39.6% of players have beaten the final boss of Elden Ring. Considering how huge the game is, and how difficult it can be, I found that to be a surprisingly large number of people. I'm not sure how that compares to dark souls 3, but Dark Souls 2 has about 33% completion and dark souls 1 (prepare to die edition) has less than 25%
I started feeling this way a while back and eventually realized it wasn’t the games that had changed so much, but me. Getting older really does change your interests and how much you have fun with different playstyles.
I used to not want to play games if they didn’t have some form of multiplayer, but these days if I get to game at all, all I want is a quality single player experience.
Indeed. While many years ago I was playing almost only League of Legends with friends every evening after school, now I’m more enjoying the quality in note/totk, Celeste, and co. I also feel like online games aren’t anymore the places where you could get to know strangers and make online friends. LoL has gotten too toxic and competitive. And Minecraft servers have a 5oo young demographic for me
Likewise, as one ages, different components of games become more or less important.
Example - used to hate sitting through cutscenes and dialogue (it was just reading back then, but I was a big reader so that wasn’t the issue), would skip whatever I could and get frustrated when I couldn’t. But these days I actually like a good story-focused game (botw, horizon), and don’t skip through it in any game unless the story is garbage… although I love largely story-free games as well (dysmantle is the current passion - there’s very minimal story that you have to piece together, and most of it is obtained through exploration rather than quests or interaction)
I also haven’t played online in years - since my wow days (vanilla and first expansion, then gave it up, so like 2008). Other people ducking around tends to detract from the game for me, and I strongly dislike PvP because I’m terrible against humans who don’t follow specific patterns… now I get frustrated when I accidentally buy a game that doesn’t have offline/single player content. If I could host my own servers for them though……
I didn’t say it was dead, most of its domains were seized by the US, so they were in fact run off like dogs. I made a post a month or two back mentioning the new domain they have.
If your colony is close to collapsing, you have a chance for a “Man in Black” event where a stranger in black comes in and, hopefully, turns it all around.
But what if the MiB doesn’t trigger? Hell, what if they’re a pacifist pyromaniac with a meth addiction who wandered into a mass of cannibal sex slavers having a rave over the ashes and dies?
Someone will eventually come. It might take in-game years, but eventually, a pawn will come and want to make those ruins home. You can try to rebuild.
Admittedly, it can be quicker to just call it done and roll up a fresh colony over watching the seasons pass, but I like how even a complete loss doesn’t mean the story is done.
It can take a stupid long time, but eventually an event should cycle through saying someone wants to join the colony. There used to be mods to force the event after meeting certain conditions, but I have no idea if they’re still maintained.
Subnautica legitimately made me stop and stare at my screen with mouth agape at the wonder and terror of a glowing undersea behemoth. I’ve never had a game provoke pure awe like it does.
I'm not a Linux fan, but even disregarding the OS (SteamOS vs Windows), the fact that most of these "killers" don't come with touch pads of any kind makes them an instant loss. So many PC games use a mouse, I'm not using a fiddly thumbstick in its place.
Without the trackpads, the Steam Deck would be considerably less useful. They open up a huge variety of games that would be practically unplayable with sticks alone. Disregarding them simply for more power is foolish.
Either the developers hit technical limitations of their save system and couldn’t reliably restart everything. I feel like RDR2 did this because most of their missions were very specific scripted sequences that needed to be kept on track from the start. A lot of roguelikes are unable to save during a run or within a node of that run. For example Peglin and Void Bastards. It’s much easier to say what node or position the player is at than all the AI states, combat, etc. Additionally, automatic saving has always been difficult. Everyone knows the whole “the game auto-saved and now I die instantly over and over again” bug that happens in any game. The way to negate this is to use checkpoints with areas where you know the player isn’t going to get attacked. Another way is to try to detect when you are in combat or not but this can lead to the game never saving. Overall it’s much easier to just save a state that you know the player will be okay to start back up in.
Or the designers felt like it added something to the game like in Alien Isolation. Save points allow you to exit and designers are trying to focus on keeping players playing. So save points are also an exit point. When you allow the player to save, you allow the player to exit without feeling like they must continue going. Designers use this to try to keep their games more engaging. Super Meat Boy removed a few exit points from typical platformers in order to make the game faster. A lot of games try to be so easy to keep playing that they make it hard to stop. In some ways, this can be seen as a dark pattern in game design. Typically though, designers aren’t trying to be nefarious but instead trying to keep the game engaging.
Eh, that’s honestly not a great solution. It’s a bandaid workaround. Getting better detection on when to auto-save or auto-saving at known good times is a lot better. The multiple auto-save solution is a good fallback but not the definitive answer. You could also just make the player invincible for 1-2 seconds after a save load and then also cast their position to the navmesh to make sure you save them in a place that they aren’t going to immediately fall to their death or out of the map. A lot of open-world games now just restart your character entirely leaning up against a building in the world or camping or whatever. Making it feel like the player character has their own agency and actions while you just play them for a while.
It’s also a compounding issue, that’s just one of the technical issues over many. In the end, it really depends on the type of game you are building. Every game is released incomplete, even the biggest masterpiece, the developers wanted to do something more. So you balance the technical issues between saving the real-time states or just saving off some simple data like you were at this mission in this area, with this inventory, with these player stats. Even that is a lot to keep track of and test. To then add stuff like AI states, active combat, randomization data, etc. I understand why a lot of roguelikes don’t save most of the active game data. After all, developing games is very hard and the save system is not a high priority to the general experience of the game.
No, those are all worse than just having multiple saves and more user control. I hate those approximate save systems because they force me to waste time getting back to what I was doing when I load a save.
That’s fair, you can certainly like the multiple saves and more user control. Personally, I feel like it boils down to what type of game I am playing. If I am playing a large RPG then yes, auto-save multiple times and let me have a ton of user control. if I am playing a roguelike in which a run will be over in 15 minutes, I don’t mind not having any control over my saves because I don’t care about an individual run most of the time. If I do, I spend the extra 5 minutes and finish up the run. For something like Just Cause or RDR2, I feel like their general save system is fine enough and gives a good cinematic feeling which outweighs any time I spend getting back to whatever I was trying to do. Which is typically just a few steps away from what I found.
That said I’m probably diving too deep into this stuff. I develop games for a living so I am constantly thinking about the best system for the game. I don’t think every game would be better if it had a multiple-save slot auto-save system. I can understand why it’s not in scope or would hurt the experience. If Alien Isolation had just saved where ever you are, that game wouldn’t have been as intense as it was. It’d ruin the game.
It’s fine to like the system, it works well for a lot of games but maybe it’s not a one-size fits all solution?
Ugh… I wish more developers kept their customers engaged by making good games instead of creating some meta game to keep the hamster wheel running. That feels like a lot of MMO’s…
In some cases, yes, they are trying to keep the wheel running and make the player less likely to quit by using psychology. Valve is very famous for deploying psychology in their games. Specifically DOTA and CSGO. But a lot of the time the design intent is innocent. In Super Meat Boy the intent was clearly and well stated that they didn’t want the player to blame the game and to keep them trying again as quickly as possible. If you are going to make a tough platformer then it’s clearly a good design choice to allow players to keep trying as fast as possible. With Alien Isolation, again the design intent is innocent as they are just looking to add tension and give the player some sense of relief from that tension. Most media follows a flow of tension then drops to relief a bit, then tension. If you keep the reader/player/viewer/etc tense all the time then they become dull to it. Frankly, it’s why I haven’t gone back into Red Dead 2 for about a week. The game has just mounted tension over and over again without a break to just be a cowboy. Always something to do and something to prepare for.
That’s funny I found the total opposite with red dead. Too much stupid bullshit like fishing and getting shaved and twenty minute fucking horse rides and not enough actual fun gameplay, just filler all the time. Of course I tried to play it like a completionist when I probably should’ve treated it like grand theft auto and just advanced the story by doing more missions.
I agree in that regard. It’s more story tension rather than action or shootouts. The downtime doesn’t feel like downtime to me but instead character-building. In the next parts of the game immediately something happens to that character. So they build the character up just to get you invested so when something happens it feels like it went to shit but it’s a constant rushed pace. I didn’t engage in the hunting or fishing more than what the story required as much as I am into the robbery and stuff that mainly comes from the missions but the missions bring this character drama that while really good, is too much at times.
You know, one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. I’d say Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is worth playing for a lot of reasons, but I think it’s got huge fundamental issues in both its combat and narrative design; it’s still on the short list for most outlets’ game of the year awards this year. Hades just got a sequel, and I didn’t even care for the first one. For many people, those two games are just about the only roguelikes or -lites they’ve ever played, but I don’t think they’re even good ones of those; the level generation is so limited that you’ll have seen all their permutations quite quickly, and the bonuses from boons just about all feel superfluous and interchangeable. Hollow Knight holds this legendary status among metroidvanias, and Silksong followed suit. I thought Hollow Knight was just fine, but I was surprised to find that this was the game with that sort of following. When facing the possibility of playing Silksong this year or about 5 other video games that came out this year, I don’t think Silksong is making the cut.
But your mileage will absolutely vary. These games have hype for a reason: a lot of people love them. You might, too.
A big part of the appeal of Hollow Knight and Hades are their respective art styles. They are both genuinely gorgeous games, and it really improves the experience. I would rather open up Hades again instead of, say, TBoI for exactly that reason, despite my thinking that TBoI is the better roguelike.
Admittedly I can’t bring myself to enjoy Hollow Knight at all, but that’s just an issue of me disliking metroidvanias.
I can answer this for you. So imagine a genre of game that you grew up playing, loved, and sunk possibly thousands of hours in. Now imagine for like 15 years they only made the most dogshit version of that genre of game. Then someone comes along and makes a decent, even passable, modern version of that game.
It’s like giving dirty water to a dehydrated person. Is the water good? Fuck yeah in the moment it’s fantastic. Is the water the greatest water you’ve ever had? Well technically no, but please don’t take away the dirty water please.
The worst part is, that decent game isn’t even in the same genre. E33 is too damn heavy on parrying. Imagine if all 2000-2015 Zelda games were garbage, and Breath of the Wild was the first good one. I’m sure some OoT fans wouldn’t be too thrilled, while a majority of gamers would be.
As a JRPG fan though, I concur, most JRPGs suck ass, and it’s often for the most obvious, easy to fix problems like slow combat speed, or throwaway random encounter design.
I played E33 for about 4 hours. The combat system is atrocious. It feels like I’m playing a turn based RPG but with elements of Dark Souls? The almost necessity of dodging in combat made me give the game up.
Was it good though? I imagine you’d be AP starved until you get the Picto for AP on hit, and then it sounds like the opposite where you can spam costly skills.
To clarify, I meant gameplay, because you can (and a lot of people do) turn on easy mode just to ignore it and focus on everything else.
The easy mode could win battles for you automatically and most people would “enjoy” it all the same, but I hardly think anyone would love it.
Edit: The context was explicitly combat, but, I feel there’s still a difference of enjoyable combat and actually engaging combat. Is parryless easy mode challenging enough?
They didn’t seem to be directly related to development, so it’s likely the other way around:
game gets delayed --> postpone cash flow --> need to save money on unnecessary roles.
On launch it was quite “difficult” in that good gear was rare (and why wouldn’t you sell a good piece of gear for 20 bucks instead of using it), and the damage being very one-shotty on higher difficulties.
Yeah I remember the travesty of that game at launch. Competent gameplay hamstrung by devs leaving room for their micro transactions. But, you didn’t need to spend real money. You could grind for 20+ hours with pitiful low magic time until you find something mildly better or sell the good items you do have on the auction house to try and close loop to get better stuff.
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