I hate bullet sponges, but I do think this joke gets too reductive for my taste. There are many games where enemies die so fast on easy mode that you don’t get to experience whatever mechanics they have. By increasing health it can have the impact of revealing those mechanics that already existed.
It has to be a reasonable increase that doesn’t turn into a slog though.
The only thing i really dislike is that there is often no middle ground. Easy is super easy, normal is still easy, and hard is annoying. I like games that tell you what difficulty the game is made for. Doom for example, the game is geared towards “nightmare” (i think) and the game really is best played on that harder difficulty.
Plenty of people’s edge is somewhere around Weenie Hut Junior which definitely complicates things when you also want to capture the “uses all the hard skulls in Halo” crowd.
Going from expert to expert+ in beat saber was jarring. Songs that we getting easy on expert still seemed impossible on expert+.
Until I realized the modifiers on the side weren’t just a cheat board, but a way to smooth the curve. And that no fail was essentially free (doesn’t affect score if you pass, reduces score by 50% if you fail).
So you use difficulty increasers on the expert songs and difficulty reducers on the expert+ and the transition is way smoother. I’ve gotten to the point where some of them are fun again at expert+.
That can be fixed by changing the factors that affect difficulty. Instead of giving the enemies less health or making your attacks stronger, give the player more health or weaken the attacks of enemies on easier modes. This would result in each combat experience being roughly equal in length and intensity, but allowing a more novice player to make mistakes and soak attacks that would be fatal in higher difficulties. You would still be able to experience an enemy’s special mechanics.
This scales well in the other direction as well - say an enemy has a powerful attack that you need to dodge. On easy, you can maybe tank 3 of them from full health, medium is 2, hard is 1, and nightmare is a one-shot kill.
Another scaling option is the speed of enemies either movement speed or the time it takes for them to land hits, attack animation timing, etc.
I think having multiple things change with difficulty is good just as you say. I was focusing only on raising health because that was the joke in the comic.
Middle Earth: Shadow of War got it right with one of its later updates. They added a final difficulty that increases enemy aggression, attack power, and perception. It also increased player attack power. As long as you’re not fighting a massively overleveled enemy, fights are hard, quick, and fairly bullshit free.
We need a new way to symbolise a good game like QQQ for Quality Quality Quality or something. AAA just means unfinished mess that cost a lot which you pay extra for.
I’m gonna release a AAAAA game. It’ll cost $95 and when you install it, it’ll just be a romhack of Super Mario World changing all the enemy sprites into butts. There’ll be a link to file complaints that just points to a terrible image made in ms paint that says “lol f u”.
I’ll only support this if I can pre-order it for double the price, and have an option at launch to pay an additional $50 to make the butt sprites into dickbutt instead
The $50 dickbutt DLC isn’t scheduled to be released until a month after the launch, but for an extra $70 you can get the limited edition collectors edition at launch, that comes with a cheaply made Mario-with-a-butt-instead-of-a-head limited edition figurine.
And for $40 you can also purchase the “getting started” pack–that includes a save file where we beat the game, so you don’t even have to play it. Your name, email address, and SSN will be on our first-to-finish list!
And for $70 more you can play it 2 days early! For why? No fucking reason other than to flex! Gotta flex on those poors by getting it earlier than them amirite?? This ensures you will be invested in our product from the very start and you are the type of person who we can do no wrong.
And for $30 there’s 2 extra skins that are just the worst looking piles of shit. But again if you don’t have them how will you flex on the poors? This is lumped in with the earlier assurance that we can do no wrong in your eyes.
And the battle pass is $10 - every 30 days. It has nothing of value except at tier 150, which is a new flagrantly pay to win weapon. This ensures we own your time, every month.
But also we didn’t finish the game, instead we released a roadmap. We will scrap this roadmap a week and a half after the disastrous launch because the game sucks so my donkey dick we cannot possibly add content to the absolute bugfest of a game. This is an abuse of loyalty to our brand, but you’ve stated you don’t care as long as you get to play it.
Now that the game is out for a month, we’ve added a cash shop. This flies in the face of regulation on the box not indicating gambling elements, but fuck those stooges standing in the way of our profits! We can make a new box with the proper markings on them in a month. Surely you would like to buy a sword skin or character skin beyond looking like normal Mario right? Also there will be at least 1 skin that blends in with the background a little too well and attracts p2w allegations for the multiplayer mode. We don’t care and neither do you because you will buy it. You wanna be a winner right?
We noticed you’re already level 8, congratulations! We halved level reward drops, but increased rarity of those items by 30% but from here on we tripled enemy hp at every 10 levels to make sure the game is a slog, so you buy overpowered shit from the shop and battle pass.
You reached level 10 in only 5 hours? That’s amazing! How about a XP Booster? Like the above we actually made progression become ungodly slow after level 10 unless you pay us $35 for an XP booster - in a single player game. We will make sure this pops up every time you level up to remind you we intentionally slowed progression so you make this purchase.
Also we can’t help but notice you picked up a Fancy Locked Box. You can divert from the main quest to grind the crafting materials and it will take 6 hours to craft, OR you can buy a key for ONLY $5! This will pop up EVERY time you pick up a Locked Box with the option to go to the shop, and be SUPER disruptive, to get you to cave.
And lastly, a “donate” button on the main menu where you just give us money for nothing, because at this point why not right?
Don’t forget the meta where a new paid DLC weapon is super unbalanced and great for two weeks until the devs nerf it into the ground and everyone goes back to the default weapons that are just ok.
Oh shoot I knew I missed one! The battle pass is weapon is op and then we will nerf it just before the next battle pass drops, to ensure an OP/Nerf cycle to enforce you always have the newest battle pass and buy tiers and have more time than filthy grinders to abuse it’s OPness
Yes, yes it is. The term coined by the Ubishit CEO trying to cover his own ass by claiming that Skull and Bones took so much time and money to make, and was being sold for higher than $60 (while still being a pile of shit) by saying it was a “AAAA game” and the term stuck. I mean, it’s own very first use was to describe a terrible AAA game. It’s only natural.
Oh hey, I forgot about that game’s existence until now. It’s name is so generic I used to accidentally call it Sea of Thieves, cause that’s a more memorable name. Also a more memorable game.
I seem to remember MS claiming they were opening the “first AAAA dev studio” (The Initiative). Since then, the studio has been radio silent, lost a bunch of talent, and needed help from Crystal Dynamics to work on their first game (Perfect Dark reboot).
It originated as a marketing term for Skull and Bones, right?
Realistically, its a corporate buzzword that is supposed to mean that the game delivers an exceptionally high quality experience, graphically, narratively, gameplay wise…
…but what it seems to actually mean is that the budget and manhour count and development calendar time ballooned to far greater than the original plan/estimates due to incompetent management.
At this point, I propose that ‘AAAA’ applies to basically any extremely costly game backed by a huge publisher that owns many development studios, that has been in development for over 4 years before any kind of release, ie, stuck in development hell, execs convinced its going to be a massive hit such that they sunken cost fallacy other games or even other studios out of existence so they can keep funding their uber project.
With a definition like this, Skull and Bones qualifies, so does Concord and Suicide Squad.
Basically… it doesn’t have to be from a grandiose marketing campaign attached to a AAA game, its more about being stuck in development hell and continuously funded to the point of destroying other parts of the business making it, like a financial cancer.
I would say I really enjoyed Sony’s games the last few years but they also don’t seem to be able to tell their non-creatives to STFU and are damaging their games recently so I’m inclined to agree.
Oh sweet summer child. Capcom is on a very sharp edge imo.
Their games are solid, but everything around it is utter god damn dogshit.
Sf5? Beta was very solid, was fucked up before release. Also had a terrible microtransactions system.
Sf6? Very very solid base game, but to get all character and stages since last year + the game you have to pay +160 euro.
Re4? Very solid remake, but prepare to loose performance on pc due to dunovo despite it being a single player game.
Re: the village? Very solid game, but better pay shit up and also loose performance despite ALSO being a single player game.
Megaman: mega who?
Monster hunter : safe, for now. Monster hunter wilds looks amazing and loads of fun, but watch them fuck it up somehow…
I like capcom a lot, have always supported them despite shit decisions and a few near bankruptcies but its the microtransactions/usage of dunovo and other weird ass decisions is making me hold back on buying their stuff atm…
Monster Hunter and Devil May Cry and Dragon Age: full of insipid, unnecessary microtransactions ranging from regular consumable items, to cosmetics that were usually just included with the game normally. God I love Capcom’s games but I hate them as a company.
So I’m assuming quadruple A is going to be a game from a large study thats recently been bought by a giant corporation and fucked with everything despite not knowing video games.
So yeah, that’s pretty much what AAAA means, although some end up decent
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