I enjoyed Expedition 33 much, much more. BG3 just made me feel stressed and confused. But if you’re used to Souls games you probably wouldn’t have the same issue I did.
Very cool. I’ve got an old Dell mini PC running batocera and I very much like it. My only gripe is that scraping the art for a large library takes an obscene amount of time.
Looking at their dev guidelines page, they don’t have any texture resolution limit other than “don’t use very large textures on very small objects”, so I doubt that the project has any really hard caps.
Do not use large textures for small objects—this wastes video RAM.
If they are concerned about distribution size, if the game supports it or could support it, might be possible to have a separate high-resolution-texture package, package those separately.
I’m not really a “plot” sort of gamer so probably don’t have a huge amount of experience to choose from, but Undertale really sounds like it fits the bill. It’s all laughs and jokes until it’s not.
A friend of mine wrote some lyrics for a contest, which includes the lines “if I alone remain, what would it mean to fail? Is there still a world to save…”. This comes into my head a lot whenever I’m playing certain games, especially post-apocalyptic games.
I’d say the Zelda series struggles with this. I put in ~40 hours into Breath of the Wild before I got bored and stopped playing. I never got around to defeating Gannon and I think I only did 3 divine beasts. I kept on looking around and asking myself… Why is Link bothering? It seems like the world is doing pretty well without him. The land of Hyrule is teaming with life. Sure, the people of Hyrule are no longer building megastructures or cities, their populations might be smaller than they used to be, but everyone seems pretty happy and unbothered. The evil forces of Gannon’s corruption mostly keep to themselves, so as long as people avoid the ruined Hyrule Castle or the ruined towers they are fine. Sure, there are monsters that spawn in the wild, but there are also just plain old evil humanoids out there too. There’s regular ass animals. It seems like nature, civilization, and even evil itself have achieved a harmonious equilibrium in Link’s absence. There are some minor problems in the settlements, but in the whole everyone seems pretty happy just living their lives. It’s like they asked the question “what if we give up and let entropy take over” and the answer was the most beautiful and vibrant state that we have ever seen Hyrule in.
By comparison, Majora’s Mask and Twilight Princess have a much broader range. TP does this very overtly by having the areas cycle through Twilight vs normal states. They establish Link’s relationships with everyone in Ordon Village first, then have Twilight fall and reduce them to cowering spirits. In other areas you see the Twilight version first and then clear it. Majora’s Mask does similar- everything is bright and sunny and cheerful on Day 1, while Day 3 is an active apocalypse. Which then gets reset over and over again.
I would say Skyrim does a decent job of balancing the two as well, though perhaps not as extreme as other examples. Moments in the main quests like the civil war battles and the journey to sovengard are serious and epic, with the fate of Skyrim (perhaps all of Mundus) resting on your shoulders. There’s deep, personal moments like the Dark Brotherhood quest to kill Narfi or talking the ghost of the child killed by a vampire in Morthal. But there’s fun moments like coming across copies of the Lusty Argonian Maid or getting drunk and carousing with Sanguine. The Sheogorath quest line starts out as “OMG so funny and random XD, cheese!” And then dives into the child abuse and subsequent mental illness suffered by one of Skyrim’s last high kings.
I didn’t quite get that feeling with Breath of the Wild, but I’ve certainly had those moments where the theme of a ruined world absolutely ruined my emotional stakes, so I can understand it.
The opening lines of Nier Automata are nihilistic and signal 2B’s desire to just get death over with. Nothing in the whole game’s story brought this feeling back in the other direction, and as a result of an adventure spanning a gray and brown “Abandoned city and death” the optimistic ending absolutely didn’t hit with me. Hard to identify why my response was so different from everyone else’s.
The pointlessness of a fight amid a ruined world is also what makes me not care about a lot of uber-dark Soulslike games. I don’t see much of what I’m saving in most of those, and learning the lore behind all of Dark Souls’ endings reinforces that feeling.
The Souls games is another good example I considered bringing up. I’ve only played Bloodborne so far and while I did enjoy it one of my criticisms is that it’s pretty monotone. Even the few NPC’s there are tend to not be very likeable. Everything is dark. Everyone is bad. It’s not even clear whether anything the player experiences is “real” even within the game world, or whether anything the player does accomplishes anything. While I haven’t played the other games I get the impression that they are similar.
I can also think of games that only lean into one side or the others but they do it in a way that I dont mind. “Cozy” games have made an entire genre of this, like Animal Crossing.
Or games where the tone of the game is always dark, but the player and player character both know that there is an “outside” world they can escape to. Resident Evil, Portal, BioShock, etc.
You brought up Metal Gear Solid because it has moments of levity within a gritty military espionage setting, but I think it’s also helped by being set in the real world. If I remember correctly, the end of MGS2 has a boss fight on the roof of a building in Philadelphia and we are shown in cutscenes that the streets below are filled with normal people going about their business, completely unaware of the threat. It’s a reminder of what the player character is fighting for.
Uncharted is another series worth discussing. The first 3 games all kind of blur together in my memory so I could be mistaken, but I remember the first game felt too isolated. I don’t think you really spend much time in a non-hostile environment: it’s all either jungles or ruins or the enemy base. 2 and 3 did a better job of putting Nathan in more mundane and civilian settings: museums, tourists sites, cities, etc. There’s moments where you need to put away your fun and act like a normal person, and that contrast makes the action sequences hit that much harder.
The opening lines of Nier Automata are nihilistic and signal 2B’s desire to just get death over with. Nothing in the whole game’s story brought this feeling back in the other direction, and as a result of an adventure spanning a gray and brown “Abandoned city and death” the optimistic ending absolutely didn’t hit with me. Hard to identify why my response was so different from everyone else’s.
Yoko Taro let the answer to the player, even in the good ending is for you to decide why is worth living.
spoilerIf you find the 2B flight unit you can read the message she left for 9S. “The time I was able to spend with you It was like memories of pure light”. To me this message is 2B answer for the question of what is worth living. Another thing, the OST for the main area of the earth, the cozy ost, is named Rays of light(I think is the same name in japanese) and to me is referencing the “memories of pure light”
I saw people asking for ships you can walk around in for a long time now, but I never saw the appeal. With this update, I get it. These ships really feel like our own, and they didn’t hold back the creative potential. I’m already building a flying restaurant.
In one of my earlier designs use the farming walls to close of the door ways like the frieghter interior wall
My current design has a Y shaped interior, with the base being the cockpit and some of the engines at the tip of the two points. There’s also a -1 floor at the base of the Y shape
After that I added reactors and engines then built cosmetics around it
Something I would quite like are coop games that don’t require anyone else to buy the game. Keep talking and nobody explodes works well for that, can have more people too as most of it is communication rather than control inputs but only 1 person is holding the mouse/controller.
I have a steam controller and can stream my PC to the TV with steam link. Apparently some games can be played with multiple controllers but I don’t have any others and they don’t make steam controllers any more. Not even sure how well that even works on Linux as it is something I have never tried.
The Neo Geo Metal Slug games were extremely fun to play side by side with a friend. Just note Metal Slug 2 has lag problems due to the engine used, but it was later ported to MS3's engine as Metal Slug X.
Also, most versions of the games on PC come with the ROMs, if you'd rather use your own emulator.
Another set of games we also enjoyed a lot were the River City Girls games. Just had to use health cheats on the SNES game repurposed because it was getting too hard for the time we had. "<.<
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