I agree that your setup would be perfect, but the reality of the situation is that it depends on the engine and how much time the programmers/artists/whatever have.
Like if the engine doesn’t support dynamically resizing equipment, then you have to make every single piece of equipment over again for every body shape. That is a potentially massive amount of work, even if there is tooling that will automate most of it and only require retouching. There’s only so much time in the day, and every hour that people are working on this is an hour that they aren’t working on building more levels or adding more systems, etc.
Is it better to have “Body Shape A/B” or “Male Body / Female Body”? Because those are the options that are the same amount of work.
It would be better to have a ton of body options. It would be even better to have sliders and have everything adjust itself to fit whatever shape you make. But both of those options take time to work on, and time is money.
I don’t think it’s fair to call (for a specific choice) BG3’s developers lazy because they only have 2 (or 4 for some races) body sizes. They are just optimizing their time investment.
Yeah, but In Baldur’s Gate 3 I can make a feminine looking character with tits and a big throbbing horse dick, a masculine character with a vagina, or an adrogynous character with whatever the hell I want… So having the pronouns separate from the build actually makes sense. The concept of binary gender identity is subverted enough for pronoun selection to serve a practical purpose.
In something like Old School Runescape or the Demon’s Souls remaster? Not so much.
If I’m ONLY going to have two body type choices, Buff Dude or Curvy Chick, why this unnatural “Body Type A/Body Type B” language instead of saying “Masculine/Feminine” ? It just makes me feel like I’m in some Orwellian New Speak environment that just simply doesn’t exist in day to day life. And again, Non-Binary individuals aren’t getting any favors here because they’re STILL forced into a dichotomy of Masculine or Feminine, it’s just now that “Those buzzword unfriendly M and F-Words” aren’t present. The best a non-binary individual can really get in that situation is do a heads/tails coin toss and pick They/Them pronouns.
No one’s needs are really being met here, we’re just forcing awkward corporate jargon to pretend the game is more inclusive than it really is.
Fun fact, BG3 only has a max of 4 body types per race, and the lower genitalia each have their own models to fit each body type, and that’s just for the “normal” sized races. The short races also have their body types, and so does the Dragonborn. Each armour and clothing piece has to have one unique model and rig to fit each of those body types; that’s a lot of modeling and rigging work.
Not to mention the massive difference in age between BG3 and OSRS/RS3. RuneScape’s running on an engine that was never built with more than 2 body types in mind. Changing that is probably a much more monumental task than OP realizes, the armor models being just one (big) roadblock.
I’m no Jagex defender but I feel like the fact that they added even this small change to a 23 year old game’s character creator shouldn’t be labeled lazy. All that will do is discourage developers from trying.
I don’t know what game first came up with it, but Super Mario RPG was the first time I saw timed hits for attack and defense in a JRPG. While the mechanic isn’t exactly ubiquitous it has popped up in a handful of other games over the years and it always reminds me of that game.
If you don’t get the mail, this is probably due to playtest schedule, they may give you access when the playtest is open, after that you can always play vs bots
I’d love an invite! ~~steamcommunity.com/id/demonictaco~~. Thank you so much! Please let me know if link doesn’t work. I’m at work so I can’t go on steam haha. They have the website blocked.
EDIT: Someone else (on Reddit, go figure) sent me an invite the day after. This may be a shocker to you but you kinda have to accept friend requests before you can send beta invites.
Accepted. Nothing’s come yet but I will let you know when the invite arrives.
To be fair, it’s not easy to make a big open world that feels immersive and competes with linear games in terms of fidelity (art, rendering, sound, music, etc), even if you know exactly where the player will go and what they’ll do. Trying to then account for every possible permutation of game state and player action is an exponential explosion of work. Without some kind of AI figuring out a believable way for the game to respond in any given situation, your only practical option is to make some assumptions, pick a small set of “golden paths” and polish those.
R* devs work their asses off to an ethically questionable degree as it is, I don’t think it’s fair to imply they’re not making the best possible experience at that scale with the technology available.
Even Gold can be comparable to Windows. Even silver, since a lot of games don't actually work well or at all on Windows anymore. At the same time, Platinum can still mean issues. It's not that black & white comparable when there's so many factors going into it (regardless of the OS).
They do it because if you have to be online, connected to their servers, you have to look at their store and be tempted to buy something else for the game. It’s also just straight DRM. The industry spent the better part of 20 years complaining about piracy and used game sales, and now they’ve found a way to defeat them by just designing their games to disappear when the servers are gone. That does come with a catch though. Building and maintaining the online infrastructure costs a lot of money, and given how many of these games just instantly flop and die, customers are less willing to invest their time and money into a game unless they know it’s a winner, which has less to do with the game’s quality and more of how many other people perceive it to be quality. This looks to me to be why the industry is crashing right now.
As egregious as horse armor was decades ago, that doesn’t offend me the way server requirements do (you can always just choose not to buy the horse armor and still have the game you bought in perpetuity). If the game requires an online connection, don’t buy it. There’s always another game out there like it without the requirement. A game that requires an internet connection is just a worse version of a game they could have sold you without it, and the online requirement gives it an expiration date. If multiplayer requires an online connection, make sure it supports LAN, split-screen, direct IP connections, or private servers. This information is very hard to find just by store pages, perhaps intentionally so, but I usually check on the PC Gaming Wiki these days; otherwise you have to hope the developer responds to a question about those features in the Steam forums.
My top ones I constantly replay are Factorio, rimworld and modded Minecraft java version, mainly because there’s a incredible amount of mods For all of them, make themed runs for each one. Sometimes action adventure sometimes just pure automation.
Nearly 8k in Factorio and probably Minecraft, not as much in rimworld but only because I bought it about a year ago
I’m a huge fan of Rimworld! Very excited to hear you’re giving it a try. It really can become whatever you want. There is an abundance of Quality of Life mods too. I definitely have recommendations if you’d like.
so I looked into modded minecraft via curse… seems awfully clunky - and so many mods are really compilations of others… can you recommend top few mods?
The only one that seems interesting from a player perspective is trees falling when cut.
The real juice of modded minecraft is in the modpacks - curated sets of mods that were configured to work well with each other, frequently with some custom recipes added by the pack developer, and sometimes some kind of a quest line to guide you through the pack and provide a more structured experience. There are many different types of modpacks - kitchen sinks (large collections of mods, frequently without a lot of balance tweaks or changes, for a more sandbox experience), questing packs (with the aforementioned quest books to guide you through the mods), vanilla+ packs that intend to expand on the vanilla minecraft experience and not change the gameplay loop significantly, packs focused exclusively on magic or technology mods (or both), expert packs (questing packs with heavily reworked recipes, where you need to build elaborate machines and automate stuff Factorio-style)…
I’m not up to date with the modpack scene, so can’t really make you a definitive list - back on reddit (sigh) there is a r/feedthebeast community that specializes in modded play.
That said:
FTB Academy seems to be a pack specifically meant to teach the basics of modded play.
Project Ozone 3 comes up quite often as a pack with a good quest book that guides you through everything.
Cottage Witch is what I’m currently starting, it’s (so far) a chill magic vanilla+ pack. New creatures, new plants, some new mechanics, tons of new decorations for building.
Peace of Mind is an older pack made specifically for playing on Peaceful, if mobs are stressing you out. It’s got a good questbook too.
and if you want to jump straight into the deep end… Enigmatica 2 (or 6) Expert, Gregtech New Horizons. Expert packs in which you need to automate everything to progress. Gregtech in particular is infamous for its complexity, difficulty, and length, but if you enjoy solving hard problems it might be for you.
You’ll also need a launcher to install these packs - FTB have their own if you want FTB Academy, otherwise there are some options such as Curseforge (do not recommend, eats resources just by existing), Prism (seems to come up a lot as a recommendation), or GDLauncher (what I’m using).
Yeah what the other guy said, modpacks and give FTB academy a start. Generally the mods add a shitload of new content (like lots more ores). Better automation and electricity is, imo, the best stuff added, and there’s tons of that. I find the magic and adventure mods don’t quite work as well. My biggest tip for modded mc is: Spread out! Make big ass bases and rooms, you’ll love the space.
After that it’s your call what’s next. A kitchen sink pack is one that sorta rams in a ton of mods with no theme and it’s fun! FTB infinity was a lot of fun, or FTB Ultimate re whatever too.
There’s StoneBlock which is the opposite of Skyblock which was a different style
Create: Above and Beyond is my favorite. It is hard though and requires that you understand the Create mod.
By the way you’ll find that Create is the best mod. It’s really fucking well done and no other mod really comes close in quality. Gears and belts!
Adds a dimension in the sky with its own progression of ores, and a system of a progression of dungeons. Lots of new enemies. It has a kinda similar progression to playing vanilla survival minecraft, but it’s harder and the things you have to worry about are very different.
It’s one of the most polished mods out there and is intended for a standalone experience.
Mine & Slash this is a big modpack intended to change the game into a more combat oriented and fantasy themed game.
There are some that are designed to make the progression be a system of automating resource production, similar to games like Factorio or Satisfactory. Create is an example.
Ones like Blightfall are a complete curated experience with a story, a custom map, and a modpack.
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