second user on the pc then sign in to the single steam account. The new user won’t have any save files in the local user directories, so the game gets launched and you’ll only see the “second” set of saves. No idea how this would work with cloud saves on the steam side though.
This might have been the issue as well? All the saves were in the Cloud. But I’m not very techy. While I can follow instructions (I think), software seems to hate me. The hardware, we’re friends!
If that was the issue then doing two separate user accounts on the PC, then having a primary steam account (the existing one with all the games) and a secondary new one, and putting them into a Steam family together just like the person I replied to said would be functionally equivalent to yall having two separate PCs with your own steam accounts when it comes to saves and steam achievements and stuff, but you only need to buy and install the game once. It’ll also let you have separate config files so if one person like controls bound one way and the other another you’re not having to rebind each time yall swap who is playing and everything.
Edit - I, as an adult, took shrooms then accidentally overwrote my dad’s Skyrim save file on his PS3 back in the day and I felt terrible about it :/. I totally understand how annoying save handling can be.
Wait, so how does that work for games that store saves in ‘c:\users%user%\my documents’ and stuff? That’s why I assumed they’d also need a separate user account on the pc.
Nintendo is infamous for this. Animal Crossing is a great game on the Switch, but it’s meant for one person. You can join an island, but unless the island creator has everything unlocked, you can’t progress the game. And even if they have, there are certain recipes you can’t get without cheating (treasure islands) for some reason.
Pokémon is the same way. They literally want you to buy a second Switch.
Oh yes, wasn’t even thinking of that. Part of my twins gift to me of New Horizons was the promise they wouldn’t play the game as well because it’s one island and it’s miiiiine. So many other games on the switch, just use a profile and bam! New game! Bah Nintendo.
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Aktywne