I had a similar experience of first finishing the DLC and then going into God of War (2018). While not open world, it’s the same type of AAA soup you get from most big studios. There are so many baffling design decisions, I cannot fathom why people love the game so much - the constant barrage of stories and small talk is the most engaging thing in there.
The combat is utterly boring. Increasing the difficulty only results in spongy enemies. Their move sets are boring at best and annoying at worst. They are all but helpless if you just keep them at a distance and throw your axe.
Even worse, your godly powers are cutscene only. If you don’t want to make your game challanging, at least make a fun power fantasy and Kratos is perfect for that. He kills giant enemies, tears the very ground asunder and moves the heaviest objects imaginable. He even has super healing. None of which are tied to actual combat mechanics.
Upgrades are meaningless. Early on, you unlock a smith. I got my axe from 5 to 40 damage. Guess what? The very next enemy took the same amount of hits as the same type of enemy did before.
Traversing is mechanically boring. Climbing just means you gotta follow the yellow markings - press in the right direction or do the indicated button press. You literally cannot fall. Everything else is just walking from combat area to combat area.
The game throws an endless barrage of puzzles at you, none of which are engaging. They are so watered down, there’s barely much more thinking involved than in climbing.
Even worse, major upgrades are placed in “puzzle” chests. The puzzle? Well, just walk around and rotate your camera for several minutes until you’ve found all three runes.
The game basically just feels like a very long cutscene with a lot of padding so you can press some buttons. You can play it just fine, but they removed everything that could make any one system interesting in favor of having nothing in there a player could be stuck at. I like the characters, but I’m better served just watching a cutscene compilation for the second one.
I’ve not played Forbidden West, but I’ve played all of Zero Dawn. I’ll just say, as much as I like the game (I do, quite a bit), it’s bad at being open-world.
Most narrow paths are only related to quests, and if you try exploring them before you need to go there the game punishes you by making it a chore to go and to leave for no gain. Also, the terrible message “you’re out of bound, turn back now or we reset to your last save” is one of the worst failure at world design ever. It pops up constantly if you’re just trying to explore.
And yes, I tried playing HUD-free for a bit (I had a great experience doing that on Breath of the Wild). As you said it’s almost impossible, the environment, while looking good, is way too messy to spot the small details you’re supposed to… Unless you turn on the magic compass and GPS.
In other games, paths and important items are highlighted with lighting and clear and functional visual cues. Beside the infamous yellow paint, HZD does almost none of that efficiently.
I had exactly the same experience. I played Ghosts of Tsushima after Elden Ring and Zelda Tears of the Kingdom, I was surprised how shallow the mainstream open world games are. I don’t hate them, but the gameplay really boils down to:
Walk slowly while characters talk to eachother for 5 minutes
Open the map, click on where you need to go, then walk in a straight line to your objective
Trail an enemy without being seen
Liberate an enemy camp (kill the same 3 enemies and collect the 5000 twinkly useless items in the area)
The Elden Ring withdrawal is really hitting me. Most AAA games are trying so hard to be cinematic and movie-like that it’s boring me to tears.
hollow Knight: 2d metroidvania so very different genre, but great exploration with no hints. Souls like fights, so similar there to some games you’ve played and liked. Metroidvanias in general are good at exploration.
genshin impact: most varied biomes I’ve ever seen in a 3d game. Will hold your hand first time you see a mechanic, but won’t tell you anything subsequent times. Cons: starting areas have the blandest exploration and quests. You need good willpower to not swipe. Combat is often very easy.
I liked Gensin Impact for the first few years, but last time I played it, that game was the worst example of this.
Teleport to location. Chat with npc for 5 minutes. Teleport to next location. Chat with another npc rehashing the first conversation for 5 minutes. Quick fight with trivial enemies. Teleport back to first npc Chat about random crap, slow walk to another npc, rehash the earlier conversation again, walk back to starting location, receive the most basic of rewards.
The game is 90% dialog of which very little is relevant or meaningful and none can be skipped. There is an auto advance option for conversations, but so many meaningless dialog prompts (with options are always the same semanticly) that it doesn’t work.
Of course this is all by design as the real goal is to sell you characters, not play a game.
Geralts talking to self never bothered me. The characters, story and world were really interesting for me. The side quests were definitely all filler. I found a few that were amusing but most were the same thing: go kill this over here.
Actually this is what I liked about the Witcher 3 is that the side quests were really great. Of course there were generic ones that felt like doing chores but a surprisingly big amount of quests were actually unique with great stories.
This for me was the best thing about the game. Combat was kind of meh, especially the oils, etc. but the world was very well crafted and not only the main story but also a big chunk of side quests were really engaging.
The chores ones are what I mean. Boring. But there were some really good ones for sure. I really liked finding all the Witcher gear too. The world is incredibly vast and detailed, packed with stuff in every nook and cranny. Same with elden ring. Though I felt the dlc lacked in that regard.
The blood and wine dlc was amazing. I loved the main story/mission. There was a lot to love in the Witcher 3. I’ll have to play it again some day.
You’re right. The witcher 3 never grabbed me because of these reasons. It’s got such phenomenal quests and storytelling but in between feels like a chore aince.im just staring at the minimap the whole time. I installed mods to remove HUD elements to help fix it but I still needed a toggle for them to show me direction occasionally since the games design relies on those HUD elements to drive the player.
It’s such lazy design in an otherwise rich experience. It boggles my mind.
Also, Witcher has some heart-punch right-in-the-feels moments in side quests, FFS. 😶 Even when you’re purposely avoiding what you know is gonna be an emotional wringer in a prominent quest line, they cut ya while you’re wandering around? Genius. Damn. 🤌🏾🙇🏽♂️
I haven’t played Forbidden West yet, but I had a very different experience from most with Zero Dawn. I think a lot of people view these games as Ubisoft style open world checklists, but if you turn the difficulty up a few notches, it really forces you to engage with the mechanics. A game where you used to just charge headlong into a fight you were surely going to win changes into one where you need to pay attention to weaknesses, lay traps, and pick off their deadliest weapons. Plus, you end up actively hunting certain machines for their upgrade parts, because those upgrades become more crucial to your own success.
I agree with you here. While turning up the difficulty means it takes me quite a bit longer to finish as I have limited time to play these days, I tend to enjoy the time more as I learn the mechanics.
Elden Ring and the other Souls games are just different in that there isn’t a difficulty setting so you have to do this from the get go. I prefer this style, but it’s possible to get a more enjoyable experience in other games.
In my opinion, easy games aren’t as fun and I lose interest much more quickly.
Speaking of this, I hate the fact that farcry just stuck with the farcry 3 format.
Farcry 2 had none of this “tag an enemy to make them always visible” bullshit. But then they did 3, and that was just their settled format from there on out.
I love Tears of Kingdom, that’s one of the few games that does open world really well and doesn’t do any of the things that OP mentioned. Sense of exploration in ToTK is even better than Elden Ring imo with some really clever environmental puzzles and multiple ways to tackle them.
I recently started learning and playing poker, and I mostly play with fake money. Here’s what I’ve used so far:
Pokerstars and GGPoker both have fake money options that you can play without depositing money. I used Pokerstars for a while as it was the only client I could get working on Linux (using bottles). They both have good mobile apps. I prefer GGPoker’s interface so I’ve been using my Windows dual boot to play that when I want to on my computer.
Poker Brawl is a phone app where you can play correspondence heads-up poker with an ELO rating system. It’s correspondence , so you only have to make a move once every three days. It’s heads-up only, though.
I’ve found playing on real poker platforms with fake money to be best in terms of somewhat emulating real poker in terms of player behavior.
Feel free to comment with any questions and I’ll try to help
You mean poker without real money? Because there are a lot of gambling sites, I would believe that some of them also offer poker. But please, there are better things to do with your money. You could donate it for example.
While I haven’t seen the previous conversation, looking at the title of this post and also at the title of the community, that leads me to believe that this may not be a community for political history.
Since many historical events (especially in regards to politics) may be controversial, painful, horrendously offensive, stressful or annoying, that also leads me to believe some people might have gotten pissed off reading that stuff in this particular community.
It sounds like you’re referring to the National Socialist German Workers’ Party of WWII infamy. People are probably going to assume something else, FYI.
SquigglyEmpire is trying to say that “the N word” typically refers to a derogatory word for black people, not for Nazi.
Video games would probably ban you for saying Nazi because it’s a nasty thing to call someone or be called. It probably isn’t relevant to the game and it’s a topic they’d probably prefer not to have discussed.
Dino Game is a simple but attractive running game built into the Google Chrome browser. With classic pixel graphics and easy gameplay, the game takes players on an endless adventure with the T-Rex dinosaur, dodging obstacles like cacti and pterodactyls. https://dinogame.app/
Szukałem kilkukrotnie, nie udało mi się znaleźć, ale coś musi istnieć, bo istnieje mastodon.social/ . W razie czego można wrzucić RSS tego bota do czytnika i tyle.
Faktycznie działa. Ale jak to się dzieje, wrzuciłem ctrl+U w przeglądarce i nie udało mi się w kodzie strony znaleźć nic co ma w sobie “feed” albo “RSS”
Działa, używam od dawna, ale jest jeden mankament. Oko raportuje część rzeczy w ramach “Dzień na żywo” czyli wiecznie aktualizującej się strony z dość krótkimi wpisami. Linki z RSS potrafią poprowadzić do zupełnie innej części tej strony.
Ten bot po prostu strzela do strony oko.press i parsuje HTML, i tworzy post na Mastodonie na bazie tego. Można do odtworzyć we własnym czytniku RSS (z pominięciem bota), tylko trzeba napisać parę zapytań w XPath (robilem kiedyś dla prezydent.pl np.)
Podobno oko.press udostępnia niektóre treści osobom z założonym kontem więc i źródło do kanału też mogliby udostępniać, ale szczerze w to wątpię, bo bądź co bądź technologia rss z winy google’a dalej jest uznawana za martwą technologię, z której mało kto korzysta.
[EDIT]: Oczywiście przez pośpiech wyszedłem na forumowego debila i zamiast ci wysłać kanał, to podesłałem link do źródła… Wystarczy, że dasz też profil jako kanał w swoim agregatorze i powinno działać.
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