There is a considerable amount of depth to the game, but it’s not insurmountable for anyone. You’ll have no problem going through the game if you read through tool tips and help pop-ups as they arise. DnD knowledge needed is none at all or negligible at best.
MUDs. Text based (generally RPG) games with incredibly immersive story telling, near infinite levels of character customization, and many even feature ways for players to build on the world itself.
I’m surprised it’s not more popular amongst D&D enthusiasts.
In its hey day, people spent thousands of dollars just to boost their characters on massive for-profit MUDs like those created by Iron Realms. But smaller MUDs like Ancient Anguish were just as quality.
Sadly they’re going extinct. Only a few MUDs are still actively maintained.
I started reading Mort (Terry Pratchett) and it reminded me of the Discworld MUD I played with my friends in the 90s, on dial-up, all crowded around a single 13" CRT. I looked it up, and it’s still running!
Whoa that’s a nice piece of trivia. Did some googling and it definitely has roots in MUDs, but Andrew obviously had higher ambitions visually. That’s cool.
My son is 11 months, and if I didn’t have my steam deck I would probably not be gaming at all right now :) That instant off/resume is absolutely amazing.
I picked up a Switch thinking it would always be attracted to my TV. Maybe it was for a bit, but when my child came along the only way I used it was handheld and for spurts at a time.
That’s how I knew the Steam Deck was an instant buy for me - the pause/resume is key.
You should try playing Cattails which is basically exactly that. You play as a stray cat living a regular cat life. You can hunt, socialize with other cats (some are nice, some not), etc. No humans, just cats. The start of the game you get abandoned by humans I think?
They are all decent, and fun to play if they’re your jam, some are more pay-to-win than others, like Star Trek Online. Some are a bit on the older side, like Guild Wars 1 being from 2005 though.
I’m a member of a Discord server like that. It’s named Past Gen. This is the server’s own introduction:
Welcome to Past Gen Gaming! We’re a community of generally older, but mainly patient and relaxed gamers. There is no age requirement to join us, just the mindset. We won’t tolerate elitism, toxicity, nor any form of hatred. A lot of us don’t have a lot of free time, so when we do, we like it to be a good time. So sit back, relax, and let’s play some games together.
Just let me know if you’d like an invitation link. If so, I would DM it to you instead of posting it publicly.
Don’t get me wrong, I fully agree in spirit, it just seems like several aspects royally screwed over the map design so it felt much smaller.
The bay being the main area where you started meant everything felt far more like linear progression regardless of where one wandered to.
The island bifurcating the bay made the bay itself far more prominent, isolated, and greatly reduced how many under water biomes were simply ‘there’ to explore. You always HAD to wander out in one of two directions to get to some other under water biome open to the surface, of which there were only, what? three?
Most later game biomes were solo, single entrance offshoots of the already limited ‘main’ areas. This made them feel much more like explicitly added game assets instead of areas you’d just wander in to while exploring.
The story and the game design itself seemed to want the on-land biome to be more cool than it was. It was ONE biome, and not even the type of biome that the game is known for.
The sea truck is cool in concept, but when every area is disparate and isolated, it SUCKED to drive a loaded truck to any of them.
The “AI” companion (and really, the story over all) totally and completely popped the isolated explorative feeling of the game.
Basically, the basic design of the map and story ran completely counter to everything that made the first such an amazing experience.
The individual biomes and assets themselves were still great, but they were composed in such a way that left them … not greater than the sum of their parts.
I think it could’ve been a banger if they had interconnected more biomes and made them larger so there was ANY point to dragging a loaded sea truck to them. The land biome could have worked if they made it much more like a real arctic; an ocean mostly covered in ice sheets instead of it just being some random biome “over there” largely literally on land. The ice worm would’ve been waaay cooler if the player had to wonder if it could make an appearance under water, for example, even if it never did. The snow fox (or what ever the land vehicle was called, it’s been a while) could’ve been way cooler if it wasn’t for one biome “over there”, too.
I don’t know how much larger it’d need to be, but a little more creativity in mixing the biomes together would’ve gone a LONG way.
I think a large part of why everything was segmented is they released the game into EA way too early. It made it to where they had to have a ‘gating’ system where they could stop players from going to areas that weren’t developed out of finished yet. Overall this affected the maps flow, validating all your points there. Also completely agree with the voiced narrative. Part of what made Subnautica great was the silence. It gives more room for hearing the crazy sounds around you. Instead you had some chatty voice in your head that had commentary about every damn thing.
Eh I know what you mean from a development standpoint (remixing the map would be a huge effort), but I still find it a kinda’ copout excuse. I bet we’d be here heralding the design instead of lambasting it if they took the time to really mix the biomes together properly once they had the assets complete.
In fact, I remember some early early access games doing exactly that: basically having demos that were WAY different than the final product. Ugh I wish I remembered any names, though such effort in to game development was over a decade ago, when some companies still treated it like an actual art form instead of a money vessel…
Oh no I wasn’t excusing the behavior, quite the contrary. I’m saying the map sucked because they went into EA too early and didn’t put effort into changing the map for full release. I agree with you!
Yea, if only they had thrown in the extra effort! Maybe we’d be here heralding it as a worthy successor instead of identifying the low hanging fruit still on the branch. lol
I’m adding some second hand experience here, but what made below zero much worse for my son when he played it was that it constantly crashed, resulting in a lot of lost progress. Often crashing when saving, too, so after having accomplished something. He got it on the switch as some kind of double-feature with subnautica and below zero on a single cartridge. He played through subnautica and loved it but ditched below zero after barely a handful of hours played, purely due to the frustration, not even being at the point where those game design points would have mattered.
Ouch. I didn’t even know either were on the switch. Ironic that the first ran well because they had a good bit of performance issues with it in beta. Though mostly around efficiently streaming assets while moving around, which I’m sure a cart is much faster than old spinny HDDs.
They’ll streamline better over time. These open source WINE frontends/orchestrators may as well have 2 eras, before and after Proton. Before Proton they had little developer interest so development was slow. After Proton, influx of users and more developers interest in working on open source Linux gaming tools and Lutris rapidly got better and Heroic popped up. PlayOnLinux got left to historic obscurity in the history of Linux gaming
So I’m not concerned about Steam reliance. Everything outside of Steam is so much easier because of Valves open source contribution and the growth of the community. Pretty much because of Valve, Lutris/Heroic/etc became better at a faster pace and will continue getting because of what Steam did for Linux gaming in the past decade
KH3 is bad. If I wanted to rank the main games, it’d be KH2, KH1 Remastered, KH1 with the original terrible camera and platforming, and then KH3. It’s not functionally broken, but it’s such a disappointment.
The story is a hot mess because you need to play Birth By Sleep to know who Aqua is, and KH 0.2 to figure out how she got to KH3, Dream Drop Distance to know how Sora and Riku got there (which also builds off KH:coded) and to understand why you’re fighting Organization XIII again after you defeated them entirely in 2 and why there’s multiple versions of the big bad, and KH X (the Greek letter pronounced “key”) to know what the hell a random thing that shows up toward the end of the game is. And I’m probably forgetting stuff. I hadn’t played everything, and by the end, I was just sitting back and saying “Yeah, that’s another thing that didn’t make any sense” for about every story point.
The attractions have no place in combat. They make it insanely easy, and I decided to turn them off entirely after I beat a boss just by juggling it on a pendulum ride. The Disney worlds kind of feel bare bones despite their size. It’s pretty, but it’s also empty.
I wanted to love this game so, so much, but they had to cover over a decade of lore because the creator couldn’t finish FFXV, and it’s not brought together in any really coherent or satisfying way. The combat managed to be a step down from KH2. I finished the game, and I was just frustrated because it just was not good.
All that said, for buying it, this game is supposed to tie up all the endings started in the other games. I’d just grab 1.5+2.5, and you’ll still have a good chunk of content if you’ve only played the main games. But if you also want to grab 2.8, buying the bundle is just cheaper.
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