Man I really want to get into Mechwarrior but I’m just so ridiculously bad at the game and I have no idea how to get better.
I’ve tried to begin the MW5 campaign three times now and I’ve been priced out of existing every time, I take way too much damage and my repair bills vastly outstrip my income. Combine with having to spend hundreds of thousands of credits in travel fees to get anywhere and I’m very quickly even more broke than I started.
Just for kicks the other day I set up an Instant Action for testing purposes and I brought two Atlases, a Highlander and an Archer to some random backwater mid-difficulty mission and still barely limped out of there alive, with the Highlander and one of the Atlases downed. That’s just shameful.
Play with keyboard and mouse - makes hitting things much easier. Redesign all mechs to have max armour. For most of the campaign bringing as many SRMs to the field as possible is good. Focus fire with your lance mates - makes them much more effective. Remove JJ - useless. LBX10s are great. Remove useless single LRM 5s and 10s from most things - put a lot of lrms on mechs with good quirks - Archer, Longbow. Keep moving, ideally always at least 45 degrees to your target
I only played up to MW3, back then the meta was maxing out on armor and medium range lasers. Go in close , aim for the opponent’s leg, shoot. Your mech powers down from the heat for a couple seconds, but the other mech is out of the action. Proceed to one-shot almost every opponent.
I tried MW3 (I think?) but never figured out ANYTHING. I was young, joystick drivers didn’t work, and I hadn’t the slightest idea how to map out all the functions of a mech suit. Now I have nearly 50 inputs mapped to an Xbox controller for Elite Dangerous fully memorized. What a change in times.
I liked Cauldron Born. I had that and Mad Cat as K’nex models. Hated Orion. Since I never figure out how to do anything, all I can judge them on is their appearance in the build menu. I was also like… 10?
Indepth tutorials told by dialogue boxes. Run 5 steps.
[Hey player!]
[You know some boxes can be moved right?]
[Just walk up to the box]
camera pans 3 feet to the left to show the box in the centre of the screen
[Press X to grab it]
[And when youre done press X to let go]
[Im sure youll find many uses for this during your adventure]
[Why not try it on that box over there?]
<hmmmm. Seems like im going to need to move that box if I want to get anywhere>
When you get near the box a massive X symbol flashes madly and unmissably above your head, and theres lines on the floor showing where it needs to be pushed to, which is also the only way its programmed to move, literally impossible to do wrong, and you push it like 5 feet.
[Wow! You did it! Looks like you can get to the next area now!]
<I should probably remember that, it could be useful in the future>.
You’re now free to play the game, all the way to the next room, where you’ll spend way longer than necessary learning something a fucking 4 year old could figure out, and you dont even need figured out because its been a staple of games since before you were even born.
I know there are folks out there who are profoundly bad at games, and that’s who these things are made for. I’m reminded of that one gaming journalist who gave Cuphead a bad review because he couldn’t figure out how to double jump and never got out of the tutorial.
But just make it a quick selection when starting a new game. “I’m new here, show me guides” and “I’m an expert, skip tutorial content”. Or even just make the tutorials an optional object interaction in the game that you don’t have to touch if you’ve already figured it out.
But the best games are the ones that teach players how to play organically. Level 1-1 in Super Mario Bros is the common example. Setting the camera controls in the older Halo games was also a work of genius. Newer games are a bit too dense to be able to cover everything quite as quickly and organically as Mario, but you can still offer some similar diegetic hints and just add a little “Help” button for anyone who can’t figure it out on their own.
Yep. Not to say that people who struggle with games aren’t valid or there shouldn’t be accessibility options to cater to them, but when writing professionally about games, you should be a near-expert in how to play those kinds of games, at least at their baseline difficulty.
It’s fine to say “I don’t quite get this game, but I’m sure there are people who do and who enjoy it.” But that can’t be a “review.” When you’re a reviewer, you’re supposed to be an authority. If you admit to not being an authority, then you’re not quite qualified to review it.
It shouldn’t honestly matter, but knowing how many publishers tie aggregated review metrics to their developers’ wages/bonuses/raises (or even if anyone gets to keep their jobs at all), it’s crazy for a publication to have journalists who don’t actually know how to play games just reviewing them on vibes alone. It’s too easy to run the risk of not understanding a core part of the gameplay and just assume it’s the game that’s wrong instead of me (because I want to continue getting paid to review games). So I assign it a negative score because my lack of understanding made the game feel bad, and then a level designer somewhere loses their bonus because the aggregate score was half a point lower than the total stipulated in their contract.
I want to GIT GUD but I’m not the kind of person who can dodge and parry while managing a stamina bar. ER and DS games look awesome but I really can’t do much sightseeing in them. I tried Demon’s Souls, Dark Souls 3, and Elden Ring and in all of them I hit a wall against the first miniboss who I should be learning to parry on. I’ve always leaned toward dodging taking priority before parrying and a stamina bar limits that.
I recently played through Ghost of Tsushima and parried a thousand cuts. The game doesn’t have stamina though. I understand stamina as a game mechanic but find all it adds is tedium. There’s what I believe to be some good games hiding behind a stamina bar. I can enjoy the games until the stamina bar runs out and then I’ll be thinking about enjoying a different game.
Odd take. Resource management is key in a lot of games to the entire design of how they play.
I play heavy tank builds in those games and block/dodge instead of parrying. It’s just a different mindset I guess to enjoy that level of resource managing to know when to commit and when to back off and get defensive, especially when my attacks take a chunk of stamina and are slow to wind up. It forces the player to be strategic so you don’t leave yourself winded mid string.
I guess what I call strategic playing you call tedium. To each their own.
The thing I hate about parrying games is that there’s rarely ever any consistency about what you can and cannot parry and also never any way for you to learn if you’re parrying too early or too soon or what.
Lies of P did a great job of color coding things (and generally being more leinent/realistic with timing). It can still be a hard game, but the most approachable parrying based game of that ilk.
There’s a Comcast store near me that still has a window ad for Superman Returns in the window. It’s still there because they moved out and no one else moved in since, but I like to think it’s because someone really loved the movie.
There was a Party City that closed around here, and they left the window display, a Halloween store moved in for October. They reused the signage, just painting fangs and Frankenstein bolts onto the kids in the pictures. Of course, as soon as October was over, they disappeared, so now there are just evil kids in the abandoned windows.
I felt like the game had enough puzzles running simultaneously that I wasn’t waiting for a particular day to work on one particular puzzle. Once everything started coming together and it was down to the final run, there was a little bit more reliance on RNG, but that’s rogue-likes. Any day that didn’t pay off in puzzles usually paid off in rolled over resources (freezer, moon pendant, trove, coat check).
I have seen a lot of complaints about the RNG in this game, but I never felt it, even on bad days.
True, but I feel like Blue Prince gets a lot of flack for its RNG, despite being part of the genre. I think it’s the lack of tangible upgrades between runs. Games like Binding of Isaac, Hades, or Balatro expand your arsenal between games with actual upgrades or perks. Blue Prince’s upgrades are pretty sparse, because what changes between runs is your knowledge of the house and the larger mysteries.
my take on that is that it’s bullshit. when your metaprogression is based on knowledge, it’s dependent on letting players access that knowledge to begin with. personally it took me until day 40 to roll credits because i simply was not given the rooms i needed to understand the puzzles. i showed my gallery to a friend who got there much quicker and they noted that i was still missing some of the more basic rooms.
the risk in rng-based games is always that someone gets shafted, and when the game is also story based, those people effectively get locked out of the story. the people thinking it did not deserve the reaction simply did not get the worst rolls.
The RNG finally started to loosen its grip around day 60 because it started giving me items and rooms I had never seen before that, as it turns out, were pretty essential.
The RNG beat me up too. I will say that there’s a handful of permanent upgrades that either allow you to mitigate some RNG or give you buffs so you’re not as reliant on it.
I think their goal was to make it so you’re not hardlocked on a single puzzle so that you kind of wander into the manor without a specific puzzle to solve and see what you can solve/find as your tools for that run expand.
This kind of makes hours 0-10 kind of miserable because you don’t know what puzzles there are and you don’t have much you can do to avoid RNG so you’re just wandering and hoping for the best, but it does get better after that point.
I feel like it got worse. I hit room 46, and was trying to clean up some of the remaining stuff. Had a run with 130 coins, but the gift shop and luxury shop would not appear. When they do appear I have very few coins. I know there are ways to increase my allowance but its a slow grind. Similarly, crafting all the workshop items is pure luck. Filling in all rooms on the board isnt too hard, but still mostly a luck thing. I like the puzzle elements but the rng really killed my motivation to do the extra stuff
I understand Valve being libertarian about not moderating people excessively, what I’d like to see are better tools like shared blocklists or general moderation for any developer that doesn’t wish to control their own Community page.
I’ve read comments to this effect for years, and the only time I see objectionable shit on Steam is in reviews for intentionally political meme games like the recent one about putting up flags in the UK. Typically my only exposure to the forums is when I’m looking up obscure puzzle solutions, but the worst comments I ever see are just stupid or unhelpful. I imagine it’s worse for big multiplayer games, but I tend to avoid those, so maybe that’s why I don’t see the problem.
Two years ago, one of my favorite games made some very minor cosmetic tweaks, and that was enough to attract a horde of post-Gamergaters crying that this is the downfall of western civilization. Two years later, the board for that game is still under seige by trolls that have rendered it unusable for anyone who actually wants to talk about the game. Every now and then a Valve mod will lock one thread, and then the trolls just make another and it continues.
It’s the TRMNL. I plan to share my plugin eventually too, but need to develop a few different layouts for different display options before I can submit it, so it’s just a private plugin for now.
I like it a lot! As a software developer that stares at LCD screens all work day, I’m really into e-ink/single-purpose tech outside of work. I found their UI framework docs for custom plugins a bit lacking, but eventually got everything working.
Yeah I was looking at that as a lot of folks mentioned the brand. The wireless is super expensive, even more than the original xbox controller. But the wired one is literally half the price.
Its wireless is much more compatible, supporting several different connection methods for use with different proprietary systems, and is just generally a better and more capable device. They’re worth every penny, IMHO. 8bitdo’s quality changed my opinion on gaming controllers that had developed after years of being frustrated by cheap, wonky, second-rate, third-party garbage controllers like MadCatz and Logitech that used “features” to cover for the fact that they were cheaply made, overpriced, and deeply inferior. 8bitdo controllers are the only ones I trust anymore. Even Nintendo apparently can’t be trusted to make quality controllers for their own systems anymore. But 8bitdo can.
This. It costs more but you will have a controller that will last years. Have used 8bitdo pro2 for a couple of years after rage quitting the Nintendo pro whatever it is named to switch for its worthless d-pad. Recently picked up a 8bitdo pro3 and yes, it cost a lot but it will probably be my only controller for many years now. Buying something that breaks after a year will cost you more in the long run. It’s expensive to be cheap.
I wouldn’t use bluetooth due to input delay, but the 2.4Ghz wireless dongle 8bitdo sold separately at the time I was buying Pro 2 controllers was plug and play on Linux. Same goes for their Arcade Sticks.
If wired is okay then yeah that’ll work well. I always try to list flaws in stuff I own as well, so: Pro 2 the input method sliding switch on the rear of the controller is the weak spot in the design. If you frequently use that it’ll eventually cause spotty connection issues according to complaints I’ve read over the years. The D-Pad isn’t something you’d want to use for fighting games, but I love it for retro. Very NES-like.
Mine very rarely leave xinput so it’s been fine for me.
If I could choose not to start WoW again, I would avoid it like a plague.
I wouldn’t call it adiction per-se, but my problem with WoW is that even though I hate what Blizzard is doing, the extreme loss of quality both in game (recent example - they released a patch where one of the main feature are class campaigns, and 8/12 questlines didn’t work and had major 100% repro blockers, like requiring items that do not exist) and in Customer Support, and how it’s more and more obvious that they just want to milk the playerbase of their money without any kind of effort, I still keep playing. It’s not love-hate relationship, I actively dislike Blizzard.
But, it’s one of the only games my partner is playing and that we can play together, and I also have a lot of friends in the guild I’ve been playing for the past two years with. I mostly just log in for a dungeon or two with her, or a regular raid night with my guild, which I enjoy.
If I stopped playing, I’d give up a lot of friends and also an activity with my partner that we’re mostly used to. She doesn’t really play other games. So far, it’s still worth it, but I’m really conflicted every time I have to give Blizzard more money, since I’m basically held hostage.
I highly recommend looking for a free server, i.e Turtle WoW (assuming it won’t get shut down, they are getting sued IIRC), because those people are actually making an effort to make a game they love better. Blizzard is just exploiting people like me, and their nostalgia, without any regard for the game. It’s a shame Morhaim lost the battle against capitalism and was driven out, and it’s extremely aparent on the quality of the game and direction Blizzard is going.
Just to be clear - the game in itself is pretty all right and fun to play, what I have issue with is the way how extremely obvious is that Blizzard does not give a fuck, produces low-quality slop without any semblance of QA, and just plain exploits the playerbase. It could’ve been so much better with the resources they have, but they chose not to, and just cut corners more and more. And I highly despise that. Patches are broken, there’s reskinned content that’s heavily time-gated, and it just screams “low effort”.
Do yourself a favor and don’t think about giving Blizzard money.
Not really defending them here but it’s worth noting that the buggy campaign wasn’t the main game. It was in Legion: Remix which is an event where you make a new “time runner” character and play it through the Legion expansion at like 10x speed and power. I found it to be extremely boring and haven’t played much of either in a few months
True, but the point was mostly that in this case, it’s extremely apparent that there were 0 QA checks before they released it or they simply don’t care. As someone who worked in QA, I can imagine them missing a lot of bugs that are happening on Remix or the main game, because they could require some obscure combination of finished past quests and an account state that can be hard/impossible to properly test for all cases, while also having millions of players, so some may encounter it.
But in the case of a major class campaign quest being impossible with 100% repro rate, because it needs items that are not even in the Remix, that’s inexcusable. It’s also easy to fix, and should be marked as critical because it’s a progress blocker. The only conclusion is that they either didn’t know about it, or just don’t care becuase they know that the community will just suck it up. It shows extreme disrespect for the players. Hell, when Remix released, you couldn’t even finish the first quest and if you tried re-logging, it didn’t let you login. It was extremely broken to the point of being unplayable for the first two days.
I’ve had similar experiences even in retail. Just getting through the main campaign of last patch required re-logging to unstuck a quest 4 times (which I specifically counted), not to mention the desyncs.
I could understand something like this if it was a developer that doesn’t have the resources, but Blizzard has and had in the past, but they decided to reduce quality just so they can increase their (already astronomical) profits.
+1 to shitty customer support, it’s what made me quit and never ce back. I got 4 months of free sub from a giveaway but I didn’t have the latest expansion so I sent them a msg asking if they could freeze for a month so I can get paid and buy the exp. They said they can’t freeze but if I don’t play a single day of those 30 days they could refund it. So I waited.
Month later I ask them for the refund and they say they can’t do it, what the previous rep said was wrong, it’s so stupid I said I would just quit for good.
It sounds like you’re the unicorn with a healthy WoW habit, lol!
But I totally get the feeling of being attached to it because of personal relationships that are WAY more important than doing the Right Thing when it comes to not sending money to a vendor that you don’t think deserves it.
I often stay away of new games because that exactly, the hype. If you play a new game and you say it sucks, everybody yells at you, but if you let past the time, it’s the time the one who gives reason to people.
In a lot of cases, the people who enjoyed it will have already said what they wanted to say about it, and then the detractors can just yell out the loudest. There’s a perception that BioShock Infinite was only praised because of release hype, and a lot of people look back at it unkindly for one reason or another, but I’ve seen a number of people experience it for the first time in just the past couple of years, unaware of any reputation it might have, and they loved it like we all did at launch.
This happened to me with Resident Evil 3 Remake, I didn’t knew that had so many haters behind but I really enjoyed the game. One thing to hate, they say, is the short duration of the game. I mean, you could beat the original game in 2 hours, if you didn’t knew nothing about the game, could take you like 7 or 8 hours
I always think it’s fascinating to see how the discourse around games evolves. It’s always most telling when people stop talking about a game at all. Remember Starfield? No one even talks about Starfield anymore, not even about how bad it may or may not have been. Just kinda flopped a bit and passed from memory.
I had to search “Bethesda space game” just now to even remember its generic name …
I remember at the time it was getting all these awards. When I still had game pass I booted it up to see what it was all about. Dear god was it dull. All I remember is some dude comes out and is like “you had a space vision! Take my ship!” And I thought that was the most absurd way to start a game.
I was just talking to someone at a party about what games we’d been playing, and we also had to fully stop and think a while to remember the actual name of the Bethesda Space Game™.
Oftentimes, devs are practically the only person who can. Especially small hobbyist devs. They’ll spend hundreds, if not thousands, of hours playing their own game as they build it and forget they have to then circle back and tune it for people who haven’t.
Potentially my hottest take, but this is my biggest criticism of Silksong. Even as someone who likes difficult games, I bounced off it. I’ll get back to it eventually, I know I’ll love it once I crack it, but it was taking a lot of effort I just can’t devote to it right now.
I wouldn’t necessarily say that it’s too difficult or that the difficulty level is bad, but it’s overtuned. The devs spent 7 years developing it, playing it, replaying it, adding, tweaking. I believe they made exactly the thing they wanted, but that makes it very dense and intricate and you gotta be on just the absolutely correct wavelength to get there …
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