I dunno, I think GTA5’s true ending with the trio working together to close off each other’s loose ends is a pretty satisfying finale.
I agree with the assessment in regards to 4 though. To me, it always came off as ‘nothing gets better, even if we have to shoehorn in a reason for that because we didn’t actually make a different finale’.
I recently finished Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 and I think it fits the bill perfectly. I laughed, I cried, I raged, I celebrated, I was in awe. Really a beautiful story and deep take on life and existence. I went into it blind and highly recommend that kind of experience as well.
omg i just got to the point where maelle’s hair did the thing and i just about died. i’m going to have to buy this one, i got it from my local library.
Lots of great options here already. I don’t see Larian’s Baldurs Gate 3 and Divinity Original Sin 2 here.
The screen gets a bit cramped in co-op but it’s perfectly playable and loads of fun playing these masterpiece RPGs on a couch with a significant other or a friend.
Also what do you mean as “runs better”? As in “better performance” or “better compatibility”? I’ll give you one answer for each question, but off course its not the only one. Other cases may have another explanation why the Proton version runs better. This is a complicated topic which cannot have a generalized answer for all games.
For performance: Developers focus on the Windows version and may not be very talented at Linux development or environments. So optimizing the Windows build by the devs will obviously make that version better. Plus optimizations and some trickery from Valve (and off course others) in Proton might also help, that is not affecting the Linux native build.
For compatibility: Proton does a better job at providing an environment that is the same each time the game is installed. Linux native changes too much and too often and differs a lot per distribution. At least that is what I think, not sure if that is even correct.
A lot of Linux ports are not the best quality to begin with, or even if they were good once, they’re out of date, utilising old fashioned technology that may not be the best at taking advantage of modern hardware. Conversely the windows version was often better built to begin with, and the translation layers have had a huge amount of effort put into them to make them as performant as possible and utilise as much of the hardwares capacity as they can, so much so that sometimes the proton version of windows games running on Linux is actually more performant than the windows native version on running on windows!
How much are you willing to dig for it? I’m playing through hollow knight atm and have been shocked at the emotional depth that hides in the margins of the world. If you plow through the game and only touch the required content then all you get is the overall somber vibe. But if you turn every stone, talk to every npc, complete every side quest, you might be surprised at how much love and loss and joy and pain there is in the story.
Overall it is about picking through the ruins of a dead kingdom. You can engage with that as much or as little as you want. IMO they do an outstanding job of rewarding you for the effort.
I assume this is part due to many games only having support for OpenGL and DirectX, and no Vulkan support. OpenGL has the worse performance of the three, and DirectX is windows only.
But when you using proton, you are likely also dxvk, taking benefit of the optimizations made by game/engine developers for DirectX, while suffering little overhead from the DirectX to Vulkan conversion.
I saw people asking for ships you can walk around in for a long time now, but I never saw the appeal. With this update, I get it. These ships really feel like our own, and they didn’t hold back the creative potential. I’m already building a flying restaurant.
In one of my earlier designs use the farming walls to close of the door ways like the frieghter interior wall
My current design has a Y shaped interior, with the base being the cockpit and some of the engines at the tip of the two points. There’s also a -1 floor at the base of the Y shape
After that I added reactors and engines then built cosmetics around it
A friend of mine wrote some lyrics for a contest, which includes the lines “if I alone remain, what would it mean to fail? Is there still a world to save…”. This comes into my head a lot whenever I’m playing certain games, especially post-apocalyptic games.
I’d say the Zelda series struggles with this. I put in ~40 hours into Breath of the Wild before I got bored and stopped playing. I never got around to defeating Gannon and I think I only did 3 divine beasts. I kept on looking around and asking myself… Why is Link bothering? It seems like the world is doing pretty well without him. The land of Hyrule is teaming with life. Sure, the people of Hyrule are no longer building megastructures or cities, their populations might be smaller than they used to be, but everyone seems pretty happy and unbothered. The evil forces of Gannon’s corruption mostly keep to themselves, so as long as people avoid the ruined Hyrule Castle or the ruined towers they are fine. Sure, there are monsters that spawn in the wild, but there are also just plain old evil humanoids out there too. There’s regular ass animals. It seems like nature, civilization, and even evil itself have achieved a harmonious equilibrium in Link’s absence. There are some minor problems in the settlements, but in the whole everyone seems pretty happy just living their lives. It’s like they asked the question “what if we give up and let entropy take over” and the answer was the most beautiful and vibrant state that we have ever seen Hyrule in.
By comparison, Majora’s Mask and Twilight Princess have a much broader range. TP does this very overtly by having the areas cycle through Twilight vs normal states. They establish Link’s relationships with everyone in Ordon Village first, then have Twilight fall and reduce them to cowering spirits. In other areas you see the Twilight version first and then clear it. Majora’s Mask does similar- everything is bright and sunny and cheerful on Day 1, while Day 3 is an active apocalypse. Which then gets reset over and over again.
I would say Skyrim does a decent job of balancing the two as well, though perhaps not as extreme as other examples. Moments in the main quests like the civil war battles and the journey to sovengard are serious and epic, with the fate of Skyrim (perhaps all of Mundus) resting on your shoulders. There’s deep, personal moments like the Dark Brotherhood quest to kill Narfi or talking the ghost of the child killed by a vampire in Morthal. But there’s fun moments like coming across copies of the Lusty Argonian Maid or getting drunk and carousing with Sanguine. The Sheogorath quest line starts out as “OMG so funny and random XD, cheese!” And then dives into the child abuse and subsequent mental illness suffered by one of Skyrim’s last high kings.
I didn’t quite get that feeling with Breath of the Wild, but I’ve certainly had those moments where the theme of a ruined world absolutely ruined my emotional stakes, so I can understand it.
The opening lines of Nier Automata are nihilistic and signal 2B’s desire to just get death over with. Nothing in the whole game’s story brought this feeling back in the other direction, and as a result of an adventure spanning a gray and brown “Abandoned city and death” the optimistic ending absolutely didn’t hit with me. Hard to identify why my response was so different from everyone else’s.
The pointlessness of a fight amid a ruined world is also what makes me not care about a lot of uber-dark Soulslike games. I don’t see much of what I’m saving in most of those, and learning the lore behind all of Dark Souls’ endings reinforces that feeling.
The Souls games is another good example I considered bringing up. I’ve only played Bloodborne so far and while I did enjoy it one of my criticisms is that it’s pretty monotone. Even the few NPC’s there are tend to not be very likeable. Everything is dark. Everyone is bad. It’s not even clear whether anything the player experiences is “real” even within the game world, or whether anything the player does accomplishes anything. While I haven’t played the other games I get the impression that they are similar.
I can also think of games that only lean into one side or the others but they do it in a way that I dont mind. “Cozy” games have made an entire genre of this, like Animal Crossing.
Or games where the tone of the game is always dark, but the player and player character both know that there is an “outside” world they can escape to. Resident Evil, Portal, BioShock, etc.
You brought up Metal Gear Solid because it has moments of levity within a gritty military espionage setting, but I think it’s also helped by being set in the real world. If I remember correctly, the end of MGS2 has a boss fight on the roof of a building in Philadelphia and we are shown in cutscenes that the streets below are filled with normal people going about their business, completely unaware of the threat. It’s a reminder of what the player character is fighting for.
Uncharted is another series worth discussing. The first 3 games all kind of blur together in my memory so I could be mistaken, but I remember the first game felt too isolated. I don’t think you really spend much time in a non-hostile environment: it’s all either jungles or ruins or the enemy base. 2 and 3 did a better job of putting Nathan in more mundane and civilian settings: museums, tourists sites, cities, etc. There’s moments where you need to put away your fun and act like a normal person, and that contrast makes the action sequences hit that much harder.
The opening lines of Nier Automata are nihilistic and signal 2B’s desire to just get death over with. Nothing in the whole game’s story brought this feeling back in the other direction, and as a result of an adventure spanning a gray and brown “Abandoned city and death” the optimistic ending absolutely didn’t hit with me. Hard to identify why my response was so different from everyone else’s.
Yoko Taro let the answer to the player, even in the good ending is for you to decide why is worth living.
spoilerIf you find the 2B flight unit you can read the message she left for 9S. “The time I was able to spend with you It was like memories of pure light”. To me this message is 2B answer for the question of what is worth living. Another thing, the OST for the main area of the earth, the cozy ost, is named Rays of light(I think is the same name in japanese) and to me is referencing the “memories of pure light”
bin.pol.social
Aktywne