I really liked my 3DS and especially StreetPass and getting all those puzzles pieces. I’d take it to work with me everyday but once I lost all my progress I eventually just stopped playing on it.
I’m keeping an eye on the new dual screen handhelds but will wait a bit longer and see how it fares.
For a recommendation, the Boxboy! games are great fun.
I’ve only played parts of Synergy and Another Crab’s Treasure. The first was interesting for a city builder, which is usually not a genre I dig into. The latter was a capable Souls-like with a very different vibe. A parody of the grim-dark world of most others while still putting up decent combat mechanics and difficult boss fights.
As long as it has fast travel I don’t mind having a big open world but if the open world itself feels empty without much life then I’m immediately turned off by the game
They have done some good work in last few years, specially the events here and there are fun. But after the event campaign is over. There is nothing else to hope for.
Funny, I have the opposite complaint about Fallout 4. In what is supposed to be a nuclear wasteland of a city where everyone is struggling to keep their small communities going, there are just too many people in such a small space to make this feel real. I liked Fallout 3 and New Vegas more because the world was properly empty, but still had so many things to discover.
I didn’t realize there were alternate hardware options available. I have the custom firmware installed on mine, but I had two of them crap out of me in the past so it’s crossed my mind that if that happened again the resale market for them might force this one to be my last.
Some ds and 3ds games tried to shoehorn in touchscreen usage, which was annoying because there’s no shame in a good game not making use of the stylus. With that said, the ones that made good use of both screens were spectacular. Shoutout to Yo-Kai Watch 3.
WoW is objectively huge, but they made it feel tiny by putting fast travel options everywhere. I would guess that any two points in the world are no more than 5m from each other if routed perfectly.
I want there to exist one MMO where you “live” in a city, and traveling to another city is actually so inconvenient that you only do it if you have to. Not because I want to make the trek, but because I want there to be a world just large enough that any one person has usually seen only ~1%, but the playerbase in entirety has seen >50%. I don’t know if any such game exists.
There are space games with procedural large scale galaxies to the point that the entire playerbase can only ever hope to see ~15% of the systems, but that’s why I put the >50% qualifier in there. That’s TOO big. Anyone can generate an effectively infinite procedural world, I want a large world.
When I had originally conceived of this, it was in the context of a pokemon MMO. You would have your home town, and as a trainer, or researcher, or rocket member, etc, you’d travel at a real-time pace akin to the show.
Alternative IP that it could work with are dragonball (imagine the playerbase on a months long search to find/fight over the dragonballs so they could awaken the dragon and make a wish to the devs), or Avatar (each player would have a chance to spawn in as a random bender. One player at any given time is the Avatar. Events happen to strengthen some benders and weaken others. Players make war and peace at will).
There would obviously be challenges in running these types of experiences, but currently it feels like the cost of standing up an MMO is so much that no one ever does anything interesting. Instead they just copy WoW.
I guess Light No Fire has a good chance of becoming such a game. It’s gonna be No Mans Sky, but on one earth sized fantasy planet. I don’t think it will have large cities though. 🤔
I don’t consider NMS to be an MMO. If everyone went to the same location, at best, you’d most likely only see a handful of players you’re instanced with (up to 32 from what a cursory search gives me). That’s kinda the sad state of what passes for an MMO these days, but I don’t accept it. That’s not even a full raid group in WoW.
But yeah, you could squint and say that that otherwise effectively produces the experience I’m asking for. I am looking forward to LNF for sure.
traveling to another city is actually so inconvenient that you only do it if you have to
They don’t work. Vanguard did it way back when, with their three continent world. Each one had enough content to get from lvl 1 to lvl 50, the max, and your starting race determined your starting location. It could take up to an hour to get to friends. Even on the same continent, with a mount (before they added flying mounts), it could take a half hour of running to cross the map… and players complained so vociferously that they were forced to add fast travel options.
I don’t think that means it didn’t work, I think that just means it’s not for everyone. I’m a firm believer that, “given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game”. Small indie games take firm stances on their gameplay all the time, not every game is for everyone, and that’s ok, that’s how you get unique and interesting gameplay experiences. But that’s easy for and indie game to do because making an indie game is cheap.
MMOs have the unfortunate reality that they’re architecturally complex, and expensive to operate, and thus need to appeal to as wide of an audience as possible to justify their existence to investors. They don’t have the luxury of making the experience they want, which is why they all end up just copying WoW’s enshittified gameplay, but with less polish.
My hope is that this indie revolution we’re in expands to “large scale” multiplayer games. Not so massive that it’s prohibitively expensive to run, but not so small that it’s a ghost town. I think that’s when we’ll start to see interesting MMO experiences again.
GLaDOS’ constant mockery of your person, your ability to navigate tests, and general spite pretty much make both games. It all even manages to provide a lot of world-building without lore-dumping. 10/10, would get roasted again.
I so love the DS and 3DS and want these new devices like the Thor to succeed, but the one thing I would see them improve before being called true successors is stylus compatibility.
I don’t know how touchscreen tech works, but the plastic tipped stylus for the DS just feels so much better than the rubber tipped ones meant for modern screens
Different touch detection methods. The squishy DS screens work by physically making contact. Glass phone screens work by detecting electrical capacitance differences.
Modern touch screens work well enough to not really require styluses to feel good though. So modern styluses feeling annoying isn’t as big of an issue for most uses.
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