A few days ago, I found out that one of the first games I ever owned, The Broken Land, was abandonware. I knew that it was generally considered a bad Diablo knock-off, but I had it remembered as at least the items and enemies being ‘meaningful’ in ways I don’t see it today anymore.
Lots of games just look formulaic and predictable to me now. Like, there’s a small and a medium potion, yeah alright game, I’m slowly getting too large of a health pool for you to not give me the big potions.
Well, I looked a little closer at the screenshots, and yeah, fuck me, the game doesn’t even try to hide its formulaicness. Health potions are literally just PNGs with a number attached, in variants, small, medium, big. There’s like 10 different PNGs of armor. And you’ll frequently have just one or two enemy types copy-pasted all over an area.
I guess, that is why people call it a bad Diablo knock-off. But having been a kid without expectations when I played it, that had me remember specifically that part as comparatively good, when it was objectively pretty bad…
When I was a kid, some piece of computer hardware came with some game demos. There was one called Taskmaker. It was not good graphically, but I really enjoyed it. It allowed access to three areas, I think. I played so much that I was able to beef up my character significantly. I was eventually given the full game. I played it so much. I tried bribing all of the NPCs to see what they’d say/do. There was a text box where you could type spells into. The normal progression of the game didn’t really give you many of them, but bestowing stuff to NPCs was one way to learn some.
Anyway, I found an abandonware version of it a while back and installed it on an old Mac virtual desktop. It still holds much of the same magic for me. I don’t have time to bribe every NPCs now, but I remember a lot, and google helps me with the rest.
The game is kind of inspired by The Stanley Parable and you can expect the same silliness. I posted here about it a few months ago and people seemed to like it. Here is the Steam link: <a href="">https://store.steampowered.com/app/2336120/Do_Not_Press_The_Button_To_Delete_The_Multiverse/</a>
Forbidden west did have allot of that, I get purple grade weapons to gear up for quest and it rewards me with the same weapon 2 tiers lower than the shop in town.
Is there a game that will analyze the weapons you’re using before doing a random drop so that the 10 minute boss battle has at least some semblance of a reward?
It also scaled unique items. That cool glass sword with the frost damage enchantment and unique blue glass texture? Its strength entirely depends on what level you were when you finished the quest that rewards it. Unenchanted standard weapons would usually outclass it in maybe two hours.
In Vermintide when you open a crate (the primary reward for doing things in-game), what is inside is based on what you already have, so even though everything rewards you with the “same” crate, you always get better and better gear from them.
Borderlands I would spend 6 hours until I find a gun that didn't spend more time reloading than shooting and pray it doesn't fall under the level curve for a few minuets. Love that game in principal but so many shit guns with the RNG system.
The equipment was legit the reason I quit playing. That and the difficulty. I was able to 100% the first game and the DLC on the hardest difficulty. I had to take the second game down to easy mode in the bulwark melee pit. That was the first time I ever came close to breaking a controller. I genuinely don’t believe that the developers actually playtested the game.
You gotta start maximizing your coils, yo. I was one shotting bad guys left and right with a couple high level impact damage coils on otherwise mediocre sharpshot bows.
yeah it's not that the game is hard it's more than most of the rewards and unrewarding and I end up buying most of my best gear instead of being quest gifted it.
If you’re halfway through the MSQ then you’re already well into the parts people widely regard as good. If you’re not having a good time yet you probably never will.
I'd go as far to say Heavensward may be the benchmark for whether people will enjoy the rest of the game. It's where the voice acting and general presentation upgrades to a level that, to me, remained consistent throughout the rest of the MSQ.
Most importantly, at least to me, you get new plot twists to some earlier events which tells you A LOT about the narrative structure going forward. There's a reveal during the middle of Heavensward that basically killed narrative tension for me throughout the rest of the MSQ.
It's not that their direction there is bad, I had just gotten swept up in the "omg it gets so DARK" hype so I was dissapointed when it consistently walked back major events. It took me until the middle of Endwalker to realise "oh, right, that's not the kind of story and experience they want to tell".
Keeping details minimal because I can't for the life of me get spoiler tags to work on kbin:
In the middle of Heavensward we learn that a very dramatic death sequence that led to some major events was a ruse. The character is alive and things will quickly return to normal.
I get what they wanted, but big fakeouts like that are not my thing. It felt like the consequences were walked back so I could never take the rest of the story seriously. Anything bad that happens could just be reverted.
Endwalker has a point after a lot of stuff goes down where I was thinking "Yeah this is edgy and all, but they really held back from doing anything actually substantial" then we get introduced to a bunch of cuteness and silly things. It took until then to really settle with me that they mostly want to tell fun and uplifting stories, so making stuff look dark and dramatic but keeping the lasting impact down is more of an objective of theirs than a narrative flaw.
I can appreciate that, and a lot of other things about the game and its story, but that in particular is just not for me.
This whole thing is especially heartbreaking because at its core, the game is great. Running around and shooting feels better then Halo has in a long time. It was just ruined by corporate fuckery.
In a nutshell: corporate greed. The only part of the game that was live service was the paid cosmetics.
At launch, their entire idea of more ‘content’ was just visual cosmetics. If you look at their communications at the time it will all make sense.
They constantly referred to an internal ‘live service’ team separate from the rest of the game, and that team was effectively the ‘cosmetics team’.
People talk about contractors, but this was the real problem. They thought they could get away with barely adding any real content and selling tons of cosmetics.
lemmy.world
Aktywne