Funny, I miss that exactly. The feeling of spring\summer air and the fragrance of jasmine\lilac\linden\freshly mowed grass and the clouds, and ICQ animations with cats scratching your screen and “hasta la vista baby” and all that, and the Web when it was actually hypertext on hundreds of pages hand-crafted all with real people.
And yeah, going to friends to play Tekken, and them coming to play SW: RotS. Watching “A Nightmare on Elm Street” in a summer camp. Older girls watching “Charmed”.
Is that the edgy vibes that you miss, or just generic childhood nostalgia?
Everyone has it, me included. I miss playing Tekken with my brother, and comparing our progress in Sacred, and generally speaking, nerding together. We are both adults and employed, and he’s got two kids as well, now. We barely have time for a brief phone call to check on each other over the weekend :(
Danger in that world was on the sidewalks and unintended. Danger in this world is on the main pathways the most, and intended by its administrators.
Edgy vibes of that time seemed more like when you reinforce your right to call a president of your country a little bitch. Or like how it wasn’t traditionally welcomed to physically punish kids in many cultures in the Caucasus - because teaching fear of punishment also piggybacks teaching fear of enemy. BTW, this was also a principle in Dragomirov’s writings on how teaching should be done in the military ; his approaches to actual warfare were kinda archaic even in his own time (basically “straight at them” bayonet shock attacks), but the parts on didactics are good.
Halo 3 is hands down one of the best games ever made.
Unquestionably the best console shooter ever made, indisputably the best splitcreen co-op and multiplayer game ever made.
I understand pc gamers or people who didn’t grow up with an xbox might find those statements in their expansiveness hard to accept, no halo 3 was fun but it wasn’t that good though… to which the only correct answer is yes it is.
I think my preference for halo 1 is pure nostalgia. I have so many memories of my best friend at the time and I going co-op legendary. Or using “gamespy?” To play online matches.
Don’t get me wrong, I fully agree in spirit, it just seems like several aspects royally screwed over the map design so it felt much smaller.
The bay being the main area where you started meant everything felt far more like linear progression regardless of where one wandered to.
The island bifurcating the bay made the bay itself far more prominent, isolated, and greatly reduced how many under water biomes were simply ‘there’ to explore. You always HAD to wander out in one of two directions to get to some other under water biome open to the surface, of which there were only, what? three?
Most later game biomes were solo, single entrance offshoots of the already limited ‘main’ areas. This made them feel much more like explicitly added game assets instead of areas you’d just wander in to while exploring.
The story and the game design itself seemed to want the on-land biome to be more cool than it was. It was ONE biome, and not even the type of biome that the game is known for.
The sea truck is cool in concept, but when every area is disparate and isolated, it SUCKED to drive a loaded truck to any of them.
The “AI” companion (and really, the story over all) totally and completely popped the isolated explorative feeling of the game.
Basically, the basic design of the map and story ran completely counter to everything that made the first such an amazing experience.
The individual biomes and assets themselves were still great, but they were composed in such a way that left them … not greater than the sum of their parts.
I think it could’ve been a banger if they had interconnected more biomes and made them larger so there was ANY point to dragging a loaded sea truck to them. The land biome could have worked if they made it much more like a real arctic; an ocean mostly covered in ice sheets instead of it just being some random biome “over there” largely literally on land. The ice worm would’ve been waaay cooler if the player had to wonder if it could make an appearance under water, for example, even if it never did. The snow fox (or what ever the land vehicle was called, it’s been a while) could’ve been way cooler if it wasn’t for one biome “over there”, too.
I don’t know how much larger it’d need to be, but a little more creativity in mixing the biomes together would’ve gone a LONG way.
I think a large part of why everything was segmented is they released the game into EA way too early. It made it to where they had to have a ‘gating’ system where they could stop players from going to areas that weren’t developed out of finished yet. Overall this affected the maps flow, validating all your points there. Also completely agree with the voiced narrative. Part of what made Subnautica great was the silence. It gives more room for hearing the crazy sounds around you. Instead you had some chatty voice in your head that had commentary about every damn thing.
Eh I know what you mean from a development standpoint (remixing the map would be a huge effort), but I still find it a kinda’ copout excuse. I bet we’d be here heralding the design instead of lambasting it if they took the time to really mix the biomes together properly once they had the assets complete.
In fact, I remember some early early access games doing exactly that: basically having demos that were WAY different than the final product. Ugh I wish I remembered any names, though such effort in to game development was over a decade ago, when some companies still treated it like an actual art form instead of a money vessel…
Oh no I wasn’t excusing the behavior, quite the contrary. I’m saying the map sucked because they went into EA too early and didn’t put effort into changing the map for full release. I agree with you!
Yea, if only they had thrown in the extra effort! Maybe we’d be here heralding it as a worthy successor instead of identifying the low hanging fruit still on the branch. lol
I’m adding some second hand experience here, but what made below zero much worse for my son when he played it was that it constantly crashed, resulting in a lot of lost progress. Often crashing when saving, too, so after having accomplished something. He got it on the switch as some kind of double-feature with subnautica and below zero on a single cartridge. He played through subnautica and loved it but ditched below zero after barely a handful of hours played, purely due to the frustration, not even being at the point where those game design points would have mattered.
Ouch. I didn’t even know either were on the switch. Ironic that the first ran well because they had a good bit of performance issues with it in beta. Though mostly around efficiently streaming assets while moving around, which I’m sure a cart is much faster than old spinny HDDs.
I’ve run Proton without Steam for a few games. You’ve pretty much got the same code that Steam uses and most of their changes make it upstream eventually, so they’re not holding you hostage with being able to run your games. It just might get less convenient. There are other Linux game launchers that have good compatibility.
Steam and the company behind it have done wonders for Linux. They’ve given publishers a reason to care, they are providing strength and resources to fix bugs and libraries they care about, and generally have done very well in sharing their contributions with the community.
I do think this is a valid concern that we need to keep in mind, but I don’t think that we are at risk just yet. Valve is a business but as businesses go, they’re pretty cool.
That’s 4 years or 104 fortnights or 1,458+ poop socks.
To put that much time into something and say you don’t like, obviously it capture that person’s attention well beyond it’s intended shelf life. How can anyone improve on something that captured someone’s attention for four fucking years of playtime.
When maxing out the damage stat just makes your game trivially easy.
Stat systems are hard and prone to optimization problems. But c’mon, you at least gotta test the glass cannon build that you know everyone’s gonna try first.
If it’s only for one game, you could probably try cloud gaming. I gave a friend of mine who wanted to play Death Stranding 2 but has no PS5 access to remote play, and it seems to be working OK. Some of the services work on phones or TVs.
Also, my condolences on selling your pc. I hope it helped your situation a bit.
This is a great interview, thank you! It (sadly) confirms some stuff I’ve been suspecting for a while about the piracy scene: that repackers are a very rare bunch, repacking is getting more complex and liveservice/streamed games would truly be the end for piracy.
Repacking main challenge is simply the huge amount of games coming out now. Live service is really not the problem. I won’t be surprised if new genre based repackers come out. But yes repackers are rare cause it’s a huge time investment for no return in any form.
It already supports single player 🩷 Enemy health, poise, and runes are adjusted to balance the lack of teammates. You can also buy a few Wending Graces that will allow you to self-revive since you won’t have teammates to revive you. Some of the final day bosses can actually be easier to manage solo. I sooo recommend the game, and I also recommend giving multiplayer a chance when you’re comfortable with the overall loop and navigating the map. While I do occasionally get a mess of a team, I would say the majority of my matchmade runs have been super smooth and fun!
Have they changed the game a lot since launch? When I was watching the reviews of it, everyone made it seem like you have to have a cohesive party all working together and using their skills properly and the game is impossible solo.
From what I saw, solo is a lot easier than coop (streams of the game, not played it myself yet). Enemies have basically no HP, and you can predict what they do, just like in a normal Souls game. Also, you’re not getting matched with randoms.
If you’re playing with friends, sit in voice chat, that might get easier for you again.
In co-op you have fully infinite lives, your teammates can pick you up at any time and even if they fail to do so you’ll respawn back at a grace. If you fall over in a boss fight you have an unlimited timer to be picked back up and automatically rez at the end of the fight even if they don’t do it.
In solo you’re fighting a boss intended for 3 players and if you die twice the game is over completely.
Co-op, even with randoms, is much much easier by an order of magnitude. I’m usually a solo player in most games and thought this would be awful for me, it isn’t at all. Map pings are plenty of communication for most matches. It is, however, definitely better with friends on a voice call.
In solo you’re fighting a boss intended for 3 players and if you die twice the game is over completely.
Ok, but what if…you just kill bosses in five hits, because they don’t have any HP?
It’s an overexaggeration of course, but the enemies definitely have a lot less HP than in coop, not even just 1/3 or whatever (seemingly).
Also, are the enemies designed for multiplayer, except in scaling? Everything I’ve seen looks like standard Fromsoft stuff, no weird abilities that just fuck over solo players.
Big boss fights in particular (and some of those in particular, in particular, looking at you Maris and/or Gnoster) often have either a gigantic AoE attack that is very difficult to dodge when you’re the only source of aggro, or else charge across the entire arena after every attack and have you spend half an hour in the fight, 27 minutes of which was spent just chasing the guy across the map. Not impossible, but very annoying.
But 90% of what makes coop easier in my opinion is just having a spare body around that can pull aggro so you can heal. Elden Ring base bosses were designed around being able to be beaten solo so they usually have big wide windows where you can get a breather if you need it. Nightreign bosses have much less of that because they expect you to be running 3 deep. Nerfing their defenses helps with the solo DPS race but it doesn’t really solve the problem that these fights were designed from the ground up for a team who is able to rotate aggro. Nightreign bosses were designed with a sort of raid-boss mentality.
I think if this game were going to be appropriately balanced for single player they would need to go in and edit a lot of the main bosses’ movesets. But that was never part of Nightreign’s design philosophy and trying to shoehorn it in now isn’t doing them any favors in my opinion. This is the equivalent of a World of Warcraft player complaining that they can’t solo all the endgame raid bosses. Sure, you can’t. They weren’t designed to be fought solo. We could try to nerf them down to the point that you can fight them solo, but then it’s no longer a raid boss, you’ve lost the essence of why people wanted to come to this fight in the first place.
Also, are the enemies designed for multiplayer, except in scaling? Everything I’ve seen looks like standard Fromsoft stuff, no weird abilities that just fuck over solo players.
Compare base game Morgott and Nightreign Morgott and I think you’ll see what I mean here. Boss enemies are much more cracked out with longer combos and shorter downtime than in Elden Ring proper, because the developers expect you to be trading aggro with your teammates to give yourself a heal break.
Both with friends and with random players. The map pinging system honestly works so well for the pace of the game! The goal to be as efficient and quick as possible generally doesn’t leave much room for arguing or debates which makes things feel so not toxic. Someone usually just takes control of routing, puts a pin down, you or the other player can place a pin in the same location to second the vote, or you can place a pin where you think is best and the other players can second it or not. When I’m playing with friends they leave the routing up to me, but when we’re playing with a matchmade player it’s 50/50 if they’ll be routing or I will. Sometimes it’s chaos, but it’s usually super smooth!
I was watching a friend who got it and he tried it solo initially before swapping to online play and it seemed waaaay harder. Not sure if he screwed up a setting and it was really the 3 player version or something.
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