Bethesda’s RPGs have always been shallow in the choice you have with dialogue and altering the story, but deep with the detail, world-building, and mechanics of gameplay. Arena is almost no different in the gameplay loop as Starfield. They went through various phases of how to use rules and complexity of certain systems, but have since settled in a formula established first by Morrowind and refined with Oblivion and further with Skyrim.
They are not about the story. The story is just kinda there to drive some motivation and give context to your own thing. They excel at immersing you in the world and allowing you to just play however you want without restrictions (such as being a god in everything without having to start over and build specific characters to do specific things). They have a pretty good track record of doing good environmental story telling and adding in all those little stories in notes and terminals that aren’t even tied to quests.
But when it comes to stories and dialogue? They had ONE game that was a masterpiece, Morrowind, and the rest have ranged from absolute shit to pretty good. And not one of them, not even Morrowind, actually have the same kind of choice and sweeping changes affected through dialogue get in a story-focused RPG like Baldur’s Gate. Bethesda will likely never have a game as well written as Morrowind again, because that isn’t what they are about.
They are very much about the action over the words. Despite the jank as fuck AI, the combat is still fun somehow (and imagine how much more fun it could be if the AI didn’t suck!), it’s incredibly easy to lose yourself in the world because of how detailed it is, and there are plenty of shenanigans to pull once you begin to dive in and see how everything works. Like, I can’t wait to completely fill one of the huge craters near my base with watermelons and then dive in.
This is it. Forget all the tracked on nonsense. The base building, the character management, production chains all that nonsense…
If you focus on the combat/looter aspect of the game, that part is actually pretty good. A world apart from the janky combat of Fallout, it actually feels pretty visceral.
They may not explode like in Fallout, but there is a new fun spectacle in town: Shooting out backpacks on low gravity environments and launching your enemies off world.
And this is why I didn’t buy Starfield. I loved Morrowind and was disappointed with Skyrim, and I think it’s because I prefer a tighter, more linear story and don’t like “messing around” as much. I watched a gameplay video, and the things that player got excited about (all the side content) really didn’t grab my attention, and the story itself seemed a bit flat.
I probably would’ve loved it as a kid, but that’s not what I’m looking for these days.
So for me, BG3 is the better game. But younger me would’ve preferred Starfield. They’re both great games, just for very different audiences. And I could totally see someone having exactly the opposite opinion as me, which just shows how great both are.
Tango closed cause it was the one of the only studios under Zenimax that wasn’t currently making a game with “executive producer: Todd Howard” squirted all over it
I should be surprised that a bunch of nerds are fixing game-breaking updates in their spare time that were created by a multi-billion dollar corporation, but I’m not, at all.
Plus, this is Bethesda, and in particular their open world games. They have always been shit the fans had to fix if they wanted to play it, as the foundation was solid but the company didn’t do any actual development.
When Bethesda began re-releasing Skyrim without ever fixing any of the many, many, MANY bugs, was when I realized they really don’t give a shit about quality. Unofficial Skyrim Patch has over a thousand bugs that haven’t been fixed by Bethesda, some as old as the original release.
This has been the gaming industry since the internet.
Back when gaming was still considered a niche pastime or just toys for kids, and the developers weren’t multi-billion corporations, the dynamic was one of a mutual love of the product.
Love how the courts are framing this. “ROMs are illegal software.” “Emulators are for playing pirated software.”
Fuck you, Nintendo. You made $1.6bil in profits last year. I bet the number of pirated copies of Zelda: TotK barely amount to a fraction of a percent of that.
Love how the courts are framing this. “ROMs are illegal software.” “Emulators are for playing pirated software.”
Ngl I kinda want them to use this logic and see what happens when they try to apply it to Nintendo’s own Virtual Console, which are emulators playing ROMs basically.
Hell, the games you can play in Animal Crossing are literal emulators with ROMs since they found iNES data in the headers.
Emulation has already been litigated to hell and back. It's very clearly legal, including relying on users pulling a blob or two from their hardware for the whole thing to function.
Yeah that would make sense except you missed a key point:
Connectix’s development strategy was based upon reverse engineering the PlayStation’s BIOS firmware, first by using the unchanged BIOS to develop emulation for the hardware, and then by developing a BIOS of their own using the original firmware as an aid for debugging.
The whole point here is that Connectix used Sony’s BIOS to develop their own BIOS. Yuzu is not doing that. They don’t have their own BIOS they are providing to their users. They are telling people to use Nintendo’s bios, but that they aren’t providing it.
This. This seems to be the argument that Nintendo is hinging on. In order for Yuzu to play the games properly you need a prod.keys file. I guess Nintendo is claiming that the keys in this file are owned by them and it’s illegal to have that number much in the same way the number used to represent the C code for decoding DVD copy protection is illegal: en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_number#Illegal_pr…
I am no lawyer but seems tenuous when you can run a program to get the prod.keys from your own console. Especially when that code is legal and exists on GitHub: github.com/Decscots/Lockpick_RCM
Who the fuck genuinely cares about a digital plot of land? The only reason stuff like this attracts people is the hope to make money, and therefore only people who only care about the monetary aspect play games like Legacy.
I highly suggest the YouTube channel “Jauwn”! The dude plays nft games “frome the perspective of a gamer”, so he tries to give those games a fair shot (although he is clearly biased against nfts in general). To no one’s surprise each and every nft game is just a grift to mine money in the pockets of idiots who think they are smarter than the rest.
"It doesn't work like in Dragon Ball, where Goku fuses with other characters," continued Kamiya, "Two people with completely different personalities and ideas would clash. There's no way you'd get a decent game of that."
It’s an interesting idea. I think sometimes two different creative people collaborate on something you can get something greater than the sum of its parts. But it all depends on the specific people and whether they have a shared vision for the art they’re creating together.
But for the Fusion Dance to work in Dragon Ball both users have to be perfectly in sync or you get a bad fusion, he should have specified it doesn’t work like the Potara fusion. smh get your lore right
What a ridiculous society we live in that someone can be so rich that they get to threaten people with a gun and don't get arrested. What an unhinged asshole he is.
The obsession with the fact that GN didn’t reach out for lmg’s response to the story is extremely rich given that ltt didn’t give billet labs that exact same courtesy
I mean Billet sent them a unit for review. That implies they’re expecting to be reported upon. Now, LTT half-assed the reporting and then accidentally put the prototype into their auction system, but I’d say “damning reporting” is an expected possible outcome of sending something to a reviewing org to be reviewed that doesn’t require special notice.
However they sent a 3090 GPU and a prototype cooler for that specific board, which they mounted on a 4090 board which has a potentially different layout and was not tested.
Imagine they were a small company , whose first product was the LTT screwdriver, and they had sent an early prototype to a YouTuber who complained that none of the bits he had laying around worked on that screwdriver, so no one should buy the LTT screwdriver because it just doesn’t work. When people complain that they weren’t doing the product justice by testing it with the wrong things they replied “I’m not spending money retesting a screwdriver that no one should buy because it’s useless”. Then turned around and sold the prototype at an auction. Then when people complained they said “we didn’t sell it, we auctioned it for charity, and have already sent money to replace it” having sent the email agreeing to pay seconds before saying that stupid excuse.
They did a LOT of wrong things there, a bad review is the least of the problems. For all I know the product is in fact shit, but because of their methodology, plus all that they did afterwards, I can’t trust that they would ever produce an honest review of the product. And this is a house of cards, as soon as one review can’t be trusted, no review can be trusted. Can you assure that they used proper protocol when testing other things if they can’t even use the GPU that was sent together with the cooler? And that when people point this instead of retesting they just dig themselves deeper into “we’re right”… Plus you should watch the GN video, they point a LOT of inconsistencies and errors in other videos, showing that the cooler is NOT an isolated thing.
For all I know the product is in fact shit, but because of their methodology, plus all that they did afterwards, I can’t trust that they would ever produce an honest review of the product.
I mean yeah I’m not arguing that point. Maybe calling that “half-assed” is an understatement when they were clearly showing their whole asses on that effort, but still:
Billet sent a unit to get reviewed, and the reviewers made a review. A grossly incompetent review, but a review. I don’t see why that would be worthy of special notification. Losing/selling the prototype was just a further demonstration of that incompetence.
Whereas if you’re going to do a long-form report on a group’s involvement in an event, it’s considered good form to reach out for comment.
Either way, imho the Billet story has kind of been eclipsed by the Xeets by their ex-employee about the toxic workplace.
Basically, Linus’ company is a complete trainwreck and he has no credibility on fixing it since it seems like the disastrous culture is his own fault. Sitting and saying “this is fine, I’m taking care of it” to every disaster while pushing for more and more content to the point that quality slips to legally actionable levels is piss-poor leadership.
I understand that point but my counter is that if someone sends you a product/video in private to review you have more reson to contact them about what you will say before you do than if the product/video is publicly available.
Do you think LTT should contact the companies that they do secret shopping before releasing the video? Any comments that they might have won’t change what happened on their experience, and any promises of improvement won’t prevent them from publishing the video so it’s kind of pointless.
Even if GN had contacted and they had explained what they already explained, the GN video would be the exact same with an added part for LTT’s response, which LTT is perfectly capable of doing themselves, and would do regardless of GN’s video.
I’m glad GN didn’t reach out. Linus emailed Billet Labs 2 hours after the GN video with an offer to reimburse them for the prototype, so that he could claim that GN got their facts wrong. But we have the receipts!
That was the nail in the coffin, for me. Making mistakes is fine, even big ones. I understand that Youtube is the devil, and it’s easy to fall into a trap of shoveling nonsense out onto the platform. I’m honestly sympathetic to that. If Linus said “You’re right, quality has suffered cuz we’ve been going too fast. We need to take another look at this.” I’d be completely happy.
But to lie – not just by words, but by actions – in order to cast doubt on the people who are trying to give you a reality check and get your work back on track… That’s really bad.
Did you watch the response video? It explains that. Colton responded…but had forgotten to add the billet dudes email to it. So it was a bone head mistake that is compounded by bad processes and bad decisions.
It’s not as nefarious as people are making it seem.
I did watch the response video before commenting. Did you read the forum post? He said it’s all settled, it’s just gotta go through the bean counters now. But the fact that he emailed them immediately before posting proves that he knew it was not all settled.
What if they replied “Actually, you can’t just reimburse us for that. The manufacturing process that produced it is being overhauled and we won’t be able to replace it for at least 6 months and we’ve got conferences to demo at between then and now. We need you to get it back.”
There is if they’re interested in competing with Steam. Epic made some very competitive offerings for the supply side of things and then provided very little reason for customers to ever shop there, which it turns out is just as, if not more important.
Let me gift games, let me wishlist games to receive gifts. There’s lots of other features I would also like but if other stores had that I’d be much more inclined to use the other stores.
Some of these are engineered to be addicting especially loot crates and stuff. A lot of them are just genuinely good.
They mention Minecraft, pretty sure that one was addicting since day 1 and completely unintentionally so. It’s just genuinely fun and you can spend hours in it easily. Same with Factorio.
Not exactly a new phenomenon, I’ve seen my own parents up at 4am just because they wanted to sneak a peek at the new level they reached. My mom had hand drawn and annotated the entire Zelda 1 map. For a little bit, that NES basically ran on a UPS to not lose their progress.
For some reason US parents always want to shift the blame to companies for their own failures. It’s her own damn fault she let this get out of control for 10 fucking years. Just like those that park their kids on an iPad all the time and then sues because their kid spends too much time on the iPad and cry out in the news how iPad babies are so bad. Who’s given them the damn iPad?
I think you’ve got some valid points but you’re completely ignoring how countless corporations have invested collectively probably trillions of dollars over decades into how to best reach and sink their talons into us.
Minecraft may be an “accidentally addicting” product (though I’d somewhat dispute it), but iPads sure aren’t just addictive by accident. No tablet is. They’re designed to be from the ground up, like every major social media app and then some.
Parents need to parent, but to act like any of us are on an equal footing with the Facebooks of the world is to completely misunderstand the imbalance of power here.
Concerning Minecraft, as I know the game it seems fine, playing Java on a survival server I run for friends.
However, I wonder what the experience is for the other millions of players, on Bedrock, highly popular monetized servers, etc.
What crappy casino-like techniques are used to monetize Minecraft in those contexts? I really don’t know as I’m in my own Minecraft bubble, but I’m sure there are lots of examples as it’s such a monumentally large game.
Hyper monetized minecraft servers can be reeeeeeally bad but i wouldn’t say the offline play is designed to be addicting in the way that most modern AAA games are
Fine tuning a gameplay loop so people keep playing (and maybe spending money) isn’t as far from designing something to be addicting as most people would like to think. Hence why gaming and gambling addiction dovetail so well.
I think there’s a core difference between loot boxes, which is out and out gambling, and gameplay. Both can be addictive, but they have very different consequences.
Gameplay addiction steals your time and maybe your social life, but that’s it.
Gambling addiction also steals your money. And when that’s gone, drives you to extremes trying to find more.
I know a kid that is really into multiplayer Minecraft on Xbox and he is always after his parents for more Xbox cards so he can buy different skins and texture packs. Servers like Cubecraft and The Hive must be making a lot of money.
The thing about older games and Minecraft being addictive is that it’s sort of fine, because they don’t benefit financially from it so obviously it was unintentional and just because of the entertainment.
It becomes a problem with these new games when they are subscription based or have lots of microtransactions because the more addictive the game, the more money the company makes.
It was the patch that got me to stop playing. Why you would nerf weapons in a non-competitive game rather than make poor preforming weapons viable is beyond me.
It’s akin to Steve Jobs telling everyone they’re holding their phone wrong.
I dont know what everyone is so upset about, the shotgun feels fine, the recoil doesnt feel bad, and the mag size isnt a huge problem for me.
Plus the flamethrower buff and laser cannon buff are super nice. Im usually in favor of the whole “buff everything else, no debuff” but this honestly feels fine.
Lack of further content and wanting to lock the little content they do have behind the premium bonds, which will drive people to buy credits since they don’t have time to grind out the credits needed.
It’s to keep design space open and to minimize developer work.
Let’s say we decide to keep an overperforming gun. It does all the things. It has all the ammo, all the damage, all fire rate, all the reload speed. Now, all future weapons have to be made with that as a consideration. Why would players choose this new weapon, when there’s the old overperformer? The design space is being controlled and minimized by the overperformer. Players will complain if new weapons aren’t on the level of the overperformer.
Now, let’s say we have ten weapons with one clear overperformer. Now, we can either nerf a single weapon to bring it in line with the others, or buff nine weapons to attempt to bring them up to the level of the overperformer. Assuming the balance adjustments of each weapon are the same amount of work, that’s 9x the effort. However, if we assume we do this extra work to satisfy players, now we have ten overperforming guns and players find the game too easy, so now we also have to buff enemies to match. However, the game isn’t designed to handle these increase in difficulty. Players complain if we just add more health to enemies, so we have to do other things like increase enemy count, but adding more enemies increases performance issues. It’s a cascading problem.
I consider nerfs a necessary evil. It’s absurd to ask developers to always buff weapons and give them so much work when they could be developing actual additions to the game. Sometimes, a weapon really does need a nerf.
If you want the game to have long term viability, you have to have nerfs. Otherwise in 3 years everyone who has been playing since day 1 has a mech with a gattling cannon that fires nukes and is fighting gods.
Also, I’m not sure how much this applies to helldivers specifically, but from what I’ve seen, teams didn’t really teamwork. Because they didn’t have to.
This can be very bad because if it follows these steps:
game is easy, no teamwork required, players learn to play the game without teamwork
game gets harder, but some people can still manage solo, complain about “newbs” and tell them to "git gud"
game gets even harder, now it’s impossible to play “quasi solo” but the environment is no longer fit to learn teamwork in the context of this game. “How” to work together effectively.
Then people will complain, justly, that they don’t have the tools and methods to beat the challenge. Which is correct. They don’t. But you can’t just tell people to “go play easy mode and learn the game”, when they are “max level” and put 40-100 hours into the game.
Of course the synergy tools still have to exist and I’m not knowledgeable about helldivers whether they do.
There is no good choice to “encourage” teamplay, except via creating “natural” funnels that people will “end up at” “organically”, and putting a challenge in front of them that they can only work with teamwork. But that means the challenge has to beat them, until they get it. And that may never happen.
One game I have found exceptional as a case study for what is “overpowered” and what isn’t, and why, is magic the gathering. All the “code” is public. The complaints are public. The bans are public, and explained. So if anyone here wants to nerd out about balance and doesn’t know mtg yet, there is a rabbit hole for you.
I remember an incident in Red Orchestra where we were on a tank map. A teammate hopped in a tank. So, I did too. He jumped out of the tank and into another; so I joined. He jumped out and started shooting at me, basically insisting I get my own tank. Apparently, his level of tactical sense and reflexes in a tank vastly outweighed the value of having a second player in the gunner’s seat; even though the game was realistically meant to depict tank crews cooperating.
It’s a common issue with lots of team play games. The other player decided that it was better to have two people operating separate mortars than to have one of them provide small arms cover on the flanks of the tank.
Helldivers 2 has a similar problem where some players can help other players reload their larger weapons at a much faster rate than typically; however the player base decided that it’s better to fan out and each operate the weapon solo because shots do not need to be made so rapidly and clumping together increases the odds both players die.
The game does have a bit of a balance problem, but as usual the players are not the best at designing the solution.
Railgun was overpowered, since it did literally everything without any risk. The funny thing is - you can still do things it did before, you just need to actually use the unsafe mode.
The armoured bugs are a bit overtuned, the devs have announced they will be looking at them, but just giving you an OP gun is not a way to fix that.
Shield was probably alright as it was, but the current iteration of armour doesn’t really make up for the lack of it.
Did you ever played Payday 2, where powercreep made us go from guns with all the best attachments could maybe kill the toughest enemy in the game in half a mag, or about 15 shots, to the devs needing to implement 3 (technically 4) more difficulty levels with new enemies that were just old enemies with more resistances or 10 times the health as their stock launch counterparts, and those things dying in 2 hits from all the meta build weapons. All because they kept introducing more powerful weapons, more attachments that made launch guns more and more obsolete, and general more power creep through skill tree expansions and entirely new jobs for perks. The player counts for that game dove off a cliff after players realized each DLC was just pay 2 win garbage and even using stuff you could get only from the base game and free updates left every weapon feeling samey with the same tactics being used and things not in the meta utterly ignored by anyone playing end game content. Because instead of reigning in the things that overperformed and broke the balance curve, they just kept powercreeping new items into the game.
You’re missing the point. Player counts for that game dived because despite fairly regular new content and replay value, the meta and power creep pushed all players into using very similar functioning builds with everything that could be considered an alternate playstyle being so underperforming many people couldn’t even make them work in the 2-3 difficulty range. HD2 has much better variance in maps and enemies, so as long as devs keep the trickle of new content and powercreep under control this game easily has a 6-8 year shelf life. Community will trickle downwards like all games do as they age and new games pop up. But as long as the devs don’t fall into the trap of caving to vocal minority of players demanding any exploits they find stay in the game, we could easily have 100k-200k regular pops a year from now.
If there was a gun that 1 tapped every enemy in the game and had infinite ammo and maybe even auto aimed for you, that would suck a lot of the fun out of the game wouldn’t it?
Would you not want that gun to be nerfed or would you want every gun in the game to become a 1 tap super weapon?
that would suck a lot of the fun out of the game wouldn’t it?
Good thing you get to choose which gun you use. I personally would love that weapon. I’ve got two kids and a full time job. I need a nerf mode. The rest of y’all can use whatever other guns you like. But give me the BFG and let me have my fun.
So what. Let me be bad at video games and still enjoy it. Not everything needs to be a side hustle, maxed out, semi-pro, rise and grind. I just want to have a hobby, even if I’m shit at it forever, because it’s fun.
You should try it sometime. It’s a much less stressful and actually enjoyable way to live.
Yea, that’s why difficulty easier than “impossible” and “helldive” exist, so that you can enjoy the game on your time.
But when other players want their guns to be of roughly equal value, so that they don’t feel pressured to not take the meta, that’s not a bad thing imo
That’s what the difficulty mode selection is for. If you want an easy One-Shot experience just play on the easier modes. Overpowered over tuned weapons just create assholes in the higher difficulties kicking people out of games for not taking “the correct” load out.
Those of us with a little more time or a little more skill or a little more both enjoy the harder difficulties actually being… Difficult. Imagine that, the correct place to give people the ability to have a Nerf mode is in the difficulty slider which thankfully the developers have done!
Instead of complaining about weapon balance just turn down the difficulty and enjoy your easy experience
Nope, I want a balanced sandbox. If I went into a lobby and everyone was using the 1 tapper (because why wouldn’t they) Then the game would be way too easy and I would have to do closed lobbies and go out of my way to find people that want to run the game without the 1 tapper, just to have fun.
If you’re bad at games you can just play on easy mode.
No part of that guy’s comment is valid. He’s not even the barest bit subtle about how badly he is distorting the facts.
Nobody is talking about any of these things: a gun that 1 tapped every enemy, infinite ammo, auto aiming, wanting every gun to become a 1 tap super weapon. It’s not even part of the discussion. All of these are imaginary things this person made up. Somehow people are just looking at it and nodding instead of calling out the bullshit.
The guy I replied to said it’s always better to buff under performing weapons than nerf OP weapons. I employed a line of logic called a “logical extreme” where I devise an extreme scenario that both follows the original logic and is also an untenable position, thus showing that the original logic does not hold up and therefore shouldn’t intrinsically apply to the realistic scenario.
Because in both my extreme and the real scenario, you have a weapon that was so good it made most other weapons not worth using and made the game easier than intended. In that scenario you could either go and buff almost every other weapon in the game and then make sweeping enemy balance changers to make them harder in the face of all the buffs, or you can simply nerf the one OP weapon. And I think the more sensible option is clear.
The weapons in premium war bond aren’t really good. Also, if it’s a nudge at the premium part being a money grab… I’m lvl 17 and I have the premium unlocked without spend any real money.
I’ve been playing since launch. I played a lot last night. I do not see the problems. I play on hard difficulty. I have a good time whether winning or losing.
There are players that take the game far more seriously than I and honestly they make the game more tense than it needs to be. They make it feel competitive, in that if I’m not doing what they think a “good” player should then I’m unwelcome.
I think the vast majority of complaints stem from these players. I lament that another Call of Duty is not coming out sooner so that the community can diminish into relative obscurity, hopefully populated with like minds that view this as a game and not an e-Sport.
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