I’d love to get another singleplayer game as well, but I’ve accepted that Valve is just unpredictable. I’m sure they haven’t given up on Singleplayer and we’ll get another singleplayer game… at some point. Their previous game was the fantastic Half-life Alyx after all.
Stuff has been leaking about the next Half Life game since Episode 2 came out, and not much of it had anything to do with what we ended up getting with Alyx. Don’t get your hopes up newbie.
They bought the game and changed out the graphics API to kill the Linux native builds, then after the community got it working via Wine, they added anticheat. Epic went further than incompetence on that one.
It’s a perfect digitization of D&D 5th edition - it’s like having an automatic dungeon master using the rules and regulations we’ve been playing with on paper for ages.
It has a massive plot that can vary wildly on playthroughs depending on how rolls go, just like the real version.
It’s four-player co-op with PVE in an age where cooperation is increasingly rare outside of competitive team games.
It’s a well designed, properly built, finished product that can be expanded on with DLC, rather than using them to address core gameplay issues. (looking at you Paradox)
Mmmm good point! I'm imagine some of the bigger 5e 3rd parties straight porting their magic items, spells and monsters into the game (monsters would be for custom campaign eventually).
Sure, but people were really mad earlier this year because Wizards of the Coast, the company that owns D&D tried to pull some licencing related shenanigans that would have massively fucked over the community. People were boycotting the movie a couple of months ago over that. It’s interesting, that Baldurs Gate seems to not be affected by this at all.
Yeah because Twitter is not a real place. The actual D&D community spoke with their wallets and they said “we like a good, finished product without stupid terms of use” and all bought BG3. People who don’t even play D&D bought BS3 to play with folks who do play D&D.
Well, I had already bought BG3 in Early Access before the OGL debacle, and before Hasbro (WotC’s parent company) sent the Pinkertons to intimidate some small time Youtuber into giving back some unreleased Magic: the Gathering cards that he had been erroneously sold early by a distributor. So I couldn’t very well boycott it when I had already purchased it and played like 30 hours of it.
You don’t need to justify your purchasing decision to me. I am not even calling for a boycott of the game. I know people at Larian and I wish them all the success they can get.
I am just surprised that this whole thing seems to be completely absent from the larger discussion about this game. I would have assumed, that it would have been at least a footnote.
Im playing a bunch of soulslikes for the first time now. You gotta exhaust everything you can think of, then check a walkthrough just for the hint youre missing.
The process is the fun part. Looking it up is just a way to minimize frustration because you can’t find the goddamn ladder.
I think souls likes are just not for me. I just want a cool story told in a relatively linear fashion. I’d take a linear 15 hour game over an open world 150+ hour game any day.
Most of em are pretty linear, really. Elden Ring is the exception. But like Bloodborne for instance, youre gonna go pretty much in the same order till you have to return to earlier areas to finish stuff. You’ve gotta explore a lot though.
Not trying to be like “LOVE THE THING THAT I LOVE DAMN YOU”, theyre totally not for everyone.
Only the most braindead of gamers has a chance of bouncing off a single Souls fight more than maybe a dozen times. Two dozen if you’re especially thickheaded.
The thing about Soulslikes - and Fromsoft games in particular - is that they teach you new things primarily by killing you with them. Once you know whatever the thing is that this encounter is trying to teach you, you can blow through the entire thing at level 1 and people do it all the time. And I do mean “people” and not just professional streamers. SL1 is a popular challenge run for souls fans, specifically because once you know all the rules of the game it becomes very easy.
But there is no easing-in to learning new things in Dark Souls. You will get flattened into paste by some bullshit without warning, and it is up to the player to figure out a) why they died, and b) how to prevent that. Throwing yourself at the same brick wall 200 times with no change in strategy is a losing prospect no matter what game you’re playing, souls or otherwise.
The essence of “gitting gud” is literally just stopping for 10 seconds to think about why you failed last time. If you’re capable of that - and 99% of gamers definitely are, it’s a core component of game design - you’re capable of not only completing but excelling in Soulslikes.
People have been jerking off how difficult Souls games are for a decade and a half now and it’s never been true. Souls games are just rhythm games that don’t give you the rhythm onscreen. Find that rhythm (through observing patterns, and especially through listening to the boss fight music) and you’ll first-clear every single fight.
Thing is I do enough of problem solving already so this just isnt my jam.
And if you like that genre/game series I wish you the best to getting more :)
I’m sorry, I just can’t stop myself from launching into this spiel every time I hear a comment like your first one. There’s a huge swath of gamers that I feel like would actually love my favorite game if they weren’t scared away from it by gamer circlejerk. It’s not my mission in life to defend Dark Souls to people who don’t care about it, but I often assume that mantle despite myself.
At the end of the day though it’s just a game about self reflection and personal growth, and I like that.
Very. I would recommend only playing it on controller. And it runs pretty well on Steam Deck. There’s an fps unlocker/resolution fix that makes it play better, but not necessary.
A lot of people will say it’s harder than other souls games, but it’s really just different. The combat is amazing once you get the timing down. It can feel like a rhythm game at times when you’re in the zone. And the feeling you get when you beat a difficult boss is second to none.
Look, it’s like my favorite game ever, but it’s pretty hard and it’s not for everyone. I hope you enjoy it, but the game only ever seems to go down to $30, so I don’t want someone to waste money on a game they don’t like on account of me.
I guess it can refund it in Steam, though I’m not sure if 2 hours is enough time for it to gel. I’ve seen people say that the early boss, “Genichiro Ashina” is the first real test, and indication of what’s to come. That one will be tough, but it’s all about learning the attack patterns.
Sounds good to me.
I am not against a challenge.
But it’s good to have different viewpoints to get a general idea what to expect (and as you said, not to waste money) ;)
Yeah this is absolutely true start to finish. Once you slow down and stop spamming buttons, and think, it becomes really surprisingly easy. Mostly. Some bosses are just gonna ruin your day for a bit. Till you figure out what youre doing wrong and adjust. Sometimes easier said than done.
Then, by the time you’ve finished like a single run of any game, youre totally ready to crush the entire genre catalog. You’ve got months of dungeons to explore if you want.
Sigh. Im so grateful for these games lol. Theres so much love and creativity in their DNA.
Oh yeah that boss music tip made a world of difference with Bloodborne. Once someone pointed it out on a flame-themed hunter boss that was giving me pause, i was amazed. Like, how the hell does that work so well??
I made it all the way through Dark Souls 1 and 2 and about half of 3 before I even knew that was a thing. I was getting curbstomped by Dancer of the Boreal Valley and went online looking for discussions about her. Lo and behold:
Tl;dw - Dancer’s song is in 3/4 time instead of 4/4 and she dances with her music. This gives her a crazy pattern that people always get got by because what feels like an opening actually isn’t. In order to defeat her you have to listen to her song and learn to dance with her.
Once I learned that it opened up an entire new world of understanding across every soulslike game I played and immediately halved my average number of boss attempts. No joke. Not every boss can be beaten blindfolded by just listening to their OST but it’ll give you good timing cues for the fight more often than it doesn’t.
I’ve bounced off some fights way more than that. It’s not even about not getting what to do, my concentration just dies and I also get greedy (or in the case of margit in elden ring was insanely underleveled on top of that). Playing claire obscure on the highest difficulty while ignoring defense isn’t very different in terms of dodging difficulty, but since I couldn’t really get greedy and my brain can go off on a journey on my own turn it was pretty smooth and much less frustrating for me.
I do agree souls games aren’t super difficult, but they are unforgiving and if concentration isn’t your strong suit that will fuck you relentlessly. I still enjoy them personally though I’ve never completed one, there’s always some area that just annoys me too much to bother after a bit.
Or the third option: someone enjoys games differently than you.
I rage quit the final boss of Sekiro (Sword Saint Isshin) after hours of trying, on and off, for days. Came back after a break of a couple of days, and beat him on the first try. The feeling was unmatched. I felt like a god lol
Soulslikes are great if you're looking to scratch an itch for mechanical mastery, discovery, exploration, etc., but stories are not their strong suit. I'm not saying the stories are bad, just the delivery of them, unless you're the type of player who wants to play detective.
First few games were delightful to me precisely because they didn’t beat you over the head with a story. It’s up to you the player to make your own meaning of the understated story.
That’s not just Souls-likes though. And only Elden Ring is really open world in that way (I think, haven’t played much of any of them). What you’re meaning is that open world games aren’t for you, which is a lot more games than just Souls-likes.
I generally love open-world games, but really don’t like any of the Souls or Souls-like games. The whole thing of always being so focused on the enemy, having to time dodges and parries just isn’t how my brain works, and I lose interest and/or give up very quickly. I have no issue with hard games, but I feel a lot of people who love those kinds of games have some kind of masochistic trait that makes them keep exposing themselves to the shit those games drag you through. I don’t get super happy or feel like I’ve overcome something big with these kinds of challenges, it’s just “fucking fuck, it’s finally dead, I feel like shit and have used up all my consumables, that was not fun in any way. I need to go do something else because I almost had a panic attack from all this crap”. The story just ends up not mattering because there’s always this burden of forcing yourself to get past every millimetre of the game. I love really hard puzzles though, and stuff like platforming and so on, almost anything except that very Souls-specific soul crushing style.
I dunno, I feel like I wouldn’t use a walkthrough on souls like games until the second play through. Part of the fun is the discovery, and its fine if you miss shit the first time.
I just mean when youre banging your head against the wall and need a hint where to go. I do this less and less now though, I’ve still only beaten one of them.
I agree and don’t typically worry so much about getting 100% in games, if i miss something that’s on me and fine.
Just gonna copy paste my comment on a related post…
Similar shit happened when they were PUBG Corporation. Fuck these lying assholes. Player Unknown was a smart, capable dude, and they exiled him to a remote office because he got pissed at the CEO for over-monetizing things in a way that cost them players.
When they released the battle pass while the game was retail, all of the non-Korean employees nearly revolted. It wasn’t smart, and it was a money grab on the players. When the team lead of market research told the product manager that the feature was a bad idea and would lose them all their Western players, the product manager got him demoted and moved to another team.
When the numbers didn’t look good, the data analysts were freaking out because they couldn’t deliver bad news up the chain of command, even if it was accurate.
When they acquired Mad Glory, they promised that the dev team would still be contracted to other game companies to build APIs and tools for them, keeping the game industry tooling ecosystem healthy (think op.gg). When PUBG Corporation acquired them, the company canceled their contract with Bethesda for the API they were in the middle of building and forbade them from working with other companies.
Fuck Bluehole. Fuck PUBG Corporation. Fuck Krafton. Fuck game studios in Korea. Don’t play Korean games. Kpop and cosmetics and whatever are chill. Don’t play Korean games. Korean game companies are fucking cancer.
Don’t buy Subnautica 2. The Subnautica franchise died when Krafton became the publisher.
Friendly reminder that Korea invented and perfected micro-transactions. MapleStory has done more damage to both worldwide gaming and Korean game devs than anything else could ever hope to.
Which is very sad because MapleStory was such a great game, at one time. I still play it (private servers) often, 20 years later. The game had such creative passion in it before Nexon took over and monetized the shit out of it.
The devs themselves are fine. It’s the leadership that’s cancer. Abusive leadership in Korean companies is actually a pretty well known issue. It’s just more self-destructive in game companies, which I have direct experience with. So they did a lot to me and my friends. And said friends shared their stories of other Korean game companies.
You’re absolutely right to question, especially with my level of anger, but I’m confident this one is justified.
it opens automatically for programs without guis that forget to set the “please don’t show cmd” flag. i made a program for my grandmother to automatically sort her photos and it would always flicker that damn window because i couldn’t figure out haw to set the flag from Go :(
that is what i used but i could not get it to work, possibly because the program did not have a gui either. it was just supposed to be a “button” in the file explorer.
for a poweruser yeah but this is my grandmother we’re talking about. she only used the program once every six months, when her camera ran out of space and she emptied it onto the computer.
200 hours in for me and I just learned you can put gates over train tracks. 🤯 Found out by reading the in game manual that I was too proud to read beforehand. So uhm… read the manual.
I thought this was common knowledge about the game but I’ll explain.
Now maybe I do need to get better and become a pro player but I have about 5k hours in the game. Since about 2016 I’ve played at the LEM/SMFC level which is about 5-8% of the top MM players. My current elo still hovers around 18,000 even though I play very rarely now, I play a handful of matches every other month at most. I also used to do a lot of the old overwatch system that let you watch matches of potential cheaters, I got very good at spotting them.
That isn’t to brag, I’m far from the best, but I quit playing around 2020 for a reason. The cheater problem is insane and Valve has done little to curb it. I got so suspicious that at one point I downloaded a publicly available cheat, popped it on a usb stick, and ran with it. I tried to use it intentionally without ruining other peoples fun btw. Even after running quite a few matches with it, no bad happened. And many years later that account is still not banned.
I got especially jaded when I saw people obviously using aimbots or wall hacks and they now have thousands of dollars in skins on their accounts. Meaning they’re so unafraid of getting caught, they put money on the line. That’s insane.
I came back for the CS2 update hoping they had fixed the problem and they absolutely haven’t. Every single VAC ban wave, go look at the leaderboards. Approximately 80% of the accounts get removed from the top 1000 players. That sucks.
And you think “cool well at least VAC” is working. Except it isn’t. Because those accounts cost, at most, $15 and the waves happen with many months between. Sometimes in excess of 6-8 months per ban wave. So that entire time, cheaters can freely exist with cheats until the ban comes down. Also insane.
All they’ve accomplished now seems to be getting rid of the most egregious spinbots and aim hacks. Other than that, the rest are still in the game and so now I play entirely casually.
For anyone interested in game development: Balatro is made with Love2D. Which means the exe you download from steam can be unzipped using just about any zip program (might need to change the file extension from exe to zip) and the whole source code and 2D asset files are available for perusing. Not even obfuscated, full variable names and comments available to inspect as a real world example of a working game that has sold like hotcakes because the end result is good. Let it inspire you, let it teach you :)
Wow. Super impressive. Guess with today’s technology you could do it pretty much 100%. I saw that model that lets you separate music into separate tracks for guitar, vocals, drums, … Guess something like that could even separate the laughs from the next actor resuming to speak.
Kind of also reminds me of those videos where they stabilize / de-shake Star Trek. There are some scenes where the ship gets shot at for example. And the actors act that out and the camera is shaking too and a bit at an angle. Looks funny once that camera shake is removed.
There’s plenty of better deep dives on YouTube, but basically it’s a system in Shadows of Mordor (and moreso in Shadows of War) that would take a random NPC you were fighting and were joined by (or almost killed,) and elevate them thematically. If one knocked you down there’s a chance they would pick up your sword and break it, smack talk you, and walk away. That guy, of his name was Doug, became Doug the Sword Breaker. Never time you saw him, he’d get a short introduction and a quip or two to remove you of who he was.
If you died, since you were a spirit they’d just mock that they already best you before. But if you were killing them, they might get a scene where they manage to get away to amplify the story. Or maybe you’ll just kill them. It was random and happened with random NPCs, elevating them in the enemy army.
I believe in the second one you could even mind control someone, and take out the people above them, and have a spy in the upper ranks.
Imagine an action game with some Crusader Kings plot drama happening.
Honestly I think there’s probably enough prior art to get away with using whatever you wanted from it. But a) I’m no lawyer and b) I’m not risking millions of dollars making a game.
The nemesis system patents and Namco’s loading screen mini game patent are two examples of why game mechanics and features should never be granted an exclusive patent.
Of course Namco’s patents expired in 2015 at a time when seamless load screens had become the industry standard.
Who knows what the gaming landscape will look like when people are finally able to get their hands on the nemesis system again?
I’m currently enjoying a Skyrim playthrough that uses the Nemesis mod. It doesn’t have ALL of the features that the shadow series does of course, but I’m really enjoying it!
Ooh, I started a new VR playthrough recently, without a concrete plan (well, beyond joining the Brotherhood, because Music of Life by Young Scrolls is amazing).
Nintendo’s always been litigious and controlling of their brand. What they haven’t been (until recently) is price-gouging peddlers of derivative schlock resting on their laurels. They used to be afraid of low-quality games and rehashes diluting their brand (they witnessed the carnage of 1983). Now they just don’t care.
Minesweeper is notorious for having some luck to it. The key is trying to do the 100% luck parts as early as possible so you don’t waste time doing the rest of the board only to fail later.
Minesweeper is notorious for having some luck to it.
There’s guess-free versions that guarantee solvable games. There’s also ones that automatically place a mine on the clicked tile if you take an unnecessary guess. Personally I really like davidnhill.github.io/JSMinesweeper with only “Fast mode” (and optionally “No guess”) enabled and everything else off.
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