The funny thing is, for all the acclaim Hades got, I felt it was pretty weak as a roguelike. It was just the combat system, with no room to get creative with it, like lots of other roguelikes would allow for.
I hope Final Fantasy 7 Remake gets a good discount. The regular price of 80 Euros is too much for a digital only game to me. I can see it got a few times a discount to 46 Euros. Hope it will get to 30 or at least 35 this time.
Baldur's Gate 3 highlighted my RPG backlog, so this will be a good time to pick up Pillars of Eternity ahead of Avowed. Plus I still need to pick up Starfield and Cocoon, so I may as well get them at a slight discount.
To me, they are both winners. I loved Phantom Liberty and just started playing it again last week, only for it to be interrupted by Shadow of the Erdtree. Both DLC’s reminded me how much I loved the base game and both are proper and large content additions. And they both run perfectly on Linux on day 1 <3.
Both these games and their DLC’s are in my opinion what other game studios should aim for.
Blood and Wine was honestly amazing. I haven’t enjoyed a DLC or xpac that much since Diablo II: Lord of Destruction. I think maybe the Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind’s expansion Bloodmoon was a great contender as well, but Blood and Wine just took Witcher 3 to a new level. It truly deserved its spot at the top of the heap.
Blood and Wine was exceptional. Much like Shadow of the Erdtree, there was enough content added that they could have almost justified releasing it as a full game. There are full games released today with less content than Blood and Wine brought to TW3.
It is, but by god don’t grind your face against bosses that are too hard. I was having a bad time when I did three major bosses in a row, now I’m fucking around and exploring it’s much more enjoyable.
If the strategy is looking at “what most people use” and “what is overrepresented in the win stats” you will always end up nerfing what is fun and popular.
So I’d suggest smaller changes… off course fix bugs and stuff that does not work as intended… but balance a weapon … and go on to the next. Also decide what a weapon is supposed to do… sniper shotguns should not exist… neither CQB dmr’s.
Nerfing things on a PVE game that’s supposed to be fun shows a lack of creativity.
You can buff the other things while finding better ways to increase the difficulty, instead of just boosting health and throwing more enemies, but that’s the “easy” button.
That’s just false, you’ll end up with Payday 2 where everything is so broken that enemies need to nearly insta kill you from any range to have an actual challenge.
That’s exactly why I super disagree with the idea, “If everything’s overpowered, then nothing is.” All it seems to lead to is a game that’s only dead easy or impossible.
I play DBD, and one of the playerbase’ biggest annoyance is balance by win rate and usage rate. Sometimes an option is just fun and well designed, without being too strong.
It’s especially important to look at what’s fun for multiple players. A good example might be Helldivers 2’s jet pack. Yes, it’s so fun to cover a lot of ground at once, but if the way that’s used is to abandon a cornered teammate to go do objectives while they die surrounded, then it suddenly makes teammates feel slow and useless.
Meanwhile there’s dopamine-driven team synergy potential with the assisted reload weapons. But, there’s not a lot of mechanical information encouraging their use, and it’s pretty simple for people to just use them alone.
I remember TF2’s simple idea where all weapons did more damage the closer you were to enemies, and it demonstrates what I think can be really good balancing design.
Genuinely excited to see Alpha Protocol available for sale again after all this time. Was not expecting to see it on the front page of GOG. It is such an interesting game, even if it isn't, strictly speaking, a good game.
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