I think Satisfactory hits a few of these targets, if you haven’t already tried it. The amount of resources is determined by a map that is not procedurally generated, so there is a hard cap to your resources per minute, though the resources never run out. So end game focuses more on playing efficiently rather than brute expansion.
Indies really are the way to go for both customers and developers if they want a better, more ethical and respectful environment. It is a risky career path, but given how many major publishers treat the developers under them, it's not like sticking with mainstream would lead to a comfortable stable livelihood either.
Baldur's Gate 3 really put me in a dilemma, but I think I'll ultimately buy it because I want to support Larian Studios more than I want to avoid Wizards of the Coast. I wouldn't trust Wizards enough to get One D&D and the likely tabletop lootbox hell they are scheming, but BG 3 is delivering a good product that deserves support. Though buying the Divinity games is an alternative if you don't want WotC to get any money.
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.
While I agree that it’s a bit disingenuous to call it’s a PvE game I do think that the feel of it is on the PvE side a lot of the times (but considerably less than half of the time). Especially since the ARC robots are so well done. And I don’t encounter other players in a meaningful way every game.
However, I don’t agree at all that it’s a horrible game. I think that it’s a fantastic game! It’s just released and it has some issues. Apart from a couple of small issues I think it’s a game that does the genre extraction shooting great, runs great, and is the first game in quite a while that feels done and polished and not rushed in any way.
Regarding the shot-on-sight and camping I think it’s a double edged sword. Of course it doesn’t feel good to die, especially by camping. But it would not feel good to extract if there was no risk/stress before doing so.
This has to be one of the worst designed data visualizations I’ve seen in a long time. God knows social media isn’t wanting for shitty dataviz, but this one is particularly awful. It’s an assault on my senses trying to read it.
I guess I shouldn’t be surprised from a company called “visual capitalist”.
edit: When I made this years ago a friend warned me that some folks would not recognize it as satire. I didn’t believe it possible for anyone to be that stupid.
the fact you probably truly believe you are delivering some burn is the sad part here.
as per your request, let me read the video to you (if you have trouble reading, you can always listen to itm but it still requires turning on your brain):
columbus saw the ocean
he sailed far and wide
just to get a cup of spices
from the other side
he knew he would die for sure
if he should reach the edge
but that’s okay cause long before
he’d starve to death instead
the world is flat
the world is flat
the world is flat
the world is flat
the world is flat
earth’s an oblate spheroid
revolving around the sun
spinning on its axis
which is tilted just for fun
that explains the seasons there
and the changing length of day
but here’s an inconvinient truth
you can’t explain that way
the world is flat
the world is flat
the world is flat
the world is flat
the world is flat
trump won re-election
he won it by a mile
only to protect us
from the socialist pedophiles
but biden wants the mail and ballots
counted and at what cost
he is so out of touch
he can’t admit when he has lost
the world is flat
the world is flat
the world is flat
the world is flat
the world is flat
endless interventions
never-ending war
all to please the oligarchs
and economic horse
but lower taxes on the rich
and do it really quick
my ship is coming in soon
and i don’t want to pay for it
the world is flat
the world is flat
the world is flat
the world is flat
the world is flat
here we are, in the the astronomy community, that should attract rather smarter people, but most of you are as lazy as average flat-earher and did not bother to even click the link before following in steps of the first downvoter. if that person jumped off the cliff, i am afraid most of you would follow, because it is easier than to use your own brain.
i made myself sad on new year.
(for the extra lazy ones who don’t have time to listen to the lyrics of his social commentary, he put that blackboard there with kepler’s 3rd law to give you hint he might not actually believe the earth is flat. but that would require using at least 10 of your brain cells. good luck next time when you complain about stupidity of the “other side”.
columbus saw the ocean
he sailed far and wide
just to get a cup of spices
from the other side
he knew he would die for sure
if he should reach the edge
but that’s okay cause long before
he’d starve to death instead
the world is flat
the world is flat
the world is flat
the world is flat
the world is flat
earth’s an oblate spheroid
revolving around the sun
spinning on its axis
which is tilted just for fun
that explains the seasons there
and the changing length of day
but here’s an inconvinient truth
you can’t explain that way
the world is flat
the world is flat
the world is flat
the world is flat
the world is flat
trump won re-election
he won it by a mile
only to protect us
from the socialist pedophiles
but biden wants the mail and ballots
counted and at what cost
he is so out of touch
he can’t admit when he has lost
the world is flat
the world is flat
the world is flat
the world is flat
the world is flat
endless interventions
never-ending war
all to please the oligarchs
and economic horse
but lower taxes on the rich
and do it really quick
my ship is coming in soon
and i don’t want to pay for it
the world is flat
the world is flat
the world is flat
the world is flat
the world is flat
and from the native speakers, i’d like an opinion - is he singing oblate spheroid at the beginning of 3rd paragraph? or is he singing old blade, which is what i hear, and is it some strange poetic phrase?
Just in the interest of cheering you up a bit, I’d like to point out that many people simply refuse to click on YouTube links. Personally, I have no desire to engage with video content, especially when it’s shared with little to no context. It’s not out of laziness, but more out of a conviction that far too many people have outsourced their thinking to random vloggers, and believe that posting a link to their favorite video essay lends credibility to their argument.
believe that posting a link to their favorite video essay lends credibility to their argument.
unfortunately that is definitely a trend. but then you also have the person who grabs one rhyme out of context and comments it aged like a milk, meaning they did open the video, listened to it and absolutely did not understood.
i am also not going to watch every 60 minutes long video someone posts me in a discussion, but if i am invested in the discussion so much i care about answering or voting on something, i at least try to understand the concept of the video and what it is trying to say.
the headline in this case did not help, but i rarely see such an example of crowd behaviour concentrated in such short time as was the case with this link.
People aren’t lazy, we just all live in a social media landscape where, when someone posts a link with an intentionally provocative title, it’s rarely worth the effort to engage with it enough to find out if they’re being sarcastic or sincere.
Sometimes this means that well-meaning people get downvoted. Oh well. Learn to read the room.
Why would anyone still be preordering? It’s a complete gamble with no payoff. Preordering made sense when games were on physical media, but there isn’t any stock limit on digital goods.
I very very rarely pre-order but if reviews are out and you’re already planning on buying it, it could be worth it. Some stores provide a discount for pre-ordering games, I got Elden Ring for 15% off before it even released which is nice.
It’s barely recognisable from the below average game that released in 2016. There used to be nothing to do in it, now there’s so much to do that it’s overwhelming. It’s a very good game now, and you have to give credit to Hello Games for what they’ve done to make it what it was always supposed to be.
Still some things I don’t love about it, but on the whole it’s well worth playing if you’re into that type of game.
The way the game launched makes me never want to buy a game from them again. It’s nice it’s better now, but now the game is almost 10 years old. They straight up lied about what was going to be in the game a release.
Now they are working on a new game and I’ll read things about how ambitious it is and fans hope they can deliver.
Lol no. They will do the same thing and lie about what’s in it to get people’s money. They may eventually make the game better, but they should be doing that before releasing pure lies.
As someone who bought it at launch, I give them credit for it. Hats off to them…
Still am never buying Hello Games games, or anything by Sean Murray, ever again.
$60 for an early access tech demo where they lied about dozens of features. It is still missing promised features after all of their work - which speaks more to the amount of bullshit they spew than the feature set because the features checklist is as shallow as a puddle.
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