I played a bit more Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice ahead of the sequel in a few months. There are a few major components to the game's core loop, and the one I'm not thrilled with is its hidden object puzzles, but the rest of it is working for me.
When I've got some podcasts to get through, Palworld has proven to be a great second screen game. There are some things I'd like to see them tweak about the progression, but they're very small complaints thus far. Ultimately, this game is working for me in a way that Pokemon hasn't in about 20 years.
I thought I would take a break from Pillars of Eternity after finishing the first game, because it did become quite exhausting late in the game, but after a discussion with some friends, I ended up excited to jump right into Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire, and so far, it's answering nearly all of my issues with the first game. For one, more quests can be resolved by being clever and avoiding combat, plus when the combat does happen, it's far more readable. As a blessing from the gods themselves, the quest log also lets you know if a quest is too high level for you, so you know which content is intended for your current level without checking it out early and dying to an enemy mob in a few seconds.
Ahead of Combo Breaker, I'm also back on the Skullgirls grind. My Black Dahlia mix and setplay are weak, and I'm giving my opponents too many opportunities to take their turn back, so I need to tighten that up.
I played through Hellblade recently and mostly loved it. I do however, agree that the quality of the hidden object puzzles vary a lot and there are a few too many of them. Sometimes it feels more like padding than enjoyable content.
I also wish the combat was slightly more demanding and involved. They have an amazing foundation with fantastic animations and a surprisingly robust combo system that just never actually demands you to explore its depths and nuances. The focus mechanic is also a little too powerful, which again doesn’t encourage you to utilise the combo system. More enemy/boss variety and more refined enemy movements would also be preferable, but they were working on a small budget so it’s understandable. It feels like they were so close to something amazing, and that makes me very hopeful for the sequel.
Yeah, I haven't seen any combo system. Following up a light with another hit is always that same jumping spin slash. If there's more depth there, the game didn't want to tell me about it. Likewise, when they had that developer direct, they said they were improving the combat system but with no description of how they were doing so; just a lot of fluff talk that was kind of about nothing. As for the puzzles, I like the ones that aren't just finding the symbols in the environment. Those puzzles can actually be reasoned out, as opposed to the symbols where plenty of things look like those shapes and they just picked one that they felt was the best fit for it, so I mostly just end up waiting for the game to inform me whether I'm hotter or colder as I get close to the magic spot.
This game also does something that I haven't seen many games do that always seemed like a natural evolution of story-driven games. The industry, operating at this level of production value, for the most part ended up going open world, even and especially for games that were better off being smaller and linear, and that's a real bummer. If you keep things small and linear, you can start loading the next scene while the current one is still playing, and then you can seamlessly cut to the next scene much like a movie would, but you get all the benefits of rendering the game in real time. This shouldn't be so rare, but the industry's obsession with being "bigger" made it rare.
Yeah the game never even hints at any combo system, though to be fair they never explain any mechanics (I guess in pursuit of immersion).
This video is not completely exhaustive, but goes through a fair amount of combos. In general, you can always interrupt a combo after the 1st, 2nd or 3rd attack with the melee button to punch/kick and follow up with a different two-attack combo. The finisher where Senua impales the enemy and pushes off with her foot can also be interrupted and extended by pressing light attack three times (which I don’t think the video covers).
I didn’t completely hate the find-the-symbol puzzles but they were definitely not particularly interesting. I think moments like the >!blind trial!< were where the game really shone. >!Navigating purely off of sound and controller vibration and avoiding the monsters in the dark!< is an experience that will stay with me for a while.
Completely agreed about the linear structure, I always thought it was the success of Witcher 3 that started an open-world craze, but regardless of where it came from it definitely ended up negatively impacting some games.
In general I think Ninja Theory did an amazing job at hiding the budget constraints. Another great example is the use of superimposed footage of live action instead of attempting to render characters and doing it poorly. The overall length of the game is also a part of this; they didn’t attempt to stretch too far and spread too thin but instead just made something brief but with the best quality they could. The game is short, but it didn’t feel too short. It felt perfectly measured for the story they were trying to tell.
I can’t imagine a world where I don’t love it. Loved AW, Control, and all the Max Paynes. I dont even know how many times I’ve played Max Payne 2. But goddamn, really guys?
Nah I agree. Minecraft Dungeons has a really approchable aesthetic that hits different. It’s an easier sell to my partner. Its cute, and the build complexity and variaty is surprisingly good. Don’t sleep on Minecraft Dungeons y’all!
Oh man, “did you want to hear this again?” Every single fucking time I would be mashing a to get through his dialog and press yes by accident. Every time…
Ahaha! Yes. So annoying!
I seem to recall navi being mostly skippable. But the owl having to say everything. But you would still button mash to try and skip, then end up having to see it all again
Don’t even start me on MGR parrying. I beat the entire game without once learning to parry. I did it by accident like once or twice but couldn’t replicate it.
Donut County (Not adventure, but a very simple and accessible puzzle that spans an entire town)
I haven’t played Stray, but it may be a good fit. I also haven’t played past the opening scene of Firewatch, but if your daughter can manage walking around Skyrim then I think it should be okay.
I searched for indie exploration games. City of Muse came up.
I wouldn't be surprised if there's a patent Microsoft just hasn't been willing to license use of.
I remember when the Sixaxis came out. It was missing vibration. It was because Immersion sued Sony (and ultimately won) over patent infringement of rumble motors. Sony ended up having to pay somewhere around $100 million.
Problem is that even on a premium product, cost is gonna be a factor. Well, and weight.
I can think of a bunch of features that could be supported in a controller. Problem is, not everyone is gonna want everything, and if they put it on the thing, everyone is gonna pay for it. On the XBox Elite Series 2:
Force feedback thumbsticks: No (I’m not aware of anyone that makes these, but force feedback joysticks were once a real thing, useful with flight sims simulating pre-fly-by-wire aircraft, like the Microsoft Sidewinder Force Feedback 2)
Gyro has been present in Sony controllers since Dualshock 3. All of the Nintendo controllers I ever used had it. Steam deck has it. I honestly assumed it is a standard feature.
I‘ve have a PS3 and PS4 and can‘t think of a single game that uses this feature. When I say widespread I don’t mean the hardware, but how it is implemented in software.
I decided to buy a good and expensive controller for my PC for the first time,
It‘s not exactly a widespread feature
Gyro has been present in Sony controllers since Dualshock 3.
Not many PC games natively support gyro, however, because most controllers that people have on the PC don’t support it.
Yeah, it’s an input that you can use to rig something up with Steam Input or some sort of macro software, but if you don’t have a large proportion of the userbase with hardware support, game developers aren’t going to put resources into native support, and without native support, most people won’t use it, and if most people aren’t going to use it, not a lot of incentive for game controller developers to support it.
I kind of wish that there were some kind of standard, cross-platform, open-source software package that you could have games hook into on one end and controllers on the other, have a developer-provided profile, but let the package provide some kind of profile that does something reasonable for an arbitrary controller (or multiple controllers, think HOTAS) if the developer doesn’t, and let game controller developers and players publish control scheme settings for games/controllers. Steam Input is kind of the closest thing to this, but is proprietary and tied to one distribution platform (Steam), which sort of sucks.
The sex toy crowd has something like this going on with buttplug.io – which, ironically enough, can actually support linking games to game controllers with vibration, not just sex toys, but for some reason we haven’t managed to get there with normal, actual game controller input. I kind of wish that given that they have their shit together enough to actually get something like this out there, that they’d rename the project to something uncontroversial like GameIO, support hooking up games to arbitrary output devices and input devices, and then expose an input layer to games. Have the option to use the game’s provided profile by default, but also use a custom one.
Steam deck has it.
The Steam Deck is successful for what it is, and maybe one day it will have enough market share to be able to really drive game features, but as things stand, it’s something like a percent.
If you crunch the numbers and assume the Deck does indeed represent 40% of Linux users, which make up 1.97% of Steam users, then the Deck is used by 0.78% of all Steam users. That’s the exact market share number for the Deck APU in the GPU survey, which means at least these datapoints are internally consistent.
That’s maybe the largest single bloc of people using a single specific non-mouse/keyboard input device on Steam, but it’s still a very small portion of the overall PC user base.
All PC games support gyro if they’re played with SteamAPI and the controller has gyro support. You can configure it however you want, it’s just a controller function being bound to an input.
You can even add gyro support to games that never had it, like PS2 and GameCube games. Because, again, it’s just a method of input.
It’s not widespread BECAUSE Microsoft refuses to include it in all their controllers. It’s been a standard in Sony, Nintendo, and even some 3rd party controllers like 8bitdo.
Tales of Maj’Eyal: An incredible rogue-like with 30+ classes and God knows how many achievements.
Cataclysm Dark Days Ahead: Apocalyptic rogue-like. Zombies, bandits, aliens and Lovecraft shit. Want to raid a dojo? Learn Judo from a book and proceed to race around town on a pair of rollerblades practicing on the undead? Feel free.
Levelhead is a fantastic mario-maker esque platformer. The official campaign is a little over 10 hours long and is pretty good but its main draw is its incredible level editor and infinite number of quality levels online. I can’t recommend it enough. Sadly it never got as popular as it should have but there’s still a massive backlog of online levels to play.
Someone else mentioned Distance and I agree. It’s a futuristic racing game with some horror elements. The campaign is short, but there’s a great amount of levels in the workshop. The multiplayer modes are also pretty fun if you can grab a few friends (there’s split-screen too).
Inkbound is launching from early access soon and while I wouldn’t say it’s the greatest roguelike out there, it’s a lot of fun and very unique. It’s essentially a co-op turn based RPG where you and other players play all your turns at the same time. I’ve played a lot of singleplayer too and the game feels well balanced there.
Voxelgram is Picross 3D for PC. Must-have for people who like nonograms.
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