For players of Black Desert, how much does Crimson Desert seem to be inheriting from it? I’ve seen some calling the trailer bullshit but I’ve heard that BD is also quite mechanically broad.
Gave Baldur's Gate 3 a try, I don't think it's for me. I didn't realize before starting that I absolutely fucking hate that kind of RNG, the Mindflayer "aesthetic" (body horror á la HR Giger-on-some-less-friendly-hallucinogenics? Check. Eye scream? Check. ), the threat of having content locked behind "lol, fuck you, you got the wrong dice roll hours ago", and, under the hood, a bunch of spreadsheet-esque mechanics I don't know jack about, never having played DnD.
I save scum in this play through, but I dont intend to on the next one. Part of the magic is that the game adapts to your bad dice rolls. Just because you succeeded a roll doesn’t mean it’s the “good” option. It’s just a different one.
And the eye horror stuff is really only in the intro (although I’m only 20 hours in so it may come up later)
In addition to save scumming to get better results as others have said, the body horror stuff goes away after the intro and you end up in much more normal forests/towns etc. I definitely understand the difficulty of the mechanics for someone new to DnD, it is pretty complex relative to what video games generally expose to the player, but it also is mostly good about explaining how stuff works with the tooltips.
Uhh… today’s AAA studios have THOUSANDS of employees, hundreds of millions of dollars in budgets, and huge IPs on which to draw. Elder Scrolls, Fallout, Assassin’s Creed, Diablo, Warcraft, Mass Effect, Dragon Age… these studios have VASTLY larger resources than Larian. Like, an order of magnitude larger. This is gaslighting and whining. I’m not having it. Do better, AAA devs. Do a lot better.
Well I wouldn’t say that exactly. GTA 5 had a huge budget and a huge team and it’s objectively a better product if you compare the two (which is only to say they’re both great games but the bigger budget game has and does more).
It’s a matter of the motivations of the developers and their financial backers. If your goal is to make an ok game that maximizes profit focused mechanics, most of these AAA developers are hitting the mark perfectly. If your focus is to make a good game like it seemed to be with the BG devs, they absolutely hit the mark and are being rewarded for it.
This is just a reminder to an industry that is trying to tell us that pay to win mechanics are the standard that they do not in fact get to dictate what those standards are. We do. If a game is shit people will abandon it even if you poured millions into that product. The recent battlefield game is a prime example of this. Even something as guaranteed as a new battlefield game isn’t enough to overcome a shitty leadership team emphasizing the wrong things. The community bailed on their product and they’ll never get them back. All those millions in guaranteed revenue are gone forever.
GTA V story mode was an excellent game, but it’s hard to realistically say a game from one genre is better than another, apples and oranges and all that.
GTA V’s online multiplayer, however, at this point is such a shitstain that I think it alone is enough to make the distinction clear.
It is. But only in so far as the content and scope of the game far surpasses anything a smaller developer could ever hope to accomplish. You may prefer one over the other, totally fine, but objectively speaking you get way more out of gta 5 content and scope wise than bg3.
As others point out gta online is a dumpster fire but it’s still massive and allows you to do endless amounts of things, racing, heists, owning property, running businesses, etc.
This is just a reminder to an industry that is trying to tell us that pay to win mechanics are the standard that they do not in fact get to dictate what those standards are. We do.
Quoting for emphasis. We control the purse, we have the voting power of the wallet.
Blaming consumers, in this instance. You could well be right that the problem is internal but in that case that’s where it needs to solved. Or if they want to get the support of consumers, be honest with their reasoning. Crying that the expectations of consumers are too high doesn’t help at all. It just makes them seem out of touch with reality.
I think I’ve realized some of my favorite games recently have involved a lot of walking up to objects and holding the E key to fill a meter.
That sounds like a terribly bad-modern style of game, but of course the context of decisionmaking and effects to those actions can be very important. Going to a terminal that takes 10 seconds to hack may mean 10 seconds you’re very vulnerable to attacks, and that a success means you successfully distracted, or trapped out, any adversaries that may not want you to hold E.
And then of course, it’s also fun sometimes for singleplayer games when you don’t want the tension of outsmarting opponents, just rewards for good positional decisionmaking.
They made a D&D video game. The most popular and successful board game ever made. They had BUCKETS of funding from wizards of the Coast for this. They also had a massive studio with more than 400 people working on it.
James Stephanie Sterling did a fantastic video about Baldur’s Gate 3. Essentially, everything came together in just the right way for this game to be made. It’s not responsible to call this the new standard in the same world where we vilify overwork and ‘crunch-time’, but that’s not to say you shouldn’t expect more from game developers. You absolutely should. But you should do so reasonably.
Other triple A devs have massive funding, a giant staff and other unlimited resources and they still can’t make a game devoid of microtransactions or bugs. Are you stunned?
I’m pretty sure EA and Activision-Blizzard have similar or bigger budgets for their AAA games and they either make shit or microtransactions-filled games.
2K is huge and they always make NBA2K decent/good but full of terrible microtransactions
I’m no financial expert so maybe I’m mistaken in some figure, but the bottom line is WotC is not the only big (and growing) company, so this are nothing but excuses.
They had BUCKETS of funding from wizards of the Coast for this. They also had a massive studio with more than 400 people working on it.
They had the IP; they did not receive a single cent from WotC. They funded the game with money from their previous games, and in fact, they paid WotC for the IP.
Why are people pretending baulders gate is the only high selling game with no microtransactions as of late? Off the top of my head Elden Ring and Tears of the Kingdom both released in the last year or so, no microtransactions or dlc as of now.
Emergent gameplay is a big part of what makes video games unique as a medium. I'd say a good example I've played recently is Death Stranding. One of my favorite games of all time at this point, it really is best and worst described as a walking simulator. Or moreso, a delivery simulator. At its core, you'll take on missions involving the delivery of different amounts and sizes/weights of packages to destinations near and far. Sometimes there are invisible ghosts that want to kill you, sometimes there's visible, inanimate landscape that wants to kill you.
What takes it from 'walking simulator' to 'walking simulator' is the fact that the walking is complex. The smoothness or roughness of terrain can directly influence the stability of your character. Even small rocks can be marginally trickier to traverse than truly flat ground. You may find pavement, dirt, rocky terrain, snow, or deep rivers, which require considerations. You can brace yourself for stability to help, and your movement speed, momentum when changing direction, and whether you're standing or crouching all affect your likelihood to slip or trip. Many items help you to move off the beaten path and find shorter routes, with ladders or climbing rope & anchors allowing the scaling or descent of steep cliffs.
Through experimentation, sliding helplessly down a mountain, and having all your important shit get washed away in a river as you scramble around like an infant, you come to understand your mobility and limitations. Enter: the packages and your hubris. You can accept multiple missions at a time. Some missions require few or relatively light packages. Some ask you to move an amount of goods that ought to be palletized. Through understanding your limitations, and attempting to slap different amounts of cargo on your person, you can possess Icarus and fly as close to the sun as you want.
But, there's more than just your person. You can use floating sci fi wheelbarrows that trail behind you, carrying a large amount of goods, but restricting your ability to use climbing ropes or ladders. You could use a motorcycle, allowing for speedy traversal and some light offroading with small storage on "saddlebags", or even a huge ass truck which affords incredible storage potential, at the cost of a squirrelly and incline averse driving model.
And I haven't even really gotten into all of the equipment or strategies required to handle the "ghosts", whose unique abilities and behavior provide an interesting additional challenge where being caught by one could easily mean the loss of your cargo, or even your life. Even in the big ass truck, you aren't truly safe. The intermittent and locational time-accelerating rainfall means even cargo you haven't dropped or bumped can have its durability rusted away given some time.
Though the game, of course, has a story, it sits alongside a story of the player's experience, limited only by the bravery and recklessness with which you, essentially, don't want to make three trips to the car to bring groceries in, so you load up yourself and two linked floating carriers to carry nearly 1,000 kilograms of cargo, and make a winding, manually waypointed journey through the desolate and oppressive landscape, stopping to deliver parts of your massive load as you come to each post-apocalyptic shelter in your list of deliveries.
Your successes and failures within are unique to the way you chose to plan and execute your trips. Shit, man, I like this game.
Dwarf Fortress and Cataclysm: DDA generate some crazy plotlines, full of narrative, twists, and character development. How come no writer has converted a character’s story into a novel, yet?
The Zelda timeline is an interesting example of emergent narrative, at least until recently. Before the Hyrule Historia, fans could see underlying clues of a general history of Hyrule and an order in which the games take place, but developers themselves wouldn’t confirm the existence of a definitive timeline. Even so, the fans speculated endlessly about where the games fit in - were all games canon or only some, was there a split or a unified timeline, and were these the same Link, Zelda and Ganondorf or were they continually reincarnated? Finally the Hyrule Historia gave a confirmed canon timeline with not one but two splits, all games canon, and with confirmation of several reincarnations of at least Link and Zelda. Considering how resistant to doing something like this Nintendo and the Zelda team were at first, I’d pretty well guarantee that the release was in response to the emergent narrative that developed and not something they had initially planned from the outset of the series, especially not before Ocarina of Time.
Here’s my thing: I don’t necessarily care what sort of game you make, I just want it to be feature-complete and technically solid (I.e. mostly bug-free). Whether that’s a small indie game or a massive AAA game, those two things should be true.
I think what most people find frustrating is that the in-game store is the most well developed part of most AAA releases nowadays, which often ship riddled with bugs.
I just want it to be feature-complete and technically solid
So, Diablo 4.
I wanted to get BG3, but the constant deep throating by neckbeards is making me gag. Now I don’t want it for the same reason bigots won’t play TLOU2: politics.
I’m sure BG3 is fantastic. It’s also not a reason for people to tell me why I shouldn’t enjoy the games I do.
I dunno the part where they try to make themselves out to be some kind of hero over racism randomly because they didn’t play a game has gotta decrease the score by at least a couple. Just feels like they’re trying too hard I dunno. Feels basic
“I won’t try this game because it’s too highly reviewed!” What a weird hill to die on.
D4 seemed to have been great at launch, but the seasons and battle pass stuff ruin it for me (though you can like it if you want, I don’t care). I don’t like the idea of a game being on a timer and asking me to play the way they want me to play it. This is what BG3 does right. It’s a game with many options and many ways to play. It never tells you how you should and you also don’t need to pay extra for other crap. You get a complete experience from start to finish with no timers and nothing extra asked of you.
I feel you on the deepthroating shit. It’s a great game, no doubt about it. But some of these articles act like it’s the second coming of Christ, and if I am to be entirely honest… It’s not quite as good as the original games. It’s lacking a lot of depth in the story telling (it’s almost entirely voiced so there’s more brevity in any given conversation than the pages upon pages of text even a random nobody can give you in BG2), but makes up for it with mechanical depth.
I agree it’s a big deal for a major release to not have MTX or a season pass or other bullshit, and that should definitely be applauded. But some of the things I’ve seen said about the game are out right fraudulent. Like an article the other day saying it is the most polished AAA game in over a decade, which is absurd. The game is plagued with issues and the polish is literally the one thing I can not give it praises for. It even feels amateur in a lot of ways. Like it has many little issues I would not expect from a seasoned developer, and many bugs ranging from minor inconveniences to full blown game breaking stuff like scripts firing wrong leading to an outcome you didn’t choose to take or characters becoming comoletely broken being unable to move or be interacted with.
Story is great. It actually feels like a remix of the first Baldur’s Gate story. Characters are some of the best I’ve seen in a long time. The combat is super fun, especially when you try to do weird random shit just to see if it works; cuz 90% of the time it does. There is a depth to the changes you can have on the world at large that are extremely cool and haven’t been done on such a scale before in all the RPGs I’ve played over the years…
Although that last part is where the previous talk about bugs really starts to drag the experience down. There have been so many points in my two playthroughs of the game where I took one path, but got the dialogue and changes to the world of another path. Like currently, my party keeps talking about one of the companions killing another. But they didn’t; I stopped that from happening. So now this character is standing around in the background while other characters talk about her death. And that’s not even the worst one I’ve encountered.
I think it’s funny talking about the second coming. It really is the second coming if anyone follows it. The thing is, it’s not extraordinary in the grand scheme of gaming. It’s just not something we’ve had in a long time on a large scale. It pretty much follows the norm for 2000s/90s games, but that’s why it’s an outlier. We don’t get those anymore. Bioware used to make games like it, but they don’t now and they’ll tell you it’s not going to happen again despite technology being better.
I understand that publishers will force them to do certain things, but most AAA studios have the capability of making games that follow the same standard (but maybe not scale) of BG3 if it weren’t for publishers. They shouldn’t copy it, but they should internalize that players want complete experiences in the box, and they want to be treated like adults who can think for themselves.
Not all the issues are bugs. There are issues in the actual design of some systems that are amateur at best (such as the UI). Even most indie developers wouldn’t have these issues, so seeing them in a AAA game that was in early access as long as this one has is totally unacceptable.
BG3 has still been riddled with bugs for me and since it doesn’t have MTX or a store or anything, it feels kinda worse. At least I know why the crap riddled with MTX is rife with issues; what is BG3’s excuse?
I probably wouldn’t mind the bugs so much if the whole game was shit. But the game is fucking awesome. I just want to play it without being frustrated by technical issues. 😩
I’m hoping that by the time the PS5 version launches, it’ll be much smoother.
I actually agree with you. People praise BG3 as if it were the most perfect 10/10 video game in existence. Its far from it. It is riddled with bugs reaching from minor to game breaking. The best example is the very first few seconds of the game. The first thing the players are likely to interact with is the tadpole pool after awekening on the ship.
Minor spoilerIt explodes, knocking you back and causing damage.
As someone who made a few characters and played the intro section a lot, the animation is often times bugged and confusing. And thats the first interaction a player has with the game.
A few seconds later you stand in front of a door. Usually the door opens and you can go through. But sometimes the opening animation doesn’t play. This happened on my very first time playing and I couldn’t figure out where to go, because my first instinct wasn’t to clip through the closed door. Things like this are absolutely unacceptable in the tutorial area.
Even though they already have full controller support it is very clear why the console release is delayed. The console player base is expected to be a lot more casual and unless they iron out all the confusing bugs they run the risk of people being frustrated and dropping the game.
And then there are other major things.
Why is there no native option for 3rd person WASD movement even though it is fully implemented for controllers?
Why does only the controller get a search area function but the keyboard doesn’t?
Why is there no camera sensitivity for controllers?
Why are there no deadzone settings for controller joysticks?
Why is there a 1 second delay on movement when using a controller?
Why can’t I set the text size below 64px when using a controller?
Why in a game that has been in early access for so long and a world full of magic can’t we change our characters appearance post creation? (I know it’s announced but why just now?)
Why do we not have advanced difficulty settings? (I’d love the enemies to be smart like “tactitian” but not be unhittable bullet sponges.)
Why is every adult character so goddamn hot in this game? I need my blood in my brain.
Why can we select a player voice, if the player isn’t voiced beyond some minor quips?
Why isn’t there a random name generator for your character?
Why can’t I shift + click multiple items or containers to queue them up for pickup or search?
Why do container windows open on top of each other or other inventory windows?
Why can’t I rename containers in my inventory?
Why can’t I filter out or hide wares in my inventory?
Why can’t I sort or filter items during trading or in the party view?
Why do containers always open in a 5x2 grid instead of trying to fit all the items without scrolling?
Why can I skip the rolling animation but not the success-continue animation?
etc.
I know I’m nitpicking here, but for a game that is as highly praised as this, I expect it also to nail all those minor things that other games have already figured out already (some of which were even their own older titles). Especially because it was Early Access and they had a lot of user feedback. I see it times and times again that studios apparently throw out all their previous knowledge of videogames and seemingly start from scratch on every title, making small stupid mistakes that could have been easily avoided. It’s like the research process for video mechanics and UI never consists of actually looking at other games.
So for me, it’s a very pretty game, its a beautifully sounding game and even a very fun game. But nowhere near a 10/10. It’s a 7/10 game. Fix the bugs to bump it up to 8/10 implement some QoL for 9/10 and release modding tools so the community can make it a 10/10.
I can’t say for anyone else, but Karlach is hot because of that infernal engine she has for a heart. :P
Why can’t I sort or filter items during trading or in the party view?
You can on a controller. Press in the left stick. The fact the UI between a controller and the M&KB is so completely different and you get dumb differences like this is another amateur hour move. I’ve played entirely on controller, but from talking to other people and seeing my sister play on her laptop, the M&KB interface is garbage and offers for fewer options far some damn reason.
I know I’m nitpicking here, but for a game that is as highly praised as this, I expect it also to nail all those minor things that other games have already figured out already
You realize that smaller companies have to do triage and prioritize what they’re working on, yes? Take bugs/enhancements in a certain order? And usually the major things get taken care of first before the minor things are.
Also, some of the things you ask for, they may just not agree with you as being needed in the game.
Have you submitted that list to them for their consideration, directly (Github, etc.)?
Stupid question, but have you been letting Steam do game updates?
Unless you’ve changed the default settings, you have to let Steam do updates while not playing any games through Steam. By default it won’t do any updates in the background.
Yes, everything updates automatically. I’ve gotten all the updates so far. Only a few of the changes made in any of them actually affected me. Most of the things I’ve experienced have yet to be addressed.
Most of the things I’ve experienced have yet to be addressed.
I was going to reply humorously with a comment along the lines of you should be moving from a technical to a spiritual solution, an exorcism perhaps, but I don’t want to kick somebody when they’re down, for the sake of comedy.
lemmy.world
Aktywne