I just chip away at my list every time there’s a sale. This time I got God of War, Spiderman, Jedi Survivor, and Dragon’s Dogma: Dark Arisen.
DD was an impulse buy since I don’t know anything about it, but the reviews were good. It was $4.79 and I see there’s a sequel coming later this month, so that’s probably a good deal and a good time to catch up.
But I’ll probably still be “ahh, suffering…” through Elden Ring when the summer sale rolls around…
Dragon’s Dogma is a great game that was ahead of its time when it came out. I can’t help but wonder how much of a hit it could have been if Capcom marketed it better (or at all).
It’s incomplete in certain areas, inventory management is a nightmare, and the mini bosses in dlc areas (gorecyclops, undead dragons, wargs I think they were called) take ten minutes of healthbar whittling and they respawn when you rest.
But the true test is whether the game is fun to play, and it is! Regardless of which class you’re playing, the game lets you feel like a badass. I’d just recommend playing with some QOL mods.
Definitely, assuming you like the fantasy action RPG style games. Some enemies are too tough to even damage until you level up and get better equipment, so keep that in mind if you find some sections too difficult. Magic actually feels POWERFUL, more so than other games like Skyrim and Elden Ring. Even with the sequel coming out soon, I couldn’t recommend the first one more; its in my most favorite games of all time.
Heck yeah, it feels very meh for the first couple hours, if you’re doing all the side quests and stuff.
I recommend either sticking with it, or skimming through till you get to the main city (Grand Soren) and then see if you like it from there.
I know that’s like telling someone the show gets good after the first 4 hour long episodes, but it’s actually really good and nothing has really matched it since.
Same! I’m even excited for the lack of fast travel. Which is crazy I figured I’d be annoyed. The ox carts seem fun though and I think will give the world size and depth
Can confirm, started playing Dark Arisen for the first time yesterday myself and I am also shocked at so r of the things that were implemented in this game. Took me by surprise. I struggled a lot to get my ps5 controller working with it, as you need mods to make it visually be correct. The start is a little rough as mentioned, but just gotten past that now and it keeps getting better!
If you’re going to play DD1 you can 100% fail side quests for going too far into the story before completing them, but don’t worry! Quest anxiety can ruin the game, there’s a new game plus if you really want to 100% it, but with DD2 coming this week I’d say just have fun with it.
From what I understand the only thing that connects DD1 & DD2 is that there’s a dragon. Lol
Dragons dogma is a fantastic game that I thoroughly enjoyed. The sequel is looking amazing so getting into the world now through the first game is a good idea
The Witness has a lot of generative puzzles that I guess technically are replayable, but you can’t go back to before the moments of joy of discovery and that’s the core of what made that game incredible to me
Agreed. By the end, i was just looking up the solutions so i can just figure out what the heck happened on the island, only to be met with the biggest let-down in my personal gaming history. Game went from an 9/10 to a 3/10 just on the ending alone.
A problem with The Witness is that the game’s single biggest excitement comes from a twist that revealing completely spoils
spoilerThe environment puzzles
So it’s stuck in the position of letting 80% of its player base walk right past the best part, or preserving the moment of discovery.
I’m personally grateful it has the integrity to let me find it on my own, but it’s also a bummer since at least two of my friends beat it without ever realizing
Ship of Harkinian is not technically emulation, but a full port of Ocarina of Time. And is totally awesome. It has tons of quality of life improvements and enhancements. It also has a built in randomizer so it has infinite replayability.
Is there somewhere to read what those changes are? Their home page just says some general stuff. I play a lot of alttp randomizer but oot always spooked me because it’s such a bigger game.
Tried looking for a full feature list, couldn’t find any. Makes sense, tho, because it would probably be massive.
I’ve tried SoH before, and my favourite features are 60 FPS gameplay and gyro aiming. It also has a bunch of enhancements like time savers (faster test speed, “Better Owl”, time travel using the Song of Time, etc.), alternate assets (= mod support!), bunch of fixes and cut gameplay restoration. If you stream, it also has Crowd Control support. It even has a co-op mode now lol. As for the randomizer stuff, it has an item and check tracker, and a lot of settings for it.
I recommend you just check it out yourself or, alternatively, watch some video on YT that goes more in-depth on the features
Heroes of the Storm: Alexstrasza in dragon form actually isn’t any tankier at all (even if she looks it) and wins fights by aggressively backlining no matter what
DnD (yeah the tabletop): The game really gets broken by Spellcasters once you understand that even if their damage is better than martial characters, the most powerful spells are generally AoE crowd control (Entangle, Web and Hypnotic Pattern) or story-warping RP spells. Also of note: the martial builds for Bard and Warlock are full casters that can still do almost everything a regular martial can do. An important part of mastering the game is realising how horrendously imbalanced it is
Dwarf Fortress: This is literally the core gameplay loop for the first 200 hours
Welcome to DnD, where the martial/caster disparity is a feature, not a bug. We’re actually really, really bad about balancing our content, please buy our overpriced rulebooks that offer very little guidance on how to actually use them.
Tbh I didn’t truly realize how deeply fucked the class balance was until I started making a really really big homebrew that required me to build and balance eight classes (operating on the personal principle that since it’s a team game, all the classes should have roughly equal impact).
This philosophy right here is the fucking devil when it comes to designing co-op games
Yeah, I’m just convinced that the designers actively hate the martials classes. Even in the playtest for the new edition, after 10 years of people pointing out the martial/caster disparity, it took them over a year to write a somewhat decent skill set for martials.
(Link away! I’m always interested in homebrews for DnD. You should also consider posting it in the c/dndhomebrew community if you want more visibility. I still don’t know how to link Lemmy communities to users from different instances, but you should be able to access it from my post history.)
Shoutout to Brutal Critical being the worst feature in the entire game for having minimal mechanical impact (sure it hits hard when you crit, but you have no way to boost crit rate outside Reckless Attack and the chances are still dreadful) and taking up no less than THREE levels on the core barbarian template.
Martials are “balanced” its just that they’re balanced around like 8 encounters a day with multiple short rests so that casters actually have to conserve their slots. Which is of course a stupid goddamn way to balance the game because no ones going to play it that way.
From personal experience, by the time casters have depleted all their spell slots, martials are low on health as well, making the balance finicky at best even if you’re having multiple encounters per long rest. The game is balanced in a way that makes it impossible for martials to shine: you either play with few combat encounters, thus allowing the casters to shotgun their infinite spell slots at the enemy, or play with multiple combat encounters per long rest, which has martials on death’s door because their HP drop faster than the casters’ slots.
It’s also difficult, from a narrative perspective, to fit so many combat encounters in a single day, to the point that I honestly don’t think it’s possible unless you subscribe to some form of gritty realism ruleset (7-day long rests, long rests in safe zones, long rests at the end of a narrative arc, etc…).
This is a 3rd party upgraded version of the that a lot of folks recommend. They put a lot of effort into balancing out different classes for the reasons mentioned above.
Heroes of the Storm: Alexstrasza in dragon form actually isn’t any tankier at all
I mean, you’re just wrong here. The ability grants a flat +500 health. That’s more tankier than not having 500 health. She also gains lifesteal from her melee attacks, adding even more health while attacking. And she gains reduced slow/root/stun duration, which also indirectly makes you more tanky by preventing damage you might otherwise have taken.
Sure, she doesn’t become a frontliner, but saying “she isn’t any tankier” is categorically false.
Slight exagguration, true, but I wouldn’t want to overexplain things to random guys without being invited. (Also the lifesteal on her attacks is only if you took both the Inner Fire and Ancient Flame talents at their respective levels)
Surprisingly, yeah. It even gets a once-year balance and bugfix patch. Mostly play Brightwing, Dehaka, Deathwing myself, although Kael’thas is fun too
It may not be the biggest game out there these days, but it’s got a good enough playerbase for matchmaking to work consistently, and it’s still fun to play
That one is new to me, so I must have quit before 2020.
I have a lvl 15 Brightwing myself (it probably isn’t the cap anymore). definitly my favourite healer along Uther.
Back in the day a couple of buddies from StarCraft an other games were trying to get into competitive after the HotS beta and it was a lot of fun for a while. But over time it just felt like Blizzard really pivoted to balancing the game around low elo QM games, which left more and more heros unviable for competitive play. It just took the fun out of it. And of course the entire lootbox shit, I hate it.
Yeah, he was one of the last heroes to get added. The devs knew the writing was on the wall so they focused on adding fan-favourites before the game went into ‘maintenance mode’ and wouldn’t get new content, so we have Deathwing and Hogger (and they’re both great)
Also yeah there’s no level cap on heroes anymore, I have Brightwing over level 200, she’s absolutely great
Ironically I found the game had the opposite balance issues before going Maintenance Mode- too much focus on high level competitive play which was getting super ultra hard stomped by Genji and Tracer plus a support. The day our competitive leagues were officially canned, then we got what I vividly recall was the best balance patch ever that made QM and draft league games so much more open-ended and fun to play.
Yeah, I remember Genji and Tracer. I suspect they were left a bit overpowered to push players to overwatch at the time. But they are both high micro, high mobility heroes, so I get they are hard to balance.
I think my biggest pet peeve was when they effectivly removed stealth by changing the effect from the decades old, proven StarCraft kind … to basically a milky outline. And at the time stealth heroes were already terrible in competitive play.
But I should probably stop being salty about it and try it out again. It’s actually still installed, lol
Took me a couple hundred hours in Baldur’s Gate 3 to realize this. Crowd control is so stupidly over powered. Twin spelled hold person gives me free crits? Don’t mind if I do.
I’m surprised the issues with D&D arent more commonly known. It’s a fine beginning system but, me and my friends literally couldn’t wait to move on to new systems once balance fell apart past level 10. Now we just play Savage Worlds, Pathfinder 2e and Call of Cthulhu.
Antichamber is hidden gem or simply forgotten? I don’t know how much attention it got in its time.
It’s a puzzle platformer but I was feeling my brain bend the whole game. And at the same time I never felt like the new mechanic was explained too little or something was artificially dragged out. Very good design.
Antichamber is great. Feels like a completely different universe with its own set of rules you need to discover. Also really interesting to see a puzzle game with an almost metroidvania-like progression, with the gates being your own knowledge of the mechanics.
That aside, I've been giving it a look again lately but haven't dove in just yet. I'm in an odd mindset atm where I don't know if I'm down to wrap my head around RTS mechanics, but I'm really impressed by the looks of the game!
Also wanna highlight that this is a great rabbit hole to go down for other open source RTS games via Zero-K, Spring Engine, OpenRA, etc.
If you’re going to dive into any RTS I would definitely recommend this one. With any of them you have to familiarize yourself with the units and the interface which can seem like a lot at first till they become like your best friends and you know them by heart. A lot of other RTS’s that have been around are somewhat losing steam for entry-level players and might not be worth the investment. If you want more “hero” types of RTS I would probably recommend something like Stormgate but if you’re interested in military/army battles then BAR is a winner.
I don’t know why I didn’t link the website lol, guess in my head I didn’t want it to come across as sponsored or something and anyone who was super interested would just look at the links in the videos or search it. I’m just very entertained atm so figured I would share the videos that got me to this point. Thank you for the Zer0-K and other references, looked it up and now realizing there’s a whole slew of projects and remakes I’ve missed out on.
You made me pause for a while and contemplate my RTS gaming history. I was never really enthralled with medieval or time period rts’s (even though I’ve definitely sunk a lot of time into some of them like lord of the realms) but C&C I absolutely loved when it first came out. The cool live-action cut scenes, expanding what I was familiar with playing Dune, even had family members that also really got into the series. I slowly drifted away from it, I realize it was because of the excessive never-ending expansions being released and an absolutely bonkers story of a political drama it was. I just couldn’t keep up with all the releases as a broke kid and the characters/story lines did nothing for me.
Old school Blizzard did a great job with Warcraft cinematics for the time, the mystery behind the world you inhabited was left to your imagination at the beginning. They did a banger of a job with the Starcraft lore when it came out as well. I still remember pouring over the game booklet with the origins story before and after getting to finally play it. Human prisoners lost in space like some kind of 30th century Australia stuck in cryo-sleep and only awake to find they can never return home? Fascinating. Zerg Hive mind with specialized broods with their own lore? Baelrog Brood is legendary to me still. Protoss was just so fascinating and everything connecting the universes stories together just seemed mystical. Though I feel like they just completely botched it, Brood wars story was too rushed with a million things going on, SC2 was just abysmal and generic story telling but I do appreciate that something did happen after sc1 as I would be complaining for different reasons if they had just dropped it and moved onto a different game lol. Sorry for the wall of text, was nice to get this fleshed out from my mind though.
No worries on the wall of text! Also fwiw I'm familiar with RTS games, which is why I mentioned not being in the mindset for them currently. They're a lot to take in, even on a good day! 😅
Nevertheless, when I'm of the right mind for'em, I really enjoy'em. Building up outposts, assembling a bunch of units, and fending off enemies, it can be a bunch of fun!
Lately I've been more interested in peaceful builders/strategy games though. Still, BAR and the like remain really impressive!
In general anything with crafting and/or excessive loot. I find it very boring and especially when a game is advertised as “survival” when in reality it is just a crafting game with no real threat.
Subnautica is almost an outlier to the rule but the ocean triggers a phobia so I can’t play it. The Long Dark is probably the best example of a survival game with crafting that I do really like.
That trend of shoving crafting into literally everything for a while was really irritating. Even with the great big empty MMO world, Dragon Age Inquisition would have been much more fun if I didn’t spend a good half hour after every expedition looking through the giant mountain of crafting-based loot I inevitably acquired.
No no no, see that’s the opposite of what I want. I want more games where you can just straight-up be the villains. Not an anti-hero, not someone who’s trying to change the system from within, not a secret rebel who needs to go along with the bad stuff to keep their cover.
I want more games where you can just be a villain. I want more games where you can rob the banks, kill the NPCs that aren’t listening, have a big fortress of doom, and fight-off heroes who are trying to stop you.
Not because of some gray moral backstory that somehow justifies some of it (or that will have people jumping through hoops to justify it like with Mr. Freeze and his wife).
Just because you can.
Tyranny gives you a bunch of options to just be evil and not enough RPGs do that properly.
I loved Tyranny, but the combat was much worse compared to PoE. For newcomers I would recommend the lowest difficulty setting so they can enjoy the excellent writing and story.
Power over Ethernet
Perl Object Environment
PowerOpen Environment
Product of Experts
Platform for Open Exploration
Post Occupancy Evaluation
Port of entry
I second this. Triple Triad is so much fun! Fun fact, they have it in Final Fantasy XIV and it’s so much fun to collect the cards and play other people. They even have tournaments.
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