Yes! As a die hard Grim Dawn fan I can say Last Epoch is awesome. Grim Dawn is still better imho, but Last Epoch comes close. Both are excellent games one could easily put 100+ hours in and have a blast.
I just wish that I could start at a higher difficulty on Grim Dawn with the appropriate scaling. I don’t want to do the campaign 3 times just like old days.
Didn’t they just change the game with the last patch (still being updated, my God the devs are GOATed) so they you can play to 100 in any difficulty? I still imagine you get pasted in elite and ultimate if that’s your issue though.
Path of exile charges for inventory QoL and with the ludicrous amount of different stuff that drops, it’s arguably kind of mandatory if you’re trying to complete seasonal objectives
For PoE you consider 30gb installed (on PS5 mind you) a large file size? Yes it has mtx, but it is not once pushed or advertised to you, and none of it is required for anything. They does improve the QoL of the game however.
CoD + WZ is around 240gb I think. Most modern AAA games are usually 90gb minimum.
Some years ago they pretty much rewrote the entire base game code (or some parts of it) and tidied it up, reducing the overall size. It may be larger installed on PC (I’m on PS5) but I can’t imagine there being too much of a difference.
The MTX for PoE are within the “nice” ones. There’s extra stash tabs, but you don’t need to consider that until after the campaign. And then there’s cosmetics. No pay to win. And the MTX are on your account, so they will be on PoE2 as well.
I played a bit more Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice ahead of the sequel in a few months. There are a few major components to the game's core loop, and the one I'm not thrilled with is its hidden object puzzles, but the rest of it is working for me.
When I've got some podcasts to get through, Palworld has proven to be a great second screen game. There are some things I'd like to see them tweak about the progression, but they're very small complaints thus far. Ultimately, this game is working for me in a way that Pokemon hasn't in about 20 years.
I thought I would take a break from Pillars of Eternity after finishing the first game, because it did become quite exhausting late in the game, but after a discussion with some friends, I ended up excited to jump right into Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire, and so far, it's answering nearly all of my issues with the first game. For one, more quests can be resolved by being clever and avoiding combat, plus when the combat does happen, it's far more readable. As a blessing from the gods themselves, the quest log also lets you know if a quest is too high level for you, so you know which content is intended for your current level without checking it out early and dying to an enemy mob in a few seconds.
Ahead of Combo Breaker, I'm also back on the Skullgirls grind. My Black Dahlia mix and setplay are weak, and I'm giving my opponents too many opportunities to take their turn back, so I need to tighten that up.
I played through Hellblade recently and mostly loved it. I do however, agree that the quality of the hidden object puzzles vary a lot and there are a few too many of them. Sometimes it feels more like padding than enjoyable content.
I also wish the combat was slightly more demanding and involved. They have an amazing foundation with fantastic animations and a surprisingly robust combo system that just never actually demands you to explore its depths and nuances. The focus mechanic is also a little too powerful, which again doesn’t encourage you to utilise the combo system. More enemy/boss variety and more refined enemy movements would also be preferable, but they were working on a small budget so it’s understandable. It feels like they were so close to something amazing, and that makes me very hopeful for the sequel.
Yeah, I haven't seen any combo system. Following up a light with another hit is always that same jumping spin slash. If there's more depth there, the game didn't want to tell me about it. Likewise, when they had that developer direct, they said they were improving the combat system but with no description of how they were doing so; just a lot of fluff talk that was kind of about nothing. As for the puzzles, I like the ones that aren't just finding the symbols in the environment. Those puzzles can actually be reasoned out, as opposed to the symbols where plenty of things look like those shapes and they just picked one that they felt was the best fit for it, so I mostly just end up waiting for the game to inform me whether I'm hotter or colder as I get close to the magic spot.
This game also does something that I haven't seen many games do that always seemed like a natural evolution of story-driven games. The industry, operating at this level of production value, for the most part ended up going open world, even and especially for games that were better off being smaller and linear, and that's a real bummer. If you keep things small and linear, you can start loading the next scene while the current one is still playing, and then you can seamlessly cut to the next scene much like a movie would, but you get all the benefits of rendering the game in real time. This shouldn't be so rare, but the industry's obsession with being "bigger" made it rare.
Yeah the game never even hints at any combo system, though to be fair they never explain any mechanics (I guess in pursuit of immersion).
This video is not completely exhaustive, but goes through a fair amount of combos. In general, you can always interrupt a combo after the 1st, 2nd or 3rd attack with the melee button to punch/kick and follow up with a different two-attack combo. The finisher where Senua impales the enemy and pushes off with her foot can also be interrupted and extended by pressing light attack three times (which I don’t think the video covers).
I didn’t completely hate the find-the-symbol puzzles but they were definitely not particularly interesting. I think moments like the >!blind trial!< were where the game really shone. >!Navigating purely off of sound and controller vibration and avoiding the monsters in the dark!< is an experience that will stay with me for a while.
Completely agreed about the linear structure, I always thought it was the success of Witcher 3 that started an open-world craze, but regardless of where it came from it definitely ended up negatively impacting some games.
In general I think Ninja Theory did an amazing job at hiding the budget constraints. Another great example is the use of superimposed footage of live action instead of attempting to render characters and doing it poorly. The overall length of the game is also a part of this; they didn’t attempt to stretch too far and spread too thin but instead just made something brief but with the best quality they could. The game is short, but it didn’t feel too short. It felt perfectly measured for the story they were trying to tell.
@peternile@Metallinatus@lemmy.ml do you think it would be appropriate to link this somewhere? Thank you for doing the hard work of running this group in any case!
My last game was exhausting. Years of cryptic lore, mediocre tie-in properties we pretended were good, pvp you could opt out of midstream by switching off your router, a sandbox that one player characterized as "as wide as the universe and one inch deep."
So, I thought I'd try something completely different, and that different thing, god help me, is Evony.
Alan Wake 2 is an amazing game, I'm glad you're enjoying it. There's nothing that I've played from Remedy that hasn't been great.
I finally finished Vampyr, and I actually managed to get an ending that I hadn't before, so that was pretty nice.
Diablo 4: Season 3 - Nightmare dungeons/vaults for days. But I'm on the verge of getting sick of it, so I'm going to take a little step back and switch my focus back to D3 (which I've been neglecting) for a few days.
My next game outside of Diablo is going to be the Dead Space remake. I've put it off long enough, and I'm ready to visit the Ishimura again.
More RDR2 this week, still haven’t finished Chapter 2 as there is just an unbelievable amount of stuff to be distracted by. Apart from further fiddling with some mods I’ve just been enjoying my time hunting and fishing and completing challenges, events and side missions.
I might need to lay off the pursuit of the challenges as they seem extremely grindy and I don’t want to burn out before I finish the story, but so far it’s not started to wear me down and I’ve been enjoying just playing poker with the boys and whatnot.
I almost exclusively play for A20 heart kills. I play all 4 classes but in a “whichever I feel like today” way. I tried rotating between the characters for a while and really didn’t enjoy playing silent or watcher while in the wrong mood for those classes.
My favorite deck in recent memory was probably a silent discard combo with Grand Finale as the only damage-dealing card in the deck. My favorite archetype in general is probably ice defect. A good all-you-can-eat ironclad run is great too.
I don’t think I agree that STS is especially well balanced - some regular hallway combats do irrationally more damage on average even to players much better than me (for example, floor one jaw worms or any act 3 darklings). In general, the game could be quite a bit harder on A20 and still be fun for players who want a challenge. It’s also weird to me that A1 makes the game easier compared to A0. Between the classes, there is a class which is clearly stronger than the others. However I also don’t think this is a bad thing. Imbalances create more opportunities for new experiences, and for different kinds of players to have different kinds of fun. And that certainly agrees with “infinite replayability.” I’m sure in 5 years’ time I will still be seeing interactions I’ve never seen before.
I mostly play it as a kind of chill casual game. I like to do endless more on ascension 1 and slowly build up the most broken deck imaginable (there’s many options). I just stop when I get bored of it, I usually don’t die ever on endless if I made it past the initial run.
This week I have discovered the joys of Slime Rancher. There is something about an adorable slime with a face bouncing past me going “whee!” that makes life worth living. They’re just so happy. Except when they’re scared of something. I don’t like it when they’re scared, and this must be prevented at all costs.
I’m going to try to revive a dead post by commenting on my own experiences playing. Based on the upvotes, others seem interested too. Let’s see if it works
I had a good crew of friends while in grad school in the 00’s. This was a super smart crew of bio-nerds so when I heard about this game on Slashdot (or maybe Memepool, can’t be sure) I knew I had the right crowd to try it.
It was a successful session and we developed a lot of those inside jokes that tight social groups do.
I tried again years later with another set of friends and it fell flat. Not a disaster but it was quickly abandoned for lack of general interest. This was also a crowd of high-wattage personalities so i still wonder what the difference was.
That’s what prompted my question. Just seeking scene setting tips that might increase the chance the game goes well again.
Idk man, shooting teletubbies and shreks with funny guns as a vocaloid character while my headphones go “BOOM goes the dynamite!” every 5 seconds is still pretty fun.
Its really immersive/atmospheric and plays pretty good on PC. Not sure yet if i like it more than Deep Rock Galactic, but ill have to give it some more time. It has the same gameplay loop as DRG, but is more tactical. It’s either way a good coop game especially considering it just launched! Theres some startup issues with connections getting lost etc, but those will get resolved within a week i think. Theres some MTX in there which i don’t like but it’s easy to ignore without missing out on things. I wouldn’t let that deter you.
Bought it on greenmangaming for 33 EUR which is more reasonable than 40 EUR in my opinion
I mean, I really don’t care about raw numbers that much here, in terms of the core gameplay loop DRG is essentially flawless.
I think one of the things many players love about DRG is the graphical style. It certainly facilitates the destructible terrain which is an integral part of the gameplay.
Grim Dawn is goated. Not a big ARPG fan but this one just hits different for me. Simple enough for anyone to get into but can get complex enough that min-max theory crafters will have a blast messing with the games systems.
The base game can be done in like 5-8 hours on a leisurely pace, the current speedrun WR is 57minutes but there are only 6 runners who’ve submitted to it so feasibly you could get a lot better times than that.
I’ve actually got a video on YT where I perform the “I Was Not Expecting You, Human” achievement to Slay Warden Krieg, who is the game’s midboss, in Veteran Mode with a character under level 11, and it was an hour and thirteen minutes from character creation to finish. The last 10 minutes are just the Krieg fight itself. This could be done much faster without the level requirement, though, because you could get more damage and better items.
The major problem with it is the enemy scaling. Every area has a minimum level and a maximum level, and as the character levels up so do the enemies. That means if you keep leveling in an area until you dwarf the enemies, it just keeps making it harder in the next area, so you’re incentivized to stay at the minimum level for that area and ignore the vast majority of enemies. Even farming for good loot comes at the added cost of making the mobs harder. I used to use a site that shows the level range for areas but I can’t find it anymore, sadly.
Mi też, ale już tak wiele razy się zdziwiłem (np. W Polsce biedniejsi płaca niższe podatki niż bogaci), ze teraz mnie dziwi chyba już tylko to, ze mnie nic nie dziwi.
Chwilę później Mazurek mówi: „… Warszawa płaci 1,4mld Janosikowego, ale jednocześnie co roku dostaje pieniądze i na przykład w roku 2024 ma dostać 5mld., co oznacza, że mniej więcej jakieś 3,5, nawet ponad, miliarda złotych, dostaje netto, to po grzyba płacić, żeby zaraz potem te pieniądze wracały, bo… No nie prościej byłoby zostawić janosikowe w Warszawie?”.
W sumie to brzmi trochę jak (celowa bądź nie, ale zakładam, ze jak najbardziej możliwe, ze tak) manipulacja - i to udana. Bo trochę zabrzmiało, jakby janosikowe nie miało sensu - czyli takie dość typowe libkowe podważanie sensu płacenia podatków do wspólnej puli przez najbogatszych. Szkoda, ze rozmówca nie powiedział wprost czegoś w stylu „Myli pan pojęcia i proszę nie wprowadzać słuchaczowi w błąd. Warszawa płaci 1,5 mld janosikowego, a dostaje…” .
A skąd później Warszawa dostaje, co miał na myśli ten fan Balcerowicza (czyt. Mazurek)? Czy chodzi po prostu o pieniądze z budżetu państwa? Jeśli tak, to faktycznie to brzmi, jakby za bardzo nie miało sensu.
Możliwe, że dostaje proporcjonalnie dotacje tak jak wszystkie miasta, a janosikowe jest mechnizmem, który to wyrównuje i jakoś robić to trzeba. Ale nie mam teraz sił ustalać co autor miał na myśli, szczególnie, że pewnie faktycznie nic mądrego.
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