Curious to hear what your thoughts are of the “punishing death penalty”. For Demon’s Souls, sure, if you’re not great at the game it can be rather intimidating. Dark Souls has an equivalent system to Elden Ring where you can become human to enable multi-player, where dying just means you can’t co-op (or even be invaded). For all the others, it’s just a bit of health that you lose if at all(you can avoid it with items for tough spots).
But if it’s souls being on the ground that’s the issue, that’s also in Elden Ring so I’m confused.
I consider losing all the money and XP you’ve accumulated since the last save to be extremely punishing. Maybe it’s just me, but I can’t begin to express how much I hate losing progress. Everything I just did for the last X minutes since the last save was completely undone. Nothing to show for it, no XP, no money, no progress toward my next goal. Just a complete fucking waste of time and X minutes of stress I’ll have to repeat. It’s like I lost power and corrupted my save file. It’s the worst feeling in gaming for me.
Yes, I realize you can get that XP/money back but it adds a level of stress that makes my stomach roil even thinking about it right now. No amount of suggestions on how to think of it differently has changed my perception of it significantly. I dealt with it in Elden Ring for a while but it’s probably the main reason I stopped playing that game.
Playing a game with similar mechanics but without the death penalty makes me realize how much more fun Elden Ring would have been without it. IMHO of course. YMMV
Your mistake is thinking dying is failure in those games when it’s literally just learning. It’s why Dark Souls is called “Prepare to Die”, it’sjust part of the game and it’s why there are checkpoints every 15m. When you die to some enemy hiding in a corner, you then know exactly where that enemy is next time.
It’s hard for me to grasp how new players approach the game at this point because it’s just ingrained, but it seems like you had the wrong idea about the mechanics and kinda entrenched yourself in that belief. Hope you come around.
Well I just picked up Last Epoch last night / Monday! It’s an Action RPG so follows the same format as PoE / Diablo. Haven’t been super impressed with the post-campaign experience of D4, and immediately after jumping into Last Epoch I already feel like it has exactly what I was looking for from D4 in terms of power fantasy and buildcrafting potential.
Its still Early Access which I generally don’t pickup, but someone here on Lemmy recommended it and I have to say, so far I regret nothing!
First, you won’t spend that money, you can spend that on other things instead.
Second, you can spend the money you have saved this way on products of better companies. For games this may be good indie developers and smaller studios (is that a thing?), but generally for software there is usually a wider range of options, and I mean even actual alternatives.
You could argue that me not paying for youtube premium won’t change a thing. That may sound true, but it isn’t necessarily: if you instead support your creators trough Liberapay or Patreon, then not only Google will get less, but the crearor and toss other platform will get more money, so they can improve their services and keep the lights up. Or like choosing to pay for Cryptpad instead of Google Drive will again besides having Google and their investors getting less, Cryptpad devs (who are very resource constrained, just as mostly any users-first software project because of not being known) will get more.
EA's portfolio has been so thoroughly undiversified that they're looking for a buyer, just like Square Enix, Zenimax, and Activision have been. In that time that EA became enormous, smaller publishers like Embracer, Paradox, Anna Purna, and Devolver have grown as they reached that neglected customer base that EA left behind. Larian has grown by making really good games in a style neglected by EA. EA owns BioWare and got further and further away from making the Baldur's Gate 3 that Larian just made. So yes, it makes a difference.
I really admire your response here as you put my thoughts and feeling about this more eloquently than I could. I really want to incentivize the good work people are doing, and while my dollar going somewhere else might not mean much to EA or Blizzard, it means a lot more to smaller groups who are trying to do the right thing with less resources. It also just feels nice to spend money on something good :)
I can understand your frustration. Right now it feels that we small people can’t do anything to do good in the world. There are greedy capitalist everywhere. It is nearly impossible to understand what damage ones desicion could make. If our desicions even could make a difference.
But the thing is, you can’t overlook everything. It’s a gouverments job to keep an eye over Corporations.
But that doesn’t mean, that you can’t do anything. You can search for Informations and make yourself aware of those topics. You can support workers and strikes. You could limit yourself on what stuff you are comsuming.
You don’t have to boycott every major company and every Product. You just could make a list about everything you really need and what you are really looking forward to. So you can balance your need for morality and fun.
I really appreciate this response. It balances the want to do good and make ethical choices with the reality that I can’t do everything perfectly. It’s important to do the best we can and also leave room to enjoy ourselves :)
I was playing red dead 2 a few weeks ago and picked it up with my steam deck. Now I’m playing uncharted 4 and realizing how rockstar and naughtydog built very similar games between the two. Rockstar is far more slow and frankly full of themselves. Not respecting the players time. Meandering through the story with no real semblance of player respect. I put 26 hours into red dead 2 and I feel like I’ve literally done nothing and feel very under accomplished. I’ve put 8 hours into uncharted 4 and feel extremely accomplished and invested in the characters.
Even though I’m pissed at Nathan. He’s such an idiot, I hate him and can’t wait to play him more. Author Morgan is just a bland cowboy that tries so much to just get by. Red dead 2 introduced more main characters than uncharted 4 has in side and main characters. Yet in red dead 2 they’ve developed none of them part the point of the basics. I’m uncharted they’ve developed all of their characters. Even the side ones that barely show up.
Likewise in red dead 2, they kill one character I only liked because their accent allowed me to actually tell them apart from the rest of them. The other character the big baddies kidnapped and I’ve played like 2 hours waiting to go get him back. It’s like wtf, let me go rescue the damn character already. Yet the game keeps saying we’ll do it as far as possible. We gotta track down all this shit. It’s clearly like this filler content because during it another random main character gets kidnapped, they find her right away and it’s rescued in one mission. Like what universe is this?
In conclusion, red dead 2 is trying hard to do what uncharted 4 did extremely well. The open world system does not help it one bit and it’s turned me off of open world games altogether for a while.
Hmm I had the opposite feeling about Red Dead Redemption 2. I felt the slower pace was nice, and respected the player by not having a false urgency for most of it like so many other games do. I really enjoy slow burn movies and novels though, and I can understand they aren’t for everyone.
Love the Uncharted series. Naughty Dog makes some good shit. I also loved both Last of Us games, but they might be more on the slow side again.
I don’t feel like Uncharted ever had a false sense of urgency. A lot of the time I would go at my own pace. Where Rockstar specifically slows you down and prevents you from going as fast as you’d like. Uncharted does this but far less often and it is far less noticeable because Uncharted doesn’t have a sprint button. So I am not explicitly telling the game my intent and having the game directly ignore it. The game is giving me feedback directly of “this is the pace we are going”. Rather than “this is the pace I want to go.” and the game telling me “no.”
Sorry I didn’t mean that Uncharted has a false sense of urgency, those games are perfectly paced. I meant other open world games sometimes do. Oblivion and Skyrim are good examples, where the main quest seems to want you to rush through it since it sounds so urgent, but there is no need to.
I’m excited for starfield so I started playing through Fallout 76 to scratch the bethesda itch which led to me starting fallout 4 again, which led to me staring new vegas again too, and then committed to finally 100% achievements for Fallout 3 after all these years.
You should check out fallout 1 and 2 while you’re on a fallout kick, I played them for the first time after playing the Bethesda games and they have become my favourites in the series
I’ve tried but the turn based combat is so hard for me to get used to and enjoy. If I could just skip combat encounters to get all the story I totally would
I initially started Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered a few days ago, but I wasn’t really in the mood for that game, so I ended up going back to The Witcher 3 to start (and hopefully finish) both DLCs (I’m part way through Heart of Stone atm and have yet to start Blood and Wine).
As for feedback, although weekly might perhaps be too often, maybe a “Show us your collection / show us your setup” kind of thread? This could generate some engagement and lead to interesting discussions imo.
Omg thank you for answering the second part of the question 😆. I think I’ll make another post highlighting this question as it clearly wasn’t looked at super closely, but your suggestion is great! I’ll add it to my list :)
Currently playing Nier: Automata. It’s incredibly hard to talk to people about this game without spoilers. It’s all about the story, but the gameplay is pretty good too.
IKR! You do want to recommend the game and talk about it, but you can’t really do so without spoiling it for other people… SkillUp’s review was pretty good in that regard IMO.
I wish that was true, there are so many games I would go back and play again. PS3 was a technical marvel for it’s time, however using it was so complicated that we only got to see it’s true potential by the end of it’s lifecycle with games like TLOU. So just speaking of raw power, PS5 could %100 not emulate PS3 games flawlessly as we barely have PS3 emulation on PCs. Technical part aside, it just doesn’t make business sense for Sony to invest in it. You also have to keep in mind if Sony offers PS3 emulation, it can’t stutter or crash on some games. it needs to be a commercial grade product which is not even guaranteed with PS2 or NES emulation on PC
I’ve played lot of games on the PC without issue like lollipop chainsaw, asura’s wrath, drakengard 3, and shadows of the damned without issue at 4k/60. Was really surprising to me, but rpcs3 has made great strides and if a game has been marked playable it’s been a fantastic experience. And that’s with someone unaffiliated with Sony making it possible. Seeing what Xbox accomplished with Xbox One when it came to 360 compatability it wouldn’t surprise me if Sony did better than what RPCS3 did.
There’s some notable attention given the games that don’t emulate well like MGS4 and red dead with it coming across as buggy, but lot of other titles do run really well as if they were official remastered ports.
I presume the Linux version is the same (I used the Windows version) but WiiUDownloader gives you a lovely graphical interface to download anything from the WiiU eShop servers. Even copies files straight to an SD card ready to install on your WiiU.
Minecraft (as usual), just finished Wolfenstein New Orden again. Just started Breath of Fire (GBA version). Nonogram (picross, android). Maybe I’ll get back to ToTK (what a drag, that game is huge). Not touching my huge backlog yet.
Yes, I’m a parent and patient gamer, how did you know?
For example, would you take a shortcut and make items appear because you’re fishing them in the pond (which makes pond a source of “outworldly” items), or rather come up with something more creative? The logistics of it can tell the story better than 1000 words on a wall made to push the narrative. Of course, at the same time, you don’t want to make this a main focus to the player, unless it’s an objective.
The hardware architecture on the PS2 and PS3 was so radically different, it effectively makes emulation impossible.
The change made in the PS4 and PS5 makes the transfer of those games relatively trivial, but attempting the replicate the now abandoned Core processor of the PS3 is the hold up there, as is the PS2 Emotion Engine.
The reason the PS3 was so expensive was including PS2 hardware to handle the backwards compatibility. They weren’t going to repeat that mistake with the 4 and 5.
Meanwhile, on the Xbox side, Microsoft never had that problem.
Software emulation is very much possible. There is software for x86 and even ARM processors that emulate PS1, PS2(doesn’t work great on ARM I many cases) and PS3 (x86 only currently)which work well enough. If Sony cared to they could develop their own software emulation layer to run on PS5 to run just about everything from the previous generation.
Also Microsoft had similar issues in hardware emulation because, while the original Xbox and the Xbox one were on x86, the 360 was a Power PC architecture similar in some ways to the PS3 which ran Power PC with other proprietary coprocessors. They had to develop a Power PC emulator in software to run 360 games on the Xbox one.
A first party solution can’t work “well enough”, it just has to work.
PS1 emulation at this point should be trivial, 2 and 3 is not. The first time someone puts a disc in and it doesn’t work would be worse for them than not having it at all.
I think the thing holding back PS1 emulation is that once they open that door, everyone will go “What about 2 and 3?”
PS1 emulation is a breeze, but with current hardware in the PS5, I think a PS2 emulator on the platform wouldn’t be too insane. But yeah, PS3 emulation? Not happening.
I think you’re wrong on the disc not working thing though. The original Xbox was only half supported for a long time.
I think the problem with emulating a PS1 is “don’t meet (play) your heroes”.
Most of us played PS1 on dinky little CRT screens before we got used to the graphical fidelity we have these days.
Playing PS1 games on your 65" OLED will probably hurt your eyes.
It’s one of those things that you want to do because of nostalgia, but isn’t really great when it comes to it.
Besides, at the end of the day Sony is selling every PS5 they make, just like they did with the PS4 and PS3.
Adding backwards compatibility doesn’t make any financial sense as long as it’s not a killer feature that shifts sales towards Microsoft then Sony has little insensitive to do it.
They much prefer you buy those new AAA titles or subscribe to PS+.
Playing PS1 games on your 65" OLED will probably hurt your eyes. It’s one of those things that you want to do because of nostalgia, but isn’t really great when it comes to it.
That really depends on the game and upscaling methods used. Duckstation for instance does a pretty amazing job of making most of those old games look good. Check out this video of Crash Bandicoot running at 4K for instance.
I actually go the opposite direction and add CRT/scanline filters, especially since a lot of sprite work back in the day was built to be viewed that way. Those games look much better on CRTs with scanlines than they do in crystal clear integer upscaling.
Honestly, I remember playing full 3D titles on friends’ PS1s back in the day and thinking they’d given me eye cancer, even with the fuzz of an old CRT TV working in their favor. I don’t think I would want to play them now without a boatload of emulator graphic enhancements to deal with all the wonky 3D projection and unfiltered low-res texture mess of OG PlayStation games.
Didn’t stop them putting out a HDMI Mini PSX. You get around that by cleaver pixel replication and filtering upressing, etc. The PS3 PS1 emulator actually had options for this.
I’m 22. I grew up playing my PS1 on with an upscaler on the 55 inch Vizio in the front room. I like the PS1 art style quite a bit and think that a good upscale and maybe a filter is all you need to make things look how I want.
Idk, I think it would make a difference in the Microsoft v Sony sales. Nintendo doing the N64 and NES eShop have been massively successful. Xbox doesn’t really have any killer apps, they’ve really just had Sony beaten on software features the past two generations. Sony implementing the software features that Nintendo and Microsoft offer would make a decent difference.
Plus, imagine how well a “play your childhood discs on your xplaytendo switchtion” would work in an ad campaign. Getting people to pull out their childhood game collection would make for a great viral campaign for gamers as well.
Idk, the thing about the internet that I don’t think older people have realized is that it creates an even larger freeze in culture than ever before. If you started gaming in the 90s, you likely heard about older games via word of mouth and got your games at a physical store. There were no minor celebrities that would turn a cult classic into an actual classic. Nowadays? Old media is fully capable of wiping out new media in the right circumstances. Songs like “Dreams” by Fleetwood Mac and some Pink Floyd (if I remember correctly) have taken #1 Billboard spots in the past 2-3 years. LSD Dream Emulator went from a game nobody played to a PlayStation classic because of some YouTube videos. We’re in an age where there is an extremely high demand for old media and no way to access most of it without piracy. There is a TON of money to be made by charging money for emulation and moving things to new consoles.
Mark my words, Skyrim will come out on the next generation Xbox, because Bethesda understands that accessibility is good enough to charge for.
I’m 36, not feeling the nostalgia, but then again I was always a PC gamer and never really had to struggle with the lack of support for old games.
I’ve played old games on newer hardware all the time over the years.
The most common realization is that the games were simpler and looked worse than you remembered.
Games also hold up better on PC, PS1 graphics was severely limited, and PS2 was a bit better, sure, but PC graphics were ahead of consoles.
PS3 and Xbox360 finally got to a level where the PC vs. console graphics playing-field seemed more even, and since then console graphics have been properly good in terms of value for money.
I paid more for my 3070Ti than my Series X, but I can’t really tell the difference without spending a lot of time optimizing the settings (or maybe I just need to break out other titles?).
The huge difference is that I can play any of the games I’ve bought over the years, plus most of the ones I acquired in my teenage years - if I wanted to.
Yet - what do I play? Surprise surprise - it’s not the games of yesteryear.
Obviously I’m just one data point, but considering how many gamers I surround myself with and I can’t recall when any of them wanted to play games from the 90’s that weren’t readily available console classics from Nintendo or Sega I’m not convinced it would make a huge difference if the classic games were available.
Maybe they’d sell more consoles, but people just don’t want to pay AAA money for 25-30 year old games. And it’s the games that make them money, not the consoles.
Skyrim is a game that probably deserves to be mentioned along Pink Floyd and Fleetwood Mac.
But in general comparing games and music is not that simple. Music production and recording has had high fidelity for ages. But pick up a worn cassette and put in an old tape deck and you might feel a bit what playing those old games feel like.
Only if you dramatically lower your standards for what backwards compatibility means. PS3 emulators might be progressing, but they're far from the native hardware in actual functionality, especially with games that actually used the features of the hardware that made the PS3 a powerhouse.
Emulators can wave that away as "it is what it is". Sony advertising backwards compatibility couldn't.
We’re almost at that point. PS3 emulation on the Steam Deck is ALMOST there. Another generation of hardware improvements should push us over the edge. Then it would be up to Sony to decide “hey, we want to make money on the titles we can license and put back in an online store…”
PS2 games work almost flawlessly on my steam deck under emulation and the PS5 is more powerful than that, and Sony have access to the OG system engineers, software and hardware to work from, note they already had PS2 games working on the PS4. The PS3 is the tricky but people do have it working on PC so no reason Sony couldn’t. There’s no excuse not to have PS1, PSP or PSVita emulation games as they’re all easy
Really none. The game walks you through rolls and what each thing does.
Having a little knowledge of how D&D works only serves to make the leveling up process go quicker since you have ideas on how to allocate stats or what specialties you take without reading through everything.
Yeah I think OP is looking at this from the wrong way. As opposed to a normal game you’ve never played before in which you have to learn the mechanics completely from scratch, with BG3, if you have any knowledge of 5e, you’ll be able to pick it up easier.
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