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
I’ve been excited to give it a try since launch, so much so I’ve avoided spoilers. I’ve heard the dungeons are all kind of iffy, but to be honest (and I know this is heresy) Bethesda dungeons aren’t usually my favorite part of the game anyways
it opens automatically for programs without guis that forget to set the “please don’t show cmd” flag. i made a program for my grandmother to automatically sort her photos and it would always flicker that damn window because i couldn’t figure out haw to set the flag from Go :(
that is what i used but i could not get it to work, possibly because the program did not have a gui either. it was just supposed to be a “button” in the file explorer.
for a poweruser yeah but this is my grandmother we’re talking about. she only used the program once every six months, when her camera ran out of space and she emptied it onto the computer.
If it’s random and unfair, why do I consistently win more than others I play with?
Many good games have some luck, some skill, and some strategy. Mario Kart has all of these. Strategy in how and when to use your items, skill to drive/drift/etc, and luck in which items you get. It strikes a really good balance of this, which results in me, someone who’s an above average player, winning most of the time, but keeping it fun for those who aren’t as skilled, like my parents, where sometimes they can get one over me due to some luck, strategy, or a mistake on my part.
Finally, let people live their lives, and maybe git gud. It kinda sounds like you just suck, and are salty about it.
The Steam Deck brings about a conversation about what a console is. To me, it’s something that plugs into the TV and doesn’t require KBM, and in that regard it very much is.
The key ingredient that separates PC from console is you can deploy code custom optimized for the fixed platform hardware. This is why you have to go up a tier in GPU to have an experience on par with what a console would have because it’s running generisized code.
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Aktywne