On the other side of the spectrum: Older games that I own on CD-ROMs are much faster to pirate, download, and install than it would be to find the CD in the attic and then hunt for the USB CD Drive ;)
limited inventories are kind of abused currently and that unlimited inventory systems would give more player choices.
In some sense that’s correct. You’d have more options, but you wouldn’t take them. Having a limited inventory forces you to make choices. Yes, you can use that scroll/potion/whatever, because you’re gonna run out of room, so feel free. On the other hand, I think that many devs don’t consider inventory management enough! I think that it’s often an afterthought and could use more dev attention.
What game mechanics do you love and hate?
Hate: instakills. Diablo 4 and Risk of Rain 2 are my current games that have this. ROR2 is not as bad, you can prevent this by getting enough defensive items. D4 is worse about this. You can be chewing thru trash mobs just fine but get to a boss and immediately die. There’s no ramp up to this.
Inventory management is one aspect of Diablo 1 that I liked a lot. If you played MP, you could either transfer your gear to mules… But if you wanted to play “as the game is intended”, you had very limited space to carry between games and had to choose which items you want to carry with you to the next game. I did a playthrough through the 3 difficulties with Warrior a few years ago and I loved having to make these choices.
On the topic of instakills, I always mod them out of Fallout 4 and Skyrim, because it’s annoying as hell that I can be instakilled from full HP, when it would otherwise take several hits to even endanger me.
If you play RoR2 on PC, you owe it to yourself to install some Quality of Life mods, like one that fixes or improves the game’s built in one shot protection. Also, auto sprint.
There are certainly many games that shouldn’t have limited inventories that have them, but I also think there are many games for which a limited inventory enhance the game. I do enjoy games that make me make decisions about what I want to take with me and budget my inventory space when it makes sense.
Slow grounded movement in open world games is so dumb. Why the fuck do you think I want to spend 5minutes walking across a plain or on a path I can’t that forces me to move slowly. I do appreciate how some games like this actively just take control for you so you can do a chore (Final Fantasy XIV autodrive, RDR2 lets you automatically move on a path while riding a horse) butIf your open world is that boring, can you just add a mode that brings me to my destination?
I’d much rather a more densely populated world on a smaller scale (Yakuza) some fun extreme forms of movement (Gravity Rush, Tears of the Kingdom). Heck even just have a faster option for mobility on basic terrain is better (Elden Ring). If there was a big desert and you gave me a dune buggy that goes 100mph, that feels way better then having to walk/trod around a hilly or mountainous landscape dotted with areas you have to move around or carefully move through.
Obviously if you lean into that mechanic as being intentionally frustrating, feel free.
In a similar vein for me, I really dislike cutscenes in a lot of first person games where you still have control of your character, but the only thing you can do is sloooowly move forward or move your camera slightly to the side. Just make it an actual cinematic so I can just sit back and watch instead of pretending it’s gameplay.
Death Stranding is a game completely about grounded movement, but it makes it enjoyable. Usually traveling in games is mostly about turning your brain off and moving forward. DS you need to pay attention to your environment and character and plan a path forward. It’s actually engaging. I don’t expect other games to do as well as a game where that’s 99% of what they were trying, but I’d hope they learn from it at least. I haven’t seen much, if any, of that yet though.
Death Stranding 100% gets this right, although it’s a bit weird in the end-game when your optimal choice is typically some combination of vehicles and ziplines.
Paying attention to the elevation, pathing around rocks and trying to stay level is a lot more fun than it sounds. Some of the best moments in that game it just lets some chill music play while you carefully walk from A-B and it’s a ton of fun the whole time.
Then you finally reach your destination and the story feels almost entirely detached from the walking experience and characters with the dumbest names imaginable explain some made up bullshit to you for 45 minutes.
This is one big reason why I liked Fenyx way better than Breath of the Wild. The Fenyx world is far smaller, but also more dense with actually interesting things to do. You have a horse in both, but the distances in BotW are still just pointlessly big, esp. when 90% of the things you can find are just the same two things: shrines and koroks.
Genuine question: how much of the marketing material did you see? I thought it was always clear that it was gonna be an exploration/puzzle game in a cyberpunk world with a baddie.
I had the opposite reaction, and was surprised by how much I enjoyed the small things, like scratching a carpet!
I do hope you find something more like what you’re wishing for, though 🙂
Yeah if OP went into stray expecting an open world survival game, that’s on them. It’s kind of silly to be disappointed that a game does not meet expectations fabricated entirely within your own head.
I’m 40, and I enjoy doing my taxes, choosing colors of paint, and reading the business section of the newspaper. I don’t listen to music or watch television or play video games.
I’m surprised people just scraped the sarcastic frosting off this cake and just ate it like a sad little honesty cake, bereft of anything good.
I have a bluetooth headset embedded to my skull and I listen to music basically constantly, my Steam Deck goes where I go, and unfortunately, I steal my television on the internets cause I can’t stand advertisements. (And, uhh… playing an instrument is out of the question for me, cause I’ve survived a couple of strokes and manual dexterity and a sense of rhythm are things best left for other people.)
Most of the time I’m writing or taking pictures though. I’ve got a portfolio that I’m building that spans twenty years!
But I should clarify: I am nowhere near anything like what I’ve presented above.
Heh. Tax returns and music should have been the giveaways, although I know someone who takes great satisfaction in taking every tax deduction they legally can, down to the last cent. :-P
You can knock her out instead of killing her. You can then save her from execution in Act 2 to recruit her. She can even have a bit if a redemption arc, iirc.
There are some specific steps (knock her out before the hobgoblin boss, else she does not remain temporary hostile, and after you knock her out, you need to kill the other two bosses before the long rest, else she wake up and you need to knock her out again), but it’s feasible. There are a lot of YouTube video about it. She is in all my runs (she is one of the funniest companion), and I never killed the tielflings
Oh shit, I just killed her in my current playthrough because I thought it didn’t matter anyway. Which sucks. I really love her voice, and she has a fun arc.
I found it to be a beautifully frustrating experience. There clearly are a ton of layers and puzzles can help you solve other puzzles. I appreciate the effort it took to make it, but it doesn’t feel like it respects the effort it takes to play it. Here’s some of my frustrations:
At a certain point you should get a magic vacuum upgrade to pick up all common items in rooms. Hunting for gems and coins in rooms on my 25th day sucks and adds nothing
I should be able to move at least three times faster. Fuck, navigating the house is slow
It really sucks that the first time you “solve” the primary puzzle you actually can’t progress until you solve a separate other puzzle that is dependent on finding one room and then another, and that is not clearly indicated at all
While footsteps eventually become trivial it’s an annoying resource when you don’t have full control over the layout of the house. So you can build a maze through no fault of your own and then you don’t get the steps to explore them
Eventually there’s a special room you can pick every run. Why do you make me actually traverse to that room? It burns useless steps and again, is slow as fuck
Additionally, the only “permanent” room you can place (to my knowledge) you can get way too early. So if you put that in a crappy spot you just kinda fuck yourself for the rest of the game
Sometimes you will think you have solved a puzzle but need to assemble the rooms to implement the solution. So you can: spam runs and rooms to get lucky and find it, do normal runs and just hope you find it, try to manipulate RNG to maximize the chance of solving that puzzle. None of those are fun when you have a couple of solutions to try and you spend multiple in game days manufacturing that opportunity
The items are kind of crazy. There is a puzzle that requires you to assemble three items in a specific room, then discover a separate other room, then get to that room to use that item. There’s like 15+ items in the game, how are you ever supposed to organically put that together? Also finding a metal detector in my first 5 days made me paranoid that every room was hiding keys and coins on the floor even when I didn’t have it
Some of the puzzles are so obtuse and have so many layers that if you ever happen to solve one that you suddenly think all puzzles could be that crazy. I solved the chess puzzle before the periodic table puzzle and was building this wildly complicated solution to that puzzle when it was actually really simple
Despite my gripes I do think it’s a good game with incredible puzzles and a very unique design. I just think it doesn’t account for people actually playing it. I would bet there’s a really intriguing story under this but eventually I got so hung up on performing solutions I had already discovered I couldn’t be bothered to also discover the plot. I did read a summary after that helped contextualize things. Honestly what I’m looking forward to is when someone else takes these mechanics and refines it into a really cool rogue-like
Just here to agree with your thesis. It feels like Blue Prince doesn’t respect my time. So much of the game relies on luck but each round is 30+minutes long.
I got credits and uninstalled. I respect this game, but I’m not sure I enjoyed it.
If you got credits, thats you completed the tutorial. The game has ridiculous depth and story to discover. I can totally see how not every one gets that
You’re not wrong. I’ve had most of these thoughts. I would appreciate more permanent upgrades to save time.
I won’t say it’s a flawless game. The depth is just so unexpected.
I played through the credits run solo. Now that I’m passed that, I’m bouncing ideas off a friend because it might take either of us ages to discover things like how to create certain items, etc.
Fate- monstrous
And empty.
Fate- monstrous
And empty.
Burning inside with
Violent anger.
Burning inside with
Violent anger.
Sephiroth!
Sephiroth!
Come, come, Oh come,
Do not let me die.
Come, come, Oh come,
Do not let me die.
Come, come, Oh come,
Do not let me die.
Come, come, Oh come,
Do not let me die.
Glorious and Noble…
Glorious and Noble…
Sephiroth!
Edit: Full Latin Lyrics for the curious.
Estuans interius
Ira vehementi.
Estuans interius
Ira vehementi.
Sephiroth!
Sephiroth!
Estuans interius
Ira vehementi.
Estuans interius
Ira vehementi.
Sephiroth!
Sephiroth!
Sors immanis-
Et inanis.
Sors immanis-
Et inanis.
Estuans interius
Ira vehementi.
Estuans interius
Ira vehementi.
Sephiroth!
Sephiroth!
Veni, veni, venias,
Ne me mori facias.
Veni, veni, venias,
Ne me mori facias.
Veni, veni, venias,
Ne me mori facias.
Veni, veni, venias,
Ne me mori facias.
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