3D Platformers. We get maybe one or two every few years, and most of them are usually pretty short. last big one was probably A Hat in Time. if y’all know more beyond that let me know. just grabbed Koa and the 5 Pirates of Mara.
so desperate for one i’m considering learning how to make 3D games so i can make my own lol
I assume you’ve played or heard of Yooka-Laylee. There’s also Clive n Wrench. Neither of those are great though.
I haven’t heard of Koa before, but it looks interesting. I’ll have to check it out.
But I really want a new Banjo game, however I doubt that ever happens at this point. I recently started working on my own Banjo clone in the Godot game engine because I don’t see anyone making the kind of game I’m looking for.
Hat in Time is probably the last big indie 3d platformer, but I’d say Kirby and the Forgotten Land is a decent 3d platformer, unless you meant collectathon style 3d platformer a la what Rare made on the N64 etc. since you mentioned Hat.
Social and conversational engines (think Stardew Valley or Animal Crossing) tend to make me feel a lot lonelier than straight NPC dialogue. I think it’s because NPCs are shallow enough that I don’t see them as people, just people-shaped quest dispensers, but when you add social systems on top they’re inevitably going to fall short and that friend-shape turns into an NPC and my brain realizes I was playing alone the whole time. I’m really looking forward to the integration of language models into games so I can actually socialize with these characters, even when they’re more shallow than real people.
I think it’s fun to work down a questline for an NPC, but I agree that attempts to make it more that a simple branching dialogue tend to fall a bit flat. I also tend not to like the gift giving grind a lot of games do. I much prefer to go do things with an NPC and often that forms a better bond than an NPC with more dynamic dialogue.
If you want to save, you gotta be able to take the current state of everything and serialize it, then read what you’ve serialized and put it back. If you only do checkpoints, you can make assumptions about game state and serialize less.
Generally, it is much easier to develop AI and such when you never have to pull it’s state out and then restore it, because if that is done improperly you get bugs like the bandits in STALKER forgetting they were chasing you after a quicksave-quickload because their state machine is reset.
With checkpoints, you can usually say “right, enemies before here? Dead or dealt with. Enemies after here? they’re in their default state. Player is at this position in space. Just write down the stats and ignore the rest.”
And autosaves just make it one less menu to fiddle with.
I really dislike being set back far when I die or mess up. I can handle a fair bit of repetition, but replaying the exact same thing over and over because I died is frustrating and boring.
Which means that I particularly dislike when games have lousy checkpointing or save systems. I also dislike when games are too difficult and I can’t turn the difficulty down to at least get past whatever is giving me a hard time. And of course, unskippable cut scenes right after a checkpoint are a classic pain in the ass.
Examples:
I just finished Outer Wilds and found that game’s checkpointing to be pretty frustrating. So many boring trips to Brittle Hollow because I lost my footing. I almost gave up because it was so bad.
I never finished GTA 4. I got stuck in some mission where there was like a 5 minute drive and then some difficult combat. I kept dying and having to redo the very boring drive over and over killed my motivation. I don’t even know why it was so hard. I played GTA 5 twice with no issues.
I tried Dark Souls once. Lol, lasted maybe an hour before giving up. Now I’m very wary of any game that doesn’t have configurable difficulty levels. Thankfully, most games these days are actually progressing to more granular or meaningful difficulty levels.
GTA 4 is definitely such a big motivation-killer because of these issues. Apparently it used to have no checkpoints, but then when the PC port was released they added just one checkpoint per mission apart from the bank robbery which has a whopping two checkpoints. And in typical rockstar fashion like 99% of the missions start with really long walking or driving sequences, so I agree that it got really tedious on the harder missions.
The worst thing is that it’s often just that one specific mission that has shitty checkpoints. The rest is generally fine, but then you hit that wall and you want to do PHYSICAL VIOLENCE. At least that’s been my experience.
I’m actually new to this whole “Federated” thing, so I did not hear about it here, but it’s good to see people discussing it. How do I access that link from the instance I’m currently in? I click it and it asks me to make a Beehaw Account.
The way I did this was going to Communities, searching Gaming so I would get gaming@beehaw.org, and clicking Next until I found the post. That’s how I found the post on Beehaw, too.
There may be a more efficient way to do this. That’s just how I did this.
I just want a high quality horse game. Is that so much to ask? :( Apparently so.
And I mean, specifically focused on the horses, not an adventure game with unusually well done “horses as cars” like RDR2 or Zelda BOTW. A “girly” horse game, like one where you take care of and breed horses and participate in horse jumping or whatever, or one where you ride a horse around a forest and it has an actual personality and acts like an animal and not just a mode of transportation (Shadow of the Colossus is the one game I can remember feeling anywhere close to this, and even that was very minimal).
It’s maddening because the minute someone makes one it’ll sell like hotcakes - there are so many horse enthusiasts dismayed by the lack of quality horse games just waiting in the wings - aaaaand yet here we are. Sigh.
I’m not sure if you’re bringing this up because of the new Sims 4 expansion, but I thought Sims 3 Pets did a pretty good job with the horses and comes close to what you’re describing, but I’m guessing you want something more in line with a traditional RPG.
Have you seen www.themanequest.com? It’s aimed at people like you trying to find a high-quality horse game. Tons of reviews of horse games on that site. I’m not even into horses but the website captivated me anyways.
Portal 2 was my first thought as well. It can also work as a good litmus test for how they will respond to FPS controls. You can try kb/m or controller and see what feels natural. My partner (we found playing left4dead after portal) is an inverted controller person. Which was wild to me considering they worked in a heavy clerical field and really took to building keyboard with me. Yet, no kb/m for gaming. After that switch , they were able to enjoy co-op 1st person stuff a lot easier.
After portal we played borderlands 2 together. It’s low pressure most of the time and can be a background activity while you talk and hang out. The story is kinda cheesy but it’s fun to share the inside jokes with someone and bonded us in an unexpected way.
Hopefully those work for you!
Edit: it takes two and split fiction are really fantastic coop experiences as well. But, it take two should probably have a small warning for emotional content. Split fiction is a ton of fun but does get kinda difficult for less seasoned players. I found it endearing helping through those sections, but it could be harder for others. There are some moments that we both audibly wowed at though! That made the difficulty worth it.
This is a very terrible take. Arc Raiders has aggression based matchmaking. If you want to play PvE you can almost guarantee that. Play 10 games on a free loadout, shoot no one ever, defib a guy or bandage someone if you can, help them kill arc, extract peacefully. Tell the in-game survey you like it when you get out peacefully and tell it you hate it when you don’t get out because of pvp and you’ll super quickly find yourself essentially playing pve.
For the last two weeks I have played hundreds of rounds solo, talking in mic to anyone who walks by, and have been shot three times. In literally hundreds of slow to fast rounds, almost always a major map condition, Stella Montis or otherwise.
Most of your points are equally as bad, but like this alone is easily disproven.
This can be overused though. There are dumb mechanics and choices in Fromsoft games that the megafans bend over backwards to defend, and say you’re just “not into the genre” if you criticise them… yet millions of people play and enjoy the games but dislike those aspects.
Wo Long straight up just lets you turn player invasions off. I would not mind it being an option, personally. I wouldn’t turn it off most of the time, myself, but I am always for more options than less.
I, personally, want it to work like DS2 but without Soul Memory. No level or weapon upgrade limits. You could be fresh out of the tutorial and be invaded by some level 347 dude with the strongest weapons and beefiest armor. It would be awesome.
Valid reason is you want the online features because messages from other players is content. Counterpoint is, pvp is also content. Counterpoint is, people can want one and not the other, and it’s not that complicated to just give people a toggle. Elden Ring is not worse because of its improvement over the DS invasion system.
I like all the online features that aren’t invasions.
Invasions, however, are simply punishing me for reviving. I don’t seek out PvP, which means I don’t have all the techniques they use for cheap crits, I don’t have a PvP focused loadout (I tend to go for slow weapons and I’m usually not all that optimized), etc., etc., so when I get invaded it’s mostly ‘Welp, this run is a loss. Better die somewhere I can get back to.’ I know I’m going to get one-shotted with some OP weapon from someone who fishes out a lagstab, and it’s been that way since Demon’s Souls.
Don’t forget the Nioh series, which adds Diablo/Borderlands style loot and skill trees that unlock weapon skills dependent on weapon type rather than the weapon arts specific to each weapon like in Elden Ring. It also has a cool take on the bloodstain mechanic where instead of seeing how a player died, you can see their gear and summon a copy of them to fight with a chance of them dropping some of their gear.
I assembled a rather large list of free Linux games a few years ago, and most of them are low-spec friendly. Hopefully you find something interesting from it :)
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