I finished Splatoon 3’s single player adventure and likely taking a break from it for a while. I found it far better than Splatoon 2 which I still haven’t finished. Haven’t tried the DLC yet.
If I could choose not to start WoW again, I would avoid it like a plague.
I wouldn’t call it adiction per-se, but my problem with WoW is that even though I hate what Blizzard is doing, the extreme loss of quality both in game (recent example - they released a patch where one of the main feature are class campaigns, and 8/12 questlines didn’t work and had major 100% repro blockers, like requiring items that do not exist) and in Customer Support, and how it’s more and more obvious that they just want to milk the playerbase of their money without any kind of effort, I still keep playing. It’s not love-hate relationship, I actively dislike Blizzard.
But, it’s one of the only games my partner is playing and that we can play together, and I also have a lot of friends in the guild I’ve been playing for the past two years with. I mostly just log in for a dungeon or two with her, or a regular raid night with my guild, which I enjoy.
If I stopped playing, I’d give up a lot of friends and also an activity with my partner that we’re mostly used to. She doesn’t really play other games. So far, it’s still worth it, but I’m really conflicted every time I have to give Blizzard more money, since I’m basically held hostage.
I highly recommend looking for a free server, i.e Turtle WoW (assuming it won’t get shut down, they are getting sued IIRC), because those people are actually making an effort to make a game they love better. Blizzard is just exploiting people like me, and their nostalgia, without any regard for the game. It’s a shame Morhaim lost the battle against capitalism and was driven out, and it’s extremely aparent on the quality of the game and direction Blizzard is going.
Just to be clear - the game in itself is pretty all right and fun to play, what I have issue with is the way how extremely obvious is that Blizzard does not give a fuck, produces low-quality slop without any semblance of QA, and just plain exploits the playerbase. It could’ve been so much better with the resources they have, but they chose not to, and just cut corners more and more. And I highly despise that. Patches are broken, there’s reskinned content that’s heavily time-gated, and it just screams “low effort”.
Do yourself a favor and don’t think about giving Blizzard money.
Not really defending them here but it’s worth noting that the buggy campaign wasn’t the main game. It was in Legion: Remix which is an event where you make a new “time runner” character and play it through the Legion expansion at like 10x speed and power. I found it to be extremely boring and haven’t played much of either in a few months
True, but the point was mostly that in this case, it’s extremely apparent that there were 0 QA checks before they released it or they simply don’t care. As someone who worked in QA, I can imagine them missing a lot of bugs that are happening on Remix or the main game, because they could require some obscure combination of finished past quests and an account state that can be hard/impossible to properly test for all cases, while also having millions of players, so some may encounter it.
But in the case of a major class campaign quest being impossible with 100% repro rate, because it needs items that are not even in the Remix, that’s inexcusable. It’s also easy to fix, and should be marked as critical because it’s a progress blocker. The only conclusion is that they either didn’t know about it, or just don’t care becuase they know that the community will just suck it up. It shows extreme disrespect for the players. Hell, when Remix released, you couldn’t even finish the first quest and if you tried re-logging, it didn’t let you login. It was extremely broken to the point of being unplayable for the first two days.
I’ve had similar experiences even in retail. Just getting through the main campaign of last patch required re-logging to unstuck a quest 4 times (which I specifically counted), not to mention the desyncs.
I could understand something like this if it was a developer that doesn’t have the resources, but Blizzard has and had in the past, but they decided to reduce quality just so they can increase their (already astronomical) profits.
+1 to shitty customer support, it’s what made me quit and never ce back. I got 4 months of free sub from a giveaway but I didn’t have the latest expansion so I sent them a msg asking if they could freeze for a month so I can get paid and buy the exp. They said they can’t freeze but if I don’t play a single day of those 30 days they could refund it. So I waited.
Month later I ask them for the refund and they say they can’t do it, what the previous rep said was wrong, it’s so stupid I said I would just quit for good.
The entire Mass Effect series. Many of the missions were dredging through mostly empty buildings that had copy-pasted boxes and random shit in them. Just generic buildings with generic crap stuffed into them. The world felt purposeless, sterile, and generic to me.
Also, the story just didn’t really grab me that much as I cringe at the romance parts of any story. And lastly, the gameplay was just clunky and awkward to me.
I love the series, but I played the games when they came out. It’s true that the level design of ML2 suffers from it being a cover shooter and ML1 is very dated now.
Which of the three titles did you hate most/represents your dislike best?
The Outer Worlds was so bad I had to put the controller down and abandon it. A fan made song got the feeling of “dystopian capitalism in space” better than the actual game did.
And an older one that’ll get me burned at the stake: Fallout New Vegas is the worst of the first person fallout games.
With 2 out I thought I’d give the original one more chance. I wish I hadn’t. The story is just as bad as I remember, and the gameplay is somehow worse.
I mean the only way to talk about the story is that you’re better off just running through without thinking about it, because at every level it just fails at its messaging. It simply is what it is. What compounds that suck is that the game isn’t even that well designed of a shooter, or implemented well. The controls are gummy, your character feels weightless, and as someone almost 7 feet tall IRL I still feel like the POV is a foot too high. Guns feel boring, the skill system is unimpactful, dialog is stilted, characters are flat as cardboard, and overall the entire game just feels like you’re meant to squint at it until you forget what you’re doing and just reminisce about playing fallout. All I feel when I play is a distinct fear that I will see the seeds of Outer Worlds in games I loved as a kid before I knew to look for such flaws.
I don’t know if the story is bad, I just don’t care about any of it. Parvati’s story was cute and I liked helping her but I couldn’t tell you anyone else’s name and I was playing it yesterday.
The loot system just feels like it doesn’t matter. Maybe I screwed myself over by doing an INT based build cause my science hammer just demolishes everything.
I wish I could say you did; almost any build works at almost any difficulty. Int is famous for being the most broken stat, though. All you need to beat the entire game is to start with very high int and dex, then grab a hunting rifle.
You’re right BTW, the loot system doesn’t matter at all. Consumables only matter at supernova difficulty, and even then just because you have to manage hunger and thirst. The drug boosts are nice enough in theory but are completely unnecessary for any strategy. Damage types are pretty unnecessary, and beyond Spacers Choice weapons don’t really upgrade enough to be worth switching. Armor is unnecessary on normal, and is essentially wet paper on anything harder. All said, stims are the only thing that matter unless you’re on supernova; if you are, get ready to fill out your inventory with bread and water.
Well just fyi. The end missions are currently, still today, broke. So only one ending available that is regardless of whatever choices you made.
I loved the first one. I like this one but they made some bad changes.
But mostly they need to fix the mission bugs.
First one you could change the armor and weapons on the companions.
Also I really liked the vicar and Parvati. Vicar was like a snarky gay guy and I loved it. I will admit the other 3 were blah. But the new companions on OW2 are kinda bland.
I don’t really like any of them. Niles and inza had potential but wasn’t developed.
And I straight up dislike Tristan’s personality. He’s just awful.
Aza can be entertaining. If they made her more impulsive I think that could have been fun.
For instance if you take too long in negotiations and shes present. She just starts attacking people after some time limit.
Or randomly attacks strangers she doesn’t like the look of.
They could have done something interesting with her.
But mostly they need to fix the damn quest bugs so I can finish the game.
Also there was a quest in ow1 where some sketchy dude asks you to do some sketchy thing. And you realize this during the quest. You can go back to him and get the reward. Or sucker punch him.
I didn’t think it was so bad I had to stop playing, but I did stop playing one night once it got late and just never started it again, nor had the desire.
It seemed fine enough, but it just didn’t click with me I guess.
Oh really? I did have fun with the Outer Worlds. Nothing too amazing, but it was fun enough to keep me invested. Parvati was also a large reason for that, I loved her character.
I couldn’t connect with Outer Worlds either. I gave it a good shot but it didn’t give me any new feelings or enjoyment.
New Vegas was one of the best games of its type… for the time. It doesn’t hold up well on a technical level, the side quests are largely less immersive and interesting because our expectations have broadly changed. It was by far the best game I had played… in 2010. A lot has changed in the intervening 15 years and now the game feels small, cramped and limited in scope, to say nothing of how dated the graphics are.
What people are really saying when they hype up New Vegas was how much the story mattered. And how you had actual choices that impacted things, something that is dreadfully absent in modern games that have to play it safe and make sure the player has exactly the experience intended. When was the last time you played a game where you could skip right to the last boss and kill him (or join him!) and then the game goes on and people now know what happened or can learn that you did it? It would be AMAZING with today’s technical advances to have that kind of freedom and involvement with a storyline.
I get that people like the story and feel like they have an influence on it, but for me it felt railroaded even from the start. “Oh yeah it’s open world but if you go anywhere other than the path we laid out for you you’ll die by deathclaws” is what it’s known for.
My biggest gripe is that when I play fallout I want post apocalyptic retro futurism. 50s vision of the future gone wrong. I feel like I don’t get that with NV and that’s the whole theme of the franchise. It’s the pizza at the Chinese buffet, like, I’m not here for that, why are you here? This is just Nevada but slightly shittier.
I mean… sure, I guess it bears mentioning my first playthrough I did brave the deathclaws and survived by being sneaky and took a wildly different path than most people at the time.
The idea isn’t that there’s an easier path of least resistance you can take, but that it actually let’s you go off the rails if you give it effort or come up with some logical ideas.
In modern gaming, solving problems with logic is almost dead, and NV had a lot of that.
Ok, but compare that to breath of the wild. The game really is an open world. And you can go right up to the boss and kill him with a stick of you know what you’re doing. You, as a player, decide to go get stronger first. You don’t have characters specifically telling you to avoid an area, and a quest line that specifically takes you down a specific path that gives you a specific narrative.
Plus it’s got all sorts of logic puzzles like, all over the place.
Hell in fo3 you don’t get railroaded until the final mission, first time I played it I didn’t even go to megaton until way later. Fonv starts you off with it. For a game that is supposed to encourage exploration to start off saying not to? C’mon.
For a game that is supposed to encourage exploration to start off saying not to?
It’s an odd point to get hung up on, I can certainly describe a lot of areas the game is lacking by today’s standards and some other open-world type games, but this wasn’t one of them for me. Some people are going to feel challenged by being told “don’t go there” and some people will feel offended and some people won’t think much of it I guess.
Its such a huge letdown for me as a massive fan of Hk… but they did so many things that are just… mean. They disrespect the player constantly… tc actually TROLLS YOU with trick benches n shit. But mainly waste so much of your time with shitty padded content. Fucking fetch quests, timed ‘flower’ quests by the dozen. Most of the primary content ends up being “just like hollow knight, but worse, and now do 10x more of the worse version.” So its unoriginal AND inferior to the source.
I tried so hard to love it and its nothing but frustration in the end.
I stopped playing it after the credits rolled only for someone to tell me there’s a secret Act 3 if you do some really specific stuff. I don’t really care for games that require guides, especially if they gate a bunch of content behind it, so I never came back to it.
However, I did enjoy the first two acts of Silksong much more than the first game. I was never a big fan of Hollow Knight and considered it among the worst of popular metroidvanias. But Silksong was pretty good outside of the fetch quests. Unlockable alternate move sets was probably my favorite bit
I still enjoyed Elden Ring, but I agree completely. I prefer the metroidvania world design of earlier From Software games. The sense of progression is one of the best parts of those games, and Elden Ring’s open world robs the it of a lot of the magic of earlier titles, where discoveries were around every corner and in every nook and cranny. I never felt the same joy of exploration and hard won progress as I did in Dark Souls, Bloodborne, and Sekiro.
Double-agreed, but from a different point. What frustrated me about Elden Ring was that some of the dungeons were literally the best designed soulsbourne levels I’ve ever played. Everything between those dungeons, though, just felt like open world slop. The game would have been pure crack if it had just been tighter.
If it were more linear akin to their older games and dramatically reduced the visual clutter of most bosses, it would’ve been perfect, but those two things brought it way down imo. These sorts of games excel in smaller, more linear but interconnected environments.
Being on the patient side of things, two games I’ve played in recent years and didn’t enjoy were:
God of War (2018) - it just felt like AAA slop to me. Meaningles upgrades, tons of obvious puzzles at any corner - never throwing in even a single brain teaser, boring combat - the best option was almost always to throw the axe, that thing were you start walking at a snails pace to mask loading and/or play a cutscene and on top of that your god powers being mostly cutscene exclusive. Just your bog standard AAA game with no ‘friction’ - boring.
Factorio - it just feels like work to me. On top of that, going in blind, I just didn’t enjoy building something up just to tear it down again because I’ve unlocked something new changing the requirements. Once again, feels like a job in IT. Also, resource patches being limited just gave me the weirdest kind of anxiety despite never actually seeing one run out.
Factorio’s the awakening for a lot of people on certain ends on the spectrum. My AuDHD makes it crack for me. I will say though, while the tutorial teaches you some essentials, it just throws you into the deep end once you start a real game.
I only discovered all the tips and quality of life from videos online, and there are some troubles in the game you can solve on your own but good fucking luck (belt balancing).
Might not be your kinda game, but if you ever feel like giving it another chance, check out some vids online for beginner tips (: It’s a game about stimulating the Eureka! part of our ooga booga caveman brains and it feels amazing.
I feel vindicated. I have the exact same feeling of factorio feeling too much like work, having to refactor everything because the requirements change is one of the more frustrating parts of software engineering imo, and the game feels tailored specifically to invoke that frustration.
I imagine that part gets better after the first hundred hours where you basically know what’s coming. I don’t have the patience to learn the tech tree though, given that I don’t even enjoy the game.
Yeah I’ve seen people try to balance things perfectly in factorio, but my strat is always to overproduce and let belts getting backed up balance out the throughput.
Yeah same. I’ve seen other people stockpile intermediate resources to try and smooth out bottlenecks, but I think that’s wasteful. Build extra throughout, and have as little product sitting there as possible.
I’m fuzzy on the details, but it went something like this:
I set up long resource lines of coal, copper and iron.
I needed a thing#1 and built a neat little package to build it, exactly to order and on minimal space.
I copy pasted that design 10 times left to right along my resource belt line.
Then thing#2 came along. Needed the same stuff and combined with thing#1 into thing#3. So I wrapped my resource belts, designed a second package on minimal space and also copy pasted it 10 times. So I had pairs of thing#1 and thing#2 with a line in the middle to combine them and a belt to collect them. Worked nicely.
Then:
Coal was replaced by electricity. I had no space for powerlines.
I got other types of the grab thingies, potentially simplifying my setup.
Suddenly I got sorting, making my belt setup a waste of space (I had one line per thing/resource).
All belts needed to be replaced by better belts.
Oh and:
Thing#4 came along, needing 2 of thing#1 and one thing#2 with some additional resources. Since I built to order, I basically had to start from scratch or severly hamper the production of thing#3. Also, my packages didn’t work anymore without wasting space and/or entirely fucking up resource belt management.
Therefore, I designed stuff from scratch to fit the new requirements.
That’s from the very beginning, but after repeating this pattern a few times, I gave up. Building it non-optimized felt even worse.
Interesting. Optimizing the factory for your immediate current needs sounds very tedious, because those needs change all the time. I instead optimize for expandability and adaptability. The factory game genre isn’t for everyone, but if you are interested in some tips:
My solution is usually something like:
really long line of basic resources (usually a belt of smelted copper and a belt of smelted iron, eventually adding more stuff and adding more belts of iron and copper as supplies are needed)
when I need thing 1, I make a little package that builds it, drawing resources from the line with splitters so the excess can continue down the line
thing 2 is an independent little package farther down the line
When it’s time for thing 3, I build copies of the packages for building thing 1 and thing 2 as necessary to feed the construction of thing 3, again as separate feeds splitting off the main resource line
when it’s time for thing 4, its again independent of the production of things 1-3, except they are splitting off the same main resource belt
If the resources on the main belt are insufficient to feed all of those machines, one of three things needs to happen: 1. Add more raw resource processing until your belt is full and backed up at the beginning 2. If that’s not enough, upgrade the belt 3. If you don’t have a belt upgrade available, build another main resource line and use splitters to rebalance it onto the main line
This construction allows for easy expansion without having to destroy anything. I typically don’t disassemble anything unless it’s actually a problem for some reason or I need the space. This is especially important because you often need some basic components like the level 1 belts even into the late game.
Also, once you unlock robots, you can literally copy-paste, just select an area to upgrade all belts/arms/etc. in, and a lot of other neat tricks that drastically speed things up.
And one last peace of advice: Overproduce everything and let belts backing up balance out the resource distribution. Then if you discover that belts that previously were backed up are now sparse, figure out why and optimize it, usually by adding more production of whatever the missing resource is.
Ultimately throughput is all that matters. Loss of throughput because you don’t need something isn’t wasteful. Loss of throughput because you aren’t producing enough of something is a problem to solve. Things that don’t affect throughput don’t matter and aren’t wasteful.
I played pretty much the same way De_Narm did. I tried caring less, though because I had no idea what would come next, it inevitably descended into spaghetti. I am stressed out about technical debt enough at work to be playing a technical debt simulator lol.
Dedicating the space needed to expand, ensuring everything you build is scalable, inevitably requires you to know a lot about what’s coming.
Yeah, if you know what you’re doing you can avoid these issues. I did not enjoy myself in the slightest, so after some hours of giving it a chance I decided that learning how to avoid these issues was not worth the pain. I’ll just stick to work instead.
Dungeons and Dragons 5e is less fun than 3.5e IMO.
There was more of a sense of character progression, and ability differentiation in 3.5e.
5e achieves balance by flattening the power curve.
For example, the attack bonus for a level 20 Fighter in 5e is just 4 points higher than it was at level 1 - same as a 5e Wizard. Both get +2 at lvl 1 and +6 at lvl 20
In 3.5e, a level 20 fighter’s attack bonus is 19 points higher than it was at level 1 (+1 to +20), but a wizard only gains half that much fighting prowess as they level up (+0 to +10).
All 5e characters are pretty much the same statistically & mechanically. Differentiation comes from role play, which is the least interesting part of the game for me.
I haven’t played any 3.5e proper, but I understand Pillars of Eternity 1 is largely based on it, and I’ve played a handful of the 2e games. I dig a lot of the changes in 5e. I wouldn’t say the power is so flat that the differentiation only comes down to role play; I’d say a lot of it comes from the apples and oranges comparisons between classes, like things beyond to-hit roles. Your fighter has no AoE attacks like the wizard has but has Second Wind and Action Surge, for instance. The advantage to flattening the differences a bit more is that your character’s role is less preordained (“you are playing class X, so you must be responsible for Y”) and that you are less hamstrung by the absence of one particular role, which scales better to small parties.
4e did some really cool stuff while also going a bit off the rails for me. I think overall I like 5E more, but we played a ton of 4e and I’ll always remember it fondly. I was really into the more defined roles, and how classes were a bit more self contained so they could just keep making more and more niche ones
Heartbreaking that they decided static item attack rolls and DCs was a good idea. It’s my biggest gripe with the system. Some items, like the Holy Avenger, subvert this and are pretty good, but most items suuuuuck the instant you outlevel them. Like, Sparkblade is cool, who doesn’t like chain swordbeams? Anyone over level 4, aparrently, because every creature you come across has learned to dodge lightning from that sword in particular
I feel the 5e rules are poorly organized, too. Lots of interdependent rules scattered far from each other in the books, and sometimes buried in the middle of seemingly unrelated sections, so unless you’ve memorized multiple chapters, understanding how to resolve common situations sometimes requires stopping the game for 15-30 minutes while someone digs through the books to find all the relevant factors. Even when you do find the relevant info, it’s often in ambiguous language describing what could have been made perfectly clear with a few keywords. The books are pretty, and the text might be nice to read for entertainment, but they’re pretty bad the the job of being game manuals.
Does 3.5e use the d20 system? Does it have the advantage/disadvantage mechanic? I like those aspects of 5e; they’re simple and they help keep games moving along.
Maybe I should give it a try. Or perhaps 4e, which I have read does a better job of clearly defining its gameplay mechanics.
3.5 does use d20, but lacks advantage/disadvantage in favor of doing a lot more math every moment of every round of combat. This is the biggest appeal of 5e, it’s approachable and keeps the games moving.
I wouldn’t recommend 4e, it strongly suffers from the aforementioned “everyone can do everything and feels samey” much more than 5e.
Pathfinder 1e is basically just dnd 3.5, and as others have mentioned, PF2e is more of a middle ground
Differentiation comes from role play, which is the least interesting part of the game for me.
Can you explain why you would play a TTRPG if you’re not interested in role play? Seems like a battle sim like warhammer, or just a video game might be the thing you’re looking for.
As a DM, the cooperative story telling IS the interesting part. D&D has never been an airtight game system, it’s a bunch if hand waving to give just enough illusion of structure and randomness so you don’t feel like you’re just arbitrarily deciding everything yourselves. But at the end of the day, you are. The characters and story you’re left with is the only thing of value.
I started TTRPGs with Pathfinder (1e). Some people talk about it like some impossible thing to play. It does have a lot more detail than 5e, but it isn’t that bad. (I did play one character as a wrestler, who did grappling a lot, which is notoriously one of the most complex systems.)
5e sells itself as being simple, and it is in how little control it gives you. However, the rules are anything but simple. There’s so many contradictions and stipulations every player has to memorize. It’s a mess. For example, some spells can be used as bonus actions, but not if you’ve already cast a spell, except for some that can anyway. It’s stupid.
Pathfinder 2e seems to make things so much simpler for everything, while still giving players freedom. Actions are just actions. If you’ve got the points you can use them for anything. Movement, attacks, spells, etc. Pretty much everything just is what it says.
I didn’t play any BF6 this weekend because Arc Raiders sucked me in. My first extraction shooter too, but nice to see that it isn’t crazy sweaty (at least in the first map). I’ve run into people left and right who just mind their own business, or I like to jump in and help others if I come across them.
Yeah the main thing I’ve noticed is solo queues tend to be way chiller. People are mostly just minding their own business. Group queue however is, for the most part, shoot on sight. Which at least feels a little less bad since you have people with you
I enjoyed Blue Prince, I’m exactly who it was made for, but it was definitely much worse than people would lead you to believe.
The game makers had no respect for players’ time. You solve one of the large, run-independent puzzles and it all clicks, then it could take you several hours to playtime to luck into the conditions to actually test your solution. Everything takes longer than it should. It’s obvious that I’m going to toggle security settings every time I’m in the Security Room, why do you make me go through this slow as hell PC every time? It’s not for realism because no PC back then had such fantastical functionality, so why not make the PCs load screens faster? How does the slowness enhance the experience? Why not just put buttons on the wall you can toggle for the security settings, at least? There were times where I figured something out, and rather than spend ten hours trying to actually do the thing, I just looked up that part of a walkthrough to get the next info.
Really interesting game, but I did some napkin math and I wasted 25 avoidable hours during my playthrough (long unskippable loads and such) that could have been spend completing an entire different game.
It’s a huge part of why I quit Destiny 2 entirely. A game that doesn’t respect the player’s time and pads it with RNG on top of RNG to extend playtime feels awful.
I absolutely agree with you, I got to a point where I had solved the “main” puzzle, but was struggling to complete other puzzles (that I knew the solution to) simply due to room draws.
I wanted to love the game, but it held itself back on the RNG design. It can be so detrimental to the game that I wouldn’t recommend it to most people.
I bought into the review hype, bought the game, then realized about two hours after the Steam refund window expired just how tedious this game felt to play.
I really wanted to like it, but it stopped being fun and started being so tedious that I uninstalled it.
I bought it ages ago but finally decided go give it a go. From the first day I could tell it wasn’t gonna be a game for me. Note-taking is basically mandatory, and it seems so easy just to get fucked out of a run by RNG.
Narrative seemed interesting but I feel like the whole “ability to decide what room you’re going into” thing should be weaved into the story off the bat.
Neat concept but not for me, but I think since I’ve owned it for so long I’m outside of the refund window.
Same. The game is fantastic but the RNG is only cool on paper and falls apart just a few hours into the game. The methods they give you to influence your luck are just not enough to do much at all.
It’s really frustrating when you are trying to do something but you constantly have to do something else because that’s what the game is giving you.
I cheated at the end and gave me infinite rerolls for rooms so I could create the layout I needed in that moment. Much better that way.
bin.pol.social
Aktywne