This might sound weird, but are you actually engaged with what you’re playing? Maybe you need to find some higher intensity games to keep your attention.
Well that’s the thing, it happens when I play games I find exciting, no matter the genre. Even when I pumped hundreds of hours into it. I put like 88 hours in cyberpunk 2077 but I found myself drifting away every time I’d start up the game.
Was it like that when the game was fresh and you were getting into it in the beginning, or just after youd put the hours into it, and the novelty wore off?
I was very close to reporting and blocking a certain user who has been spamming meme trash for the past couple of days. A little bit doesn’t bother me, but dominating the forum with it is selfish, and makes it a place I don’t want to be.
There is the Anno series of games, which are technically RTS games but if I’m honest I find them the most fun when I go out of my way to avoid combat/micromanagement. I’ve only played 1404, 2070, and 2205, 2070 being the best in my opinion, but it has a bad history with DRM so I’d suggest 1404 (known as “Dawn of Discovery” in the US because us americans are afraid of numbers apparently).
Edit: looking at the steam page it looks like they decided to take 1404 down and made a new page where the game is (mostly) unchanged besides requiring you to jump through all the BS hoops that 2070 did, so I’d say if you’re gonna spend money get 1404 on GOG, or if you are willing to do unspeakable things go with 2070.
Hey there. In case you didn’t see, we have a new rule for containing meme’s on this community to Monday. I’ll be removing this post. Thank you for understanding
Curious to hear what your thoughts are of the “punishing death penalty”. For Demon’s Souls, sure, if you’re not great at the game it can be rather intimidating. Dark Souls has an equivalent system to Elden Ring where you can become human to enable multi-player, where dying just means you can’t co-op (or even be invaded). For all the others, it’s just a bit of health that you lose if at all(you can avoid it with items for tough spots).
But if it’s souls being on the ground that’s the issue, that’s also in Elden Ring so I’m confused.
I consider losing all the money and XP you’ve accumulated since the last save to be extremely punishing. Maybe it’s just me, but I can’t begin to express how much I hate losing progress. Everything I just did for the last X minutes since the last save was completely undone. Nothing to show for it, no XP, no money, no progress toward my next goal. Just a complete fucking waste of time and X minutes of stress I’ll have to repeat. It’s like I lost power and corrupted my save file. It’s the worst feeling in gaming for me.
Yes, I realize you can get that XP/money back but it adds a level of stress that makes my stomach roil even thinking about it right now. No amount of suggestions on how to think of it differently has changed my perception of it significantly. I dealt with it in Elden Ring for a while but it’s probably the main reason I stopped playing that game.
Playing a game with similar mechanics but without the death penalty makes me realize how much more fun Elden Ring would have been without it. IMHO of course. YMMV
Your mistake is thinking dying is failure in those games when it’s literally just learning. It’s why Dark Souls is called “Prepare to Die”, it’sjust part of the game and it’s why there are checkpoints every 15m. When you die to some enemy hiding in a corner, you then know exactly where that enemy is next time.
It’s hard for me to grasp how new players approach the game at this point because it’s just ingrained, but it seems like you had the wrong idea about the mechanics and kinda entrenched yourself in that belief. Hope you come around.
I’d never play that on PC. It would work on xbox though since quick resume just let’s ju pop out to the dashboard and resume whenever. It’s not foolproof but I’ve only had to restart from a checkpoint a few times.
Just started timberborn and it seems to be in this vain. It's a beaver city builder and you have to manage the river with dams to survive droughts, along with the typical food, water and energy resource management.
Either the developers hit technical limitations of their save system and couldn’t reliably restart everything. I feel like RDR2 did this because most of their missions were very specific scripted sequences that needed to be kept on track from the start. A lot of roguelikes are unable to save during a run or within a node of that run. For example Peglin and Void Bastards. It’s much easier to say what node or position the player is at than all the AI states, combat, etc. Additionally, automatic saving has always been difficult. Everyone knows the whole “the game auto-saved and now I die instantly over and over again” bug that happens in any game. The way to negate this is to use checkpoints with areas where you know the player isn’t going to get attacked. Another way is to try to detect when you are in combat or not but this can lead to the game never saving. Overall it’s much easier to just save a state that you know the player will be okay to start back up in.
Or the designers felt like it added something to the game like in Alien Isolation. Save points allow you to exit and designers are trying to focus on keeping players playing. So save points are also an exit point. When you allow the player to save, you allow the player to exit without feeling like they must continue going. Designers use this to try to keep their games more engaging. Super Meat Boy removed a few exit points from typical platformers in order to make the game faster. A lot of games try to be so easy to keep playing that they make it hard to stop. In some ways, this can be seen as a dark pattern in game design. Typically though, designers aren’t trying to be nefarious but instead trying to keep the game engaging.
Eh, that’s honestly not a great solution. It’s a bandaid workaround. Getting better detection on when to auto-save or auto-saving at known good times is a lot better. The multiple auto-save solution is a good fallback but not the definitive answer. You could also just make the player invincible for 1-2 seconds after a save load and then also cast their position to the navmesh to make sure you save them in a place that they aren’t going to immediately fall to their death or out of the map. A lot of open-world games now just restart your character entirely leaning up against a building in the world or camping or whatever. Making it feel like the player character has their own agency and actions while you just play them for a while.
It’s also a compounding issue, that’s just one of the technical issues over many. In the end, it really depends on the type of game you are building. Every game is released incomplete, even the biggest masterpiece, the developers wanted to do something more. So you balance the technical issues between saving the real-time states or just saving off some simple data like you were at this mission in this area, with this inventory, with these player stats. Even that is a lot to keep track of and test. To then add stuff like AI states, active combat, randomization data, etc. I understand why a lot of roguelikes don’t save most of the active game data. After all, developing games is very hard and the save system is not a high priority to the general experience of the game.
No, those are all worse than just having multiple saves and more user control. I hate those approximate save systems because they force me to waste time getting back to what I was doing when I load a save.
That’s fair, you can certainly like the multiple saves and more user control. Personally, I feel like it boils down to what type of game I am playing. If I am playing a large RPG then yes, auto-save multiple times and let me have a ton of user control. if I am playing a roguelike in which a run will be over in 15 minutes, I don’t mind not having any control over my saves because I don’t care about an individual run most of the time. If I do, I spend the extra 5 minutes and finish up the run. For something like Just Cause or RDR2, I feel like their general save system is fine enough and gives a good cinematic feeling which outweighs any time I spend getting back to whatever I was trying to do. Which is typically just a few steps away from what I found.
That said I’m probably diving too deep into this stuff. I develop games for a living so I am constantly thinking about the best system for the game. I don’t think every game would be better if it had a multiple-save slot auto-save system. I can understand why it’s not in scope or would hurt the experience. If Alien Isolation had just saved where ever you are, that game wouldn’t have been as intense as it was. It’d ruin the game.
It’s fine to like the system, it works well for a lot of games but maybe it’s not a one-size fits all solution?
Ugh… I wish more developers kept their customers engaged by making good games instead of creating some meta game to keep the hamster wheel running. That feels like a lot of MMO’s…
In some cases, yes, they are trying to keep the wheel running and make the player less likely to quit by using psychology. Valve is very famous for deploying psychology in their games. Specifically DOTA and CSGO. But a lot of the time the design intent is innocent. In Super Meat Boy the intent was clearly and well stated that they didn’t want the player to blame the game and to keep them trying again as quickly as possible. If you are going to make a tough platformer then it’s clearly a good design choice to allow players to keep trying as fast as possible. With Alien Isolation, again the design intent is innocent as they are just looking to add tension and give the player some sense of relief from that tension. Most media follows a flow of tension then drops to relief a bit, then tension. If you keep the reader/player/viewer/etc tense all the time then they become dull to it. Frankly, it’s why I haven’t gone back into Red Dead 2 for about a week. The game has just mounted tension over and over again without a break to just be a cowboy. Always something to do and something to prepare for.
That’s funny I found the total opposite with red dead. Too much stupid bullshit like fishing and getting shaved and twenty minute fucking horse rides and not enough actual fun gameplay, just filler all the time. Of course I tried to play it like a completionist when I probably should’ve treated it like grand theft auto and just advanced the story by doing more missions.
I agree in that regard. It’s more story tension rather than action or shootouts. The downtime doesn’t feel like downtime to me but instead character-building. In the next parts of the game immediately something happens to that character. So they build the character up just to get you invested so when something happens it feels like it went to shit but it’s a constant rushed pace. I didn’t engage in the hunting or fishing more than what the story required as much as I am into the robbery and stuff that mainly comes from the missions but the missions bring this character drama that while really good, is too much at times.
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