I hate bullet sponges, but I do think this joke gets too reductive for my taste. There are many games where enemies die so fast on easy mode that you don’t get to experience whatever mechanics they have. By increasing health it can have the impact of revealing those mechanics that already existed.
It has to be a reasonable increase that doesn’t turn into a slog though.
The only thing i really dislike is that there is often no middle ground. Easy is super easy, normal is still easy, and hard is annoying. I like games that tell you what difficulty the game is made for. Doom for example, the game is geared towards “nightmare” (i think) and the game really is best played on that harder difficulty.
Plenty of people’s edge is somewhere around Weenie Hut Junior which definitely complicates things when you also want to capture the “uses all the hard skulls in Halo” crowd.
Going from expert to expert+ in beat saber was jarring. Songs that we getting easy on expert still seemed impossible on expert+.
Until I realized the modifiers on the side weren’t just a cheat board, but a way to smooth the curve. And that no fail was essentially free (doesn’t affect score if you pass, reduces score by 50% if you fail).
So you use difficulty increasers on the expert songs and difficulty reducers on the expert+ and the transition is way smoother. I’ve gotten to the point where some of them are fun again at expert+.
That can be fixed by changing the factors that affect difficulty. Instead of giving the enemies less health or making your attacks stronger, give the player more health or weaken the attacks of enemies on easier modes. This would result in each combat experience being roughly equal in length and intensity, but allowing a more novice player to make mistakes and soak attacks that would be fatal in higher difficulties. You would still be able to experience an enemy’s special mechanics.
This scales well in the other direction as well - say an enemy has a powerful attack that you need to dodge. On easy, you can maybe tank 3 of them from full health, medium is 2, hard is 1, and nightmare is a one-shot kill.
Another scaling option is the speed of enemies either movement speed or the time it takes for them to land hits, attack animation timing, etc.
I think having multiple things change with difficulty is good just as you say. I was focusing only on raising health because that was the joke in the comic.
The Last Sovereign(NSFW) is an 18+ RPGmaker game. The basic premise is this: What if you had a setting with a bunch of hentai tropes lumped together and played straight, with no porn logic or stupid characters?
You play as a middle aged, very competent army veteran who gains the powers of an incubus, and reluctantly uses them with the aim of making the world a better place, slowly developing a harem of well realized, cool characters along the way. There’s sex scenes, obviously, but you very quickly forget all about them as you are plunged into an underdog story where you have to manage your fledgling armies + resources and have to constantly make tough decisions.
And isn't everything derivative? What's the issue with that? If feel like you're really trying to gather negativity towards this game simply because it doesn't pander to your tastes
Well, I guess your are right that everything is derivative. I also think some things are more alike than others and also some markets are more saturated than others. When Half-Life came out it was in a saturated market of FPSs but it also revolutionized the market. When Portal came out no one could compare it to anything other that a student project. Half-Life Alyx is still considered the no 1 most polished and complete game in the VR space. We’ll see the impact that Deadlock will have I guess.
Even if it is, it’s a derivation I’ve been sorely missing. Ever since Battleborn got shut down, there’s been a Battleborn shaped hole in my heart. Deadlock fits in that hole really well.
It’s possible that the whole impetus for creating Deadlock came from something like that. Someone at valve, like me, enjoyed the hell out this particular mix of mechanics.
There’s nothing like it. Dota doesn’t do the trick, neither does Overwatch. Of all things, the closest thing might be Titanfall 2’s titan combat.
Did you ever try Paladins? I somehow ended up playing Battleborn when it came out and really liked it, even though it got panned. Always thought Paladins was a close second.
Also calling Overwatch a “MOBA shooter” is like calling Mario Kart a “Rogue like racer” because you start each race fresh with everything reset. It’s just an FPS, nothing MOBA about it.
I personally think MOBA should be used to broadly describe a style of game rather than what’s done while playing it. I know that when Riot coined the term, they were referring to games like DotA, LoL, etc.; to me the whole approach to a match’s flow is echoed similarly enough throughout multiple games, that applying the term MOBA to other games is a logical extension.
To me a game is a MOBA if:
The way to interact with it is primarily designed around playing with other players online (the M and O of MOBA.)
The goals of the players are against the goals of other players — ie. it’s competitive rather than cooperative (the B of MOBA.)
Any player at the beginning of a match has access to all the same options as any other player. This one is a little more vague, but as the A in MOBA stands for arena, I imagine it like a group of gladiators standing before a communal weapon rack that they’ll all pick from; no one has any options that the others don’t have access to.
Following these criteria, something like Overwatch is a MOBA, as is DotA, and ironically LoL isn’t as you have to unlock options meaning you don’t satisfy the arena condition. To differentiate games like DotA, Smite, Awesomenauts, Deadlock, etc., I prefer the term lane-pusher as that’s a lot more specific and understandable.
Does it really matter what it’s called? Not really. I mostly just do it so I can feel superior to Riot for coming up with a vague term that is applied, how I deem, incorrectly, while also excluding their own game from the term that they made to describe it.
Because it's not identical. SMITE plays like the top down mobas but in a third person perspective. Deadlock plays like a third person shooter with moba elements.
There are some sicilians who are about to be horrified listening to all the characters suddenly sounding like their third cousins from America who insist they can speak “italian”
Lol I can imagine, it’s often the same with shows and movies trying to do Dutch and then it ends up being the most incomprehensible and cringe attempt with an insane accent.
Hopefully they just hire legit Sicilians to do the voice acting. Otherwise they might just as well not bother.
I was talking more about how Italian Americans that are native speakers tend to speak a dialect that largely derives from Sicilian and other southern dialects that have since fallen out of use in favor of common italian, which is technically an entirely different language based on a northern dialect.
The joke is that these sicilian speaking mafiosos will sound like the american cousins because the dialect the Americans speak is closer to sicilian than the modern italian Sicilians are more likely to use in their everyday right now.
It’s actually a pretty hilariously documented phenomenon across the old world and in multiple places within the new world, where countries that endured a nationalist unification period adopted a common tongue, and in doing so diverged the language from native speakers that had migrated to the Americas.
Similar sitch with “inauthentic” ethnic cuisine being criticized by others in America and elsewhere in the Americas, it’s not different because it’s inauthentic, it’s different because it’s a preserved cultural artefact which predates a prescriptionist change dictated from the elites (who tended to be from a single language/culture group) to the common public, while the forms seem in the Americas are those predating cultures and traditions.
I don’t know about Italian but I can tell you Greek Americans plainly can’t speak Greek.
Same with ‘ethnic’ cuisine, they don’t put lettuce in “Greek” salad because that’s how it was originally but because that’s what was available and accepted in the US.
Its also far more likely that very regional or even just family traditions/customs/recipes got attributed to whole nations rather than an elite managing to wipe it out from the original group.
One recent example that comes to mind from recently is a scene in Oppenheimer where apparently there’s a bit of Dutch during a lecture, but nobody can really tell what they’re even saying lol
How is the Helldivers community these days? I had so much fun with that one before the whole PSN debacle. It kinda killed the vibe for me at the time and I have since moved on to other things, but I was so surprised how much a third-person online shooter sucked me in at this point in my life.
Games playerbase is like, less than half what it was on Steam. Arrowhead has put out like 3 or 4 “apology” letters about “we hear your feedback, we will fix stuff” but its like, how many times you gonna say that? You know?
I haven’t played for a while. Last I played, the bots spawn rate was too high when only two people loaded into a 4-5 star mission. They said they put out an update so I played to check, and they actually made it worse. Maybe it has improved since, but I haven’t been back to check.
The fact that they’re still apologizing for not listening to the player base and then going ahead and just not listening to the player base really doesn’t fill me with confidence.
They just added a bunch of new missions, planet modifiers, and ship call downs, which was a pleasant surprise. Also, there is a lot of speculation that they’re going to introduce the third enemy race pretty soon, so if you were enjoying it before, now might not be a bad time to dip your toe back in the pool.
I have considered it a few times and I even have Helldivers installed still, buuuut I’m balls deep in my first run of Elden Ring right now and I haven’t even hit the DLC yet, so 🤷♂️.
Instead of offering anything to be a better platform they are burning money on the platform in hopes they can pay their way to dominance by paid exclusivivity and giving away games. One of those isn’t bad for users. Now consider what Epic offers beyond being able to buy and download a game. Nothing. Epic is only a storefront and they’ve had years to work on this at this point. Steam has gained dominance and maintains it in no small part due to all the additional features available to everyone. Do you use the steam workshop for any of your games? Have you used the steam community forums to troubleshoot a problem? Do you use big picture mode for a more console like experience? Do you customize your controller settings with the pretty expansive controller support built into steam? The overlay? How about the custom profiles and badges and trading cards? Epic is only a storefront. That’s it. That’s all that’s on offer. So they supplement it with bribing devs to be exclusive to their store and giving away games to try and attract users.
I love the steam chat, as someone who doesn’t use discord very often at all. Having the chat is an easy to too flick a message off to someone while i play
These are true criticisms, but I’m not sure if they’re fair. To the best of my recollection, Steam had none of those things in 2008, either, about the time they were the age of the EGS, now.
You could say they should (be able to) compete on the merits alone, without free games or paid exclusivity, but that argument wouldn’t reflect reality: you need a hefty carrot to lure people away from their comfort zone.
Yes, true. But it’s not 2008 anymore. It makes no sense for companies to compete based on features and functionality equivalent to their age.
If someone starts a company today offering only old 1960 color TVs, I’m not going to say “Well they’re new, and that’s what TV manufacturers would have had at the time”. That makes zero sense.
If Epic wants to compete with steam they need to actually compete. They offer nothing of value presently. They have the money and the technical talent to make a good launcher. They just appear to choose not to.
They have the money and the technical talent to make a good launcher. They just appear to choose not to.
This is completely the case. You can’t tell me the makers of Unreal Engine couldn’t figure out how to replicate at least some of the more commonly used features of Steam. Of course they can do it. Someone somewhere in the corporate ladder decided they don’t need the extra features to compete with steam. Maybe burning money on the exclusivity contracts and game giveaways will work out in the long run, but I doubt that when they flat out said they’re spending more money than they earn in their 800+ person layoff just a few months ago.
Epic doesn’t see gamers as their customer - they see developers as their customer and shape the customer experience around that. For example, Epic said that if/when they add reviews, developers could choose to opt their games out of reviews. That’s very pro-developer, but very anti-consumer, whatever you might think of the value of reviews. Informed customers can rattle off a long list of reasons they don’t like Epic and why they’re bad, but they are a small minority of PC gamers. The “silent majority” doesn’t keep up with this kind of stuff or really care about it, so they are literally judging stores on their merits and Epic is a bare bones platform that doesn’t offer customers a good reason to spend money in their store because they don’t think they need to.
Also, as it was pointed out, Steam does not control pricing, that would be entirely in the hand of the publisher or developer, not to mention it is against TOS (and also illegal in some markets)
Then tried adding to cart from my wishlist. It added both games, but on my wishlist it only shows the one game. That’s just really buggy, and fortunately only unintentionally deceptive instead of intentionally.
And yet when libgen was broken a couple of days ago it sent me to the broken libgen for the (admittedly obscure) thing I was after. Perhaps caching I dunno. Still, glad it’s there…
I remember it being blacklisted in Reddit’s r/piracy megathread, supposedly they used IGG’s cracks or something. I, however, never had any problems with them.
Tread with caution. Use steamrip.com or other safe sources if you can, and if you have to use this site, at least be wary, read comments and scan the fuck out of everything.
IGG is a cracking group with a mixed reputation. Early on they distributed malware, which continues to give them a negative reputation. Though, I haven’t heard of anything bad about them, in some time… some repackers also use their cracks, with no issues. I think they were the first that cracked the latest Armoured Core, for example.
Since when was IGG a cracking group? They're just uploaders. TENOKE is the one who cracked Armored Core. Repackers use SCENE/P2P cracks like RUNE, TENOKE, EMPRESS, SKIDROW, etc.
IGG is not a cracker. I personally don't trust them. I don't understand why they include unimportant files in their uploads.
Free Premium Accounts at OfficialMrB.com.txt (0.8 KB)
IGG-GAMES.COM.url (0.2 KB)
PCGAMESTORRENTS.COM.url (0.2 KB)
README.txt (0.3 KB)
_INSTALL TUTORIAL.txt (1.7 KB)
What is the point of including these files? They're irrelevant.
IGG is bad because some of their repacks had their drm inside dll files, there were Ads built into the game at runtime, were found Cryptominers and startup malware included in their games and many other things.
It annoys me when you close down a game, and it only has the option to send you to the title menu instead of closing out. It's not the worst thing ever, but it's kind of annoying when you need to go, and you have to "quit" the game just to wait for it to go back to the title screen and make you hit "quit" again a second time.
Or, they have a hypervisor, so instead of needing to quit from inside, you just hit the magic button and go back to the console UI. Game is suspended and might resume after power off or switch, or not, depending on the system and user.
You could just ctrl-alt-del or window switch or whatever to get the same experience on a computer.
It differs, on some games it doesn’t work or still takes a long time. For those programs I like to use SuperF4, which kills the process when you press ctrl+alt+f4.
Clicks quit
Are you sure you want to exit? Clicks yes
Goes to title Clicks Quit
Are you absolutely positive you want to exit?
*Clicks yes DO YOU ACTUALLY THINK I CLICKED THREE TIMES TO GET HERE BY ACCIDENT??
Game hangs.
Iirc they are working to integrate it into the Steam client on desktop wherever possible (and to try to allow for cloud syncing the game state between devices.) Not sure how it’s been going but iirc it was never going to be made available until after the UI update (which came out quite recently.)
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