As someone who has never fully clicked with turn based JRPGs, Chained Echoes would be my answer as well, I've been enjoying it a lot. The combat system is one of my favorite executions of turn based combat I've ever played.
A short Hike: It’s a pretty short relaxing game. Low stake, no stress.
Chained Echoes: I don’t know how long Octopath 2 is, I only finished the first game, but since you mentioned it you may like this one. It’s a turn based rpg, but there is basically no grind. Your party is fully heal between each fights. It’s quite respectful of a player’s time in that way.
I knew that I was going to enjoy A Short Hike before I played it. What I didn’t expect was how much I enjoyed it. There’s so much more there than I anticipated and some of it is really lovely.
The only thing I don’t like about Deep Rock Galactic is having to watch both the publishers, and the studios logo sequences every time I start the game.
Go to steam, right click the game and browse local files.
Navigate to something like Deep Rock GalacticFSDContentMovies and delete (or move) them.
I’ve played other games with annoying intros. Normally, deleting the files means the don’t play on startup.
Where they are depends on the game. A quick Google found this solution.
You will probably have to re-delete them after an update, and after running a “verify local files”.
I’ve done this with EAC games without issues (incase you are worried)
I’ve been playing through it with a few of my pf2e group.
Larian did such an amazing job with this, and I am enjoying it, but I find myself wishing this game had the action economy from Div : OS2 or pf2e.
That said, I’m glad to see that they’ve continued the trend of their prior crpgs, and made something approaching the flexibility of a GM behind a screen.
It’s great!! At first I wasn’t too into it, but I leaned in to my chaotic stupid bard shenanigans and I am having a blast. The dialogue and VAs are fantastic, especially Astarion’s (who doesn’t!?). This is my first cRPg and it’s good introduction to beginners new to the genre. Choices are remembered by characters so be careful. Combat can be confusing at times because I’m dumb and don’t play DnD.
I can understand your frustration. Right now it feels that we small people can’t do anything to do good in the world. There are greedy capitalist everywhere. It is nearly impossible to understand what damage ones desicion could make. If our desicions even could make a difference.
But the thing is, you can’t overlook everything. It’s a gouverments job to keep an eye over Corporations.
But that doesn’t mean, that you can’t do anything. You can search for Informations and make yourself aware of those topics. You can support workers and strikes. You could limit yourself on what stuff you are comsuming.
You don’t have to boycott every major company and every Product. You just could make a list about everything you really need and what you are really looking forward to. So you can balance your need for morality and fun.
I really appreciate this response. It balances the want to do good and make ethical choices with the reality that I can’t do everything perfectly. It’s important to do the best we can and also leave room to enjoy ourselves :)
it’s a complex issue, and it will probably end up dirty, since it’s business in the end.
I could understand why people would avoid buying Hogwarts Legacy, because how much the IP is tied to transphobic JK Rowling. But the devs on the other hand, they mostly don’t get the say on which IP to work on. I personally avoid games like that, because the same person has enough followers to keep spouting hate which could and have translated to real world bigotry and violence. And the game serves as marketing for people to follow JK Rowling.
Then there are companies with sexual harassments incidents. In that case, spreading the words and making enough noise so that some legal investigations or actions are taken, should be the way. Then there’s crunch and overwork issues, helping them to spread the word about union, not to cross the picket lines, etc.
There are many of those issues, because we didn’t address them earlier in the past few decades. But shedding the light on them and you feeling frustrated are good things, it means that we’re progressing, we’re identifying, feeling guilty, and trying to address them.
I’d say, be more conscious when purchasing games, maybe if you really really want to play Baldur’s Gate 3, then only buy it when there’s a steep discount? Nowadays I play a lot more indies and retro games, and probably would only buy a full price games once or twice a year. There’s large number of other good games out there, don’t be pressured to be FOMO, wait until there’s steep discount. And after waiting for awhile, sometimes you realize that you could just ignore the problematic game altogether.
Thank you for your response. I also think it’s good that people are becoming more aware of these issues and doing what they can to address them.
I also think your point about FOMO is a good one; it becomes much less frustrating when I look at my backlog of games I’ve already purchased and have thousands of hours left to play. There will always be new games, and they won’t always be made by people that make me feel uncomfortable.
As others have stated, you make a good point about indie game devs. Jonathan Blow is one that my partner brings up regularly. I didn’t know about Ion Fury or Kovarex but that’s disappointing. It’s hard to keep track of it all, but when I find out about things like this, I’ll do my best to consider it when making future purchases.
It is also helpful to know that if you make any mistakes in you character build, you can respec your class and ability scores very early in the game for a fairly low price. The things that you cannot change are your origin, race or appearance, but these don't have such a great impact (unless you take the Dark Urge origin and find a bit too bloody for your tastes - in which case you have to start over)
Personally, I never played DND but I did play a bunch of RPGs before (such as the Pathfinder games on PC) and I love checking out character build guides. The learning curve of BG3 was pretty smooth for me.
I feel like someone generally familiar with RPGs will be fine with the basic mechanics of BG3. It’s my first exposure to the 5e rules - bonus moves, reactions, feats, etc - but they mostly make sense. I may not have combat as optimized as someone with tons of practice, but it works most of the time.
Long term character building, though? When I was presented with class specializations at L3, with nothing to tell me about what they get at L4, 5, 6…those choices seemed completely arbitrary. Being able to respec on the cheap if you feel like you’ve made a mistake is nice reassurance.
OTOH, making choices of specialization and feats without a long term plan, but entirely on the immediate circumstances and whim, feels a lot more like how I planned my IRL degree, job, home… So, immersion?
As somebody with no knowledge of 5e but some knowledge of 3.5e, it’s been pretty user-friendly. The game goes out of its way to make mechanics pretty easy to grasp. Tooltips can be brought up to and you can go further with any highlighted words in the spell/ability tooltip, so you can look up what “Prone” is when you’re look at the “Trip Attack” tooltip, as an example.
The only knock I have so far is that it doesn’t outline class progression at all, especially since the game apparently does deviate from tabletop rules at times, but that’s more of a QoL thing than anything else.
When it comes to the corporate world, your purchases are like your vote in politics. WotC has done some stuff that lots of people (myself included) don’t like. They’ve also done some stuff people really do like.
The situation around the open gaming license was the perfect example. People boycotted D&D beyond, and other directly related products, but very few boycotted the D&D movie, because people wanted to discourage Wizards from the specific license changes, but didn’t want to discourage making good movies for our niche audience.
Obviously not all companies have separate things like this. Activision/Blizzard are more monolithic, and so selectively boycotting them is harder.
All this said, there is no ethical consumption under capitalism, so if any boycott is costing you too much, monetarily, mental health-wise, etc., you shouldn’t feel bad for breaking it
I once heard "when you vote with your wallet, people with more money get more votes", and that really helped me internalize how unlikely it is to expect occasional boycott to beat executives investing millions in marketing to lure entire audiences of well-off customers might not even be informed of the issues going behind the scenes. You can boycott for your moral satisfaction, but to enact actual change, it isn't enough.
I feel you, it’s tough knowing that there’s great games out there and feeling like you can’t play them. It’s even tougher when the people around you are playing them too, especially when they’re telling you how great they are.
I think your partner has the right idea with supporting indie developers, generally speaking the money stays closer to the creator, so it feels like you’re more directly supporting them. But you’ve also got to be careful because individuals can be just as vile as organizations, there’s been times that I bought a game, thought it was great, and then found out after the fact that the creator is outspokenly transphobic or something like that.
I want to mention Hogwarts Legacy as a specific example. It’s a game I don’t want to support because JK will profit from it, and she supports the erasure of people like me. I have a friend who played the game, and from his account the game itself is pretty hip. The character creator is supposedly pretty inclusive. He raised the point that JK had very little to do with the development of the game, and the development team seems to really care. Does that mean we shouldn’t support them because an evil individual profits from it? It certainly added some nuance to the situation that I hadn’t considered.
I think the best way to stay hopeful is to play games that you really enjoy. For me, it helped to educate myself on this list of dark patterns in gaming, and to find games that don’t include these features. To me that says that the creators want you to enjoy their experience to the utmost, because generally speaking the more dark patterns are in the game, the more the game is designed to profit off of you. You should be the one to profit from the game IMO.
He raised the point that JK had very little to do with the development of the game, and the development team seems to really care.
The development team got paid regardless of how well the game sold, and unless the company operates a system of employee profit-sharing, they’re not going to see any of the benefits of the game doing well. So the “buy it to support the devs” argument doesn’t really hold any weight, save in the hypothetical scenario that they’ll get a payrise for working on the studio’s next title.
That’s a good point, I never really considered that. The argument does hold some weight for the live-service model, but to my knowledge that’s not really how that game operates.
But there’s plenty of support besides financial too. I’d agree that as a developer I do care most about being paid for my work, especially if I’m going to work on a AAA game. But for my own projects, I mostly care that people play my games and enjoy them, even if that means piracy or streaming.
I dunno, sometimes “supporting the devs” these days just means not sending them death threats. But I also think that if we look at financial support as the only way to support a game then we risk dehumanizing the people who work on our toys.
I’ve tried the original Life Is Strange twice, and both times I >!failed to save Kate!< because I don’t have an infallible memory and quit out of anger.
Admittedly, it’s not ideal for inline spoilers, but if you really want to hide for the benefit of others, that’s they way you’re supposed to do it on Lemmy, I guess.
Looks like sync doesn’t implement lemmy spoilers correctly, and still uses reddit spoilers. But the lemmy web-ui doesn’t honour those spoilers and does them the way I showed in my comment. That’s unfortunate, because people using Sync won’t be able to effectively hide spoilers, and will potentially be spoiled on things when Lemmy users use spoilers the way the web-ui tells them to in the editor.
bin.pol.social
Ważne