I always downvote any post or comment that complains about downvotes, especially when the commenter claims that downvotes are somehow proving their point. This is probably the only exception I’ve ever made, because you’re right.
I was lucky enough to play WoW when it first released. Nothing will ever come close to the experience of Vanilla & the first two expansions. There were no aggregate sites with all the info/strats/drops/… it was pure discovery.
I remember doing Onyxia for the first time with randoms and getting our asses whooped like you wouldn’t believe. Then someone told me that Molten Core would soon be released and contain TEN of these bosses back-to-back. While we could scarcely fathom bringing one down.
Suffice to say, our first foray into MC (again with randoms) was… painful. Got our asses whooped again, this time by the trash mobs there.
Yeah it was wild. There were so so many things to discover, just wandering around. I remember getting stuck in the sewers of undercity once. My finest moment 😁.
Lies, there were no randos for any 40m raids, only some zg, later maybe aq20. Winning anything, looting anything was too low chance, compared to so big repair costs and highly chance of just wasting time.
Also limit of 8 debuffs on a boss, bye bye afli warlocks.
Lol there were definitely rando mc raids at the beginning. They weren’t very successful mind you, but people did get some purples from trash which were insanely better than any other gear at that point. Eventually they got enough people geared and trained to do the first few bosses. Reaching Raggy was, at that point, only possible for dedicated raid guilds.
And some people STILL can’t beat it without parries.
Granted, I’m in Act 2 (Expert), and I think the ludicrous level factor into damage is to blame. The fact every other (mini)boss you fight is overlevelled, and just a few levels seem to be a 2-3x damage difference, is so stupid, I imagine someone running into 3 in a row and just giving up.
Someone on YouTube made their first playthrough an all-hit run without parries or dodges. On Expert. They had to grind a bit but made it work. I think the Curator fight where he teaches you jumping was the hardest because his damage scales with your level.
spoilerThey even beat Simon without one-shotting him. Impressive stuff.
It really proves that the game can be a normal JRPG, albeit a grindy one in the beginning.
It really proves that the game can be a normal JRPG, albeit a grindy one in the beginning.
It’s unrelated to difficulty, but, is it a good one though? Being grindy to me is generally a pretty terrible thing in a JRPG. Part of marketing for SMTV’s rerelease was nerfing the impact of level on damage, and basically everyone loved that.
I also don’t see many defensive options for the half of the game I’m at besides Maelle’s redirect, or maybe absurd defense/HP stacking, if defense even works.
This goes for every JRPG: if clicking and winning is bad, how is chess popular? It’d just mean the RPG part isn’t balanced (or is not your type of game)
Mario&Luigi, the only series close to this I’ve played, just does it way better, some dodges require holding, almost all include figuring out who to dodge with, different effects depending on when you jump etc. Parries in E33 come down to timing one button, and occasionally pressing the others with very clear telegraphs. And dodging seems barely more helpful
I absolutely hate parry systems and cheated my way through it, although I lost interest once something spoilery happened to the main character you’ve been playing as.
I was actually optimistic, because I like Mario&Luigi, so these combat systems CAN work. The problem is, the parry systems in E33 are 80% of your success (if you don’t grind), yet are more shallow by comparison, and most of the depth is in the RPG parts that are just a supplement (unless you grind + play on easier difficulty settings, but it seems you need a Picto for AP on damage to let you have fun then)
Both Mario RPG and the M&L games have timing systems I don’t mind. They have pretty generous windows and don’t punish you too severely if you miss them. E33 was brutal on both fronts.
That’s also because M&L requires more attention to get the timing right. You need to look for cues who the attack will go to, see if you can jump on the attack or only over it, hold the dodge button rather than press, or multitask when both bros are being attacked. Or sometimes, DON’T jump, because you then take damage. The games are puzzle/action games with JRPG elements slapped in.
E33 is extremely telegraphed (barring the very rare jukes) so it needs to compensate with tight timing and erratic animations, requiring both higher skill + trial and error. Sometimes have to press another button, but you don’t even need to figure it out (I tried to jump some attacks because of Elden Ring habits lol), the enemy or whole screen telegraphs it. It’s a JRPG with action slapped in, at its core at least.
For another example, Deltarune and Undertale are basically action games too, but do a lot of stuff with their dodging, sometimes even switching genres to platformer/shooter etc.
Disco Elysium, such interesting and complex world building beneath the drunken detective murder mystery. Shame ZA/UM ruined everything with the devs and we probably won’t get anything else out of it.
Aside from my concerns about the kind of shit libertarians think counts as free speech, how the hell would Microsoft implement a ban on a Minecraft server that Microsoft doesn’t host?
Like I assume it’s just connecting to the server by hostname or IP. What are they gonna do, hardcode the server’s known IPs and hostnames and prevent connections??
how the hell would Microsoft implement a ban on a Minecraft server that Microsoft doesn’t host?
if a minecraft server wants to enforce verification of the game license, the server needs to be in contact with the authentication servers of microsoft. the server operator can turn this off, but then moderation becomes much harder, as usernane based banning becomes useless, and the paywall from ban evasion disappears.
other than that, in recent years there’s something with chat message verification that I think involves sending some of the messages to microsoft? I don’t remember exactly
but also the minecraft client could have a built in blacklist of servers. I don’t know if it has but it’s not much work.
a ban from the authentication server is probably easier though.
The chat message verification is the Chat Reporting system, which can be required on servers. That’s a whole rabbit hole to go down. TL;DR you can get banned from Minecraft if your messages get reported. (Use the NoChatReports mod like everyone does)
I’d say it’s clickbait. The hardcore SC people act like other games don’t exist and won’t say a peep about them. Those of us that have sunk money into SC but play other games too will just play whatever suits us at the time. There is plenty to bitch about SC without comparisons to other games’ updates. When we do compare to other games it tends to be generalized like, “Online games have had working doors, elevators, and inventory since the 1990s.”
When used properly it makes sense. But there are only rare occasions when that is appropriate. So instead everyone just uses it all the time and so no one really understands when it should be used. Dumb.
To continue this logic, if “nobody” says nothing it could be construed as the start of the conversation, implying the subject came to the conclusion without prompting or context
I feel the opposite when I hear people complain about load times… “We want you to buy our SSD so your game will boot in 11 seconds instead of 19 seconds!”
Son, let me tell you about loading games from casette tape.
You’d start it loading, get up and go have dinner with the family. After 30 minutes, maybe it would be done. Maybe.
Maybe it hit an error 5 minutes after you walked away and now you need to re-wind and try again.
The generation of Amstrad, Spectrum etc had the games on tape. I would say they were the closest thing to a console pre-NES, so 1980s. I had an amstrad that was handed down to me by a friend of an older sister and it had tapes like this.
I had one, I had the tape drive for the Commodore 64 as well.
The Supercharger back in the day wasn’t that expensive, about $70 or the price of 2 games, because you had to supply your own tape player, the supercharger just connected to it with a wire.
Not only on tape, but some radio shows would transmit computer programs that you could record and use. I know of the UK and Finland, but I think other European countries did it too.
Up to the 90s my friend. Then 3.5 floppy"s took over (1.44 MEGAbyte!) then came zip (100MB) but only for rich people, then it became the era of CD and later dvd burning. Internet was not measured in mbits back then and most of the time not even in kbits. The internet was not a valid delivery system. It was slow and very expensive. Also the first memory cards (CF) around the millennium and from there it went on to the 10s and around there you got the pivot to what we have now.
Tape is still around in computing; its cheap, it’s cheerful, dependable and has quite a throughput. Seeking on it is still horrible though. But anyway, watching a real mechanised tapelibrary do it’s thing backing up computer systems is still mesmerizing.
You left out 5 1/4 floppy disks that were actually floppy. Yes, I know there are 8" floppies but those were mostly business use and specialized drives that you didn’t really get in the home computer market. Atari, Commodore, Radio Shack, etc all had 5 1/4" floppy drives, and when I got my first box of floppies, it was $50 of early 1980’s money for 10 disks. And on my Atari they held about 90K worth of space.
Not just any hobby, any country. You think this country still uses fax machines and are a bunch of racists? You think that country doesn’t believe in vaccines and elected a moron? You think that country is committing a genocide?
I know these are very bland choices, but these games had a huge impact on me. I’ve only played disco Elysium recently, but it truly is a masterpiece. FNV gives me warm memories of [the good parts, at least.] of my childhood, and outer wilds… I don’t even really know how to describe it.
This isn’t an exhaustive list by any means, and there are some other games that affected me on the same level, but I could only pick 3 :)
I adored Disco Elysium while playing it, but the ending felt kinda rushed/soured for me so it didn't quite hit top 3. However, the book Sacred And Terrible Air by Robert Kurvitz that was fan translated to English semi recently helped a great deal with unanswered questions about the world the game takes place in that I had which really helped brighten my overall opinion of the game in retrospect.
The book isn't very approachable I think with almost zero exposition, so it actually helps to have played the game first.
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