Honestly, I’m more into the progression planning than the fighting itself. I would not like a game where I have to put too much effort in the fight part of the game. Even soulslike games have ways to cheese them and any proper diablolike arpg should have ways to destroy enemies with little thought on the combat.
It IS gory stardew valley, I see no problem in that though? The only reason I don’t play stardew is that the feel of the game is too slow, not because I dislike the gameplay loop.
I’m all for the cultivation part, but not when games make it so planning it wrong means starting over and grinding a hundred hours more. To keep the analogy, if your farm is not going too well you can just change things after the next harvest. Experimentation is something that helps these games stay fresh.
It’s not a hundred hours, I play multiple character for less than 20 hours epr season of PoE.
Sure, if you lack the knowledge it sucks, but that why there’s so much content on guides.
I enjoy having to investigate the best ways to plan and having tools to emulate planning scenarios to be able to take informed decisions in game. It’s cool if you don’t enjoy that but then this genre is not for you.
I’m guessing you are referring to the passive respects of PoE. Honestly, I pseudo respec and tweak my tree a lot per character and spend a lot of currency for it. But it’s fine, I’ll just farm more currency. Having to start over happens only when I decide that it’s best to do whatever with a different class, that’s the only truly non respeccable part, but that’s really basic, right? Having an inefficient tree is not that big of a deal honestly, it’s usually more about gear and other big decisions that break characters.
And that’s entirely valid; like I say, stardew gameplay is immensely satisfying in and of itself.
I just feel like all these other mechanisms in arpgs are thrown on top to try and disguise the nature of the thing, and it’s that disparity that leaves people jaded.
Stardew doesn’t have an endless progression of increasingly fell and eldritch vegetables that need you to constantly grind for upgrades just to tend to them. You water things in one click all the way through, and that feels good; you don’t need to chase a sawtooth pseudo-progression in order to be satisfied.
Stardew doesn’t make you do NP-complete multi-knapsack-problems in order to even have a viable character, or drown you in overly complex interactions so you can’t usefully plan in your head; there’s complexity there, but of the kind that opens up more options.
It manages to be fun without those things, but ARPGs seem to overwhelmingly rely on them in order to be engaging at all.
Why is that?
Why does gory-stardew need all those external obfuscations, when the normal kind doesn’t?
How could you make a gory-stardew that’s comfortable in its own skin?
You call them obfuscations, I call them fun. Having different ways to scale my killing machine is fun. having to design different and new ways to becoming a mowing machine is fun. I’m with you with the “endless progression” thing, that’s what I prefer from D2 and PoE, once you reach the top tier content there’s no infinite content.
Stardew doesn’t make you do NP-complete multi-knapsack-problems in order to even have a viable character
Oh come on, you don’t really need to optimize that much to have a viable character!
drown you in overly complex interactions so you can’t usefully plan in your head
You don’t plan for all, you just pick the ones that are useful. I enjoy using out of game tools to optimize my in game characters.
It manages to be fun without those things, but ARPGs seem to overwhelmingly rely on them in order to be engaging at all.
It’s a different kind of fun. Stardew is fun not really because of the farming gameplay loop, but the farming gameplay loop within a town with character interactions and tbh, I haven’t really finished all the content it offers because its simplicity bores me.
What you need to ask yourself is not how to remove those obfuscations, but what each game offers to the player. I assure you that neither SV, PoE, LE, GrimDawn, even D2 are designed to offer you the simple gameplay loop of “mowing the field of vegetables and monsters and getting the produce aka loot”. Stardew offers a chill experience with a simple gameplay loop so you don’t feel pressured into being good at it, alongside with a story around the townspeople and the farmer. D-clones offer a multi layered toolset with complex interactions to prepare better for the mowing, a big big part of the fun is in the preparation, for a lot of people the “mowing” process is more there to test the machine than to enjoy the game.
I honestly think that if you don’t like the layered design space that most ARPGs offer, it’s not your genre.
Obviously ideas of fun vary; people are allowed to enjoy things I don’t like :)
Also I’m not rampantly disagreeing with you here, just picking at the edges for discussion because it still doesn’t sit quite right in my head.
It’s just… sometimes I feel like the implementation of complexity in these things is just kind of lazy, comparable to adding difficulty by making enemy bullet-sponges. It’s certainly more work to defeat them, but is that work rewarding?
Consider the annoyance that triggered this whole post.
In grim dawn, mid way through elite. I had some gloves with fairly miserable specs for my level, but they were providing most of my vitality res. Can I change them out?
Well there’s some with better overall specs but no vitality but they do have a lot of fire res, so I could swap those in, then the ring I was getting lots of fire res from could go, and there’s one with some vitality but unfortunately no poison, so let’s see, I do have a helmet that …
spongebob_three_hours_later.jpg
… but now my vitality is three points too low to equip the pants, oh fuck off. How is this fun?
Finding a reasonable solution doesn’t make you feel clever, and making an awkward compromise doesn’t feel like a justifiable sacrifice, it feels like you finally got too exhausted to search through more combinations and gave up. You can’t really look forward to getting better gear to fill a gap, because you’re going to have to go round and round in circles again trying to build a whole new set around the deficiencies that come with it.
It’s like debating against a Gish Gallop - taxing to keep up with but without any real sense of achievement.
And honestly it doesn’t feel like that’s really intended to be the real gameplay. If the genre is really a build-planning-combinatorics game with a bit of monster-bashing on the side, where’s the quality-of-life UX to go with it? Where’s management tools to bring the actual problem-domain to the fore? Where’s the sort-rank-and-filter, where’s the multi-axis comparisons? Where’s the saved equipment sets? Why is the whole game environment and all the interface based around the monster-bashing, if that’s just the testing phase? And if navigating hostile UX is part of the the challenge, then again I say that challenge is bad game design.
And all the layered mechanics across the genre feel like that: bolted on and just kind of half-assed, keeping the problem-domain too hard to work on because of externalities rather than the innate qualities of the problem itself. I know, let’s make the fonts really squirly and flickery so you can only peer at the stats for five minutes before you get a headache, that’ll give people a challenging time constraint to work with.
Did you ever play mass-effect: Andromeda, with the shitty sudoku minigame bolted on to the area unlocks? You know how that just… didn’t make the game fun?
That.
Also it seems to me that if the prep-work was really the majority drawcard, we’d be seeing a lot more football-manager-like tweak-and-simulate loops, if that’s what they were going for. Build your character, let it bot through the map (or just do an action montage), then come back with a bunch of loot and XP to play with before sending it out again.
I think an ideal game would hit all three kinds of satisfaction: tactics/graaagh, exploration/harvesting and mastery/optimisation. And ideally, each of those three targets would be free of external complications and left to focus on their own innate challenge and rewards.
I know that’s easy to say and hard to do… I’m just surprised that we haven’t got signficantly better at it in the last couple of decades.
Regarding your grim dawn complaint, did you not have enough level for augments? Augments and the crafted thingies you put on itels are what usually caps you until you reach suepr endgame in grim dawn. You don’t really need to be 100% capped anyway, I usually pick strong gear and augment/enchant it with resistances where I can to cap myself. The typical constellation paths also have resistances.
Dunno, I usually decide to lose that resistance and risk taking the damage and something else drops, it’s grim dawn, where most mobs die in 2 seconds and you can recover damage very fast.
I think you should try “The slormancer”. It got the gear quality of life stuff solved. You can go pretty much any spec of whatever you want and make it work. Just have to work a bit to get there :)
You described the garlic-like genre. Which has gotten VERY big. “we’d be seeing a lot more football-manager-like tweak-and-simulate loops, if that’s what they were going for.” They are MAKING THEM it’s VAMPIRE SURVIVORS lmao
Most of your complaints about obfuscation make me think you haven’t played Last Epoch and don’t know there is a solution: simply put the information someone would alt+tab or otherwise leave the game to find it IN THE GAME! LE has a robust in-game guide with info on everything from weird status effects down to how elemental resists work against elemental penetration and reduction.
A large portion of the issue is the ever eternal Minecraft Problem imo, it seems like you (and many people in general) have trouble setting your own goals when it comes to why you’re making the character more powerful. ARPG have different approaches to this: diablo 3 hasn’t got much stuff to “distract” you from pushing greater rift levels, while Path of Exile gives you a 12 boss checklist in different dimensions and you need to finish a LOAD of content, then fight 4 of them to fight the bigger bosses after them (and content beyond even that). Without knowing which bosses or how to find them, some players get lost.
TL;DR the genre is evolving as people ask these kinds of questions and you’re slightly behind the forefront of questioning here. Not a knock, just worth mentioning that what you’re looking for (an ARPG with sparkling information clarity) already exists, and the thing you’re thinking might exist in the future (streamlined ARPG with less mechanical intensity) also already exists.
That’s the big reason why I loved Diablo II, but was lukewarm on the following two. The skill tree was fixed and a had nice synergies between the skills. I used to keep a notebook with plans for different builds that seemed fun and was primarily interested in the skills rather than items.
In Diablo III, the skill tree was much more limited, and you could swap things out at any time. So planning out a build and starting a new character was pointless. You could just swap the active skills.
It also didn’t seem to have any hard spots. If you followed the main quests, your character improved just fast enough to keep the challenge throughout consistent. So I never really felt a need to grind. I mean, I hate games that are all grinding, but I also like it when there are walls that you have to spend some time and effort to move past.
Diablo IV was even worse for this as the areas adapt to your level. So no matter where you were, the challenge was the same.
Neither of the two were awful, in my opinion, but they dropped the parts that made Diablo so exceptional to me. So I really didn’t spend too much time with either of them whereas I played Diablo II for about 10 years.
I think that, if you have the resources to support that niche, which the savings from cheap offers hopefully allowed for, and you want to see it grow, it’s worth paying more.
Buying isn’t supporting. Capitalism is not a social support network.
Companies have spent millions and taken years to convince people that going shopping is a kind of activism.
If I suggested you donate money directly to a video game company, or volunteer your time to help them you’d see right away how fucking weird that whole concept is.
Still better than Horse Armor. So no, not Bethesda’s worst DLC.
The difference is that Oblivion wasn’t bad at all. It was terrific. Starfield was trash from the beginning, then delivers a trash DLC. That’s much worse. No improvement.
In general, it isn’t about waiting for prices to drop, though that’s definitely a part. It’s more about avoiding early adoption, imo. Waiting until there’s some degree of information about the game that isn’t marketing, then deciding.
The goal is to make sure the game is stable, that it’s something you actually want to play, and avoiding hype based playing. If the price drops, or there’s a sale, that’s icing on the cake.
In the case of visual novels, I don’t really think it applies. The only thing you’ll really avoid by waiting is any bugs that need fixing, and they aren’t prone to a lot of bugs that break the enjoyment of the story. It does happen, but it isn’t like the usual mobile game bugfest at launches.
I agree, this is why I consider myself a ‘patient gamer’… I don’t want to reward releasing half-done games, or trickling out DLC that should have been included in the original release.
I had to re-evaluate my stance on this when Baldur’s Gate 3 was released because I really wanted to play it, but was going to wait until it went on sale. Then the reviews starting coming in saying that it was a full game, no major issues, and no planned DLC. I immediately purchased it because **THAT **is the behavior I want to reward, and I’m very glad that I did.
Patient gaming is a budgeting technique, not a strict law you must always adhere to.
I separate upcoming releases into two categories: games I'm so excited for that I would gladly pay full price at launch, and games I'm willing to wait on. Which games go in which category depend entirely on you and your budget.
I’ve come to the point where at least some people come to me for advice on buying electronics.
Girl friend asked me for a TV to connect with her PlayStation, not that expensive, 4K/60 and low input delay for casual gaming, and it should last for at least 10 years and should be cheap. Long story short, I got her a 4K/60fps TV with a gaming mode that has like 2~3ms delay for € 550. It‘s a dumb Philips TV running Linux, so no google play and you can remove all spyware. It has apps, but she got the PS to do all of this anyway.
Huh, that’s interesting. I would have thought that a TV running Linux would be called ‘smart’.
I’m with you though, it’s better to be more ‘modular’ and have your playback device- be it PlayStation, media server, heck even television receiver, seperate from the display itself.
Yeah i think that tv is still a smart tv just not an android based smart tv (or it might still be Android since that is also very Linux like, especially when you remove Google services)
The question can be asked for most things in life really so just do both options. Generally I’m a “value for money” gamer now but If something catches my eye I will make an effort to support it.
I’m not sure what you mean by “low effort”? OSRS is an incredibly good game and keeps getting new content all the time. I’m happy to pay 15$ a month since we get a free update every wednesday. Sometimes it’s just some hotfix , other times it’s a whole new boss or continent. We had an new part of the map just last week.
Yes there is bot, but I never felt like it impacted my gameplay other than lowering the price of some items. The team is also doing a lot to ban them, it’s getting much better.
The community is booming. If you look around on YouTube, there’s a lot of content creators doing awesome thing on OSRS: custom game mode, weird twist on existing challenges, documentary, etc.
Honestly, I think we are currently in the golden age of Old school RuneScape, and if you feel like the game is bad or low effort, it might not be for you, which is fine, but the game itself is not the issue.
I hope you find some other game to give you what you had with RuneScape back in the days !
For the last bit hoping they’ll find something like what RS used to be, they won’t. That type of game can’t really exist anymore. (It obviously could make money, looking at OSRS’s player base, but it would never get the funding it needs.) The best options are OSRS (or RS3, which has pros and cons with OSRS and doesn’t deserve all the hate), potentially https://www.polygon.com/24099403/runescape-andrew-gower-brighter-shores-new-mmo in the future (developed by one of the brothers who created RS), or playing a modern MMO.
I think for a visual novel, you’re probably better off buying it near release for full price. Maybe even get the more expensive version that comes with the soundtrack if you like the game.
For other types of games, especially more mass market games, they’re more complex and prone to bugs. Visual novels, not so much. So being patient in this particular case would certainly hurt the small creator making the game more than it will hurt your bank account. Visual novels aren’t usually $60.
Just to say that the question might not only concern niche games. Any game that you do not buy shortly after its release might have a negative impact on the franchise (because most sales happen in a few weeks, with rare exceptions of course).
Great point. Completely agree this applies to any niche games or even any niche market as a whole.
My personal connection and the reason I posed this is me considering whether or not to pay full price for the fate/stay remaster as well as the tsukihime release.
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Aktywne