I was waiting for this post, thank you! Since I discovered this “series” I’ve been hooked. It’s nice to read some long content in a non clickbaity way (that seems to be the norm in the industry nowadays).
I’m really sorry about your nerve damage and hope you recover as soon as possible!
As for what I’ve been playing, right now I’m going through Blasphemous 2 (i loved the first one too) and a nice surprise: Pippistrello and the cursed yo-yo. A zelda-like adventure in which you play as a bat with a yo-yo fighting industry magnates to help your aunt recover the monopoly on energy she built to keep a grip on the city (I know! The setting is original, to say the least).
The gameplay makes you think of 2d zelda games, but the yo-yo makes combat (and even movement) a completely different thing of other games, I suggest you to try the demo!!
Oh that’s so kind of you to say! I have to say, I’ve been pretty down about it all, but writing this up made me so very happy. I really love Lemmy for how easy it is to share these long-form posts :)
Pippistrello and the cursed yo-yo
Sounds wonderful, I’m looking this up now! It sure sounds weird, but the longer the gaming industry runs and ruins great things, these odd little different ones just make me happy!
Oh that’s so kind of you to say! I have to say, I’ve been pretty down about it all, but writing this up made me so very happy. I really love Lemmy for how easy it is to share these long-form posts :)
Happy to read this (the part about writing this making you happy I mean!!).
Lemmy is great for sharing long posts, much like reddit was before the enshitification. It’s good to see long elaborated posts here among all the memes and other low effort content. And in the case of your posts, they are also a nice read in my mornings because of all the possitivity and joy you can feel when reading them. You really pour a lot of that in your posts and it feels!
Sounds wonderful, I’m looking this up now! It sure sounds weird, but the longer the gaming industry runs and ruins great things, these odd little different ones just make me happy!
I love “'weird” or unconventional games. And right now, it’s the indie world that provides these gems. In an industry that looks for the short-term profit like the “mainstream” videogame one, they rarely innovate anymore. They just pick a formula that works and copy it until they find a more profitable one, so innovation now happens mostly in the indie world, giving birth to games as odd as this one, a yo-yo player bat that goes around a city beating corpo suits to recover a monopoly! You won’t see EA making this kind of game, ever.
Damn, sorry to hear about the nerve damage. That’s really rough to deal with. I hope you’re to lose yourself in Firebreak a bit next week; I’m also looking forward to it, and I’m assuming that while some of my friends will probably play it on Game Pass for a few days and drop it, I’m hoping at least one will stick with it for a while. And if not? I’m also intent on playing it solo. I love the Remedyverse.
As for my own gaming, I played a bunch of demos from some of the RPG directs from last week. Dreamed Away is looking to be a particularly inspired horror take on Undertale’s gameplay with Earthbound’s wrapper.
I was excited for the Space Marine remaster, but…I only played perhaps 1 hour or so…it’s super disappointing, but that’s on me for getting excited before it came out (again).
Firebreak is 100% my next ‘big’ excitement, I’m so ready to play it!!! I’m right there with you with the Remedyverse!!!
I too was wondering about MGS4 in the midst of all of these Konami announcements, since Volume 1 was so long ago now. MGS4 is just about the only reason I still have a PS3.
My wife and I rolled credits on Blue Prince. It’s a great puzzle/adventure game, but I don’t think either of us have the patience to see everything it has to offer. It would have been nice if they doled out more ways to control the RNG earlier and more frequently, but they did not.
I’ve also been continuing on with Kingdom Come: Deliverance, the first one. I just had a night of debauchery with a priest in order to progress a main quest line, and then had to give a sermon hung over, which went surprisingly well.
trying not to have too much of a spoiler___ The game has a new game + type mechanic that allows you to grow stronger in a specific way that I won’t ruin. Unfortunately that means focusing on an outpost or series of outposts becomes somewhat pointless. Depending on whether you care about the extra strength or not, you could either play through a few times to build up that strength, or just stick to your single game and build your outposts there.
Aside from what I wrote in the spoiler (which I hope really didn’t spoil anything) if you’re on PC I really suggest giving the Star Wars Genesis mod a try when you’re done! It’s a complete overhaul and it’s pretty damn cool!
I’ll have to give it a try if I end up enjoying it. I’m not much of a Star Wars fan outside of the prequels but it would be cool to see it with the engine
I’m 40, and I enjoy doing my taxes, choosing colors of paint, and reading the business section of the newspaper. I don’t listen to music or watch television or play video games.
I’m surprised people just scraped the sarcastic frosting off this cake and just ate it like a sad little honesty cake, bereft of anything good.
I have a bluetooth headset embedded to my skull and I listen to music basically constantly, my Steam Deck goes where I go, and unfortunately, I steal my television on the internets cause I can’t stand advertisements. (And, uhh… playing an instrument is out of the question for me, cause I’ve survived a couple of strokes and manual dexterity and a sense of rhythm are things best left for other people.)
Most of the time I’m writing or taking pictures though. I’ve got a portfolio that I’m building that spans twenty years!
But I should clarify: I am nowhere near anything like what I’ve presented above.
Heh. Tax returns and music should have been the giveaways, although I know someone who takes great satisfaction in taking every tax deduction they legally can, down to the last cent. :-P
For all the faults Nintendo embody, they know how to make tutorials, especially with the Mario series. You may think “there are no tutorials in Mario” but that’s part of it. Nintendo’s design formula for making stages for Mario games consist of “introduction, escalation, complication.” First they throw a new mechanic at you, maybe the stage has rotating cylinders you need to stay on top of to progress, and not fall down. Then they up the difficulty a bit, adding more factors to the gameplay like introducing enemies that you have to dodge simultaneously. Then finally they turn the new concept up to 11 towards the end, by making you have to juggle both the new mechanics and some other modifiers, perhaps having to fight a boss at the same time, or perhaps requiring some more advanced platforming maneuvers to progress. That way a stage can be a tutorial, and you don’t even realize it.
Dark Souls since it doesn‘t stop you in your tracks much. I dislike tutorials that stop you and make you read walls of text or force you to input/click exactly what it wants you to.
I was coming here to mention Dark Souls. It's an excellent example of how to make a tutorial not feel like a tutorial. Either you take the time to understand what the game is telling you or not, up to you. Don't care about going through the entire tutorial area? Just beat the boss and start the real adventure.
Force them to jump in the tutorial, and solve the main boss thing through normal storytelling, whichever way makes sense for your game. If the only time you need to know something is late game and there’s nothing to remind you mid-game, that’s poor design.
Dark Souls has a good tutorial because it lets you skip it? That’s your bar for a good tutorial?
Souls games are terrible at even explaining what the buttons do. Every blind lets play I’ve seen it is like 30 minutes before the player even discovers they have estus or what it is for.
Yes, I prefer a game that lets me figure things out on my own through gameplay instead of popups. You are (arguably) forced to engage with the game‘s mechanics to beat the level, it has parries, environmental hazards, ambushes all in it without huge punishment in case of failure. I take the aha moment of using estus over „press square to heal.“ I‘m aware that others might need more guidance, but I didn’t and hence it‘s a great tutorial for me.
I wouldn‘t mind replaying the tutorial even now after having done it dozens of times already. It doesn‘t feel like one, I’m already playing the game and having fun, immersed in its world. So my bar is: The best tutorials don‘t feel like tutorials at all.
If I don’t want to play the tutorial and I get absolutely blasted, then I gotta walk my sorry self back to the tutorial like the idiot I chose to be. I like to press all the buttons and figure stuff out on my own, its part of the exploration process.
I don’t hate when certain gameplay elements are forced, but when I am given that impression I expect the whole game to be like that. The tutorial in Dark Souls promised me the game wasn’t going to hold my hand the whole time by letting me completely skip the tutorial, and then it kept that promise. It didn’t hold my hand. And I think that was great. Meanwhile Call of Duty tutorials hold your hand the whole time, and then your hand keeps getting held for the whole game. Also good.
The tutorials I think are bad are ones that fail to properly communicate important features of the game. If I choose to skip that part it is no fault of the game.
For example, Helldivers 2, which I enjoy greatly, has a tutorial that fails to teach the player what the Galactic War means, anything about the various mission types, or especially how to deal with supply lines and reinforcement routes. What happens in the players spend a lot of time and effort doing the wrong thing expecting the right result, a result they can never achieve because the game never actually told them how to do it. There isn’t a bestiary where players can read about various enemies and their weak spots, you just have to trial and error figure it out, or have someone else that did that already tell you.
A dumping ground is really all my Fallout settlements turned out to be anyways lol. Every once and a while I’ll see an idea I want to recreate but usually I just end up slapping some chests down and walking away
Don’t chase weapon upgrades and crafting research too hard. The minor stat upgrades don’t really effect much for the stupid amount of grinding required to get the exact right materials needed.
I found that the novelty of the game wore off pretty quick after I started finding what initially felt like handcrafted points of interest repeating for the third time. Apparently there’s a mod that tweaks the RNG to significantly reduce how often things repeat, because it’s really rough out of the box.
I might look into that mod. I heard the repetition of the dungeons is particularly rough, but I was planning to leave it because I honestly don’t really care for Bethesda Dungeons anyways. After the second dungeon my brain just defaults too “okay. When will this be over”. But It sounds like RNG extends outside of the dungeons too, so I might look into the mod
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