I liked the game well enough when it came out, had a good friend at the time whom I always traded little game design insights and fun facts about the AssCreed games with.
But the one thing nowadays I always remember about this one is that the ‘opening’ part is looooo(…)oong - until you really swing you sword and hidden blade about it takes hours of grand opening, shipping to America, learning the controls, doing little ‘preview’ missions in a restricted zone, then
Spoilerfinally switching to the actual main character only to have to do a new tutorial intro all over for a couple of hours.
It felt somewhat compelling the first time round but on subsequent playthroughs it really stretched your patience - imo, of course.
Yeah, I’ve sunk maybe 4 hours in already and I only just got out of Haytham’s part. Granted I went off and started doing all the Sync points, but still. The game’s pacing really is it’s biggest issue
It was mind blowing to me on a technical level back then though. I just remembered the footprints in the snow, the slow-trudging animations in the deep snow, the free-running along trees, all that was really cool.
Sidenote: thanks for always posting some interesting games to learn and/or reminisce about. Haven’t been posting much in your threads but they are always a joy to read when they pop up!
I was always a guild wars fan, in part because there’s no subscription fee.
Guild Wars 2 is still going. They do expansions every so often, but it’s been almost nothing but horizontal growth. No new level caps or gear tiers. Just stuff like “as a necromancer, you can summon spirits to fight for you instead of getting a death powered scythe” trade offs.
I am absolutely loving the expansion that was just released. Just like the one released last year, it has excellent “hangout maps” where I can just roam around and enjoy the ambience, complete random events, and find the occasional collection/achievement item. The music is gorgeous and the scenery immersive.
I haven’t tried all the new subclasses yet, but I’m having fun with the ones I have tried.
Nice! I got the new expansion but haven’t gone far in it yet. I played around with ritualist (my favorite from gw1) but reaper might still be my true love.
But I love that it’ll all just be there when I get around to it, and I can still have fun doing old content. The wizard tower convergence is a recurring favorite of mine.
I do love that convergence. It’s got the right level of challenge where you can’t just coast through it, but failures are rare. I like how they added the weekly rewards to convergences. It keeps them populated.
I mostly play engineer, and similarly it’s difficult for me to give up my beloved holosmith for the new subclass.
I was wary of the new yearly expansion format, but so far all 3 have been excellent.
I just can’t be bothered to grind through levels in an MMO anymore. I recently thought play LOTRO again, by level 15 I couldn’t be bothered with collecting 12 boar foreskins for the 25th time just to unlock more quests doing the same fucking thing. To make it worse, no one is playing helms deep, the 1 bit of level scaled content IIRC.
ESO was different by level scaling eveverything so you can play with anyone for almost anything and it works pretty well. But their cash shop puts me off.
I also don’t have much patience for “it gets fun later I promise!”.
Guild wars 2 will scale people down for earlier levels, but the majority of content is aimed at the level cap (which hasn’t changed since launch ten years ago).
I don’t know how long it would take a new player to hit the cap. With friends, I think you could get to the cap via crafting in like 30 minutes if they spot you the resources.
I played this one purely for Desmond’s story. I found everything about Connor’s story utterly tedious and the setting meant that the buildings were awful for traversal.
This is the game that taught me the hard way to never preorder. And yes! The Desmond stuff was like 70% of my excitement for this game after playing Revelations and boy did they fumble that story…
Fair enough, especially the traversal. I can see how it’d be bad for the traversal with how spaced apart everything is. Some of them are way too far apart
I was trying to get all of them first go around and already messed up one where I had to explode 3 powder kegs, and I only missed the first one because I had to reload my pistol and was already past the first barrel by the time I finished
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.
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.
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.
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Aktywne